B Plus Movies

When I was a teenager, often my mom would ask me when I was going to stop watching cartoons. With Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Thundar the Barbarian on the TV in the background, I’d say “never”. As I became an adult, I was exposed to Japanese Animation (Anime) and I found mature themes incorporated into the medium that grew along with me, allowing me to still enjoy animation while not having to only experience it as a tool for telling juvenile tales.

One of the first full length Anime works I saw, one that set high expectations for any other Anime I might watch. It was called Ninja Scroll.

Ninja Scroll is a period piece, starting with a ninja for hire named Jubei. He roams the earth, basically spending time being an unparalleled badass more concerned with fulfilling obligations than personal gain. He crosses paths with a ninja girl named Kagero who is on a mission to find out the truth behind plague that has killed a village. The two of them soon discover there’s much more to the death of the village than simple illness.

Jubei meets up with a government agent who presses him into service by poisoning him. The trio continues the investigation and soon find themselves facing a group of supernaturally powerful warriors, one of whom has a history with Jubei. The more they find out the more danger they find themselves in and the price of knowing what is really going on just might be their lives.

Ninja Scroll is remarkably accessible for western audiences as compared to some other Anime which practically expects you to have a native understanding of Japanese folklore and social idoms. Ninja Scroll runs like a pretty standard action movie and displays just how much violence and drama you can pack into a cartoon.

In addition to being beautifully told, it’s also beautifully presented. The approachable nature doesn’t get betrayed by the fantastic elements (including a villain who can turn his skin to stone and another that is capable of electrocuting people with the just a length of wire and his force of will). On the other hand, the fact that it is a cartoon doesn’t dull the edge of the very bloody violence nor the near rape scene nor the sex scenes nor any of the other elements to this rich piece of animation.

Anime has influenced western cinema for years now, like The Matrix or even has been adopted whole cloth, like The Dark Knight prequel, Batman: Gotham Knight. If you wish to delve into this art form but don’t want to have to already understand the significance of giant drops of sweat and spontaneous nosebleeds, then Ninja Scroll is a excellent, if brutal, starting place.

And for that reason I give Ninja Scroll a B+. And not because I fear the Shadow Warriors coming after me for rating it lower. Definitely not.

Movie trivia is a strange comfort for the film buff, not because it lets us know more about the story but because we connect more with business of movie making. Knowing that Viggo Mortensen wasn’t the first pick to play Aragorn (it was Stuart Townsend) doesn’t make the movie better in the telling but it does speak to the actor’s ability and connect us more to the efforts that went into making the Lord of the Rings trilogy so amazing. False trivia, conversely, disconnects from that experience and reminds us that we are but consumers of a product.

For instance, I’ve been mistaken for years that the abandoned script for the propoesed sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, reviewed Wednesday, was cannibalized to make the script for the movie I’m reviewing today, Big Trouble in Little China.

Big Trouble in Little China brings us into the life of Jack Burton, played by Kurt Russel, a loud mouthed truck driver who has friends in Chinatown including Wang Chi (played by Asian character actor Dennis Dun) who is on his way to meet his bride, a Chinese woman with green eyes. Unfortunately, Wang’s would be bride gets kidnapped at the airport by members of a Chinese gang. Jack and Wang (I feel dirty typing that) head down to Chinatown to find her and end up in the middle of a war between rival gangs. This might all be well and good except the battle is joined by three mythical Chinese warriors, the Three Storms in the service of their master, Lo Pan who is a wheelchair bound invalid during business hours but spends more of his time as immortal evil sorcerer (played by another master character actor, James Hong).

Then it gets weird.

We meet Egg Shen (played by Victor Wong), a historian and peasant magician who drives a Tour bus and is the guy who knows what’s going on. Also joining the fight is Gracie Long (played by the still hot Kim Cattrall), a woman looking into the disappearance of Asian girls into prostution rings. Together with the help of one of the gangs of Chinatown, this group must take on Lo Pan, his warriors and demons to keep the sorceror from becoming immortal.

Big Trouble in Little China plays on sterotypes, the unexpected mixed with the expected.  Where a drama would break those stereotypes with insight and displays of humanity, director John Carpenter decided to break those sterotypes with explosions, lightning and the flash of swords. But the thing that makes this movie memorable is Jack Burton, the ugly American.

For the most part, Jack has no idea what’s going on even as he’s trying to overcome the dangers of his situation. In Asian cinema, the viewer is often handed bucketloads of concepts and cleverly named artifacts (Six Demon Bag!) and just expected to accept that these esoteric references are vitally important to the situation. I have no idea if Asian veiwers are any less confused than American ones, but if you’re born in the states and don’t have a degree in Asian Studies, then you probably just look up at the screen and just like Jack Burton go “okay, I can deal with this… whatever this is”.

Because of that aspect of confusion in the midst of action, we connect with Jack and take this fantastic and over the top world at face value, so no matter how strange or twisted the next scene is, the suspension of disbelief stays firmly in place and the time that might be spent with long and complicated plot exposition for the Anglos in the crowd is instead spent shooting things and in general kicking butt.

Big Trouble in Little China is sort of an ubiquitous find in department store $5 bins. I’ve seen in packaged on the same disc with movies that have nothing in common with it except gunfire. I’m not sure if this is a testament to its logevity or a mark against it’s public opinion, but either way it’s easy to find.

If you buy only one obscure, cheap 80’s movie this year, make it this one.  Big Trouble in Little China is fun, confusing, cool and bizarre. It’s a B+ film all the way and perhaps one of the best weird Asian flim with an American main chracter and that wasn’t made in Asia.

Watch it and see if you don’t end up quoting it for a week. I dare you.

The death of a sequel is in its inability to bring anything new to the table. Sure, we want enough of whatever the original story was that we get the same feeling, the same magic and emotion brought on by that introductory tale, but we also want to see something else. Play it too close to the original and you risk boring the audience by taking them over well tread ground.

And fear of innovation is not anything I can pin on The Crow: Salvation.

The last movie to review in my four part retrospective of The Crow franchise, The Crow: Salvation had a lot going against it from the beginning. It would invariably be compared to The Crow and it would be hard to capture that depth of story again using the same plot. Also, critics were less than impressed with The Crow: City of Angels, so not only would be compared to a very well liked movie, but also a less than well liked movie.

Seemingly destined for failure, the movie failed to bring us back to where we started but it didn’t just stop and die either.

The Crow: Salvation begins with the classic formula that made us fall in love with the series. Take two lovers, add some tragedy and sprinkle with an unkillable thirst of for justice and once again, you get an undead vigilante in black and white makeup ready to pass out the butt kickings to all comers. In this case, we have Alex Corvis who was framed for the death of his lover and spots the killer (by way of a plot provided identifying mark) as one of the members of the gallery watching him be electrocuted. He comes back and along the way must not only find his killer but also look after his girlfriend’s sister, played by a pre-Spider-Man Kirsten Dunst.

What this movie does right is that it doesn’t directly try to be the first movie, just with a different actor in the lead. It plays with the plot devices, requiring Alex to believe in the purity of his mission and his own innocence to keep going. This adds a vulnerability and introspective twist to the character that means there’s a chance that the unstoppable can be stopped. This in turns builds tension and at least for me, made me engage the story and really wonder how the character was going to finish his quest.

The less than perfect parts of this tale are in its framing, like a complete lack of understanding about how electrocutions take place. Also, the acting by the main villain (played by Fred Ward) left just a bit to be desired. Despite it’s curves, there are few framed shots where it’s pretty obvious they were trying to copy scenes from The Crow. Not enough to make me get bored, but enough that I said to myself “yep, I guess it’s time for him to get shot by a line of guys in a bar”.

The Crow: Salvation was neither the best movie I’ve ever seen nor even the best comic book movie but it was the best of the three sequels, I felt. While this is faint praise, in the B+ rating system, this means that I give it a B. There will never be another movie, I fear, that will completely capture the magic of the first movie but if they keep making sequels, future filmmakers wishing to take up this tale would do well to look at the third installment and see exactly how much you can push the formula and still make a movie worthy of the pre colon title The Crow.

Cult classics are hard to manufacture because they require something genuine. It usually takes a movie with no money behind it but passion to catch an audience, a fringe that resonates with the message as if they’ve been there all along, just waiting for someone to help them say what was in them from the start. Like a chance encounter that leads to a sweaty night in the back seat of your Celica or a fine meal whose only recipe was “take everything left in the refrigerator and throw it in a pot”, you can’t so much plan a cult classic as let it happen.

When you try, you get The Crow: City of Angels.

The Crow: City of Angels starts many years after the original, in which Sarah, the young girl championed by The Crow’s Eric Draven, finds and aids Ashe Corvin, who is the newest victim of a crime so heinous he must seek vengence before he can return to the grave, in this case the murder of his self and his son. The villian is Judah, a sadomasochist who leads a band of colorful villians and keeps company with a modern day witch.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a pretty straight forward rehash of the first movie. This is sad, because the director originally said that he’d wanted to distance the sequel from it’s predecessor. Despite whatever effort he made towards that desire, the only really evident difference between the two was green lighting instead of gray lighting.

As with the original movie bearing the title The Crow, this flick is not something I would normally review. I saw it in a normal theater and it had a budget to speak of, unlike the straight to video pieces that would follow it. I’d originally intended to tack this review onto one of the others. The reason I can’t is that there is one thing this movie has that those others don’t: A rare, impossible to find alternate version.

Alternate versions and director’s cuts are the filet mingon of the movie geek’s DVD collection menu. Having tracked down a copy of a movie with five minutes of never-before-seen footage is the difference between saying you’ve seen the movie everyone else saw and saying to saw what the creators really hoped to show. It’s the whole reason that deleted scenes and outtakes are included in DVD releases these days, to give the ravenous the few extra crumbs that make it worthwhile to bring home the whole cinematic cake.

According to IMDB, Wikipedia and probably some old movie buff telling stories in the back of a seedy bar, the original cut of The Crow: City of Angels was a very different movie before the editors got a hold of it. It took the cookie cutter villians and gave them depth, so that when they get killed we actually care. It ran a romance sub-plot that the theatrical version hints at but never follows through on. It even had a radically different ending and one of the best closing lines I could imagine for such a gothic and downbeat movie.

That cut would have been awesome. At least I think so. I’ve never seen it.

It apparently showed up on German pay per view once and now only exists as a cobbled together piece that you have to track down through torrents and downloads (which we know you don’t do, because that’s illegal). If the studio who did this, Mirimax, has this copy available, they haven’t apparently realized there are people salivating for its release.

But no, they only released a safe and gutted version. What would have been a hard hitting, moving two hours of cinema instead was bad rendition of the first movie with more colorful death scenes but no heart. Despite some passionate performances (most of the scenes with Iggy Pop, who plays chief henchman Curve, are pure genius) The Crow: City of Angels is a hot dog when we were looking for a steak dinner.

As such, I can rate this one no better than a C and it gets that only for being pretty and having Mia Kirshner in it. I just wish that whoever made the editorial choices for this movie had realized that if we’d wanted to see The Crow again, we would have just pulled it off the shelf and rewatched it.

Sometimes, the ingredients don’t predict the soup that they make. You can take cheddar cheese, peanut butter, broccoli, flounder, cherries, and chicken broth and no matter how much you like them individually, the result of their mixture is probably not anything you’d like to consume. Sometimes, even taking a tried and true recipe (like say, lasanga) and tossing in an extra ingredient for variety (like say, squid ink) does nothing to improve it and everything to bring it down.

Sadly, the same can be said for some movies and specifically about The Crow: Wicked Prayer.

I gushed over The Crow on Monday and talked about it’s base premise, repeated in each of it’s sequels: A man is wronged and his loved ones dealt with by cruel men. The grave cannot hold his sorrow, so it spits him back forth with a black bird to guide him. His mission is simple: set the balances straight and gain revenge, but those who upset the balances in the first place have no problem making that a hard task.

The fact that three attempts have been made to recapture the raw power and pathos of the first is a testament to how well this formula works.  The Crow: Wicked Prayer promised, from it’s earliest rumors, to be faithful to this vision without simply re-doing the first one.  I had high hopes for this movie.

The cast includes Edward Furlong (of Terminator 2 and Detroit Rock City), Tara Reid (of American Pie and gossip magazines), David Boreanaz (of Angel and Bones) and even a cameo by Dennis Hopper (of…. do I have to tell you who Dennis Hopper is?). Furlong plays Jimmy Cuervo, an ex con trying to walk the straight and narrow. Boreanaz plays a Satanist who wants to sire the AntiChrist with the help of Reid and his three companions who have styled themselves after the four horseman of the apocalyse. To do this, the group tracks down Jimmy and takes his heart and his would-be fiance’s eyes.

Now the stage is set and we can begin the path of revenge. Unfortunately, this is where it all takes a bad turn.

The Crow: Wicked Prayer took passionate, dedicated actors,  well written dialogue and an engaging plot and somehow still missed the mark. Furlong’s character, post-mortem, is supposed to come across as out of sync and darkly alluring, but instead he just looks off balance and drugged. Boreanez does well as a villian up until he gets the power of Satan and his acting becomes a parody of past performances. Dennis Hopper didn’t just phone in his performance, he called collect to do it. The script developed plot holes that it doesn’t even bother to try to justify. They fall back on cliches, reinforcing that if you’re part of an ethnic minority group you must know all of your culture’s arcane rituals.

I don’t know if the movie got rushed at some point, if the editors were off their meds or if the director just wasn’t watching the playbacks but this movie squandered it’s potential. What could have been a solid reboot and an answer to the prayers of J. O’Barr’s fans was  reduced to a suggestion of what it could have been.

So not only seeing what it could have been on it’s own but knowing the standard The Crow: Wicked Prayer had to live up to, I can give it no better than a D in my scale. If you’re a fan of the series already, then check it out. If not, know that there are better movies based upon J. O’Barr’s The Crow. Unfortunately, unless the proposed reboot turns out to suck, there aren’t any that are worse.

Well, except for the movie Phoenix Rising. But that one was a porno.

The job of art is to act as a gymnasium for the emotions. I realize others may differ with my assessment, but I think it’s a pretty good one. You look at a painting, you listen to a piece of music or watch a performance and you know it’s good if you feel something. Sometimes, you seek out things that make you feel a certain way, like renting a love story to feel more romantical. Sometimes, you find things that confirm that yes, other people have felt what you’re feeling right now.

This is how I came to The Crow.

By the standards of B+ Movies, I probably shouldn’t be reviewing The Crow: This is a film which most of you have probably already seen, that was on the big screen, and that is pretty well known. The reason I’m going to review it anyway is that I’d like to talk about it’s sequels and a proper examination of them can’t be made without first explaining to what they’re being compared.

The base concept behind The Crow and all it’s bastard children is this: Someone who had no business being killed has their life ended while they still have things to do. The person can’t rest until they’ve gotten revenge for the injustice visted upon them and because of this, something lets them rise from the grave to balance the scales.  This person is granted invulnerability and a guide in the form of a black bird, genus Corvus.

The Crow starred Brandon Lee and it is sad that one of the main reasons you’ve probably heard about the film is that Brandon lost his life when a lead plug in a prop pistol came loose and became a very real bullet, the projectile entering Brandon’s body and inflicting a fatal wound. Brandon gave an immensely passionate performance as Eric Draven, a musician whose girlfriend gets raped and killed shortly before they are to be wed on Halloween night.

As the plot unfolds, we find out that Eric and his girlfriend were killed to prepare for Devil’s Night, which is based on the all too real repeat occurance of people setting fire to buildings right before Halloween in Detroit. In the film we find out that Devil’s Night is far more organized than one might expect and that the criminal organization involved is sinister, ruthless and run by a sadist (actor: Michael Wincott) and his witchcraft dabbling sister (actress: Bai Ling).

The Crow did an amazing job of setting a mood and a feel, on in which Eric Draven’s tale for revenge seems not only plausible but righteous.  There’s a strange dark thread of hope throughout the story that promises that great pain will be met by great retribution, that even though evil may triumph in the short run, evil will never go unanswered. With powerful imagery, skillful pacing and one of the best soundtracks ever, this movie batters you down, but only to grant a better appreciation for the light from which you are taken and to which you’ll eventually be returned.

Fifteen years later, this movie hasn’t lost its impact and it’s message is still very accessible, understandable and relevant.

To be certain, The Crow has flaws, flaws which lie in two places: the compromises made in order to finish the film after Brandon’s death and a few places where points have to be hammered down to explain this grim yet fair world we’re watching. The former comes in the shape of early CGI, re-use of footage in a shot or two and actors that had to stand in and be shot from far enough away that we’re not supposed to be able to tell. The latter came in scenes where it seems like they wanted to just tell you the rules of the universe, but had to back off to avoid overdoing the prose.

Also, the original script called for some elements that didn’t survive to the theatrical cut: Eric’s guide is the crow that carried his soul back from the land of the dead to this Earth. As concieved, there was also the Skull Cowboy (voiced by Ron Perlman), a gruesome wraith that keeps Eric focused on revenge and tries to pull him away from some of the more benevolent uses he makes of his remaining time. The removal of the character leaves a couple of scenes feeling like there’s something missing and a few editing oddities, like Eric having electrical tape wrapped around his abdomen but no reason given for it’s appearance.

The last paragraph of a B+ Movie review customarily includes a rating. This one will not. If you’re asking why the cop out, it’s because I can’t remain objective where this movie is concerned. There are production  errors that would drop its grade but that I think the power of the storytelling more than corrects for. More than perhaps any other movie I’ve reviewed in this blog, I say go get a copy of The Crow and judge it for yourself.

Because for some movies, it doesn’t matter what a critic says. It matters what the movie says to you.

Brandon Lee
RIP

While I’m not in favor of censorship or of huge fines for showing a nipple on TV or for putting chips in television sets so that parents don’t have to think, I do encourage people to look at a movie before they hand it over to their kids for viewing. This especially goes for cartoons, which occasionally rise above the status of “cute and for kids” and occasionally tackle big themes and horrifying images while still interspersing it with the whimsical and fantastic.

One thing that you should probably never hand a person whose age is still in the single digits is the 1977 Ralph Bakshi work, Wizards.

The reason I say to be cautious with this one is that, like many og Bakshi’s other animated works (American Pop, Fritz the Cat, etc.), this film talks about very adult topics: War, racism, organized religion and the consequences of failing to respect the environment. It just happens to do it with elves, fairies, and as the title suggests, wizards. The film was partially animated and partially rotoscoped and the film they traced over for the rotoscoping is from very real shots of war machines and their use.

The story behind Wizards is that we’ve got two nations, one of light and prosperity and the other of shadow and waste. The good guys have the wise Avatar, a wizard who enjoys his leisure but is more than capable. The bad guys are lead by Blackwolf, Avatar’s brother, who wishes to lead his nation, Scorch, into the good lands and subjegate those in his path. The movie picks up where Blackwolf and the armies of Scorch have discovered a weapon that will allow them to accomplish their goal and have begun to make their move. Avatar, along with an elf, a robot assassin and a faerie princess, must ride forth to end the threat and bring peace to the land once more.

Where Wizards succeeds is in that it tells the story that it wants to tell seriously while retaining its whimsy. Seeing this I smiled at the parts that were meant to be funny, winced at the parts that were meant to be brutal and felt bad at the parts meant to be sad. From where it stands, Wizards can see the line between commentary and sermonizing, but it thankfully doesn’t take the short trek to cross it.

Where Wizards fails, however, is in the execution of some of it’s moments. There are scenes meant to be heart wrenching that come off just as kinda “meh”. While I did occasionally feel that the heroes were in peril, I never fully got the sense of how the difference between victory or defeat was truly depending on their actions. As a teenager watching this for the first time, I went with it because I understood how much of my disbelief I was supposed to suspend. As an adult, this one makes that suspension a little harder.

As one of the milder introductions to Bakshi’s work and for the parts that it get’s right, I give Wizards the silver medal of B+ Movies, the B rating. I do recommend that if you enjoy animation and have some tolerance for hippy ethics that you check this one out. Just don’t mistake this fanciful tale for a kid’s film.

Trust me.

Some movies, one watches for the plot. Others, one watches for the characters or the acting. Still others are enjoyed based on dialogue. But most movies, one watches for the imagery.

And that is the best reason to watch MirrorMask.

MirrorMask was written and co-produced by Neil Gaiman, who wrote the comic book Sandman and a number of novels including Neverwhere and American Gods. It begins with a young girl whose desire is to run away from the circus, full into the throws of adolecent angst while working as a juggler in her father’s big top. When her mother falls ill, the girl finds herself transported to a strange and suprising world full of living books, masked people and fish swimming in the air.

As one might expect, soon she finds that her presence there may determine the fate of that world and perhaps much more.

If you were to watch this movie with the sound off, you’d get much the same experience as if you’d kept it audible. The art and detail in this piece is amazing. Even though it primarily takes place in a world of imagination and dreams, the scenery, whether CGI, drawn or born of stagecraft is captivating and engaging, often dipping into the creepy and bizzare. Every time I felt the movie losing me, the visuals were enough to bring me back and keep me engaged.

But that said, in places, the movie almost lost me.

MirrorMask is a fairy tale and it’s plot progression follows a fairly familar footpath. There are twists from it, such as the main character is certainly not a princess and early on, she begins to understand her relationship to this world, but beyond that there’s little to suprise you if you’ve seen Labyrinth or The Neverending Story.

I was glad that I saw MirrorMask, for the performace of the lead actress alone, but I wanted this to be something I was dragging people into dark rooms and duct taping them to a couch so that they didn’t miss it. I’m glad it exists, if for no other reason there are people who would find other movies of it’s kind corny or dated that will be hard pressed to make the same judgement about this one. But that said, where MirrorMask made me hope it would be an explosion of insightful fantasy, it turned out to be more of a puff of nostalgia and homage to it’s inspirations.

Mirrormask gets a C on my scale, though it pains me to say it. I love Gaiman’s other work and for that reason high hopes. Alas, high hopes sometimes result in substantial disappointment, and such was my reaction to this beautiful (if predictable) film.