Unlisted: Kindergarten Cop (1990)

On catching this just starting on TV, I was reminded just how strange a film Kindergarten Cop is, and how you would never see anything like it being made today. It’s not really strange in terms of plot or anything – although the very high-concept idea of letting a platoon of small children loose on Arnold Schwarzenegger is a bit odd – but it’s so different to any mordern film that bears the label of “family entertainment” that it’s almost unrecognisable. So, let’s look at the central idea for a second – Schwarzenegger and kids. How do we get him in the classroom, and have him hate it at first but then come to shed his tough-guy persona and kinda dig it? Well, he can be an undercover cop, who needs to pretend to be a kindergarten teacher, because of… some reason or something, that’s not incredibly important. And to establish what an unfit person he is to be around children in the first place, and how much he’ll hate taking his partner’s place going undercover, we need to see him being a real gritty scummy cop – let’s have him shoot up a crack den or something. But we’ve gotta make the bad guy he’s after even worse than that – he can be a creepy sleaze with a yuppie ponytail and an Oedipal complex that makes Norman Bates look well-adjusted – so everyone will be on Arnie’s side when he shoots him in front of the main kid during the climax.

Yeah. The 90s were weird.

But despite the film being something like bolting Beverly Hills Cop to Daddy Day Care, it kinda works. A lot comes from director Ivan Reitman, who knows his way around off-beat comedies, and a lot comes from Schwarzenegger, who has tons of charisma. Is it one of cinema’s great masterpieces? No, but it does maybe rank as an interesting curiosity.

Rocky (1976)

The American Dream. The idea that anyone, no matter how unlucky or hopeless their background is, can make their way to the top if they’re given just the thinnest sliver of a chance. It’s the great equaliser, the ultimate underdog story, which is why it’s told and re-told time and time again through film, but I don’t think there’s any single piece of media that even comes close to embodying at every level the ideal of the American Dream as much as Rocky does.

Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) is a small-time boxer who is sudddenly thrust into the spotlight when the undefeated champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) challenges him to a match for the World Heavyweight title as a publicity stunt following his intended opponent suffering an injury. Creed maintains complete confidence in his abilities, while Rocky knuckles down and trains for what he sees as his one shot at the big-time after a life of rejections and missed chances. Stallone, also the writer of the script, injected a lot of autobiographical elements into the plot, translating his then-unsuccessful acting career to a character who was a boxer. The film was responsible for launching him into stardom, a clear case of life imitating art, but it’s also the path of the film itself that follows the underdog model. Many of the scenes were films guerilla-style, without permits and shot by a cameraman from the window of a van. One key scene in the film called for hundred of extras, but only a single one showed up to be involved in the tiny as-of-yet unknown project. The budget for Rocky was halved down to one million dollars after Stallone insisted he play the lead (where the studio wanted to simply buy his script and cast a known actor as Balboa); it earned its production costs two hundred times over at the box office, a sleeper hit that led to a chain of five sequels and an unquestionable position in pop cultural history.

The myth of Rocky is in many ways more important than the actual film itself (another place in which real life reflects the details of the plot). Is it a rich and nuanced story? Does it have complex and multifaceted characters? Will inspire you to think deeply on an aspect of life which you had never previously considered? No, but I’m not giving a score to just the film alone. It’s a good film, but the whole package is an amazing story.

Unlisted: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

I don’t really care for 3D in films. It’s a gimmick technology, and not even a really good one. It doesn’t add to the immersion, no matter how many good things James Cameron might have to say about his Dances With Smurfs film. It makes a film blurry and slightly distracting for about fifteen minutes, and then I forget about it until I have to push those stupid glasses up my nose some point halfway through. I’m counting down the days until Hollywood abandons this silly technology for another thirty years.

No, the real breakthrough is 48fps film. Want to make a film where the audience feels like they’re actually there with the characters? Double the framerate. After the initial adjustment period (roughly the same time it takes to ignore a slight depth effect to the backgrounds), it looks more like you’re watching a stageplay than a film, except this play has amazing technical effects and you have front-row seats. This is the real deal, as important as films having a synchronised soundtrack or colour film being easily available, and it’s the direction I really hope film technology moves toward. It’s a huge step in making films look more real – so I suppose it’s mildly ironic that the first major film to showcase the increased framerate is The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Like most of the world, I couldn’t comprehend how Peter Jackson could split The Hobbit into three parts instead of two, but after seeing the first third, I get it. The film unfolds at a very calm pace, taking the time to pause with songs and tidbits of backstory and worldbuilding that were often lost in even the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings. Jackson’s familiarity with Middle-Earth shows – I have no doubt that, when finished, The Hobbit will seamlessly lead right into The Fellowship of the Ring. There’s a couple of unnecessary moments of heightened drama, but that’s not enough to stop me wanting to see what happens in the second act even though I know what’s going to happen. (I’m really hoping for an appearance by Tom Bombadil – hey, if Radagast the Brown can be in the first part…)

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

When you hear the words “legal drama”, it’s more likely that your mind is going to focus on the “drama” part over the “legal”. After all, what’s more interesting – shouting matches resulting in surprise revelations that shock the court and cause the judge to bang his gavel for order, or a couple of laywers reading law books to build their case? Let’s face it, the law is boring, right? You need to spice it up a bit with shouting and last-minute evidence and personal drama outside the courtroom to get anyone to pay attention, because otherwise nobody’s going to watch a film that’s mostly about the long and tedious process of taking a case all the way through court. Right?

Anatomy of a Murder does exactly that; the majority of the film is spent in the courtroom, and what else occurs outside is all investigation and building up the case. On trial is Lt. Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara), who has killed the man he says raped his wife, Laura (Lee Remick). Defending him is Paul Beigler (James Stewart), a small-town lawyer with a sharp mind and a flair for the theatrical that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Law & Order. There’s not a lot more to be said about the plot without going into actual details of the trial itself; although the film passed the two-and-a-half hour mark, none of it feels slow or unnecessary. The realism with which the case is presented is refreshing even today, and the ambiguities and grey shades of all parties involved – accused, witnesses, defence, prosecution – help to paint the events as something very real and plausible rather than drama cooked up for the big screen. The novel the film was adapted from was penned by judge and former lawyer John D. Voelker under a psuedonym, and was based on a case he himself was the defending attourney for, and it’s pretty obvious given the similarities in the real case and the fictional one that Voelker wrote what he knew.

There’s another aspect of realism to Anatomy of a Murder, and that’s the frank language used in the film. While crime proceduals that try to out-shock each other are the default form of scripted entertainment on television now, everything in the film is presented very matter-of-fact – it’s just that the matter is a sexual assault in the late 1950s, which in itself is shocking. It’s obviously tame compared to what’s scandalous fifty years on, but there’s still a weird “this shouldn’t be happening” vibe to hear James Stewart say “rape”.

District 9 (2009)

There are two stories to be told about District 9. One is the story of the making of the film itself, which is a classic underdog tale – outsiders to the Hollywood system get their big break and a shot at making a name for themselves, and take the establishment by surprise and by storm. District 9 is a technically astounding film for its modest budget, for which I think it deserves its accolades and recognition – because the other story, the one being told within the film, is unfortunately not strong enough to carry it.

In an alternate version of history, an alien ship settles of Johannesburg in the 1980s, bringing with it a species of aliens that come to be treated as a social underclass, confined to post-apocalyptic ghettos, and generally be a giant neon metaphor for apartheid. Two decades on, an office worker, Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley) runs afoul of an alien MacGuffin that slowly rewrites his DNA so he becomes more like them, and learns first-hand of their persecution and closeness to humanity. From the very first second of the film, the entire audience should know where it is going to go. It’s a parable about racism and xenophobia that’s been played out hundreds of times before. It would be a fine idea if the film didn’t try to constantly find ways to make itself unlikeable – its hero is a terrible person even following his redemption, the dialogue has moments that are like listening to forks grinding against plates in how unnatural it sounds, the faux-documentary style is abandoned halfway through when a) it’s obvious there wasn’t any way to deliver information to the audience without breaking away from the perspective of the handheld footage, and b) it was time to blow up a bunch of stuff, Michael Bay style. The message of can’t we all just get along gets lost completely when Wikus finds himself in the driver’s seat of an alien death machine with more firepower than the entire arsenal of a video game – if it wasn’t already erroded enough by having a sub-plot involving Nigerian gun cartels, depicting them as warlords and witch doctors in sharp contrast to the mostly-white faces of the South Africans.

As a film, it’s a real choppy mess. A bold first effort, and if it were made without the aid of special effects and shot mostly on hand-held cameras, it might be an interesting thing to revisit when the director sharpens their style to see their roots. But in a way, the effects significantly hurt the story, bloating out a neat short film idea into a tedious string of action setpieces. There are better films about race, and better films about explosions, and the two subjects don’t seem to have a lot of common ground.

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

A Beautiful Mind is a film that, for whatever reason, went right past me when it came out. I was aware of it, and I gathered some kind of pop culture understanding of what it was about, but nothing ever really compelled me to seek it out to watch it. Part of it could be Russell Crowe – dislike is maybe a strong word, but I certainly don’t get him as an actor even though it seems that most people do. Part of it could be that I had the film pigeonholed as a “film for sad people” (other titles in this category include Girl, Interrupted and The Virgin Suicides), possibly due to its core themes of creativity and mental illness. After watching it, though, I feel like I have a new reason to avoid seeing it again, and that is that I have a hunch that it may be responsible for a trend in media that I don’t really like.

John Nash (Crowe) is a gifted yet socially awkward mathematician. His genius brings him to the attention of a clandestine government operation searching for encrypted Soviet messages in magazines and newspapers where he is given the role of codebreaker – this is later revealed to all be a schizophrenic delusion, and Nash must learn to cope with life through the filter of his illness. I’ve found that my reviews have a trend of taking biopics to task if they stray too far from the truth of their subject, and while A Beautiful Mind is noted for altering or omitting details of the real John Nash’s life, I feel they were ultimately unimportant about the point the film was trying to make about asking which is more important – to be sane, or to be one’s self. I could also be slightly biased, because in spite of the excellent technical make-up work I could always see Russell Crowe hard at work acting and pretending to be John Nash. I never once felt like I was watching John Nash – perhaps I may have been more picky with the reality of things if I had.

My real problem with A Beautiful Mind is that this may have been the film to start the link in popular culture between high intelligence and mental disorders. It is no longer allowable for a protagonist to be smart, they must be smart to the point that it becomes a disease. John Nash paved the way for Gregory House, Sheldon Cooper, Lisbeth Salander, and Mark Zuckerberg – autist geniuses who are almost cartoons in how poor their interpersonal skills are. It’s about as realistic a depiction of intelligence as showing that all high school athletes wear only letterman jackets and are constantly pushing lower-caste students into lockers, or that all villany is perpetrated by men in black capes, top hats, and twirlable moustaches – both of which are dead or dying tropes, so maybe I’ll just have to wait for this one to run its course too.

The Exorcist (1973)

It’s very rare that horror films are met with anything other than contempt by most reviewers who deal with “serious” films. Horror is cheap, gaudy; it lives on visceral reactions from the audience rather than their connection with the characters being haunted and tortured. For a horror film to get any credit, it has to be a tense, quiet affair that devotes more of the film reel to uncomfortable silences than blood and guts. For any horror film, apparently, that isn’t The Exorcist.

Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is a perfectly ordinary wholesome twelve-year-old girl, until she is possessed and turned into a foul twisted obscenity. Her mother, Chris (Ellen Burstyn), after exhausting her options with doctors and psychatrists, comes to Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) to perform an exorcism and cast the demon out. You want shocks? You want gross-out disgusting effects? You want to see things that they aren’t able to show on television? That’s what you get. Regan’s possession is as unsubtle and vulgar as you could imagine, and it makes the portion of the film where science is simply at a loss to explain how such a little girl can be tossing her mother around the room, dropping the temperature all around her to freezing cold, and vomitting pea soup on command almost laughable. She’s possessed! It’s the Devil! How do you not see that?! But, the real horror of The Exorcist doesn’t really come from the grotesque images – it all comes from feeding on Catholic guilt, so in that light it makes sense why the men of science are such idiots. Chris MacNeil is a liberal, a divorced single mother, and an atheist, and Father Karras, with his psychology degree from Harvard, is on the verge of abandoning his faith. They’re symbols of the world that doesn’t think it needs God any more, that spirituality has been replaced by modern science and progressive thinking, and it takes a visitation from Satan himself to shock them into believing again.  Overblown junk like Avatar or Independence Day gets crucified (forgive the pun) for paper-thin symbolism – why not this? Don’t put your faith in science, or the Devil’s gonna get ya!

Despite that rant, I actually quite like The Exorcist – I usually watch it whenever I catch it on television, and I shut up when the actual exorcism scene comes around. The effects hold up, the acting’s solid (although maybe a little too real in places, considering some of the slightly unethical stuff director William Freidkin put his cast through), but come on, best horror film ever made? scariest film ever? Can’t say I agree.

Rope (1948)

Black comedy is a tricky sort of genre, in that the line it skirts between being morbidly funny and being just plain morbid is often razor-thin. There’s a fairly well-known bit of film trivia that Slim Pickens, the guy who famously rides the atomic bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove, was only shown his character’s sections of the script in order for him to play the role straight. What makes something dark also funny is sometimes just the darkness itself; we need to laugh or else we’ll start down a spiral of contemplating the Nietzschean abyss. I couldn’t find Rope referred to explicitly as a comedy, but I certainly felt it had enough of the elements of making light of darkness for me to class it as one. Then again, maybe all that says is that I’m possibly as unbalanced as the film’s protagonists.

Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) are two educated well-to-do young men who have taken it into their heads to murder their friend David. The film opens with them hiding David’s corpse in a book chest, and there is stays for the duration of the dinner party the pair are about to host. It’s fairly clear from an early point that they won’t get away with their “perfect murder” – it’d be poor writing not to have Brandon’s massive ego deflated, for one, and they’re providing just enough rope to hang themselves (ha ha) by inviting their acute and slightly eccentric former instructor Rupert (James Stewart) to the party. That doesn’t put any dampers on a set-up ripe with tension, however; the chest sits in plain view for the majority of the film, calling attention to what has happened even when the characters are not. It’s simple, but very effective, turning what would otherwise be dull moments into fist-clenchers through just a little bit of additional knowledge that most of the characters aren’t privy to.

Alfred Hitchcock described this film as an “experiment”, and from a technical sense it’s incredibly impressive. The shooting is a series of long takes that all blend with each other, giving the impression of one continous real-time take – each around ten minutes in length, the duration of a canister of film at the time. The set was constructed to let the walls pull away to allow the single camera to track actors as they move about the apartment, and the backdrop showing the New York skyline dims as covers in clouds as time passes. Even if Hitchcock himself was dissatisfied with the final product, it’s an interesting watch for these reasons alone even if you don’t find dead bodies funny.

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Being a critic is a difficult thing sometimes. It’s a fine line to walk between objective criticism and personal criticism – a review is basically a glorified word for an opinion, which is going to be your own view no matter which way you look at it, but at the same time you want to back that up with reasoning and arguments and not simply say, “I (dis)liked this.” You want to be able to come up with something more eloquent than, for example, that a film bored you, or at least be able to explain in an entertaining way why it bored you, but I am having a hard time doing something other than just that for Barry Lyndon. Three hours of a deliberate methodical pacing in a period I have zero interest in in a genre that sounds like the exact opposite of good storytelling – I was bored.

Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) is a rougish scoundrel in 1750s Ireland who hops from one series of (mis)adventures to another across Europe. That’s the synopsis for both the film and the original novel, but while the novel draws a lot of humour from its unreliable first-person narrator, the film is worked over in tone to play more like a tragedy. It’s split into two parts, the first detailing how Barry works his way up to a position of wealth and class and the second showing how he loses it, by an intermission, which I definitely made use of and was by far for me the highlight of the first act. The second half showed a lot more promise – the rivalry between Barry and his stepson Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali) came with a few fantastically tense and uncomfortable scenes – but ultimately failed to go anywhere. A screen giving a written epilogue cemented my frustrations with the film: “It was in the reign of King George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.” Everything you have just seen has ceased to matter. Everyone has died, they are of no consequence any more. Your three hours have been misspent. Congratulations, a winner is you.

The film looks amazing – it’s a grand undertaking in period accuracy which in its way is just as revolutionary as the rotating sets on 2001: A Space Oddyssey or the Steadicam in The Shining. It’s a similar experience to going to an art gallery to spend an afternoon looking at all the 18th century paintings – but I don’t like that experience. Stanley Kubrick‘s characters in the film are as cold and austere as the setting is historically vibrant, and as the plot is expressly designed to wander from one element to another I really didn’t feel there was anything for me here at all. One of the hardest things about being a critic is when you have to criticise something that is clearly meant for someone who is not you.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

It seems that the Westerns that make it onto the list of best films ever are all some kind of deconstruction or “answer” to the average horse opera or cowboys-and-indians shoot-’em-up affair – which is understandable, because logically there’s going to be more substance to something being critical (or, at least, pointing out the boundaries) of the genre rather than just playing along with it, but that doesn’t help me all that much when it comes to giving an opinion decades later. I can imagine what a generic Western is like, but I can’t really imagine being inundated with them, so it’s tough to pick up on what makes individual films stand out from the generic masses. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is meant to be one of the ones that stands out; does it? Well, we’ll see.

Aging senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) travels into the small town of Shinbone to attend the funeral of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a rancher. Stoddard, in flashback, tells the story to the local reporter of how he and Doniphon were involved in the now-famous shootout with Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), outlaw and baddest dude in Shinbone. Doniphon and Valance represent the two faces of the untamed West – the rugged cowboy and the reckless outlaw – and Stoddard’s arrival from the East with his law degree, his school to teach the children (and many of the adults) of Shinbone to read, and his pleas to handle Valance and his gang lawfully is a clear symbol for the spread of a more orderly form of civilisation, the whole film serving as a kind of farewell letter to the Western in general. Stoddard builds his reputation as a politician as being the titular “man who shot Liberty Valance”, but the end of the flashback reveals it was actually Doniphon who fired the lethal shot – you can have all the fancy book learnin’ you want, but to really make things happen in the world requires a cowboy with a steady aim who’ll kill a man in cold blood. At the end of the film, Stoddard decides he’ll retire, raising the question of whether it was right to take the credit for Doniphon’s actions even though it went against his ideals; it would be more interesting if it wasn’t so obvious that the answer was that John Wayne killing the bad guy and saving the day is always right.