Category: Action

DTV ACTION ITEM: AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR JESSE V. JOHNSON

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March 26, 2013

To make a thoughtful direct-to-video action movie is about as difficult as recovering from a meaty right hook to the jaw from Stone Cold Steve Austin. Working on shoestring budgets and two-week deadlines, most DTV product is a jumbled mess of plot holes and broken bones. So when a director is able to compose a coherent space and worldview out of such chaos, it’s a minor miracle. With The Package (2012), Jesse V. Johnson joins Isaac Florentine (Undisputed III) and John Hyams (Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning) in accomplishing this magic act. It is a simple story well told, of a mob muscleman (Austin) tasked to deliver a mysterious package to a gangster known only as “The German” (Dolph Lundgren). Its contents are sought by a third gang, and what was a simple job for Austin turns into a war. Johnson strips down dialogue and establishes character through fighting styles: Austin is a deliberate and quiet thinker, waiting slowly for an opening for his devastating punch, while the flamboyant Lundgren speaks in long winding monologues before springing for a quick and outrageous kill. Johnson shoots fights up close but in wide angles, so the need for cutting is minimized and blows register with traumatic impact. Jesse V. Johnson has been a stuntman (The Amazing Spider-Man), a writer (The Butcher, 2009) and a director, and he took some time out to speak to me about his varied career adventures. We discuss Dolph Lundgren’s working methods, the fun and frustrations of working in DTV, and the motivation behind his viral Wonder Woman fan trailer.

One of the things I admire about THE PACKAGE is how the fight scenes tell an ongoing story. Steve Austin’s character moves slowly against quicker opponents, but maneuvers himself around them to deliver one of his knockout blows. Lundgren’s character is flamboyant and dramatic, and his brawls are equally showy.  Are you planning these fight scenes in the writing process, or does this action storytelling occur more on-set, with your stunt coordinator and actors?

I had planned to take my regular fight choreographer, Luke Lafontaine, to Canada with me, but that would have cost the production some of their tax incentive, so I was urged to hire a local Canadian, Paul Wu, a very capable young man. I didn’t write this script, but we discussed the various characters’ fighting styles at some length, and how they should reflect the physical size and fictional background of the key players.

There were two or three rehearsal sessions, where details were further refined, and then we shot.  Steve and Dolph are both so expert in this kind of business, that they adapt their choreography to what they know works for them and always operate within their comfort zone. I hired the adversaries, the other fighters, and was quite involved with Steve’s fights as to where and how they would escalate.

From that perspective, I wanted the adversaries all to look extremely energetic, highly technical and motivated to fight, while Steve’s character actually tries to talk his way out of every confrontation, or looks for a way to avoid the fight. It’s subtle, but I believe it makes him look like the more honorable man.  Without realizing it, you’re rooting for this battle-weary warrior with heart – he knows everyone he tangles with is going to end up in the hospital, there’s really nothing to prove anymore . I know guys like this, they are the calmest, gentlest souls, but God, you know if it came down to it, in a physical confrontation, you’d be hamburger meat in their hands.

With the actual choreography, I wanted to see Steve get punished, violently. I wanted the audience to be pissed, to accept that a line had been crossed and it was OK for this massive guy to get mad and get even. I feel many of these DTV movie fighters can end up looking like bullies – and if there is one thing I cannot stand, it’s a bully. If the supposed “good guy” overreacts, looks for trouble, uses guns that are bigger than everyone else, it’s all material that turns you against your protagonist.

Because of Austin’s incredible size, the audience would buy that he wasn’t going to get KO’d when he got beaten, taking this awful punishment. Then they root for him as he waits for the opportunity to throw this killer haymaker – few actors can get away with that, but if you’ve seen the size of Steve’s arms and hands, you know that is just not a bomb you want coming down on you.

Dolph Lundgren is very funny in THE PACKAGE. How much did you work with him in hitting this very theatrical tone?

We discussed it at length in pre-production — the silk dressing gown, hair, aged looking skin (to be honest I wasn’t at all convinced it was a good idea), but, when an actor is insistent, you know he’s going to be motivated, and more than anything I wanted him motivated.

When I saw what he was doing with the character, the slightly over the top take, I simply gave him enough room to do what he wanted.  That meant setting the stage in such a way that we could run his scenes as long takes, so the performance could build and remain in continuity – it would have been very difficult for him to have pulled this off without that methodology.

We’d shoot our coverage from the various angles that would allow me to cut in an artistic manner, but we ran all of the coverage as a complete take of the scene.  This sounds obvious, but it is rarely done, in these kinds of movies, it is laborious and will mean a lot more editing, and to a degree more time on set, but boy do your performances improve, and the actors know exactly where they’re supposed to be (emotionally, etc.,) at any time, so they have that look of belonging in their eyes – which can often be a lost, the kind of, “why am I here look” – if you’re not careful it’s all too easy to see it appearing on their faces on a short schedule.

The scene where he makes a fruit smoothie while interrogating a bleeding man really encapsulates the savagery and humor of Lundgren’s character. And also happens to be hilarious. Could you talk about shooting that scene? Did Lundgren improvise at all or was that exactly as written?

That scene was exactly as written by Derek Kolstad, as I mentioned before, there is almost zero improvising with Lundgren, he arrives ready to go and you set the stage in a manner that allows him to work most efficiently.

I feel it is my job as a director to gently feel out how to get the very best from my performers, and then make them feel like I am collaborating with them and watching, listening, able to bounce ideas back and forth, when the opportunity is right.  Compliment and applaud when the timing is favorable.  We talked about blocking (camera movement and placement) a lot.  I wasn’t allowed to show blood when the bullets hit people, so you notice the camera has to get all the way around behind the chair so we only see the back of the chair exploding – you imagine you’ve seen something violent, but there is actually no blood in those hits.

I saw the movie for the first time at a public screening, where there were a lot of WWE fans present. Steve was signing autographs afterward, and they starting laughing during that scene, I thought I was going to get beaten up when they found out who I was – then half way through the scene I realized they were laughing with us, not at us, it was really quite fun. It is very difficult to predict how straight-faced comedy will be received.

How much input do Lundgren and Austin have in their fight sequences? Is there a lot of give and take between them, fight choreographer Paul Wu and yourself?

These guys both know exactly what they can do well, and where they don’t look good. Lundgren has Barry Evans with him, Barry is a Kyokushin karate master, and has trained Lundgren for 40 years, he watches all of the choreography and has great insight.  Steve has been fighting for a living for thirty odd years, he knows what works best for him – these guys will say if they don’t like anything!

The choreography was quite straightforward, but the dialogue is always tricky, you’re trying to work it into the scene, without it seeming clunky or unbelievable, do you stop and chat (do your dialogue) or chat between punches? You rehearse and sometimes shoot it both ways if you can’t get a meter reading, but usually it is obvious.

With pros like Lundgren and Austin they get it quickly and we all nod our head and know it worked, other times you’re just not so sure.  With the fight itself [between them], we had about three hours, I wish I could have had three days. God, I’d have given you something epic!  But, these films are not laid out like that – they are a Rubik’s cube puzzle, how do you tell your story with flourish and some kind of artfulness in such a short amount of time?

I knew more than anything else I wanted to treat both these guys as mythic adversaries that require a certain kind of photography: low “tracking inwards” shots. The camera is always subservient, always catching up, you never look down on them, they always get the back light, the rim light – they never talk about themselves, have the other characters do that, in fact if at all possible have the other characters do all the talking.  With Steve, I treat him as I would if I were working with John Wayne, and I have read everything I can get my hands on, on that actor.

In the fight scene, they are evenly matched, but Lundgren is ill, and towards the end of the fight he loses steam, and with it the will to live. Austin capitalizes on this, but even then he doesn’t want to kill him, until he is left no choice.

The guys rehearsed this fight scene at quite some length, but, it all went in the trash when we ran out of time, and had to come up with the choreography for the second half of the fight on set – with the producers there, tapping their wrist watches, it was a real shame, but, we’ve all done it before. Lundgren was incredibly helpful, I cannot remember exactly what went down but he came up with a way of getting a chunk of the fighting shot without relighting, something really technical based but a simple solution that neither I or Kim Miles the DP had thought of, and it worked, it was pretty amazing really.

I thanked him profusely afterward, he laughed as he walked away saying something about fifty action movies, five that he directed himself, and that was that.

How has your relationship been with the producers on your DTV movies? Do you have freedom to shoot what you like as long as you meet your budget?

I had seventeen days to shoot the movie, we had heavy snow for half a day, and lost another half a day’s shooting to corrupted software.  The snow day allowed me to invent a scene with Darren Shahlavi’s character at the gas station, we just kept adding backstory, it was quite funny, we shot it about ten times, adding another line and another line each time, as we watched the snow slowly melt outside (where we were supposed to be shooting a different scene). I think we used the second-to-last take.  The last take was too much like Dr. Evil talking about his childhood in Belgium.

My relationship with my producers is usually good, or I tend not to do the project in the first place. I have become pretty good at judging character, my family are horse-traders and market men, so I think it is in my DNA. I look past the smiles and promises, and try to see what they’re like after the seventeenth hour on a day where we’re going into overtime, if I imagine they’re going to be destructive and spiteful, I move on, or continue with caution – if I can’t afford to turn down the job.

I have never had anything resembling creative freedom on these projects, but depending on how you align yourself with your employers from the start, you can attempt to make a movie close to your ideals, or something that matches the formula of what you would like to see in the theaters as much as is possible – it is bloody difficult, and not at all easy to do this by the way.

On The Package – I had to make a film with an overt killing or beating on every page into a TV safe movie, no blood, no swearing, no nudity, no profanity, or the film was going to be re-edited after my leaving. I knew this from the get go, and that was that, take it or leave it! I knew if there was a director’s cut, it would never see the light of day, so I decided to work within the system – The Dark Knight is a great example of smart violence in this respect – you think you’ve seen something that you really haven’t.  Cause and effect, sound effects, but no blood.  I’ve had people tell me they thought The Package was one of the most violent films they’d seen, I asked them to tell me which scene particularly, they usually describe a scene like the fruit smoothie scene where there is actually nothing shown at all, just implied.

I accepted this lack of blood as a great challenge, and am complimented in situations where people erroneously mention the amount violence in the movie.   It may sound corny and old hat, but given the right stimulus the human imagination is far more explicit than any fake imagery we can come up with.

I am not sure how many more DTV movies I want to make, I am positioning myself to move on to larger movies and intend to.  I am not a fan of watching many DTV movies on the whole, and prefer a film that reaches a larger audience, has greater production values associated with a larger budget and a recognizable cast of characters, but also a chance to work with the very best crews and technicians in the business. It is extraordinarily frustrating at times to work in DTV. We hire the cheapest talent available, while on a studio movie you hire the best available – that may not sound so very different, but it is exhausting to put your heart and soul into a project to be let down by shoddy sound design, or editorial incompetence, or a prop that looks awful, or any manner of other manageable issues.

However on The Package I was very lucky – it was one of those rare occasions when I able to work with a stellar technical crew. We were scheduled to shoot right after the Christmas holidays, so Justin Bursch and Jamie Goerhing were able to assemble a sensational team who otherwise might not have been available to us.  It did mean contending with the inclement weather, of course.  But, Kim Miles and his camera, grip, and lighting team are some of the very best working up there. Kim shot the Mortal Kombat series and always has great energy – I was very lucky to have him on board. My point is though, it is a gamble.

In many Hollywood action films, the shaky camera, quick edit aesthetic has made it harder to recognize the athleticism of stuntmen. Your work is clear and crisp in comparison. Does your experience as a stuntman inform your shooting and blocking of fight scenes? Do you feel an obligation to show these scenes with clarity so the stuntmen’s work can be truly appreciated?

No obligation to the stunt men per se, I just don’t find that technique very “of the moment”, it feels old hat and passe.  It was/is used a lot to hide the fact that actors didn’t really move very quickly, or look very good; a long lens and a bit of wobble and you try to inject some energy into it.

Handheld has its place for sure, and can be eloquent beautiful and artistic – just don’t use it as a cover for poor choreography. My personal credo is something Robert Capa supposedly said: “If your pictures don’t look good you’re not close enough to the action.” I like to put a wide lens on and get right into the action, where kicks are glancing off the Steadicam, and everyone starts getting irritated, that’s when the footage starts to look visceral and exciting for me.

I competed in martial arts as a teenager, and I loved feeling my heart race, stepping into the ring to fight, it was so intoxicating I was almost passing out before the first punch had been thrown, which was when I usually ended up on my behind.  I wasn’t a very spectacular fighter, but getting hit, and seeing the room spin, watching the guy with pure aggression in his eyes come at you, and not being able to move fast enough to do anything about it, how exhilarating is that?  That’s the surge of emotions I try to recreate in my movie fights. I don’t like watching from afar, there’s no thrill, it’s sometimes necessary of course within the context of the story – but my favorite place to be is within the action, getting spattered with blood and mud and beer.

I read that stuntwork runs in your family, starting with your grandfather. Can you discuss your family’s history in the business, and how you got started in it?

My grandfather was a racehorse trainer and had many wonderful horses, he traveled the world and had many adventures, a real man, quick with his fists but always generous with his time and money to the deserving.  He provided horses to movies as a way of making a little extra cash. He had a wild thoroughbred that a Hollywood movie wanted, and his son was the only person he trusted to ride it, so they gave my uncle Vic Armstrong his first job, doubling Sophia Loren.  He has gone on to have a pretty good career, with an Oscar and BAFTA award.  I started out carrying his stunt bag and storyboarding action for him to direct as he cut his teeth as a second unit (action unit) director.  I went about things slightly differently, I have Irish blood and am slightly bloody minded – obstinate, and like to do things my own way. There were times when I wished I could have kept my mouth shut, and just worked with him, but we have to do what our heart tells us, or we’re nothing but pawns.

How do you think the stuntman’s job has changed with the evolution of digital technology? What were the major differences between working on an analog blockbuster like TOTAL RECALL compared to THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN?

Total Recall had many Vista Vision plate shots, very early CG work, so it wasn’t totally analog by any means.  Really, regarding the differences in stunts from then to now, you just have to understand what the effect is you need to give, and work within that technology.

For the individual performer, it is really no great change – there are always specifics to what you’re doing, stunt-wise; you have to fall here, miss the sharp edge, don’t knock over the actress, get through the candy glass, don’t go out of frame, and avoid the pyrotechnic effect that will blow up as you hit the ground – it’s very often the same now as it once was.

There is always room for error, and it is simply not an exact science – you do everything in your power to shift the odds to your favor. The survivors, the pros, the super stars within the stunt business know this and are disciplined, intelligent human beings, just as they were seventy years ago.

Wire work has become an incredible art, and is a technology all of its own. it was always there, but so slow and problematic, you’d have to use fine piano wire (Mary Poppins, etc.,). Now it’s easy to remove the wires in post – so there’s no need for many of the old stunt effects – air rams, high falls, Russian swings, these effects can all be achieved far more safely with wires – but they still require a stuntman to test the wire rigs, and more stunt men to rig and operate them.

You must evolve with the technology and embrace it, you keep learning, experimenting and challenging yourself. There’s always a place for the professional, who is willing to risk it all for the shot, he’ll do it within the realms of his experience and will have trained hard and rehearsed, but it’s still a stunt, and he is still a professional (If you cannot do a second take it’s not a stunt but an accident).

There is a great desire right now within Hollywood to go back to a more romantic era of action, to give the audience the impression that it is seeing real danger, to do the stunts without/with less CG, without blue screen, I like this, and think it’s cool, but frankly, I think the investment should be made in character and story telling. The action defines itself from these ingredients first and foremost.

What are the most dangerous stunts that you have been asked to perform? Have you ever turned down a job because of safety concerns?

There used to be a live show guy that would go through the stunt book calling people from A-Z to do ridiculous stunts for cash in hand, in Vegas, diving into six inches of water, dropping inside a car 200 feet onto a pile of cars. I turned those down, I have no interest in risking my life that way.

The stunts I have performed are all valid, but nothing particularly special. I am not a great fan of stunts with animals. Horses are problematic for me, as are diving near sharks, or scrambling through the Thai jungle with snakes and spiders.

Although I don’t remember often being “scared”, just focused – you have to realize you are truly living in these moments of fear, your senses are racing, you can think about seven things at once, and then shut everything down and focus like a laser pinpoint on the task at hand, and time does often feel like it is slowing down, it is a wonderful dynamic rush – your adrenaline is often surging, and you will feel bullet proof, all the rehearsals have created a muscle memory, and you come out of it on top, you’re not dead, and it’s over. Great fun.

I always feel the biggest sense of responsibility when I’m coordinating. I am very protective of my performers. Last year I was directing the action unit on a Russian movie in Utah  [Bilet na Vegas], and we had a ’67 Cadillac convertible careening backwards out of control on the wrong side of a freeway headed towards an eighteen wheeler. The Cadillac was then supposed to swerve, missing the eighteen wheeler, and perform a reverse 180, effectively correcting itself, and drive away.

I was very tense, we rehearsed for weeks, and knew how to do it safely, but there are so many troubling factors: should the Cadillac turn over, could the passengers (all stunt performers) pull their heads down into their laps using their straps and avoid being decapitated, would the eighteen wheeler hit them as they swerved around it….  It was nerve wracking, but it was a very nice one to pull off successfully.

How did you get involved in the Wonder Woman fan trailer (watch here)? There are still not a lot of strong female characters in the superhero world – did that factor into you taking the job?

I wanted to test a camera system [the Sony FS700] that I was planning to shoot a passion project feature on. I chose to make a short film about one of the most maligned super heroes there is. Talk about messing up a cool character.

She was an awesome hero created in the dark days of WWII to give hope to the women working in the factories, to inspire them to do their bit for the war effort, a woman who didn’t need a man, she was a warrior – great stuff, then in the 80′s they put a non-physical actress in high-heels and had her wobbling around, jumping and rolling, throwing punches like a seven year old (Yes, I realize she is sacred to many 40 year old men, but I have daughters, I’m looking for a role model for them, someone they can root for).

You cannot blend these two versions, so I decided to go back to the original, I put my spin on it, with the scars and bullet-scraped armor, but it was all in the spirit of the original (I laugh hard when people ask why I didn’t stick to the original Wonder Woman!). It was an extremely fun project that really hit a chord. I wish I could afford to do a short or fan trailer every month.

It has landed me more studio meetings than any of my features, so it has served its purpose – thank you, Wonder Woman.

ZOMBIE WATCH: A CONVERSATION WITH DAVE KEHR ABOUT PAUL W.S. ANDERSON

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Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

September 18, 2012

It was a banner weekend for Paul Andersons, as Paul Thomas Anderson and Paul W.S. Anderson topped the specialty and worldwide box office. As PTA’s vaultingly ambitious The Master has understandably dominated the cultural conversation, I wanted to create some space to discuss the ever-workmanlike W.S. One of the few directors to fully embrace 3D, creating dazzling depth effects on half the budget of most Hollywood spectaculars, he’s an endlessly resourceful stylist. Despite this, W.S. has long been one of the worst reviewed directors in the United States. One of his staunchest defenders has been New York Times film critic Dave Kehr,  so I went to see Resident Evil: Retribution 3D (rated 30% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes) with him at the Regal Union Square in Manhattan. Afterward we sat down and had an informal chat about Paul W.S. Anderson’s work and career. [Warning: Spoilers Ahead]

RES: So you were first impressed by Paul W.S. Anderson by seeing Shopping (1994) at the Toronto Film Festival?

DK: I’m pretty sure that’s where I saw it. British punk movie, big rock score. Stylistically, it’s not as accomplished as his later work, but the elements are there. It’s all nighttime, it’s all glare and chase sequences that move into the next one. And the people who consider themselves the last representatives of humanity in a corporate world.

RES: Yes, his villains are always the ultra-privatized, corporate overlords.

DK: The classic figure, right. I interviewed him once [you can read the 2002 NY Times interview here], and he was a very affable guy, and was startled that anyone would want to talk to him. It was really an effort to track down his publicist, because he had given up on getting recognition years before that, even.

RES: Once he made Mortal Kombat (1995), he became associated with video games, which was just considered trash.

DK: No more serious consideration necessary, the guy makes video game movies. And he’s still making cheesy video game movies…

RES: But excellent ones!

DK: Yeah. And he’s seen a lot of movies. Who he reminds me of is Fritz Lang. I’m pretty sure I asked him about that, and he said, “oh yeah, love him.”

RES: The connection with Lang is with his use of geometric figures?

DK: All the underground stuff, worlds within worlds, imagined conspiracies. In particular the space used in Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), the geometry and symmetry.

RES: Also similar is the puppet-master, a Mabuse-like figure.

DK: Sure.

RES: Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil, Joan Allen in Death Race (2008)…

DK: The sinister boss figure hovering over all these people, and making them move and jump around. In the Resident Evil series, I guess it’s the computer, the Red Queen.

RES: It’s the corporation itself, a faceless entity.

DK: Yeah, it has its own life.

RES: It’s the entity that makes them jump around, but it’s how Anderson shoots this jumping around that makes him special. How would you describe how he shoots action?

DK: It’s hard not to think of the musical. It’s so perfectly choreographed. It reminds me of the first Hong Kong stuff in the 70s, with a real sense of exuberance in action that you haven’t seen in a long time. Real physical action, not just shooting guns at each other. Jumping off of buildings…

RES: While shooting guns…

DK: That came a little bit later, but what I’m thinking of is Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986). I don’t know if it stands up now. That style has been so overdone to the point of absurdity.

RES: Well, Hark’s Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (2011) was rather disappointing.

DK: Wasn’t it? I turned it off. So much CGI…

RES: Yeah, even with their weapons. And that’s the thing with Anderson’s films. There is tons of CGI, but they’re also very physical…

DK: He never gives you the sense that he’s faking it. The stunt choreography is really good. He clearly has a personal interest in that stuff. Getting to Budd Boetticher – the way people fight each other in Paul Anderson movies, it’s that kind of psych-out thing that Boetticher does. Through dialogue, through intimidation. It’s like a chess game, they’re anticipating each other’s moves. The fun is in seeing the twist at the end – how Milla Jovovich really out-thought the other person.

RES: Like in the opening of Retribution, Milla grabs a chain and lock, and works a number of variations on how she uses it in attacks. I did read that interview you did with him, and I remember he mentioned that he comes from a family of coal miners, explaining his fascination with claustrophobic spaces.

DK: Even when there are exteriors in his films, they turn out to be interiors. [In Retribution what looks like Tokyo, NYC and Moscow turn out to be an underground testing facility built by the evil Umbrella Corporation.]

RES: Each entry in the Resident Evil series has a very specific sense of place. The first was an underground labyrinth, the second an urban hellscape, the third a version of the West, and the fourth is the Western coast of the U.S. In Retribution, Anderson devises a plot where he can jump between these differing spaces.

DK: Although he does add the suburban section here. It’s fun to see her in normal clothes, playing at playing the mom. Then when she straps on the S&M gear, it’s very satisfying.

RES: Yes, the suburban sequence is really poking fun at traditional family drama, or even sitcom scenarios. It acknowledges the artificiality of genre constructions right up front.

DK: He really lays it on thick, with the deaf child. A perfect Spielberg suburb that turns out to be a deliberately unreal nightmare. These stock figures are actually trying to kill you.

RES: He shows these stock characters as stock – disposable. Even the little girl, who is the emotional center of the movie, is presented as fake, a clone with imprinted memories.

DK: Yeah and the little girl realizes it too, that Milla is not her mommy. I’m trying to visualize the scene where they see the cloning room. Are there any male characters there?

RES: No, I don’t think so. You see the clones of Milla, Michelle Rodriguez and the girl. Which goes to show how subordinate the male characters are in this film, they don’t even get decent clones.

DK: You hear complaints about there being a lack of action films with women, well, this is one of the most successful series out there, and it stars a woman. There are no compromises here, it’s just not a big deal at this point, in the Resident Evil world.

RES: What did you think of the use of 3D in this one?

DK: Great. It never seemed arbitrary, it always worked. I like all that stuff in the white prison cell, the geometrical form, the Umbrella design, it looks flat until something  pops out. It just has stuff you don’t see in other movies, including the lighting, backlit scenes with one or two lights. He doesn’t fill the frame the way Cameron does. Cameron has to have something going on in every corner of the frame. Anderson seems to be aware that, 3D isn’t just putting everything in one frame, it’s directing like as you would a normal film. Anderson knows how to put those shots together so it doesn’t feel disruptive, isn’t jarring. You need good solid old-fashioned match-shots on action. Where a lot of 3D directors get hung up is, they’re just framing every shot for what it is, and not thinking about what comes after it. It gets irritating after a while, with depth-of-field changing left and right.

RES: That’s what causes people to get headaches…

DK: It does for me. It pains me watching that stuff. I can’t help trying to put it together in my head.

RES: You saw The Avengers (2012).

DK: Every shot is just a guy shooting, with no sense of who he’s shooting at or chasing after. There’s just no relationship between this action and that action. It’s either complete in itself or it’s forgotten by the next shot. So it’s not about the logic of how you fight an army of 12 invincible zombies and get out alive, which has a certain amount of plausibility in the Anderson because the strategy is there, the athletic abilities are there, the ballet-like quality of moving through the air… It feels kind of serene in a way. It’s always so cool, she just knows how to execute it.

RES: You can see people thinking in Resident Evil: Retribution…

DK: Yeah, she’s thinking down the line – look at this person, what’s he going to do, how am I going to react.

RES: What do you think about his use of slow motion?

DK: It’s kind of a cliché since The Matrix (1999) but I find it pretty effective. It exaggerates, or brings out those qualities more. And I really enjoy seeing whoever that stunt-person is doing her flip three times through the air. You want to savor that moment. I can accept it as part of the conventions now.

RES: At least of the new conventions, it adds clarity to movement rather than muddying it. What about that opening scene, of the action scene rendered in slow reverse motion. It’s gorgeous, although it seems like Anderson and his crew are just fucking around.

DK: Was it in the last film? No it wasn’t.

RES: It’s a continuation, picking up where Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) left off. I don’t know what the point of it was, but I certainly enjoyed it.

DK: I also appreciated the recap at the beginning, because at this point, after five of them, I forgot exactly how it all got started.

RES: Although it’s not really a series where you have to know the mythology to enjoy it. Another thing I love are those architectural blueprint shots, which shows you where all of the characters are. Anderson is obsessed with letting you know where you are.

DK: He also does that in Event Horizon (1997). It’s important to know your position in space for a coal miner… I wonder if those are the same matrixes they used to model the CGI. Well, the Moscow stuff, I guess that was real location footage.

RES: Yeah, there was a second unit in Moscow

DK: The White House didn’t look all too real though…

RES: I’m sure they tried to get permission to shoot at the White House.

DK: Yeah, they called them up. “-I’m the producer for Resident Evil Part Five, we’d like to stage a zombie holocaust. –We’ll get back to you.”

RES: It’s interesting that they shot real locations and in the movie they made them into virtual places. Usually that works in the reverse direction. What are your pantheon Paul W.S. Anderson films?

DK: They’re all pretty good. He keeps getting better. Retribution is the smoothest and most satisfying. It does not feel monotonously fast. And it’s really tight. Every scene flows. And that’s exactly what Joss Whedon can’t seem to do. “Alright, that number’s over. We have two to three minutes of sarcastic banter between thinly sketched characters before it’s time for the next number to start.”

RES: This feels like the ideal Paul W.S. Anderson movie, plucking from everything he’s done before…

DK: You think it will convince people he’s got talent? [laughs]

RES: If one person is converted, we’ve succeeded.

DK: They don’t have press screenings for his films.

RES: And that’s not going to change.

DK: It’s not like that audience is going to respond, “hey, this got a great review in the Times! Let’s go see Resident Evil 5!” It’s funny how people get that label of being schlock directors. I don’t know what he did to deserve that.

RES: It’s just received wisdom. His name has become shorthand for schlock.

DK: Yeah, but is he Uwe Boll or something?

RES: It’s the subject matter.

DK: But Christopher Nolan became an international star directing comic book movies.

RES: Yeah, but Anderson does video game adaptations, there is a difference. Comic books have risen in cultural capital the last couple of decades. Not so for video games. Roger Ebert says video games are not art, so Paul W.S. Anderson is out. He’s out. People always forget how Hawks and Hitchcock were regarded as vulgar entertainers in their day.

DK: It seems like that lesson never gets learned. Each generation of critics blows it in their own way.

RES: Not that I’m saying Paul W.S. Anderson should be compared to Hitchcock…

DK: Well, he’s at least Far Side of Paradise at this point. [laughs] Maybe he’s Gordon Douglas. Anderson is not able to make the number of films Douglas was – Douglas could make five movies in a year, and Anderson makes one every two years, and he’s incredibly prolific for today. He has a little studio system set up now. He has a star, a franchise…

RES: It’s one of the great director-actress duos of our time…

DK: Absolutely!

RES: Len Wiseman and Kate Beckinsale – that’s the B-team.

DK: C-team. That’s bad because they bring out the worst in each other. She’s a fun light comedienne but terrible in action movies. I don’t know what Wiseman is good for actually [laughs].

RES: Any final thoughts?

DK: Well, it’s just such a pleasurable, kinetic experience to be moved through that. You don’t feel assaulted, irritated and beat up by a movie. It’s a movie that respects your intelligence, and has put some thought into how it’s going to work. It’s not one damn thing hitting you in the face after another. That’s just stimulation, lights flashing, sound going off, CGI crap falling on top of everything. If you get people hopped up and stimulated then maybe they’ll think it’s entertainment, but it’s not. I’m a grumpy old man.

RES: Justifiably so. What does that make me then?

DK: Well, I was a grumpy young man too.

BRAKING NEWS: MOTORWAY (2012)

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September 4, 2012

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Car chase movies are necessarily clamorous things, as they orchestrate squealing rubber, huffing pistons and the screams of crumpling steel. Which is why Motorway (2012), the new film from Hong Kong director Soi Cheang now out on HK Blu-Ray, is so unusual. It’s a particularly quiet automobile action movie, focused on the finesse of driving. The defining technique of the film is a 90 degree hairpin turn executed at 8,000 RPMs but only 2 Kilometers/hr. It requires great power exerted with careful, slow consideration, which holds true for the film as a whole. Pared down to a sleek 89 minutes during a prolonged two-year post-production process, back-stories and subplots were removed in favor of a film with narrative lines as clean as the ’89 Nissan 240 SX S13 that the traffic cops are unable to stop.

Motorway is the second film that Soi Cheang has made for Johnnie To’s Milkyway Studios, after the elaborately entertaining assassin drama Accident (2009). Where that is a clever expansion of the hitman movie, with its complicated Rube Goldberg made-to-look-like-accidents killings, Motorway is a reduction. Each of its characters is reduced to genre archetypes, with the audience using its knowledge of previous car chase films to fill in their background. The main driver is Chan Cheung (Shawn Yue), a speed freak gearhead who also works for the traffic cops in Kowloon. His partner is Lo Fung (the ever stone-faced Anthony Wong), who is near-retirement but is still haunted by the  getaway driver Jiang (Guo Xiaodong) who escaped him decades previously. So of course that wheelman returns to Kowloon in order to spring his imprisoned pal  Huang (Li Haitao), in order to set up the heist of a large diamond.

They are defined by their jobs and the roles as established by previous films. The enigmatic Jiang is descended straight from Ryan O’Neal in The Driver, whose every press of the accelerator seems to assuage some deep existential dread, while Chan, with his souped up vehicle and late night drag races, is a fugitive from the hyperactive Fast and Furious series – a hot-headed punk over his head. But while the characters are familiar, the chase scenes are not. They are uncannily intimate affairs, always at night under flickering neon lights, and they are paced and fought like duels. Cheang makes much out of dramatic pauses and rests. Jiang is constantly finding holes in the city to rest in, from the back of a truck to the obscured spot in a parking garage. There is a sense of vehicles as an extension of their bodies, no more so when Lo Fung rolls down his window in an effort to hear his adversary more than see him, as the darkening night corrodes his vision. The repeated close-ups of the engine block throbs with the energy of a heartbeat.

It is a thrillingly organic film, in which the lines of a map which Jiang is tracing morphs into the lines of the road, of the car, and of the street. And all of this rather quietly rendered structure  does not diminish the impact of the chases. Using a camera attached  low to the ground,  Cheang and his cameraman capture the stunt-drivers locking horns through the streets of Hong Kong. I only detected CG in one shot, in which a car nearly tips over a cliff. Everything else was, at least in the movie-verse, authentic. Cheang told Edmund Lee at Time Out HK what he was going for:

I’m not exactly a fan of racing movies, but I have fond memories for the racing scenes in several crime thrillers, such as [William Friedkin’s] The French Connection (1971) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), as well as the likes of Ringo Lam’s Full Alert (1997). When you watch the old movies, you can actually feel that someone is driving the car; when you see The Fast and the Furious movies nowadays, you can’t help but feel that part of their beautiful [action sequences] have been animated. I really want to go back to the human dimension of driving. I want to find out who these drivers are as human beings.

You can sense the characters’ human qualities through their driving styles. Jiang is elusive and fond of trickery in his ancient S13, while Chan favors a more barreling forward damn-the-torpedoes style in the police sedan. Lo Fung is harder to pin down, as he is only given one opportunity to show his driving chops, called back to the wheel after decades of refusal. He prefers a more sensorial style, as indicated when he turns off the AC and lowers the window. But everything can fail, especially when one depends on machines.

For in Motorway crashes have devastating impact, the steel frames of cars as permeable as skin. The more the vehicles are mastered and become extensions of drivers’ bodies, the more vulnerable they become. Every protagonist is either bruised, battered or dead by the end, with Jiang’s rabbit-punches keeping Chan off-guard until a final showdown on a pier, in which both woozy fighters circle each other in a screeching pas de deux. Motorway is a brooding original which turns the manic breathlessness of a car chase into a subtle duel of personalities.

THE TOSHIRO MIFUNE BLOGATHON: THE CHALLENGE (1982)

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August 7, 2012

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The collaboration between Toshiro Mifune and director Akira Kurosawa ended in 1965, following the release of Red Beard, their sixteenth and final film together. Having built up an international reputation thanks to his work with Kurosawa, Mifune looked West, receiving his first Hollywood paycheck playing against type as a Japanese industrialist in John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966). He would jump back and forth between Japan and the U.S. through the early 80s, working mainly in stolid war dramas (Midway, Inchon), but also getting to stretch out a bit with John Boorman (Hell in the Pacific) and Steven Spielberg (1941). In terms of viewership, his greatest success was playing opposite Richard Chamberlain in the TV mini-series of James Clavell’s Shogun (1980).Perhaps realizing that Hollywood would continue to shunt him into stereotyped Japanese roles in stuffy historical dramas, he spent the majority of his remaining career at home. For his final U.S. film in this period, he re-united with John Frankenheimer to shoot the entertainingly silly East-meets-West martial arts film, The Challenge (1982). Frankenheimer had similarly entered a low ebb in his career, resulting in these two dynamic talents making a mid-budget action film for CBS Films, to be distributed by the small Embassy Pictures studio.

The Challenge stars Scott Glenn as a prototypical ugly American who gets caught in the middle of a feud between two Japanese brothers over their family’s legendary samurai swords. Glenn was fresh off of his supporting role in Urban Cowboy, and this was CBS and Embassy’s attempt to capitalize on that and make him a star. That it didn’t work doesn’t take away from Glenn’s admirably schlubby performance, in which he slouches and slurs his way through Kyoto. Buried up to his head in dirt, he even manages to croak out “Deep In the Heart of Texas.”  Shot on location, the film has a largely Japanese crew, including DP Kozo Okazaki, but there were some up and coming American collaborators as well. John Sayles did a major re-write of the screenplay, and had fond memories working on the film, as he told Philip Wuntch:

The funniest experience I had was rewriting The Challenge for John Frankenheimer before it started filming. When Frankenheimer found out he could get Toshiro Mifune, he changed the background from Chinese martial arts to Japanese martial arts. They’re completely opposite forms, but he said no one would know the difference. We changed all the martial arts scenes and all the background story because he was able to get Mifune.

Steven Seagal was living and teaching Aikido in Japan, and was brought on as “martial arts coordinator”, presumably helping to help choreograph and fact check the accuracy of the fight sequences. He would later open a martial arts school in North Hollywood, teaching the movie execs who would later make him a short-lived star. But as Sayles writes, it was Frankenheimer’s eagerness to work with Mifune that necessitated large scale revisions, as well as scouting locations in an entirely different country from which they expected. As an actor, Mifune still garnered that kind of respect, although Embassy had to be hoping it was Glenn that would drive the box office, as it was his face that is emblazoned on the posters.

The movie provides a stark vision of culture clashes, creating a triangle between old-school samurai Toru (Mifune), his super-rich Westernized brother Hideo (Atsuo Nakamura), and the brusque uncultured America of Rick (Scott Glenn). Rick is a down and out boxer, who Toru recruits to help escort one of his lost swords back to Kyoto. Unaware of the dangers of his employment, he agrees, but he is soon waylaid by Hideo’s goon Ando (a wonderfully sarcastic Calvin Jung), and endures a barrage of beatings before he has any idea what is going on. It’s a broad mishmash of the kineticism of Chinese kung-fu movies, the honor code of Japanese samurai films, and the body count of Hollywood action movies.

Mifune plays his Toru as a gruff, soft-spoken patriarch with a shock of white hair, injecting gravitas into a movie of profound absurdity. The final action sequence has the samurai-robed Mifune taking down an entire skyscraper of guards and goons with his bow and arrow (and an assist from a machine-gunning Glenn). It’s an outrageous sequence that presages the bloodbath at the end of Commando (1985), and the only thing keeping the film moored to its dramatic arc is Mifune playing it absolutely straight. The sequence is a pungent metaphor for the fears Americans had toward the growing economic power of Japan, as the film pines for the civilized, if technologically backward dojo of Toru, while painting Hideo as an unprincipled free-market capitalist ready to destroy tradition for his material gain. The American Glenn comes to the aid of Toru, battling back the threatened economic competitor.

It is what they call “a rich text”, although it’s unclear how much Frankenheimer contributed. It was during this period that he had become a serious alcoholic, and he told Charles Champlin that he was even bringing drinks to the set, for the first time in his career. It was following this eye-opening and sense-dulling shoot that Frankenheimer checked himself into rehab and dried out. It is not one of his more visually interesting films, lacking his usual smooth lines and frames-within-frames. Although I should admit I had to watch it in a cropped 1.33:1 aspect ratio (it was shot in 1.85), as this VHS version is the only one available. He would dry out, and revive his career on television, where he began. Mifune would also make a series of TV movies in Japan, before ending his career in 1995 with the drama Fukai kawa.

DTV ACTION ITEMS (PART 2): INTRO TO STONE COLD STEVE AUSTIN STUDIES

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May 8, 2012

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This is Part 2 of 3 in my series on direct-to-video action movies.

In last week’s post, direct-to-video action expert Outlaw Vern modestly proclaimed that, “for the time being I think Stone Cold Steve Austin is the most prolific star with a good track record [in DTV].” In Part 2 of my industry shaking series on DTV fight films, I exhaustively investigate this claim. Steve Austin (born Steve Anderson) was the biggest star in professional wrestling for most of the past 15 years, perfecting the persona of a blue-collar hellraiser with a rabid anti-authoritarian streak. A series of injuries to his neck and back forced him to retire from the ring, and he’s been churning out DTV bare-knuckle brawlers  since 2009, after his one big bid for the theatrical market, The Condemned (2007), failed at the box office. While he hasn’t matched the insanely successful screen career of frequent WWE foe Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Austin is forging a worthy one of his own, albeit on the fringes of the movie business.

Steve Anderson was born in Austin, Texas on December 18th, 1964. His biological father James abandoned the family when he was barely a year old, leaving his mother Beverly to raise Steve and his two brothers. They moved around the state, first to Victoria, then to Edna, each town smaller than the last. In his autobiography The Stone Cold Truth, Austin writes that Eden, “had three or four red lights and a Dairy Queen.” Beverly re-married to a “wonderful man” named Ken Williams: a rancher, country singer and insurance salesman. Ken was also a football player who received a scholarship to Rice University. Steve followed in his step-dad’s footsteps, playing defensive end at North Texas State while nursing a dream to become a pro wrestler. After graduation, he enrolled in Gentleman Chris Adams’ wrestling school, which he attended on his off hours from unloading freight at the docks in Dallas.

A strikingly handsome blonde-haired blue-eyed physical specimen, he was hired by the USWA (United States Wrestling Association). Since there was already a Steve Williams in the territory (one Dr. Death), he had to change his name. Local booker Dutch Mantell suggested “Steve Austin” fifteen minutes before his first match, and it stuck. Initially starting out as a pretty-boy villain (or heel, in wrestling parlance), he rose to be hired by the nationally broadcast WCW (World Championship Wrestling) in 1991, where his narcissistic “Stunning Steve Austin” character failed to create much heat. He was fired after four years.

It was not until 1996, a year into his contract with the then-WWF, that the “Stone Cold” character fully emerged. Drawing on the real-life bitterness from his failed run at WCW, Austin developed a character that embodied a kind of redneck class warfare, a hard-drinking, hard-fighting SOB who would undermine the boss at every available opportunity. His feud with WWF CEO Vince McMahon brought the company record ratings and media exposure, and plenty of opportunity for hilariously over the top subversions – like pouring cement into Vince’s sports car or swatting him over the head with a bedpan. While Austin’s fame also came from his incredible work rate and storytelling ability inside the ring, his ability to tap into underclass rage was the driving ratings force. How could he embarrass the CEO this week?

As the now-WWE (after a tussle with the World Wildlife Fund) expanded their reach, they formed their own production company, WWE Studios. The Rock was the centerpiece of their efforts, as early on it was clear he was eager to expand his brand. They produced or co-produced The Scorpion King (2002), The Rundown (2003), and Walking Tall (2004) before The Rock moved on to bigger things. While The Rock was becoming Dwayne Johnson, movie star, Austin was bickering with WWE’s bookers, and he left the company in 2002 due to a combination of exhaustion and creative differences. By the time they reconciled and he received his one-and-only starring role in a WWE production, in 2007′s The Condemned, he was no longer a cultural phenomenon, but merely wrestling-famous. The Most Dangerous Games-style fight-or-die movie  croaked at the box office, taking in $7 million.

With WWE no longer interested in producing his films, Austin turned to DTV. Joseph Nasser was a prolific producer of trashy TV movies, executive producing such gems as Paparazzi Princess: The Paris Hilton Story (2008) and Anna Nicole (2007), before he started investing in Stone Cold, with whom he has made five fist ballets since 2009. Clearly a canny opportunist, he’s also produced the inspirational religious dramas What Would Jesus Do? (2010) and the Thomas Kinkade-branded Christmas Lodge (2011)). But all we care about here is Austin 3:16, the gospel of which Nasser thought could still make him some quick cash.

The first Nasser-Austin collaboration is Damage (2009) which is also their most ambitious. Austin already has his film persona in place here, which retains the working class resentments of “Stone Cold”, but removes the venomous verbosity. In its place is a bemused, solitary stoicism, a fiercely moral version of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, a wise cracking anti-hero haunted by the past, who values family above all (but never gets the girl). In Damage this character is called John Brickner, an ex-con out on parole from a manslaughter charge in Seattle (shot in Vancouver, as always), drifting from low-paying construction jobs to lower paying bouncer gigs. He’s drawn to an underground fighting ring to make some quick cash, and teams up with slimy promoter Reno (Justified’s Walton Goggins) and his gal Frankie (Laura Vandevoort).

Director Jeff King and writer Frank Hannah are proudly bound to the boxing genre, recalling everything from Gentleman Jim to Body and Soul to Hard Times, with its shady promoters, sympathetic diner waitresses, dangerous pier-side brawls, and just to throw in a side of melodrama, a little girl who needs a heart transplant! All of them are on the take, and all have their reasons, up in their ears in debt and lashing out in desperation. Put across with earnest intensity, it honors its predecessors by playing it straight, which works thanks to the authentically idiosyncratic performances, including the manically weaselly Goggins and extra-crusty Donnelly Rhodes as a fallen priest. The fight scenes are blunt but effective, serving their purpose as expressions of character rather than spectacles-in-themselves.

The Stranger (2010) is the kind of garbled mess that gives DTV a bad name, a paranoid thriller that finds an amnesic Austin racing through Vancouver (posing as Seattle) trying to kick-start his memory. Shot in dilapidated offices and back alleys in what looks like a long inebriated weekend, there’s nothing resembling narrative coherence here, although there is the compensatory pleasure of Austin wearing a big hobo beard. Hunt to Kill (2010) is a welcome return to technical competence and satisfying genre kicks. This one is of the kidnapped-in-the-woods variety. Austin plays a divorced Texas (aka Vancouver) border patrol agent haunted (!) by the death of his deputy (a snickering cameo by Eric Roberts),  who is desperate to insulate his teen daughter from any danger. Of course, they both get kidnapped by raving psychos and go on a forced march through the forest. Strictly abiding by the Rambo playbook, Austin picks off the crazies one-by-one, which director Keoni Waxman (Anna Nicole) and Damage scribe Frank Hannah move along with admirable speed and precision. There is an especially brutal and well-staged fight between Austin and kickboxer Gary Daniels, a drama of reversals and counter-moves that looks like a lead-footed ballet.

There is more light-stepping in Tactical Force (2011), which contains an ingenious B-movie scenario from writer/director Adamo P. Cultraro. This time Austin is the head of an aggressive LAPD swat team that act like a swaggering group of Dirty Harrys, destroying property and criminals’ internal organs with impunity. You can sense Austin cutting loose a bit, channeling some of the absurd humor of his later WWE run, as this character has none of the morality of his other films. Here is a purely destructive force, and is the closest thing to a “Stone Cold” performance in his growing oeuvre.

The SWAT team is suspended after an especially creative outing to a grocery store (in which frozen steaks and BB guns are brandished as weapons), and sent for re-training at a warehouse. Unbeknownst to them, Russian and Italian gangs are there violently negotiating for the rights to a mysterious suitcase (whose contents, as in Pulp Fiction’s McGuffin, are never revealed). Provided only with blanks, the SWAT team is suddenly caught in their crossfire, with little hope for escape. Masking the low budget by filming in one location, and pushing the pace through cross-cutting, this is a resourceful, snarky Tarantino clone aided by the athleticism of its cast. In addition to Austin, the presence of MMA bruiser Keith Jardine and martial artists Michael Jai White and Darren Shahlavi add a bit of physical grace to a film otherwise situated as a snappy dialogue comedy.

My favorite of the Austin DTVers might be Recoil, though, which Nasser just released on DVD and Blu-Ray this past March. Dusting off the Phenix City Story and Walking Tall scenario, Austin is a very haunted vigilante stalking through the Pacific Northwest (read: Vancouver) town of Hope to rid it of the vise-like grip of vice imposed by the biker gang “The Circle”, led by Danny Trejo. After his family was brutally murdered by dirtbags, Austin is eager to return the favor. The film is crisply shot by Terry Miles, whose measured pacing and clear lines make even the smallest of exchanges alive with murderous possibility. It begins with some simple match cuts early on, when he rhymes Austin cleaning the muzzle of his gun with the way he stirs his coffee. Then it builds to deadlier range, when Austin’s first encounter on the street ends with muzzle pointed towards a head. This occurs in a quicksilver although perfectly legible series of movements, emphasizing the quickness and lack of consequences to death in this town.

Later, Miley will match a squeeze of lemon in tea to the local handyman Kirby being forced to squeeze his hand around a knife. The everyday is continually associated with violence, seeped deeply into this town’s being. It culminates in an epic slobberknocker between Austin and Trejo, an operatic brawl which starts as a regular grappling, MMA-style battle and ends with two men taping their hands together,  one single mass of fighter, seemingly beating itself into senselessness. Relentlessly logical in its visual connections, this image of, not one man clapping, but one man brawling, is a rather brilliant way for this movie about a town devouring itself to end.

Unsurprisingly, Outlaw Vern appears to be correct. Steve Austin is a reliable indicator of DTV quality, with four out of his five efforts worthy of attention. With two more films scheduled for release this year, The Package  (co-starring Dolph Lundgren), and Maximum Conviction (with Steven Seagal), it will be interesting to see if he continues to elaborate upon his stoic straight-edge persona, or if  the cocky and logorrheic “Stone Cold” that he flashed in Tactical Force will creep back in to once again strike fear into CEOs the world over.

DTV ACTION ITEMS (PART 1): AN INTERVIEW WITH OUTLAW VERN

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May 1, 2012

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The summer movie season is obnoxiously approaching, with long-form toy commercial  The Avengers opening on Friday.  While estimable writer-director Joss Whedon is sure to provide a witty quip or two, this is still a 142 minute movie about a gang of men (and a token woman) who wear molded plastic underwear. This 3D “spectacular” will cost upwards of $20, so I submit that your movie dollar is better spent on the humble direct-to-video action movie. With no budget for CG, these cheap-o brawlers resort to showing actual humans moving in real spaces, often with jaw-dropping athleticism. And if not, they are over in 90 minutes or less.

For the next three weeks, I’ll be discussing DTV action movies, in the hopes of bringing more appreciative eyes to this last bastion of  the B-movie spirit. This week, I chat with Outlaw Vern about the general state of DTV movies today, from its studios to its stars. Vern has been a vocal (and very funny) supporter of the genre for years at Ain’t It Cool News and his own popular review site, sparking my own interest in them with his polemical call-to-arms in his write-up of The Marine 2: ““Some of us are starting to suspect that there’s been a switcheroo, that the DTV format – once designated as a 100% crap zone – has become the more reliable place to find good [English language] action movies.” The more I watch, the more I agree with him.

The interview was conducted over e-mail. Vern writes in very slangy prose, so words like “websight” are not typos, but are his own invention. You can order his book on Steven Seagal, SEAGALOGY, here.

For some background, what year did you start reviewing movies? Could you talk about what led you to start up your site?

I started in ’99. Back then there was this thing on the internet called “newsgroups” which was sort of like bulletin boards, and I would write crappy little movie reviews on the one called rec.arts.movies.current-films. Some of the people there thought what I was writing was funny and sort of sarcastically suggested starting a websight, so I did. After doing it for a long time I got better.

Did you cover DTV movies right from the start, or was there a particular film (or actor) that made you pay closer attention to them?

It started because I had a friend who was hooking me up with screeners from a video store, these were VHS tapes that the studios sent out to promote upcoming movies. Since they were movies that hadn’t come out yet I would write about them and send it in to Ain’t It Cool News. Back then a lot of them were sequels to Wild Things, Cruel Intentions, The Skulls, stuff like that. I also got some of the DTV Steven Seagal movies and I was really interested in him because of On Deadly Ground so I really took to those and that obsession led to me writing my book Seagalogy.

Unlike the majority of movie writers, you focus a lot on the way action scenes are shot. What do you think are the key ingredients to making a good action/fight sequence? Of those, what do you think DTV movies do particularly well?

There’s no one way to do an action scene but I’m very big on them having a clear sense of where the characters are standing and what they’re doing. That used to be a minimum standard of competence but now it’s kind of rare. A decade ago I was really bothered by fast edits starting with Armageddon, and then started worrying about bad framing after Gladiator, and of course since then you can usually assume that a theatrically released action movie is gonna have most of the scenes shot very close up with a handheld camera so you get confused and aren’t sure if anything cool happened or not. When the director actually makes an attempt to plan out the shots and clearly show people fighting it becomes a major promotional point, like in Hanna and Haywire.

For a long time actually the action was usually crappy in DTV movies. For example Seagal’s action scenes showed way less effort and craftsmanship than his earlier movies. Belly of the Beast and Urban Justice are two exceptions. But in recent years as most of the studio action movies have turned into shakycam bullshit with actors pretending to be fighters instead of the other way around, DTV became sort of the last refuge for American fight movies with the spirit of what we used to love in the ’80s.

Could you give a general DTV lay of the land for newcomers? Who are the major studios, directors and actors?

Millennium Films is mostly theatrical now (they did The Expendables and the Conan the Barbarian remake) but they were sort of the Cannon Films of the early 2000s, pumping out lots of the DTV movies starring Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Wesley Snipes. Those guys, Dolph Lundgren and Academy Award winner Cuba Gooding, Jr. are the primary marquee names doing DTV vehicles, but of course Wesley’s in jail now and Seagal has slowed down a little to do TV shows. For the time being I think Stone Cold Steve Austin is the most prolific star with a good track record. Most of his DTV movies, especially Damage, are way better than his one theatrical starring role, The Condemned.

WWE Studios (or “the prestigious WWE Studios” as I always call them) made The Condemned but I think they’ve become much more trustworthy in the DTV market. I really enjoyed The Marine 2starring the son of a wrestler I used to watch in the ’80s, and a quirky crime drama called Inside Out where the wrestler Triple-H is reunited with his Blade 3 co-star Parker Posey to play an ex-con who gets mixed up in his friend’s untaxed cigarette scam, but just wants to make pickles [this actually received a limited theatrical release last year -RES].

Years ago it seemed like no DTV directors left a mark on their movies unless it was a mark of suckiness. Now there are a bunch of directors I try to keep an eye on: Isaac Florentine (Undisputed 2 and 3, Ninja, Special Forces, US Seals II, many others) and John Hyams (Universal Soldier: Regeneration, Dragon Eyes) are the standouts, but I’m also interested in William Kaufman (The Hit List, Sinners and Saints), Roel Reiné (Pistol Whipped, The Marine 2, Death Race 2) and Jesse V. Johnson (The Butcher, Pit Fighter).

Where are most DTV productions shot? And do you know the general budget of most of these productions?

It seems like most of them shoot in Vancouver, but Avi Lerner, founder of Millennium, has a studio in Bulgaria, so a lot of them are shot there. There are a lot of New Orleans productions now too, because of tax incentives they have there. I don’t really know about budgets, but I just looked it up and IMDb estimates Universal Soldier: Regeneration at $14 million, less than a fourteenth what it cost to make Battleship.

What is your opinion of the “mockbusters” that the production company The Asylum  churns out? Most of them look like manufactured kitsch, but is there anything worthwhile or interesting there?

Not that I’ve seen. I mean, I get a laugh from the titles and covers like everybody else, but the parts I’ve seen have been terrible and not in a fun way, so I haven’t had the stomach to venture into that territory too much. People always ask me to review different ones but I’ve never had anyone claim to have found one that was watchable. Actually I thought about watching I Am Omega because it stars Mark Dacascos. That could still happen. My dream is that they’ll start doing rip-offs of Oscar winners. I’d like to see The King’s Peach and The Artiste. The ‘e’ in Artiste would be really small on the cover.

Scott Adkins is a favorite of yours (and now mine). How would you describe his work to someone who hasn’t seen him before? Do you think he’ll ever break through in Hollywood?

Adkins is an agile, high-kicking screen martial artist kind of like a modern Van Damme, but he’s English so he’s more eloquent in our language. But actually I like him best in the Undisputed movies playing a stoic Russian criminal. He has more of a background in straight acting than most action stars, having been on British TV shows like EastEndersand Mile High, but it’s his fighting that has earned him a following. He also kind of looks like Ryan Reynolds, so he was able to stunt double Reynolds in Wolverine.

I don’t know, part of me feels like he’s so talented and likable and has such an impressive body of work that he’s destined to blow up on the big screen, but part of me thinks there’s just not a theatrical market for martial artist stars like that anymore. Jason Statham is probably the closest thing we have to that in the western world.

Of the aging DTV action stars (Seagal, Lundgren, Van Damme and the like), who is making the most interesting stuff? Any recent recommendations?

I think Van Damme is in an interesting place right now, because he turned down The Expendables to do Universal Soldier: Regeneration, which totally paid off because US:R is a way better movie and now he gets a bigger role as the lead villain in Expendables 2. He’s really great in US:R, playing his zombie super soldier character as a burnt out, tragic character yearning for humanity but not able to reach it. Lundgren is also great in that (he’s only in a few scenes because he didn’t turn down Expendables). He’s doing some experimenting now too, he did an indie comedy, he’s got one coming out where he plays a villain, and he’s working with 3 of the directors I listed above, plus doing some directing of his own.

The best recent movie I’ve seen with any of those guys is Dragon Eyes, but Van Damme really just has a glorified cameo as the mentor to Cung Le.

I know you’re an admirer of Isaac Florentine. What makes him in particular such an effective DTV director?

He’s a martial artist himself and also grew up a movie nerd obsessed with Sergio Leone. But my theory is – and I’m not sure anybody else subscribes to this one – that it comes from directing Power Rangers. He did like 60 episodes as a choreographer and directed a lot of those so it just gave him years of practice quickly shooting down and dirty martial arts sequences with very little money. He loves movement and believes in visual storytelling, so he has a very energetic but clear visual style. And at this point he’s done more than a dozen movies but still puts his all into it so he’s gotten really great at taking guys like Van Damme, Lundgren or Michael Jai White and putting them in a story that really emphasizes their badass qualities. Florentine is also the guy that turned Adkins into a DTV icon, first stealing the show in Special Forces, then as the villain in Undisputed 2, who became the protagonist in Undisputed 3.

I think your favorite DTV production is Universal Soldier: Regeneration. Could you say a few words about why DTV doubters should see it?

That movie is the surprise masterpiece I’ve been hoping for ever since I started watching those screeners. It grabs you right from the beginning with this intense kidnapping, car chase and shootout. The cameras are right in the middle of the action but used very intentionally, not shaking all over the place. It takes these silly but fun sci-fi concepts from the original Roland Emmerich movie but treats them much more seriously. The music and sound design seem very influenced by Alien and The Terminator, it creates a really strong, grim atmosphere. The super soldiers are played mostly by MMA fighters so the fight scenes are really brutal. But there’s also something poetic about it, like the scene where Lundgren’s villain has been cloned after being chopped up in the original movie and he knows to fight Van Damme but can’t remember why. It’s this awesome sci-fi action movie but also says something about war taking away our humanity.

From the few I’ve seen, the DTV action movies seem to have a higher level of craft than Hollywood blockbusters because of their low budgets, forcing them to use more analog techniques (like using longer takes with real fighting instead of fx and rapid cutting). Do you think that is true, or am I exaggerating?

It seems that way because you’ve seen the very best ones. I gotta be honest, there’s a lot more crap than there is Undisputed. But I think that’s definitely true in best case scenarios like Hyams and Florentine. I compare them to the standout directors who were taking advantage of the drive-in market to do interesting stuff in the old days.

The standards keep going up for DTV and at the same time the standards for action scenes in theatrical releases are pretty much in the toilet. It’s like you’re not even expected to point the camera at the action anymore. Did you see Warrior? Really good sports drama, but the fighting tournament is literally shot to look like you’re in the audience with shitty seats where you can’t see anything. The fights are choreographed by J.J. Perry, but his work is showcased way better in DTV movies like Undisputed II, The Tournament and The Shepherd: Border Patrol.

What upcoming DTV movies are you most looking forward to?

I can’t say Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning because that’s hopefully gonna be in theaters. I have some hopes for this one called The Package because it’s Jesse V. Johnson directing Steve Austin and Dolph Lundgren, plus lesser known white guy martial artists Darren Shalavi and Jerry Trimble are in the cast. And I’m hoping Maximum Conviction will be fun because it teams Austin with Seagal. It’s all about team-ups right now.

If you had to select five DTV productions to convince someone to take DTV movies seriously, what would they be?

1. Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009)

2. Blood and Bone (2009): Michael Jai White is a badass motherfucker who gets out of prison, rents a room and enters an underground fighting circuit on a mysterious mission of revenge. He’s every bit as badass as he was in Black Dynamite but in a non-parody context. This reminds me of the best Van Damme movies like Lionheart, mixed with a little blaxploitation swagger. It has an excellent villain, a surprising use of a Wang Chung song, and great little touches like the legendary Bob Wall cameoing as his character from Enter the Dragon.

3. Undisputed II (2006) and III (2010): – I didn’t really like the original Undisputed even though it’s directed by Walter Hill and has a great performance by one of my favorites, Wesley Snipes. But in the sequels Isaac Florentine replaced the boxing with MMA and came up with the brilliant idea of turning the villain George “Iceman” Chambers (originally Ving Rhames, now Michael Jai White) into the protagonist to fight the Russian prison champ Boyka (Scott Adkins). Then in part 3 Boyka has to rebuild himself after defeat and face the great Chilean fighter Marko Zaror (Mandrill). Boyka is a convicted murderer but you find yourself rooting for him to win and escape.

4. Darkman III: Die Darkman Die (1996): I want to honor the rare good-DTV-sequel. Most are half-assed rejected-TV-pilot-esque rehashings with different characters. Darkman III is one of the rare DTV sequels that seems to fit the medium: it’s certainly not worthy of a theatrical release – I mean, Liam Neeson is replaced with Arnold Vosloo from Hard Target and The Mummy – but gives us an idea of some of the fun we might’ve had if more people had paid to see Darkman like we did. It’s from the writers of Face/Off, and they come up with all kinds of clever and funny things to happen to the vigilante master of disguise. My favorite is when he disguises himself as the villain (Jeff Fahey) to break into his house and walks into his surprise birthday party. Later he impersonates the villain again for the good cause of attending his daughter’s school play.

runners up: From Dusk Till Dawn II: Texas Blood Money and Hostel Part III, both directed by Scott Spiegel.

5. Belly of the Beast (2003): I gotta include a Steven Seagal picture on here. Urban Justice is his most hardcore DTV action movie, Out of Reach is maybe his funniest (he plays an animal rescuer/swordsman who has to rescue his orphan pen pal from white slavers) but I think Belly of the Beast is most representative of the DTV yin and yang: quality action mixed with charmingly sloppy filmmaking lunacy that would never make it to theaters. Helmed by the great Ching Siu-Tung (director of A Chinese Ghost Story, choreographer of Hero and Shaolin Soccer), it brings Seagal to Thailand to save his kidnapped daughter from Islamic extremists, a corrupt general, a transvestite and a sorcerer. There’s a great shootout and a fight in a market where a guy slips on a tomato and lands on a meat cleaver.

JIM BROWN, MOVIE STAR: THE SPLIT and THE SLAMS

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March 20, 2012

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Jim Brown retired from the National Football League in 1965, after nine seasons of transcendent athleticism. “For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness, and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil, there is no other like Mr. Brown,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Red Smith. Brown was only thirty years old when he shockingly hung up his spikes, but he never much cared about public opinion. Instead of exposing his body to more pounding (he never missed a game in his astonishing career), he entered the comfier confines of the movie business, where stuntmen will happily take beatings for you. In his debut, Gordon Douglas’ fine Western Rio Conchos (1964, I wrote about it here), he establishes the quiet tough guy routine he would soon build upon. It was with The Dirty Dozen (1967) that he became a bankable name, and Brown knew it, as  it was during production of that blockbuster that he announced his retirement from football. He went on to star in close to twenty films over the next decade, and the Warner Archive recently released a sample of this output on DVD, four works from 1968 – 1973: The Split (1968), Kenner (1969),…tick…tick…tick (1970) and The Slams (1973).

Brown churned out three ensemble action movies in 1968, slowly moving his way up the credits. He provided solid support in the violent mercenary film Dark of the Sun and cold-war submarine adventure Ice Station Zebra, but it wasn’t until November of that year, in The Split, that Brown gained top billing. Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler had produced Point Blank for MGM the previous year, and sought to replicate its success by again adapting one of Richard Stark’s (the pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake) crime novels featuring the ruthlessly efficient thug, Parker. John Boorman’s icy stylization on Point Blank was replaced by the anonymous workmanship of  British TV director Gordon Flemyng, who brought Stark’s The Seventh to the screen. Retitled The Split, it also changes the no-nonsense Parker’s name to McClain, played by Jim Brown.

Just out of prison, McClain is eager to take on a new job. He’s tipped to the heavy amount of cash flowing through the Memorial Coliseum during Los Angeles Rams games, and begins assembling a team to snatch it. The heist goes off with nary a hitch, but soon the money goes missing, and the crew starts turning against each other to find the cause.

Stark’s books excel in breaking down the brute mechanics of crime, of the intricate processes and rituals involved, from the punchy language of black market firearms deals to the nitty-gritty of pawn shop cons. The Split is a cartoon version of the novel, replacing process with pizzazz. This would be a disaster except for the eager cast, which is a motley collection of odd-faced acting talent. The team that McClain puts together is played by Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates and Donald Sutherland, with Gene Hackman as the cop sent to take them down.  Each is given one characteristic to play with, and they mug it to the hilt. Borgnine is the hot-headed muscle, Klugman the anxious wheelman, Oates the antic lock-picker and Sutherland an aesthete sniper. Brown puts each through a gauntlet of ridiculous tests to prove their worthiness, like running Klugman off the road and drop kicking Borgnine.

When not involved in some spectacular fight scenes, Brown is tentative in the lead, still clinging to his early roles as a quietly monotonal badass. He hasn’t yet developed the deadpan humor that would so invigorate The Slams, so he tends to fade into the background when next to his engagingly over-the-top castmates. But when the fists start flying, he is the one who overwhelms. The bout between Brown and Borgnine is a classic office smashing bruiser, a slugfest so brutal that Borgnine recalled, “I actually got my head bashed in because he took things a little too seriously.”

Brown was nothing if not serious, and always took offense to his films being described as “Blaxploitation.”  He told David Walker that, “the word is basically irrelevant… Whenever you sign a contract to play a role and make money, you’re exploiting yourself. Nobody else is exploiting you.” Later, he quipped, “You could say that James Cagney was white exploitation, or John Wayne, because they did action films, they made money, and they were major stars.” For Brown then, these were very lucrative “self-sploitation” movies, although ones in which he could play “roles that had never before been played by black actors.” In simply being the leader of an otherwise all-white ensemble in The Split, he was breaking ground, gaining a position of power where he could sell-out more than any white actor could dream of. This was a practical kind of equality he could believe in, which also allowed him to found organizations like the Negro Industrial and Economic Union, to stimulate investment in black-owned businesses.

In Kenner and …tick…tick…tick, Brown tried to expand his limited range. In Kenner, he played a merchant seaman in Bombay, trying to track down a man who conned him out of case. Instead he gets mixed up with a street kid, and a tender relationship develops. In …tick, he tries his hand at social drama, as Lilies of The Field director Ralph Nelson plops him into an In the Heat of the Night style anti-racism drama, in which he plays a sheriff caught in the middle of a brewing race war. These are rather stodgy films, obvious in their emotional manipulations, but Brown continued to get more comfortable as a performer, developing a relaxed charm to go with his intimidating physicality.

By the time of The Slams (1973) Brown could really command the screen, introducing a looseness and humor to his strong silent type that no longer needed an ensemble to carry a film. The film originated when Gene Corman (brother of Roger) was inspired to make a film based on the 1970 “Soledad Brothers” incident, when three black inmates at Soledad Prison in California killed a white guard, in retaliation for the shooting deaths of three inmates. Corman had interest in casting Diana Ross as Angela Davis, who advocated on the Brothers’ behalf, but that never came to fruition. The film that was made has almost no relation to the original incident, aside from scenes of racial tension in prison. Corman had just made the successful Blaxploitation film Hit Man, so tailored The Slams to feature as much brawling and shootouts as possible.

Brown plays Curtis Hook, a small-time thief who finds his way into a million dollars. Before getting cuffed for the job, he manages to hide the money at an abandoned amusement park. In jail on a misdemeanor, all he has to do is bide is time until he is released, and become a rich man. But alas, the local mob syndicate has put a hit out on him, which the white supremacists are eager to collect on. While fighting for his life, he learns that the amusement park will be demolished, and his fortune with it…

Director Jonathan Kaplan had earned his Corman spurs with the sexploitation-ers Night Call Nurses (1972) and The Student Teachers (1973), learning to favor speed and spectacle over anything else. The Slams careens along with relentless action, from the opening shoot-out to the wildly intricate jailbreak that dominates the last third. He barrels forward with handheld camera and the ever-present zoom, always goosing the action with one or the other. Brown confident and cocksure as Hook, radiating arrogant calm rather than fading into the backdrop as in The Split. In the parade of fight scenes, which include inventive tortures like molten steel getting poured down a man’s throat, he gets to display his quick-twitch athleticism and penchant for kidney shots, getting especially brutal with the freakishly tall supremacist Glover (Ted Glover), whom he leaves writhing in pain at the end of almost every scene.

The cast is filled with pungent turns, including Roland Bob Harris as a skin-crawlingly obsequious Captain, Quinn K. Redeker as the short-fused warden, Betty Cole as Hook’s wise mother (“You know you can’t mess with the man!”), Paul Harris as  sleepy-eyed pimp Barney, and an indelible cameo by Joe Dante fixture Dick Miller as an incredulous cab driver. A relentlessly entertaining action movie, it presents Jim Brown at the peak of his star power. While never as elegant and jaw-dropping as his play on the field, his performances from this period hold a brusque, brutal charm (similar to Jason Statham’s current run), while his fight scenes should be objects of rapt contemplation.

THE TOP TWELVE GENRE FILMS OF 2011

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December 20, 2011

genre 2011

As the carcasses of prestige pics get picked over by awards committees and prognosticators, I like to distract myself from this pointless posturing by watching movies featuring actual corpses. After last year’s rundown of genre flicks received a good response, I return to the bloody well again, this time with twelve of my favorite action/horror/exploitation items released in the past year. Sure to be ignored by your local film critics circle, they are works of grim resourcefulness and ingenuity, deserving of more attention. I look forward to your criticisms, insults and recommendations in the comments. My picks are presented in alphabetical order.

Attack the Block, directed by Joe Cornish

With his origins in sketch comedy (the British “Adam and Joe Show”), one would expect Joe Cornish’s debut alien invasion feature to be episodic and tongue-in-cheek. While laced with humor, Attack the Block is instead a sleekly designed chase film, as a wanna-be gang of teens defend their South London project from the alien hordes. It was shot at the dilapidated Heygate Estate (which is now undergoing demolition), whose brutalist, prison-like facade emphasizes the kids’ status as second-tier citizens, convicts even in their freedom. They roam the streets and halls, led by Moses (played with sensitive stoicism, and shades of Gary Cooper, by John Boyenga), harrassed by cops while they harass (and rob) outsiders, as if outlaws in their own Wild West, Moses facing his own kind of High Noon.

***

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, directed by Tsui Hark

I devoted an entire post to this pulpy marvel back in April (read here), so I’ll be brief here. Suffice it to say that Hark combines martial arts, Sherlock Holmes and steampunk into one of the most deliriously entertaining films of the year. Reveling in the sheer joy of storytelling, it hearkens back to Poverty Row serials of the 30s and 40s, telescoping an entire season’s worth of incidents and cliffhangers into its 2 hour running time. And yes, the CGI looks fuzzy and second-rate, but for me, it only added to its ramshackle charm.

***

Fast Five, directed by Justin Lin

I had not seen any of the previous iterations of this revived testosterone oil slick of a franchise, attracted only by the presence of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who enlivens whatever material he swaggers into. He is, of course, a magnetic presence in this one, his Diplomatic Security Service agent growling out orders with a starved pit-bull intensity. But the bombastic world that Justin Lin inflates around him is equally compelling – especially the turbocharged action sequences which are both outrageous and rigorously designed, from the moving train car heist to the torn-out bank vaults which are chained to cars and used as wrecking balls. Justin Lin is one of the few Hollywood directors to have firm control of the modern action film aesthetic, his quick cuts and mobile camera managing to convey a coherent geography (if this is “chaos cinema”, I’ll take it!). Examine the extended, wall breaking fistfight between The Rock and Vin Diesel for a meaty example.

***

Insidious, directed by James Wan

Finding creative solutions to monetary restrictions led James Wan to make one of the most profitable movies of the year. Insidious was made for $1.5 million and has since earned $97 million worldwide (figures from BoxOfficeMojo). Building tension off of long takes, smoke machines and a record playing Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoeing Through the Tulips”, this is an elegant shocker that also has the gall to build defined characters. Patrick Wilson is a distant, condescending husband and father, Rose Byrne an artistically frustrated songwriter turned housewife. Wan and screenwriter Leigh Wannell use the couple’s bad faith and turn it into the stuff of nightmares — their mutual resentments manifesting in the form of a vengeful wraith who absconds with their child. The second-half dimension-folding freak-out fails to exert the same slow-burn creep of the haunted first, but it still houses more indelible scares than any other film this year.

***

I Saw the Devil, directed by Kim Jee-woon

A cat-and-mouse revenge thriller where the roles of hunter and prey are continually reversible. The sociopathic killer Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik) and secret agent Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun) engage in a pas-de-deux of sadism, each torturing the other in a game of gruesome one-upsmanship. Containing elements of fairy tales (a cannibal’s house reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel) and self-reflexive black humor, it attempts to encompass all forms of revenge narratives, seeming, as Dave Kehr wrote, to be “the natural endpoint in the revenge film cycle kicked back off by Tarantino.”

***

The Mechanic, directed by Simon West

The pick of the Statham platter this year (other options: Killer Elite and Blitz), this remake of the 1972 Michael Winner/Charles Bronson original is an effectively no-nonsense bruiser. Statham is upscale hitman Arthur Bishop, who takes on hard-headed Steve McKenna (Ben Foster) as an apprentice. Bishop is an ascetic aesthete, living in a gorgeous arts & crafts style cabin on the water, with a preference for high-necked cable-knit sweaters out of the J Crew for assassins catalog. McKenna is necessarily a bit of a drunk and a hothead, needing the guidance of Bishop’s meditative nowhere-man. Director Simon West, if not exactly a stylist, is at least efficient, and frames fight scenes of lucid brutality. Statham brings a coiled physicality and a reliably self-effacing charm, while Ben Foster continues his run of mannered, fastidiously manic performances, his McKenna exhibiting non-stop DTs. He pops off the screen with garrulous intensity, and he’s building a gallery of eccentrics worthy of the great character actors. He’s no M. Emmet Walsh yet, but he’s on his way.

***

Point Blank, directed by Fred Cavaye

A refreshingly brisk 84 minutes long, this breathless French thriller wastes no time on exposition and races headlong into a chase. Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) is a nurse in training who inadvertently interrupts the murder of a hood (Roschdy Zem) in the ER. Soon his wife gets kidnapped and he is forced to ally himself with Zem to save his wife and his reputation. They race through Paris city streets, with Cavaye’s camera following them in hurtling tracking shots. Structured as one epic sprint, there is no time to sketch in character detail or complicated plot maneuvers, so while there is no emotional investment here, it still packs quite a kick of adrenaline.

***

The Robber, directed by Benjamin Heisenberg

A resolutely anti-psychological heist film, it examines the daily routine of marathon runner and bank robber Johann Rettenberger with clinical detachment. The true story it is based on, of “Pump-Gun Ronnie”, a runner who also wore a Reagan mask during jobs, is more spectacular than what it is on screen. Heisenberg pares away any hint of backstory, forcing lead actor Andreas Lust to express everything through his sinewy body. Curling into himself, Lust rejects any outside help, even recoiling at the accidental touch of a stranger in a park. It is when he falls for his childhood friend Erika (Franziska Weisz) that he lets the outside world inside – which collapses his carefully manicured facades. Outside of this, it’s a terrifically staged action film, including an open air stunner in which Lust sprints from one bank robbery to another, weaving through hotel lobbies, parking garages and open fields – leaving the police huffing and puffing behind him. Using controlled handheld camera (no shaky cam here) in sinuous long takes, Heisenberg and DP Reinhold Vorschneider create one of the most propulsively exciting chase scenes of the year.

***

Stake Land, directed by Jim Mickle

My favorite vampire experience since Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It. So it’s been a while. Set in a post-apocalyptic America ravaged by the pointy-toothed beasts, it’s part survivalist horror, part road movie, and anchored by a quietly charismatic performance by Nick Damici (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Mickle). Damici plays “Mister”, a crusty self-sustaining loner who has built his life around a violent routine: rifle abandoned shops for food and dust a few blood suckers. He picks up Martin (Connor Paolo) along his desultory journeys, the lone survivor of a slaughtered family. Mentoring Martin in the ways of survival and vamp-killing, Mister gains a purpose outside of himself, and is determined to ferry Martin to “New Eden”, a supposed safe zone in Canada. Mickle shoots the film in a dusky low-light, as if in a perennial twilight, where danger lurks in every unexplored nook and cranny, from vamps to the fundamentalist cult which worships them. With haunting makeup and creature design, these are not the dapper vampires du jour, but demons in decaying bodies, oozing goopy fluids which can only be replaced by fresh blood. It’s a genuinely unique vision – and one that aids the film’s subtle allegory of American intellectual decline (it’s no coincidence the promised land is in Canada).

***

Unknown, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

Following up the cold precision of his ace horror flick Orphan, Serra again churns out a film of with strong compositional lines and an entertainingly ridiculous scenario. What stands out this time is his tactile sense of place, a multi-cultural Berlin of five-star hotels and seedy flop-houses. It’s a huge improvement on its model, Taken, the previous Liam Neeson Euro-sploitation outing, which was directed by Pierre Morel. While that film took place in a world of Eastern-European stereotypes and chopped its action sequences to bits, here the city still seethes with racial tension (a taxi dispatcher blames the city’s perceived decline on immigrants), but Neeson is assisted in his quest by a Bosnian cab driver (played convincingly by Diane Kruger) and her African immigrant pal named Biko (a nod to South African activist Steve Biko, played by Clint Dyer). As with Orphan, its actions sequences are concise bits of legible brutality . Bruno Ganz steals the movie as a proud former Stasi member who aids Neeson in his quest for identity. In what is surely to be one of the finest scenes of the year, Frank Langella swings by to cradle Ganz in his arms, as they discuss how to die with dignity.

***

The Ward, directed by John Carpenter

The unjustly derided return to the big screen for John Carpenter, who shows his talent for slow-burn scares is as sharp as ever. Working with a hacky script, Carpenter turns this story of a haunted insane asylum into an experiment in visual repetition, evoking the ritualized circular movements of these girls’ daily lives. An example of form triumphing over content. You can read my full thoughts in my post from June.

***

The Yellow Sea, directed by Na Hong-jin

Na Hong-jin’s follow up to The Chaser, is an operatic bloodbath about a poor Chinese immigrant in Korea, trying to find the wife who abandoned him years ago. There are no guns in this movie – everyone gets stabbed or bludgeoned by an axe-handle– and there are some epic battles here. With South Korea’s highly restrictive gun ownership laws, even the underworld has trouble obtaining firearms. Without shoot-outs, each death becomes more personal, because you have to get close and smell the sweat of your opponent before taking their life. It is a ritual bloodletting to rid the world of the infection of humanity.

Honorable Mentions: Drive Angry, Wrecked, Burke & Hare (which I wrote about here).

ADAPTATION: THE THREE MUSKETEERS (2011)

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November 1, 2011

musketeers

Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers has been adapted countless times for the screen, most of them forgotten. There is a 1911 Edison production, a modernized 1933 Mascot serial that starred John Wayne as a French Foreign Legionnaire,  and now a newfangled 3D version crafted by Paul W.S. Anderson. Left out of this un-illustrious list are the canonical Douglas Fairbanks interpretation of 1924, and the popular jokey two-parter from Richard Lester in ’73 and ’74, but alas, it seems the latest Dumas gloss will go the way of Edison’s and the Duke’s, filed away as a rote remake and quietly ignored thereafter. Garnering a variety of gleeful pans and disappointing box-office returns, Anderson’s Three Musketeers nevertheless abounds in visual riches and confirms the director as one of the few to fully explore the possibilities of new 3D technologies.

Anderson told the London Free Press that Richard Lester’s Musketeers was one of the first films his father took him to see as a child. It was this childhood memory, and an interest in filming Baroque and Romanesque European architecture that set the project in motion. The idea started when Anderson and long-time producer Jeremy Bolt were marveling at the buildings in Berlin, where they were shooting Resident Evil: Afterlife, and,  Bolt told ComingSoon.net, “Paul said that we should really try and find a project where we could shoot some of these buildings for real.” The impetus for the project was purely visual, and a bit of a departure for the duo, whose previous films were mainly studio-bound. After sharing their mutual love of Lester’s lusty and slapstick take on the material, they pitched it to Constantin Films, who accepted. I would imagine the pitch included more references to the success of historical fantasies like Pirates of the Caribbean than King Ludwig II, whose Bavarian castles they would shoot in, but the influences of both are prevalent throughout.

Anderson and Bolt made a number of tweaks to Dumas’ story and Lester’s film. Most of the sexual energy of Lester’s version, which is overflowing with innuendo and Raquel Welch’s heaving bosom, is softened and diverted entirely into Milla Jovovich’s wonderfully sinuous and menacing turn as Milady, another of Anderson’s steely feminine heroes (or, here, anitheroes). In a nod to the lucrative tween audience (and inadvertently more faithful to Dumas), D’Artagnan is made younger and callower, with the Bieberesque Logan Lerman taking over the sabre. Not as spry as Fairbanks or as impish or Michael York, Lerman is a bit of a non-entity, but succeeds in not distracting from the often spectacular backdrops. The youth push is rounded out by Freddie Fox as an earnestly mincing King Louis XIII and Gabriella Wilde as D’Artagnan’s chaste love interest Constance. The three title roughnecks (Matthew Macfadyen/Luke Evans/Ray Stevenson), while not matching the oily majesty of Lester’s Oliver Reed/Richard Chamberlain/Frank Finlay, do a workmanlike job of swashbuckling, and were physical enough to perform the swordfights without stunt doubles.

This athleticism allows Anderson to get close and analytical in the sparring scenes, using slow-motion to register every thrust and parry. This facility with clean lines of action is nothing new for the director, but the spaces in which they snap into place  certainly is. The first of Anderson’s films to be shot mostly on location, his Three Musketeers emphasizes dizzying verticals as opposed to the claustrophobic horizontals of the Resident Evil series. This transition is visualized in the the first action scene, which takes place in an underground corridor that could have come out of R.E. The receding depth-of-field works brilliantly in 3D, as it did in Resident Evil: Afterlife (recently named by Stefan Drössler (director of the Munich Filmmuseum), as one of the best contemporary 3D films in a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art), and it even ends, like its zombie-killing forebear, with a Milla Jovovich action scene, as she dives through a barrage of weight-sensitive booby traps. The prize at the end, however, is the plans for an airborne killing machine, supposedly designed by Da Vinci. This hot-air balloon warship is indicative of the vertical heights Anderson will push his visuals for the rest of the film.

The castles of King Ludwig II are a reasonable match for the France of Louis XIII, since Ludwig was obsessed with Versailles and ordered the Herrenchiemsee to be built, a replica of Versailles in neo-Baroque style. These are garishly gorgeous constructions, and Anderson was allowed to film interiors as well, which he approaches in airy high and low angles, the actors receding into the depths of their own history, the ornate ceiling murals gaining the foreground to the characters’ background in the sharp 3D compositions (shot on the Arri Alexa, also Scorsese’s choice for Hugo).

The introduction of the flying warships, while clearly an effort to pump up the film’s action quotient, is also a perfect device to push Anderson’s experiments in verticality. The closing set-piece is a slow ascent followed by a steep decline, the 3D depth effects shifting so that up and down becomes the new background and foreground, a re-orienting of space that is a logical extension of the scene but dizzying to behold. When the battle crashes , the lines of Bavarian architecture re-ground the image, with the climactic swordfight taking place on the vaulting roof of a church, whose steep declines tumble the combatants back down to the earth. A marvel of cinematic architecture, Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers should rightfully carve out a space next to the efforts of Douglas Fairbanks and Richard Lester as the exuberantly entertaining Dumas adaptation of its age.

WARNER ARCHIVE ROUNDUP: LATE FILMS

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October 18, 2011

last run

Every week the Warner Archive dusts off a bundle of forgotten studio productions onto DVD and hopes they find an audience. Recently they released a quartet of late films from veteran studio auteurs, and they all deserve to be seen. They are Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), Richard Fleischer’s The Last Run (1971), George Cukor’s Travels With My Aunt (1972) and Blake Edwards’ The Carey Treatment(1972), all presented in handsome remastered editions. These are directors who had been weaned in the classical studio era, and who were now facing the reality of producer-brokered “package deals” and the escalating power of the lead actors. Many of these were fraught productions, and none will rank with the best of the respective director’s work, but they all, somehow, end up as solidly crafted entries on their brilliant resumes.

The Last Run was originally a project set up for John Boorman at MGM, who was to produce and direct. As the AFI Catalog reports, star George C. Scott requested that John Huston replace Boorman, as he had worked with Huston on The List of Adrian Messenger (’63). After three weeks of shooting, however, Huston quit the picture, “after arguments with Scott over rewrites”. Richard Fleischer became the third and final director on the project, and lead actress Tina Aumont was replaced by Trish Van Devere.  It is unknown if any of the footage Huston shot remains in the film.

It is clear that Scott exerted a lot of control, even marrying two of his female co-stars (he left wife Colleen Dewhurst for Van Devere after shooting), and yet Fleischer still imbues the film with the cool, clean lines that had highlighted his work since The Clay Pigeon and Follow Me Quietly (also in the Warner Archive) in 1949. He traced these lines along the well-worn track of the story, the starkly familiar tale of aging getaway driver Harry Garmes (Scott) accepting one more job, “to see if my nerves and brain are still connected.” He picks up escaped prisoner Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) and his girl Claudie (Van Devere), but it appears Paul was sprung in order to be assassinated. Harry has to decide whether to aid their escape, and risk his life, or return to his solitary life on the Portuguese coast. It’s an easy choice unless you are in an existential road movie, in which the death-drive trumps lazy afternoons in the gorgeous coastal city of Albufeira.

Scott was 43 at the time of filming, but he looks at least 60, with thinning gray hair, a prominent paunch and wrinkles carving up his sagging face. As Harry Garmes, you can see every indignity in his life manifest on his body. His son died at the age of 3, and then his wife up and left him alone with his car obsession. He is subsumed in feelings of loss, using work as an escape. The loveliest moment in the film occurs when Garmes is forced to sleep over in a room Claudie has just departed. Her bra, panties and pantyhose are sitting wet in the sink. With lugubrious patience he takes them out, unrolls them, and hangs them on the laundry line by the dresser. In his ashen face you can see the memories flickering by, of when this banal act was routine, of intimacy once taken for granted and now enshrined in an alien past.

Fleischer does an unobtrusive job in choreographing the love triangle, re-configuring the three jousting players around the frame as their power-relations shift and shudder. These cramped, sticky compositions are a stark contrast to the opening shots of Garmes on the road in his BMW, in which the edges of objects all point outside the frame, towards escape. Now the eye just circles inside low-lit hotel dives, the eye cycling around these three increasingly dour criminals, the only way out a bullet in the chest, to turn the triangle into a line.

***

George Cukor was still a prestige name in Hollywood in 1972 (the trailer included on the DVD trumpets his name), although he didn’t have a hit since My Fair Lady (1962). So when the intended star of Travels With My Aunt, Katherine Hepburn, was “frustrated by budget cuts and demanded several script alterations”, per the AFI, the studio declined her requests, and she quit. Maggie Smith stepped in, and was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for her efforts.

The film is a buoyant adaptation of the comic Graham Greene novel, about milquetoast Briton bank manager Henry (Alec McCowen) who is whisked away on an international adventure by his dotty Aunt Augusta (Smith). Augusta is trying to acquire $100,00o by any means necessary to ransom one of her ex-lovers, Visconti (Robert Stephens, Smith’s husband until ’74), away from his kidnappers. In order to get this money, she re-acquaints herself with her multitude of formerly amorous companions (including North African fortune-teller Wordsworth (Lou Gossett)), as well as engaging in some minor money laundering and art theft.

This international romp (mostly shot in Spain) gets a lot of mileage out of Maggie Smith’s fluttering bohemian routine, but Cukor also manages to invest her character with a tragic sense of time’s passing. Augusta, who sucks life to the marrow, is a creature of the present tense (“I’ve always preferred an occasional orgy to a nightly routine”), but she is granted a powerfully moving reminiscence at “Le Train Bleu”, the Belle Epoque restaurant at the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris. She is speaking to Henry about her youth, and then the camera pans right, and suddenly the years have worn away, and it is a young Visconti who is walking towards a window. Outside a teenaged Augusta, in a schoolgirl’s outfit, exchanges giddy glances with him. She ditches her class and races inside, into a swirl of noise and movement, until Visconti lifts her away into light-footed waltz. It was a time of endless possibility, which has now shrunken for Augusta into re-living her past flings and scrounging for cash. This is the melancholy that underlies all of the film’s high-flying farce.

***

Director Blake Edwards  wanted his name taken off of The Carey Treatment (1972), an efficient medical thriller adapted from an early Michael Crichton novel (A Case of Need, by his pseudonym Jeffrey Hudson). Edwards was unhappy with the cuts MGM had made to the film, just as with Wild Rovers the year previously, but his name remained on the prints. I don’t know what was excised, but what remains is a solidly built contraption anchored by a smugly sexualized performance by James Coburn.

Coburn plays Dr. Peter Carey, a womanizing rogue taking up a new job as a pathologist in a Boston hospital. His adeptness at manipulating women becomes the recurring theme of the film, beginning when his erotic gaze is leveled Georgia Hightower (Jennifer O’ Neill), the clinic’s dietician. Carey’s seductive charm is later utilized in his independent investigation into the death of the hospital president’s daughter, after a botched illegal abortion. Carey’s friend David Tao (James Hong) is wrongfully tagged with the murder. Carey flirts his way through town, becoming more sexually aggressive until it turns to intimidating violence, as when he asks the victim’s old roommate if she is a virgin, and then nearly drives them into the ocean to scare her into talking. He discovers the killer through a bit of homo-erotic flirtation, receiving an aggressive deep-tissue massage from an intrigued meathead until he gets the information he was after.

It is difficult to locate Edwards’ personality, aside from the sardonic shot of a mouse stuck in a jar in the extreme right foreground, the faces that look into it distorted into gargoyles. It’s otherwise a workmanlike production, nothing more than a wonderfully acted episode of House, what with a harrumphing Pat Hingle and nervous Regis Toomey on board to support Coburn’s wildcat act.

***

Still riding the late career renaissance brought on by the camp theatrics of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), Robert Aldrich directed The Legend of Lylah Clare with even less consideration of good taste. A wild kitsch re-imagining of Vertigo, it invents tragic Hollywood star Lylah Clare (Kim Novak), who died before she was to marry her long-time director Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch). 20 years later, Zarkan discovers an actress who looks strikingly like Lylah, the bespectacled Elsa Brinkmann (also Kim Novak). He decides to make a biopic of Lylah Clare’s life, with the unknown Elsa to star. Elsa, however, is prone to channeling Lylah’s husky tenor and mannerisms with disturbing accuracy, and Zarkan becomes entranced, his obsession leading him to make the same mistakes that led to Lylah’s death all those years ago…

Hallucinatory and ridiculous, Lylah Clare is an often uproarious send-up of Hollywood self-seriousness, with its menagerie of skulking gargoyle performances. Peter Finch is the head freak, a narcissistic blowhard who believes his genius trumps reality- he looks pretentious even after he shaves off his pointy devil goatee. He gets the best lines: “Stop poncing about like an oversexed dwarf!” and “You are moving like a deeply offended Tibetan yak!”Then there’s his brittle and viciously jealous assistant Rossella (Rossella Falk), the worm-like producer Bart (Milton Selzer),  Ernest Borgnine as the infectiously boorish studio chief Barney Sheehan, “I make movies, not films!”, and Coral Browne as battle-ax gossip columnist Molly Luther, plus a cameo by Dick Miller as a journalist!

Aldrich often freezes them inside Zarkan’s mausoleum of a house, standing rook still like slowly oxidizing statues. Unable to see life beyond the glories of years past, they try to recreate it with Elsa, who is too open to suggestion to withstand their entreaties. As her life dissolves into Lylah’s, the film gets more strident and less bitchy, ditching the satire for a dime store version of Vertigo’s doubled identities. The presence of Novak only highlights this film’s shortcomings at metaphysical speculations. While it’s not terribly deep, I still had great fun skimming along its sarcastic surfaces.