An Elephant in the East.
When it comes to the notorious White Elephant Exchange Blogathon, I have been quite mean these past two years. To be fair, I got blind-sided by Bio-Dome in the inaugural edition, so I had some fury that needed venting. But still - there’s really no excuse for the two nuclear stinkbombs I tossed into the pot. People shouldn’t even know of the existence of King Kung Fu and Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy, let alone find themselves forced to endure the likes of them. This year, I decided to go with something that, love or hate, is an odd and singular work, and I’m very anxious to see how the lucky recipient responds to it.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say with this needlessly long opening is that I was a nicer guy this year, and I guess you get what you give because fortune smiled upon me this time around. How else to explain my receiving the ridiculous, wonderful ball of ’80s-style goofiness that is…..
GYMKATA!!!
Gymkata! Oh, Gymkata! It’s so much goddamn fun to say Gymkata! Seriously, between that title and that poster, how could I not be excited for this? It’s awesome before I’ve ever popped in the DVD.
Gymkata, if you didn’t know, was the ill-advised attempt to turn gold-medal-winning gymnast Kurt Thomas into a fists-of-fury action-movie star. It was also part of the long karmic bitchslap administered to Robert Clouse in retaliation for his part in bringing the debacle that is Game of Death to fruition. Seriously, look at the guy’s resume. He makes one of the greatest martial-arts films ever in 1973 with Enter the Dragon and makes an enjoyable followup with Black Belt Jones. Even Golden Needles and The Pack have people who are willing to go to the mat for them. But post-Game, yeesh: A couple of telemovies for Disney, an unloved entry in Jackie Chan’s first attempt to break into the American market (The Big Brawl), a film with dachshunds dressed up as giant rats (Deadly Eyes), not one but two Cynthia Rothrock vehicles (the China O’Brien films)… and this inexplicable thing. It is an enormous, unbroken string of bad laughs, an entirely straight-faced rendition of an entirely ridiculous concept. To watch Gymkata is, among other things, to wonder if anyone involved in the production understood what a silly, silly film they were making.
But who the fuck am I to complain about a bad laugh? I much prefer misguided sincerity to the easy snark of the cult readymade - if you’re going to expend the resources to make a movie, it makes zero sense to waste all that on something to which you feel superior. So Gymkata takes itself very seriously even though it has (among other things) a scene where the hero finds a convenient pommel horse in the middle of a Asian mountain town populated entirely by psychotics, and I’m okay with that. Even as a retarded work of art, it still stands its ground as a era-specific cultural object.
Gymkata could only have been made in the Reagan ’80s - it’s a relic of the waning days of the Cold War, the days when a Star Wars military defense system sounded viable and thus would be a fine thing around which to construct your doofy action movie. Turns out the tiny East Asian nation of Parmistan (which, I assume, is bordered by Provolonistan and Asiagistan) is the perfect location to set up a ground base for such a defense system. Putting such a construction up would bring invaluable aid to whichever nation was allowed to build it there… but of course such a proposition is not as easy as it sounds. For 900 years, Parmistan has challenged all entering outsiders with “The Game,” a deathsport that’s a cross between The Most Dangerous Game and an Army training obstacle course. No outsider has won in all that time, which makes me wonder if even Genghis Khan got his ass whipped by the then-native Parmistanians or if he just intrinsically knew to leave those crazy bastards alone. Kurt Thomas, though, is determined to win for flag and family and all that patriotic jazz. (Also, his dad having disappeared in Parmistan while playing The Game probably added a motivational boost.) He’ll have to compete against his fellow players (a parade of ethnic stereotypes including a Hispanic guy, a Chinese guy and a big burly cheating-bastard Russian sumbitch) as well as the Parmistanian forces, comprised mostly of a couple low-rent ninjas and angry angry Richard Norton.
Just describing the basic concept of the film makes it sound shithouse-rat crazy. It’s to my great pleasure, then, that Gymkata lives up to that - The Game itself is properly daffy (the long sequence in the town of crazies is an indescribable highlight, not just of the film but of all Bad Cinema), but the film shows its willingness to jump the rails of logic and competence from the start. Because this is the ’80s, the film waits about four minutes to set up its premise and then kicks into a training montage, in order to explain how Thomas goes from Olympic hero to mad-kung-fu-skillz wizard. Thomas is taught how to fight, how to pay attention to his surroundings and generally how to be an ultimate-warrior type, and he also falls for the exiled princess of Parmistan who’s there for, I dunno, emotional support or something. (I kid: She’s there because she’s the only person who can get Thomas into the country, for obvious reasons. Interesting to note how the film sets her up as a sneaky ass-kicking bitch who can handle her own business only to conveniently forget that the minute the story shifts overseas.) One thing becomes very clear very quickly - Thomas is a fluid, agile gymnast, but he’s no martial artist. The grace he demonstrates on the parallel bars evaporates when he’s asked to kick people in the face; his attempts at karate are stiff and awkward, like he never quite got the choreography right because he was afraid to muss his mullet. Not that I blame him - his hair, so carefully maintained and precisely feathered, damn near deserves a supporting credit. Check it out:
You may think I’m being unnecessarily cruel and snarky. And maybe I am. But we live in a modern age, and instead of resorting to words to describe the Thomas-fight-scene problem to you, which is akin to using finger-paint to describe the taste of a Bordeaux, I can show you. To wit:
You see now, right? Thomas is a lot of things - an incredible athlete, a beacon of physical fitness, a potential second-place finisher at a Richard Dean Anderson lookalike contest, hopefully a good sport - but he is not a martial artist. Never was and likely could never be without a lot more intensive practice which wouldn’t have fit into the production schedule. You wonder how something like this basic conceptual failure could have happened. Why base a large-scale, high-budget kung-fu movie around a guy who cannot perform kung fu, cannot even reasonably fake kung-fu?
I ask this even though the answer is beautiful, obvious and very telling about its time: Kurt Thomas is in this kung-fu movie because he was a champion gymnast, a gold medalist in a number of international competitions. What’s more, he was denied a chance to go to the 1980 Olympics and win another gold medal on the home turf of those dirty rat-bastard Commies. He was, for a time, a national icon, a recognizable face… a god-damned hero. And why the hell wouldn’t you cast an athletic hero in a film that allows him to do a good many athletic things in the name of ass-kicking whilst simultaneously offering him a chance to symbolically enact the Commie beatdown he never got to do in real life? Easy peasy lemon motherfuckin’ squeezy. Gymkata may be dumb as dirt, may be a terrible action film, but it’s a true and sincere effort. A hero on the mat becomes a hero of flying fists for God and country, and America emerges victorious over the Eastern forces. USA! USA! USA! USA!
******************
Post-script: I couldn’t work this into the review proper, but I can sum up exactly how dumb this movie is in the space of one minute. This, I think, is an even more succinct explanation of this film’s wacky appeal than the above fight scene:
From the Shelf: The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963, Eric Rohmer)
Acquired: December of ‘08 as a Christmas gift.
Seen before?: Once - June 1st, 2008 from a disc checked out from the library.
Eric Rohmer is the kind of filmmaker that makes me realize how inadequate I am at this reviewing game. Give me a piece of mangy, downmarket, unloved genre fiction and I’ll tear it open and describe, in minute detail, what’s going on within its innards. But when confronted with a typically-intelligent work from one of cinema’s grand masters, I’m at a loss. I’ve no idea how to articulate why I like this. I can talk about how Bakery Girl, in the space of twenty-three minutes, sets up the themes and tropes that define the Six Moral Tales cycle (like the consistently amusing disconnect between image and narration, as potent a display of irony as I’ve seen in film). But that’s summation, not criticism. I have nothing to say that will illuminate the work any further than the work illuminates itself - Rohmer’s characters (and films) are far more eloquent about their situations than I am. Obviously, I suck.
Up next: More morality…
From the Shelf: Bad Santa (2003, Terry Zwigoff)
Acquired: I… I don’t actually remember. Pretty sure I bought it rather than received it as a gift, but couldn’t tell you the time frame.
Seen before?: Several times.
This is a film I adore and have seen a number of times. Because I adore it, and because I’ve seen it a whole lotta buncha times, I don’t feel I have anything to say about it that I haven’t already said. Bad Santa, with its gloriously pungent dialogue and perfectly boozy, sleazy performance from the invaluable Billy Bob Thornton, is the kind of film I’ve seen often enough that I’ve incorporated it into my everyday dealings with the world - I’ll quote the film a few times a week, mostly the line, “Well, they can’t all be winners, kid, now can they?” (Though lately, I’ve also grown inordinately fond of “I’m gonna stick my whole fist up your ass.”) Interesting to note on repeat viewings how the creeping sentiment that defines the film’s last third begins to feel earned because Thornton truly invests himself in the character of Willie and allows us to see the flashes of disappointed humanity that he spends all his waking moments trying to drown in alcohol and licentiousness. This is, if nothing else, a dark portrait of a man on the edge of ruin who wakes up just enough to keep himself from going over the edge, and we laugh anyway because the self-destruction is so outsized and surly that it’s sickly amusing. That’s probably why the vulgarity has an impact beyond simple shock - it’s an expression of existential despair as potent as anything by Bergman.
Up next: From one drunk to another…
From the Shelf: Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)
Acquired: A long, long time ago (probably mid-2000).
Seen before?: Twice, both times from this DVD, Last viewing likely late in 2003.
For my money, the greatest war film I’ve ever seen. There’s the famous Truffaut quote about a truly anti-war film being impossible to make because cinema makes war seem exciting; if we accept this as a truism, I submit that Coppola’s extraordinary, expansive rendition of the Vietnam War should be considered the rare truly anti-war film, because it makes war seem exhausting, paranoid and terrifying, and it does so better than any film I can think of that isn’t named Come and See. Most of the military grunts we see are twitchy, frightened young men who do whatever they can to distract themselves from the fact of the war, and the few truly competent soldiers we see are all completely insane, ranging from the outward barking mania of surf-obsessed Colonel Kilgore to the mind-blown, hollow-eyed fellow at the Do Long bridge who is uncannily accurate with a grenade launcher. At the center of it all is the grim Captain Willard, who exists only as a man of war, and the enigmatic Colonel Kurtz, whose clarity of vision regarding his purpose and function in the war machine have left him both the sanest and most psychotic man in the film. The overarching idea here is not of war as a cause of psychosis but as an incarnation of it - madness is endemic to the soldier because what they’re participating in is madness, and you can only simmer in that shit for so long before it rubs off on you. Apocalypse Now is a hugely harrowing vision of Hell from a great filmmaker who would never again work at this level - but then, most filmmakers never even get to this level.
Up next: Ghosts and perverts…
From the Shelf: Amarcord (1973, Federico Fellini)
Acquired: May of 2007, from Amazon.
Seen before?: No.
A flashback crafted as only Fellini could. Loosely structured around a handful of characters, notably towheaded teen Titta and temptress-in-red Gradisca, this details a year in the life of an Italian village. Mussolini is in power, yet while Fascism is a part of the lives of the citizens (and there’s a terrific setpiece involving a Fascist parade and an enormous bust of Mussolini), it doesn’t seem to have a large effect on their day-to-day existence, maybe because they’re too busy living their lives or maybe because it’s a comment on what we choose to remember when we look back on past times. We remember that which stands out, and for, say, a young man deeply in the throes of puberty, whether or not the woman down the street was a loyal Fascist would occupy less space in your mental storehouse than the time the local tobacconist shoved your face into her massive breasts.
Its status as an explicit memory piece gives a certain weight to the Fellini gallery of grotesques. If these people are extravagant caricatures, if they walk around with leers carved on their faces like statues, it’s because they’re frozen in a certain time by the narrative and narrator(s). Did Volpina, the local prostitute, spend her every waking minute hunting men and carrying a look on her face that spoke of deep, insatiable hungers? Probably not, but that’s the image that gets burned in precisely because it’s so indelible. The mundane fades while the outsized and the unusual holds fast; to understand what this film does and why is, potentially, to understand the whole of Fellini’s work. It’s a film of moments, of incidents and beautiful images and great galloping desires splattered across an immense canvas. There’s room in here for the ridiculous and the serene, the extravagant and the understated, the terrifying and the joyful and the tragic (sometimes all at once, because such is life). There are parts and pieces here - the epic snowstorm near the film’s end and the peacock that happens along, the thick and unyielding fog in autumn - that get as close to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s intoxicating magic realism as nobody else in cinema has. Reflect on what a Fellini-directed adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera would look like. Then reflect on the fact that the adaptation that actually exists was made by Mike Newell. Then reflect on why that should make any sane person weep bitterly.
Up next: Boris, he’s my prime mate…
From the Shelf: Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen)
Acquired: A long time ago. Probably 2001 or 2002.
Seen before?: A couple of times, the last time off this DVD… um, a long time ago.
Looking at it from a remove of twenty years, I think the reason that Woody’s big artistic breakthrough was as successful as it was is that, in the context of the work that had already come, it does seem like a different breed - more serious, honest, realistic. And yet, given what was to come, it’s really not as big a break as it probably looked. The fingerprints of the “early funny” Woody are still all over this film. Annie Hall may not be as out-and-out ridiculous as Bananas, and amusing fourth-wall flourishes like the subtitle scene might be playing in service to genuine emotion rather than for their own hilarious sake. Yet, in the context of a supposedly-serious work, you still have a short animated sequence and a little girl saying, “I’m into leather,” in flashback. There’s still corny shtick like the famed cocaine scene and Woody’s repurposing of old stand-up material into the script (“I once took a puff of the wrong cigarette at a party…”). There’s still the terrific Marshall McLuhan fantasy sequence. Basically, this is a textbook example of how a comedic figure can “mature” while still holding onto what made him popular in the first place.
Now, just imagine how much different modern cinema would look if Allen had followed the lead of many a comedic actor and made the shift more radical, if he had left Annie Hall off the menu. Imagine a world where we jump straight from Love and Death to Interiors.
Up next: A year in Old Italy…
From the Shelf: Animal Crackers (1930, Victor Heerman)
Acquired: Birthday present, 2005.
Seen before?: Roughly fifteen years ago on VHS.
There’s something gleefully freeing about the Marx Brothers’ particular brand of vaudeville anarchy, a bubbly stew where whiplash verbal banter butts up against sharp slapstick and clever and corny seem like two sides of one coin. My spirits are always lifted whenever I see them hurling their sensibilities at dignified institutions (high society, college, goverment, the opera, etc.) and, in doing so, reducing them to scorched comedic rubble. (Quite literally in Duck Soup, but we’ll get there when we get there.) I used to think Animal Crackers was the weakest of the Brothers’ classic period, which I think we can agree starts here and goes through A Day at the Races (The Cocoanuts is clearly too creaky to be included, and general wisdom has them falling off post-Races). And it still may be - the last half-hour of the film, though including the amazing back-and-forth between Groucho and Chico about clues and house-building, can’t quite sustain the fever pitch of the first two acts, owing mainly to its having to pretend that it has a plot that involves stolen paintings or something. But even if this supposition is true, it’s the weakest by a degree of angstroms - these guys were ridiculously consistent, finding fresh absurdities to deflate or explode in every milieu they tackled.
The evolutionary leap from The Cocoanuts to this is really spectacular - on their second cinematic go-around, the Marx template comes out fully formed. It’s like that first film was a testing ground to shake the bugs out of the system in moving their material from stage to screen, and the second is where it all clicks. From the delightful opening musical number introducing Groucho’s intrepid explorer Captain Spaulding to Groucho’s hilarious stories of shooting elephants (which leads into maybe the greatest set of twin puns I’ve heard) to the rigged bridge game to the endless climactic shakedown of Harpo (an early appearance of what most people know now as the “Simpsons Rake Gag”), this thing just gives and gives. There’s the requisite musical number/harp piece for Harpo, but it’s fairly minor - nothing as showstopping as the stable-hand musical bit in A Day at the Races or Harpo’s Night at the Opera harp epic.
It is kinda sad, though, how little Zeppo has to do here even by Zeppo’s standards - when Groucho called him in to take a letter to Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger and McCormick, it occurred to me that I’d forgotten Zeppo was even in the film. Maybe the film had as well. Also, I’ve never observed this in any of the other Marx films, so maybe I’ll have to pay closer attention next time around, but Margaret Dumont looks like she’s constantly on the verge of losing her shit and collapsing with laughter in this film.
Up next: La-dee-da…
From the Shelf: Alphaville (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)
Acquired: This past February from criterion.com.
Seen before?: Once - Spetember 20th, 2007, from a copy of the Criterion disc that I checked out from the library.
Even though I covered most of the salient stuff the first time around for this Godard doozy, I still managed to underestimate it. A second viewing didn’t uncover anything new or unexpected; instead, it merely reinforced what I already knew the film to be. What did change was my opinion of the effectiveness. What once was an unusual and interesting transitional work now, to me, seems like the pinnacle of Godard’s achievements. This is more than a mere stopgap or artistic evolution - this seems to me the perfect synthesis of everything Godard had done up to that point and everything he was going to do in the ensuing years. The shiny coat of genre paint makes the philosophizing go down much easier than in a lot of his subsequent works, and the dry and stilted tone of much of the dialogue makes sense in the context of the film’s mechanical and sterilized logic-only world.
Plus, Eddie Constantine is fabulously rumpled and hard-boiled, Anna Karina is alluring as ever (and gets the film’s swooning penultimate image), Godard’s puckish sense of humor has rarely been this delightful and the action sequences are terrifically staged. Seriously, check that first sequence where Lemmy is attacked in his hotel room - using basic camera setups and creative blocking, Godard crafts an fight scene that plays with notions of limited perspective and chaotic movement without sacrificing spatial coherence, unlike all those who utilize the shaky-cam “realism” that has come into vogue these past few years. Basically, he makes Paul Greengrass look like a stooge thirty years before the fact.
And that sense of humor - loopy and dry, intellectualized without seeming overthought. The “Insert Token” gag still kills. (It might be my favorite moment in any Godard film ever,) Alphaville has the probing, ruminative intelligence, involved revolutionary rhetoric and pretension out the ying-yang that would come to define its director’s metier (even more than it already had), yet it never forgets one key thing: entertainment value makes the medicine go down. I always wondered if I would see a Godard film that I could point to and go, “Yeah, that’s a masterpiece.” Turns out I already had - I just needed to recognize it. (Makes me wonder how many other of Jean-Luc’s works will improve the second time around.)
Up next: A whale’s vagina!
Horror Challenge entry #3: Antichrist (2009, Lars von Trier)
I’m not going to say too much because this film should really be experienced as cold as possible. But… holy shit. Overwhelming, I think, is the word. Two films that kept popping to mind as the film unraveled: Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf and Zulawski’s Possession, if that tells you anything about where Lars’s latest flick comes from. It’s an extravagantly painful experience; when Von Trier says he made it to help drag himself out of a crippling depression, you can believe it because of the agony and despair on the celluloid. It also appears to be, at least to me, an attempt to grapple with or at least understand his much-derided feelings towards women as evinced in his films. So there’s that. Charlotte Gainsbourg gives an extraordinary performance, as you may have heard, but Willem Dafoe’s just as important and accomplished in a role that is necessarily less showy.
This was clearly made to exorcise some great pain. Somehow it’s both therapy-as-cinema and the inverse of that, akin to Cage’s latest album Depart from Me where the obvious therapeutic value for the artist lies in bringing you, the consumer, deep into the kind of torment that the artist experienced and not letting you out until you’ve accrued a couple scars of your own. Unshakeable, lacerating, searing stuff. A major work from an important artist. Chaos reigns.
