Walter hill – R. Emmet Sweeney

January 10, 2012

I always work better with a deadline. Since the world is ending on December 21st, 2012, I expect to have the most productive movie-going year of my young, super-handsome life. In preparation for these blessed final hours in darkened theaters, I’ve drawn up a list of new releases I wish to see before my anticipated demise, those which I expect would give me the most pleasure in my twilight year. I hope it is also some help for you, dear reader, usefully arranged in descending order of preference.

Gebo et L’Ombre (Gebo and the Shadow), directed by Manoel de Oliveira

What better way to shuffle off this mortal coil than with the latest film from that ageless wonder, Manoel de Oliveira, the only man likely to survive doomsday. Gebo is an adaptation of the eponymous play by modernist Portuguese writer Raul Brandão (1867 – 1930), who was born in the same city as Oliveira, Oporto. The play is from 1923, and portrays an accounting clerk who is divided between wealth and honor, and who has to sacrifice himself to protect his own son. The production company, O Som E A Furia, rather blandly says the film, “portrays the poverty and the tragedies of life of ordinary people who can easily be related to contemporary life.” The sterling cast is made up of Oliveira regulars Ricardo Trepa and Leonor Silveira, plus the august triumverate of Jeanne Moreau, Claudia Cardinale and Michael Lonsdale. Likely to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it should hopefully reach these shores by the end of the year, in one fashion or another. Oliveira has already started production on another film, A Igreja do Diabo (The Devil’s Church), starring Fernanda Montenegro and based on the short story by Machado de Assis.

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A Pigeon Sat On a Branch Reflecting On Existence, directed by Roy Andersson

This is more hope than reality, as there’s only a slim chance this gets completed in time to screen this year. But since I wanted to type out that amazing title, here it is. It is the third and final section of Andersson’s “Living” trilogy, following the extraordinary duo of Songs From the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007). In October the film was awarded 650,000 Euros from The Council of Europe’s Eurimages fund, and CineEuropa reported it is “shooting for a 2013-2014 delivery”. We might be waiting awhile. For a taste, here is Roy Andersson talking to Ethan Spigland in 2010, when he was calling it A Dove Sat On a Branch…:

Can you say something about your next project?

RA: It’s a sum-up of my life; of the way I see existence. I have a preliminary title: A DOVE SITTING ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE.

ES: I like it.

RA: With a title like that you can be totally free—it’s not predictable. A painting by Breughel inspires it. It depicts a bird sitting on a branch overlooking a city. You can see the city from above and all the human activities below. Stylistically it will be similar to SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR and YOU THE LIVING, but this time I want to reach two things: more brutality as well as more poetry. . .and also more jokes, more humor.

ES: You want to push everything a bit further?

RA: Yes, I want to be more expressive. Anyway, I will try.

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Flying Swords of Dragon Gate 3D, directed by Tsui Hark

Tsui Hark, whose Detective Dee and The Phantom Flame was one of the inimitable delights of 2011, makes his first foray into 3D with this martial arts extravaganza. It opened on December 22nd in Hong Kong, and while it should be easy to find DVDs of this at online Asian retailers, I dearly hope I can see it in 3D. An irrepressible showman with an innate command of action cinematography (if not narrative), this could be one of the visual treats of the year.

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Casa De Mi Padre, directed by Matt Piedmont (March 16th)

Three Mississippi, directed by Adam McKay (Thanksgiving weekend, according to Vulture)

After a down year for American comedy in 2011 (Bridesmaids excepted), I am relieved that Will Ferrell will be appearing in no less than three movies in 2012 (I left off Dog Fight, in which Ferrell and Zack Galifianakis play dueling South Carolina politicians, because of wet rag director Jay Roach). I have been anticipating Casa since a trailer appeared almost a year ago. A parody of Mexican telenovelas, it has Ferrell playing frequently shirtless rancher Armando Alvarez, who is trying to save his father’s farm. The gimmick is that the film is almost entirely in Spanish, with Ferrell speaking the language phonetically throughout. With co-stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal, this looks just ridiculous enough for me to love. Three Mississippi is the latest collaboration between Ferrell and McKay, after The Other Guys in 2010. The duo has perfected an improvisatory approach to comedy, in which they push scenarios – and language itself – into realms of absurdity previously breached only by the Marx Brothers. I prefer John C. Reilly to Mark Wahlberg as Ferrell’s co-star, but I’ll take them however I can get them.

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Untitled Terrence Malick Project

It’s a Terrence Malick movie, which at this point is enough. It stars Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Rachel Weisz, Javier Bardem and other famous people. Here is what IMDB says about the story:

A romantic drama centered on a man who reconnects with a woman from his hometown after his marriage to a European woman falls apart.

OK!

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Holy Motors, directed by Leos Carax

Leos Carax’s first film since Pola X in 1999. I know very little about this, other than its delightfully eclectic cast of Eva Mendes (a wonderful comedienne: see The Other Guys and Stuck On You for proof), Michel Piccoli, Kylie Minlogue and Denis Lavant. Here is the summary from CineEuropa:

“Holy Motors traces 24 hours in the life of a person who travels between different lives, including that of a murderer, beggar, CEO, monstrous creature and father of a family.

Like a lone killer acting in cold blood and going from one hit to the next, he has a completely different identity in each of his intertwining lives. Like in a film-within-a film, he plays different roles. But where are the cameras, the film crew and the director? And where is his house, his resting place?”

Some production photos show Eva Mendes crawling out of a sewer, which would lead one to believe there are some elements borrowed from his segment of Tokyo! , in which Denis Lavant played a gibbering idiot named Merde who lived in the sewers, and who also wreaked havoc on the streets of Japan.

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Tabu, directed by Miguel Gomes

After being enchanted by Our Beloved Month of August a few years back, I hotly anticipate Miguel Gomes’ new feature, Tabu, which was just announced to be part of the Competition slate at the Berlin Film Festival. Apparently unrelated to F.W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty’s film of the South Seas, its production company describes it thusly:

A temperamental old woman, her Cape Verdean maid and a neighbour devoted to social causes live on the same floor of a Lisbon apartment building. When the old lady dies, the other two learn of an episode from her past: a tale of love and crime set in an Africa straight from the world of adventure films.

Otherwise all we know are that the stills are in B&W, and they look gorgeous.

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Resident Evil: Retribution 3D, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (September 14th)

The Master, directed Paul Thomas Anderson

A battle of Andersons! W.S. is one of the few contemporary directors to fully investigate the possibilities of 3D, with both Resident Evil: Afterlife and The Three Musketeers templates for how to shoot fight scenes in depth, with multiple planes of action roiling at once. P.T. is one for grand statements and grander tracking shots, an ambitious auteur with capital A’s adept at sketching particularly charismatic strains of grandiose American self-deception. His next entry is about the rise a religious sect, reportedly based on Scientology, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. I look forward to both, but admit, if I had to choose, that I’m a W.S. man (and a Jovovich one, too).

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The Grandmaster, directed by Wong Kar-Wai

Whether or not this actually comes out this year is anybody’s guess, as Wong likes to camp out in his editing room, but this is his return to Hong Kong filmmaking after the awkward, intermittently affecting My Blueberry Nights, and it stars dreamboat Tony Leung. Its subject is Ip Man, the Chinese martial artist who trained Bruce Lee, and who was also the subject to two fine fight films starring Donnie Yen.

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Others, in brief:

Bullet to the Head, directed by Walter Hill (April 13th)

Did you see it’s directed by Walter Hill? Well it is! And starring the intriguingly decomposing Sylvester Stallone. It’s Hill’s first theatrical feature since the underrated Undisputed in 2002.

Barbara, directed by Christian Petzold

Will premiere at the Berlinale. Have a pressing urge to gorge on the psychologically astute, visually controlled films of the Berlin School. Petzold (Jerichow, Beats Being Dead), is the exemplar of this style.

Haywire, directed by Steven Soderbergh (January 20th)

Curious to see how MMA fighter Gina Carano’s imposing physicality translates to the screen. Also, it’s Soderbergh’s first collaboration with writer Lem Dobbs since The Limey, which was great fun.

The Three Stooges, directed by The Farrelly Brothers (April 13th)

This is the project the Farrelly’s have been trying to make their entire career. Hopefully it unleashes the spastic, slapstick body-comedy-horror of their earlier work.

Lock-Out, directed by James Mather and Stephen St. Leger (April 20th)

The latest from the Luc Besson meathead factory, this Escape From New York knockoff drops wisecracking Guy Pearce into a max security space prison in order to rescue the president’s daughter (!). The trailer shows Pearce to be adept at falling and quipping.

June 15, 2010

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Walter Hill made his directorial debut with Hard Times (1975), a downbeat portrait of Depression-era gamblers, bare-knuckle brawlers, and the women who put up with them. In 2002, Hill made Undisputed (2002), another fight film, this time set at a prison in the Mojave desert, where a recently jailed ex-heavyweight champ faces off against an undefeated inmate fighter. Two direct-to-video sequels were spun off of the latter, with the third hitting DVD and Blu-ray this past week (Thanks to IFC’s Matt Singer for recommending #3).

In Hard Times, Hill utilizes the wide 2.35:1 aspect ratio to stage scenes in depth, capturing desperate faces in the background cheering on the back alley brawls. During fight scenes, Hill cuts for strategically dramatic emphasis and spatial coherence. When a bald thug lands a blow, Hill cuts back and forth between reaction shots of Charles Bronson (the new fighter in town) and James Coburn (his shyster manager), interspersed with a long shot of the pier on which the scrum is taking place. In this sequence he efficiently establishes the initial goals of the plot – Bronson will destroy the baldie and set up a feud with his opposing fur-lined coat wearing manager. As a fight scene, it’s crisp and coherent, almost always keeping both men’s bodies in the frame, and switching from low to high angles to establish the shifting fortunes of the “hitters”, as Coburn calls them.

In Undisputed (2002) the tempo is sped up considerably, but Hill maintains spatial continuity and dramatic interest. The opening bout is held in a cage, in which there is a similar scene in Hard Times. In both instances, the set has steeply sloped audience seating, and Hill repeatedly cuts to high-angle shots to establish the carinvalesque, Roman Colosseum feel of the bouts. Undisputed packs in far more exposition though, with repeated flashbacks (in B&W) to the back-stories of the main participants (Ving Rhames’ Iceman and Wesley Snipes’ Monroe Hutchen). There is also repeated use of white flashes to cover jump-cuts, adding to the jittery rhythm. And where Hard Times has sparing use of slow-moving pans, Undisputed utilizes a roving SteadiCam in and around the ring. But even with all of these MTV style additions, the fights are clearly mapped out, with same use of high-low angles to chart the fortunes of the bout. Hill uses the tools of modern ADD-cinema to his advantage, packing in tons of information, from mobster Peter Falk’s love of boxing (cuts to B&W Joe Louis fights) to the details of Iceman’s arrest.

Hill introduces Iceman as a multplied image on a TV monitor, a media creation. First we see interviewer Jim Lampley behind a screen asking a question, but instead of a cut to Ving Rhames, Hill cuts to the production room and his image on television. This clever reversal sets up the gassy bravado of Rhames’ character – who is constantly performing his “warrior” image. In contrast, Snipes is depicted as all interior, quietly building temples out of toothpicks, and speaking only when absolutely necessary. The film is filled with resourceful character bits like this. Rhames and Snipes are in top form here (while Falk enjoyably swallows the scenery whole), and with Hill and fight choreographer Cole S. McKay’s lucid setups, Undisputed is an underrated entry in the history of the fight film.

Four years later, production company Nu Image (and their subsidiary, Millenium Films), resurrected the title for a sequel, hiring Power Rangers veteran (and martial artist) Isaac Florentine to crank out a low-budget direct-to-video version. Ving Rhames was replaced by Michael Jai White (Spawn), and was re-located to Eastern Europe to take advantage of their low production costs. Instead of trying to pass off Bulgaria as Venice (as they did in the landmark Sharks in Venice), they relocate Iceman to a Russian prison, where he’s jailed on a frame-up drug charge. It’s a ruse by Russian mobster Gaga (Mark Ivanir) to set up a fight with Boyka (Scott Adkins), the champ on his highly lucrative prison fight circuit, which is broadcast to private gambling clubs.

Where the original Undisputed builds a semi-realistic version of prison life, the sequels focus entirely on the fight sequences. The plot is negligible, the supporting cast weak, but the fighting is superb. The term “B movie” is much abused these days, but the Undisputeds honor the scrappy spirit of the Republic and Monogram studios. Limited to a few sets and a flimsy narrative, these cheapies pack in more impressive physical feats than any Hollywood blockbuster that will be released this year.

Florentine, Jai White and Adkins are all trained in martial arts, and have boxes full of black belts among them. So what the film loses in character detail, it gains in athleticism, incorporating more styles in its version of mixed martial-arts. Once called “human cockfighting” by John McCain, MMA, as promoted by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, has become halfway respectable and turned into one of the most popular sports in the world.

Jai White is a low-key performer, offering none of the sarcastic menace of Rhames, but he’s lithe and powerful in the ring. Adkins is the reason these films got popular, however. A nimble Englishman donning a believable Russian accent, he possesses incredible balance and gymnastic aerial skills – the Astaire to Jai White’s Rogers. Florentine is no Walter Hill, but his fight scenes are clean and economical, mostly keeping both fighters in the frame, with the occasional close-up for emphasis. It’s bracing to watch such simple craft since quick-cut Bourne-clones ruined action movies over the past decade. Florentine’s main tic is using high-speed cameras for super slow motion in capturing Adkins’ more athletic twirlings, moments in which he’s turned into a religious icon of the ring (like the etchings his character prays to before each match). My friend Matt Singer objected to its use in his article, but I think it’s essential to the construction of these films – further illuminating the physicality of the performers.

Listening to their fan base, Adkins is turned from villain to hero in the third, and most satisfying film in the series. Not only does Adkins prove to be an appealingly mulish lead, but the film is filled with breezy supporting turns as well. Mark Ivanir is back as Gaga, played with sardonic charm, and veteran character actors (check out their resumes) Robert Costanzo and Vernon Dobtcheff provide American buffoonery and East-Euro creepiness with as much bravado as Peter Falk did a crusty old man in the original.

Mobsters from around the world gather for an international prison fighting tournament, betting on the champ from their own country. After getting his leg snapped in Undisputed 2, Boyka is reduced to cleaning toilets while rehabbing his knee at night. He claws his way into the tournament, only to discover it was rigged by the crooked Georgian, Rezo (Dobtcheff). As if pulling names from American Gladiator, he befriends a Yank named Turbo (the I Wanna Be A Soap Star winner Mykel Shannon Jenkins) and plans on upending the whole money-grubbing show.

The tournament shows off a wide variety of fighting styles from a Brazilian’s capoeira to a North Korean’s taekwondo to the unnameable dance-fighting of Dolor (Marko Zaror), the Colombian and Arch-Villain. Prone to shooting heroin in his neck and reading Garcia Lorca under an umbrella shade, he’s a wildly entertaining villain and an equally unpredictable fighter. Pulling aspects of capoeira, boxing, and the tango together with self-regarding verve – his climactic fight against Boyka is an epic and strategic delight. Dolor attacks Boyka’s knee, destroying the Russian’s aerial attack, so Boyka switches tactics and uses a ground game of submission moves and tackles. It’s a nicely thought out piece of fighting psychology that encapsulates the Undisputed series, a group of films that shows visual and emotional intelligence where you’d least expect it.

Tag: Walter hill

MODERN FIGHT FILMS: THE UNDISPUTED TRILOGY