Tits and Gore

I think this might be the first flick we’ve reviewed for the site so far that actually contains tits and gore in that fun filmic unit sort of way. And boy, the gore! Maybe it’s because these folks were French, and they can tolerate more gooey, stinky things than your average American, but this gore was so gross! I actually had to cover my eyes and turn away a couple of times, mostly due to severe gooeyness. The first instance of extreme gooeyness was the sad zombie dude on the train. His face was really leaky even at the beginning of the scene, but by the end, he was yanking off different pieces of his goo face, and it was just absolutely disgusting. This continued and just got more disgusting as the film played out.

Besides Grapes of Death being really gory in a pus-heavy sort of way, it’s also particularly creepier than your standard zombie movie because the zombies are so much more coherent than they usually are. Since they know what’s going on in these disturbing moments of clarity, yet still have the zombie’s intrinsic homicidal impulse, I almost felt guilty watching their blood-thirsty escapades. Or dirty. Yeah, I felt dirty watching the characters go after their relatives, while plaintively muttering, “Je t’aime, je t’aime” in their sad little zombie voices.

And speaking of dirty, many of the scenes in Grapes of Death reminded me more of porn than other zombie flicks. In particular, in the final scene where our protagonist finds out her boyfriend has been turned, the way the blood shoots and drips onto her face combined with the angle of the camera looks more like a cumshot than a tragic denouement. Interesting.

On an unrelated note, as a foodie, since thinking of France makes me immediately think of wine, I thought it was really funny and clever that the zombification delivery system was tainted wine. Cute.

In John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government he doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) trust. In Neil Marshall’s new picture Doomsday, a military-type badass with an eyepatch infiltrates a quarantined area on a political mission for a government she doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) trust. Throw in a healthy dash of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, a little 28 Days Later, and a weird curveball’s worth of Gladiator, and Marshall has created a monster - an amalgamation of other people’s genre triumphs (well, roll with me on Thunderdome) that somehow manages to be lumbering, dumb, and ready to throw a little girl into a lake.

The kicker of it is, Marshall is (was? will be again?) a fantastic director - I feel comfortable calling his first feature, Dog Soldiers, one of the best werewolf films of all time, and his 2005 picture The Descent is without question the best British (if not flat out best) horror film of the new millennium. But Doomsday is so unforgivably bad that, try though I might have to enjoy it, I couldn’t help but be crushed under the weight of its ample absurdity - and this is coming from me, whose academic focus is firmly rooted in exploitative trash.

It’s clear that Marshall is shooting for a Carpenter-style pulp-actioner, but he makes the fatal mistake of playing it utterly straight. Whereas Carpenter’s Escape movies, or for that matter They Live or Big Trouble in Little China, deliver serial-style thrills with a generous side-order of nudges and winks, Doomsday shambles on humorlessly, destroying what could have been enjoyable scenes with grim determination. And for a movie this insane, a movie that asks so much from its audience, levity should be essential.

Doomsday doesn’t just jump the shark. It jumps the shark, then finds the shark’s mom and fucks her up the ass for half an hour. In a film full of silly mini-premises that run from clever to barely-tolerable, you will eventually experience what will henceforth be known as The Twist, capital letters, a “surprise” so fucking unbearably stupid that it defies all defense. It is not an overstatement to suggest that I was desperate for this movie to end.

Right before we hit The Twist, Adrian Lester (whom I resolve to still like despite his role in this catastrophe) prophetically throws his hands up and says, “Fuck it!” I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the film’s motto, if it was embroidered on the wrap jackets of the cast and crew. If you want to see what Marshall can do, pick up The Descent and prepare to be blown away; should you find yourself eyeing Doomsday, even out of sheer curiosity, I urge you to follow Lester’s example, and fuck it.

What I experienced tonight was truly amazing. Sure, Mike and I were both worried even before we decided to see it. We like Neil Marshall. We like Dog Soldiers. We really like The Descent. So, yeah, we were worried. It’s the same way pregnant women get excited but hope the kid’s not retarded or ugly.

For awhile everything was going fairly well. Not great. But not horribly. Things were rolling along in that not too uncomfortably scary way that The Descent started, and I was expecting Marshall, in M. Night Shyamalan-style, to replicate the format that had worked for him before—to twist it up a bit, pull out all the stops half way through, rock me to my core, and make me crap my pants a little. And then it happened. And I wanted to crap my pants, but for a different reason. Somehow, in some sort of ill-advised homage to Lord of the Rings, 28 Days Later, and Braveheart, Marshall instead, and unfortunately, delivered a mixture of Nothing But Trouble, Waterworld, and Queen of the Damned (remember? with Aaliyah? yeah…). Right, I’m embarrassed for Neil Marshall. And I feel a little cheated. Why, Neil Marshall, why did you do this to us?

Okay, so honestly, I’ve never been the biggest fan of action, and martial arts rank right up there at the top of the list of what I don’t enjoy. That being said, since meeting Mike, I’ve reevaluated lots of things—from winter to the idea of spawning—and action flicks couldn’t be that far behind!

So when we first started watching Drunken Master, it was really annoying, like a combination of the Three Stooges and Rush Hour. But it got better. The slapstickiness of the first half of the film was offset by actual humor in the second half. I can see how this flick has influenced lots of future action films, and I’m looking forward to seeing this influence as we finish with 1978 and head forward to the present!

I’m a Jackie Chan junkie, and so it was a pleasure to watch Drunken Master, the film that catapulted Jackie to stardom when it was released in Hong Kong in 1978. It takes the familiar martial arts story of Wong Fei Hung (a role also played by Jet Li during his early career in the Once Upon a Time in China movies) and turns it on its ear, making Wong a big fucking jackass who likes stealing food and groping women. It’s a pretty typical HK screwball comedy high concept, albeit translated onto a very atypical historical figure!

Druken Master definitely suffers from a weak first act, although there are some excellent fight sequences as the story develops. Even at this early stage in his career, you can see Jackie’s trademark, lyrically-choreographed kung fu and stuntwork taking shape. There are also some sincere, huge laughs, mostly once then-66-year-old Simon Yuen takes to the screen as Jackie’s titular drunken mentor. This was one of Yuen’s last roles, and you’ll have a hard time believing some of the acrobatic stunts he pulls off in his advanced years, although there are a few noticeable uses of a body double.

Like most fight films of the period, the plot is mostly an excuse to usher in the next kung fu exhibition. Thankfully the fighting is uniformly excellent (as well as the comedic training sequences, which show off Chan’s admirable physique), particularly the final battle, where Chan seamlessly utilizes eight different forms of drunken kung-fu to dispatch his foe. Of particular note is that this is also one of the few chances you will have to see Jackie consistently get the shit kicked out of him. His stunt falls are truly inspirational, with more spins and somersaults than you can imagine.

Though not one of my favorites, Drunken Master offers a welcome look at Jackie’s early development, featuring some great laughs and just about the most kung-fu per minute of any martial arts film you’ll ever watch! If you really want to get into the spirit, have some drinks handy for your screening; in the immortal words of Simon Yuen, “Power and wealth are to no avail - let only our drinking prevail!”

It’s not my intention to be throwing around high-star ratings willy-nilly so early in our endeavor, but I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize what I believe are the best movies out there simply because I have this nagging feeling that there is some kind of predetermined allowance of nigh-perfect films that I can’t exceed. And so we come to The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino’s otherwordly epic of the Vietnam War.

Early on in The Deer Hunter, Mike (Robert DeNiro) uses a bullet as part of an object lesson. “This is this,” he says. “This is not something else. This is this.” He’s setting up the major theme of the picture’s first act, the idea of immutability and America, about the steel mill and its community and its vision of the war as a microcosm of American thought. A is A - why question; why change?

Indeed, the film is so powerful precisely because it thoroughly demolishes this well-developed superstructure. Russian roulette may be a metaphor for the arbitrariness of war, but moreover it demolishes free will, it demolishes immutability. The certainties of blue-collar thought and immigrant struggle are revealed as defense mechanisms against a country that is openly hostile to both; God is erased from the sky, from the minds of the characters and hearts of the audience. The holy trinity of the departing soldiers is torn asunder by torture and glued together again by three tiny bullets, all symbols erased and replaced with the random and tangible. The soldiers are inexorably drawn to the game of roulette again and again, because any immutable judgements about character or religion or the nature of a bullet are dwarfed by this last true certainty, the inevitability of death.

In the final, heart-breaking tableau, the cast mourns the death of their America as much as their friend. Americans, here and now, may have lost the ability to create another film of this caliber without reaping scorn or apathy. We seem content to leave it to our forebearers (and our forebearers’ art) to answer our most difficult questions about patriotism.

What do you say about The Deer Hunter? It’s just so good. I suppose the most striking aspect of the film for me was the Russian roulette theme. As metaphor for war, especially such a difficult and controversial war, Russian roulette is so perfect. Each time we go into war as a country, each time a person is deployed, we play Russian roulette with our lives, with our “honor,” with our families, with everything. What is there to prove? What does a person prove by going to war, by playing Russian roulette with his life? One shot, and Nick is dead. But why does Nick want to die so badly? Why can’t he go home and deal with life after war? Maybe he realizes the game has already been played out—that by playing at all, he has already chosen his fate.

This was my first opportunity to see this film, and admittedly, from the beginning, I couldn’t quite grasp the significance of the title, of the deer hunter theme. But as the Russian roulette sequences played out it became clearer and clearer. When DeNiro’s character, Michael, first vaingloriously states his belief in “one shot,” in reference to killing a deer in a single attempt, it seems like a noble idea. But when the idea of one shot is applied to human life in the Russian roulette sequences, the whole theme changes. In some ways I think this film is addressing life in general. We literally have one attempt—one shot—and what is the point of wasting it? What is the point of wasting our own lives, or worse, the lives of others over conflicts that no one even believes in? This film really made the problems of the Vietnam War seem relevant for me, even three decades after it was released.

Debbie Does Dallas is one of those much-talked about porn classics that few people have actually taken the time to see. For my part, I’ve seen it about eight times over the course of the past decade and used it as a teaching tool. I’ve watched two different modern remakes and I even took in the off-Broadway musical version during my first year in the Big Apple. Theoretically, I should be the biggest Debbie fan in the world! But in the final analysis, its originality notwithstanding, it’s a difficult picture to recommend outside the context of its obvious historical importance.

And Debbie Does Dallas is definitely an important work. It may features all the hallmarks of early porn: a straightforward narrative story, unremarkable-looking actors, a funky if erratic original score and lots of hair; but what we may perceive as a relative lack of sophistication today was unique and groundbreaking in 1978. Debbie is arguably the first modern teen sex comedy, the progenitor of that storied genre, from Porky’s to American Pie. In fact, it is so liberally cribbed from within this genre that it begs the question: why haven’t more people seen it?

Honestly, because it hasn’t stood the test of time; to be fair, almost no films from the dawn of porn have. The producers of early theatrical releases of this nature could not possibly have predicted the omnipresence of pornography in modern culture. At the touch of a button, we can experience a vast array of unimaginable sexual activities; the curve of filth trends ever upwards - nothing stays shocking for long. Narrative porn has gone the way of the dodo - its power to titillate long ago surpassed its ability to entertain. And in this world of infinite sexual possibilities, no one wants to watch the same porn they watched last week, much less an awkward, half-funny mess made thirty years ago.

These days, Debbie is a museum piece, ancient history; she got old, and though we’re all content to examine her legacy, no one wants to watch her fuck anymore.

So these are the problems I have with porn: I’m unconvinced, and it’s not sexy. I understand that there are millions of people who disagree with me, including my husband. To these people, I say: whatever.

I generally enjoy good acting and believable plot. This is not to say that I am incapable of willingly suspending my disbelief; it’s that the suspension can only last so long. In Debbie Does Dallas, there is a shower sex scene that is one of the least convincing scenes I have ever watched. Everyone is supposed to be in high school; the men are clearly something like 35 years old, and the woman in this scene has a scar from a cesarean section. I think there was a used bandaid on the floor, although Mike tried to convince me that it was used chewing gum, as if that were somehow more appropriate to the mood. That being said, maybe porn from back in the day is closer to what I should enjoy than what’s available today since the people look like real people, and they actually attempt to tell a story that contains sex instead of consisting of a nebulously linked series of sex vignettes.

Still, I wouldn’t want to attempt to have a conversation with most of the people in Debbie Does Dallas, much less have them touch me. I suppose the degree to which we are creatures of our time can be comical. While the perhaps naïve seventies idea that porn should have plot is appealing to me, I don’t want to see any of those grody seventies people naked ever again. Being a big fan of twenty-first century hygiene standards, and being a fairly unhairy person myself, I present you with the problem I had last night: the hairy girl ass hole. That’s right. I didn’t know this was something women had to deal with. Unfortunately, the girl having the ass-sex in Debbie Does Dallas didn’t deal with it at all. I couldn’t pay much attention to the rest of the movie because I was on the internet researching the hairy girl ass hole phenomenon that my husband assured me was common. So my rating is pretty much for the film up to the point that the ugly hairy-ass-holed girl takes the cock in her colon.

In Days of Heaven, writer and director Terrence Malick uses an essentially simple story to show viewers exactly how tied to the earth we are. Beautiful, captivating studies of the landscape are punctuated with shots of the farmer’s obnoxious and towering, vibrant and gaudy Victorian-style house. Malick really got this one right. This is what plantation houses feel like: huge monstrosities rising up from parts of the earth so flat you could believe we’re not living on a sphere at all, surrounded by swaths of farmland, cut off from anything that could be considered a community. Community, certainty, accomplishments, friendship, love, life, and even heaven are all fleeting. At some point, no matter how high we fly, how close we get to heaven, we all must return to the ground.

The idea of heaven in the film is really interesting. At one point, when Abby has accepted the idea of making a life—fake or not—with the farmer, she explains to young Linda why she’s doing this. She talks about how hard her life has been in the past, and as the two of them sit indoors for the first time since they’ve been on the farm, relaxing and enjoying the easiness that life can sometimes offer, Abby says, “This is not so bad.” This is a little piece of heaven. A taste. A view. But our protagonists are tied to the earth.

There are many ways that Malick gets this concept across in Days of Heaven. Perhaps one of the most effective ways is his use of animals—birds and dogs in particular. There are birds and dogs everywhere in the film. The migrant workers seem to identify with the birds. Everyone wants to fly, to be closer to heaven. They are usually not successful. Even as the workers come to the farm, leaving the last chapter of their lives in the past, they “fly” in on the tops of the the train cars. The camera’s suggestion of this “flight” is reinforced by the perky music of the soundtrack, which is so different from the eerie music and ambient sounds that had made up the soundtrack before that point in the film.

The circus performers fly in more literally, in their man-made attempts to become like birds—airplanes. This is when I really started to notice the divide between those who long to fly, and those who are content to hunt and live always tied to the earth. Those who manage the earth try to hunt and tie down those who work the earth. Bill, Linda, and Abby are immediately enamored of the flying circus, while the farmer takes a bit longer to see their appeal, because the farmer doesn’t see the point of flying away.

The workers repeatedly identify with birds throughout the film, but the scenes with the hunting dogs are a successful counterpoint to the workers’ need for flight. There are many scenes of Bill and the farmer involved in the various stages of hunting, including an especially striking scene where the farmer holds the dogs off the birds they are hunting. Bill always seems uncomfortable hunting, and at one point, the farmer brings this up. Bill stops dressing his bird, stands, and confesses that he just can’t do this anymore. The farmer doesn’t seem to understand: this is simply a part of life. But Bill is a bird, not a dog. Even in the climactic scene where the farmer/hunter/dog comes after Bill who is working on his bike, Bill kills the farmer, but Bill was the one being hunted. He never initiates fights or confrontations; and when presented with the fight or fly scenario, he may fight, but afterward he always flies. And as I mentioned before, birds and those who want to fly must always return to the earth, and that’s where Bill ends up at the end of the film—dead, returned to the earth.