B Plus Movies

Monday, I talked about Japanese Animation and gave a very easily accessible and understandable example of the medium. Today, I’d like to talk about another classic of Anime that’s just a bit less accessable.

I speak of fanboy favorite Akira.

Akira is the sort of anime that makes it hard for westerners to accept cartoons as serious stories. It’s a very pretty film, but the story has a steep learning curve that gets even steeper if you have no clue about Japanese culture. The fact that it’s one of the three or four movies that’s on everyone’s Anime 101 list attests to its importantce, but it’s as likely to leave you scratching your head  as pumping your fist.

The story of Akira starts with three very different groups. The first is a bunch of pill popping juvenille delinquent bikers, the second is the military government and the third is a group of revolutionaries and/or terrorists. The three come together when a biker (named Tetsuo) crashes into an albino toddler (formerly in the care of the government) that had been sprung from incarceration by the revolutionaries. Everyone involved survives, but Tetsuo gets dragged off by the government along with the escapee. Another biker, the alpha delinquent Kenada, joins up with the revolutionaries, his motivations more that he wants to sleep with one of them than he’s trying to find his friend and gangmate.

Somewhere in here is where the psychic powers come in.

You see, the albino toddler is part of a small group of powerful psychics. Coming into contact with him awakens Tetsuo’s hidden potential. Tetsuo also has a major case of self esteem issues which once combined with ridiculous amounts of ability to do cool and vicious things rapidly turns into a bloody mess.

In the meantime, the government is collapsing, cults are on the rise and giant teddy bears are showing up for no good reason. And all of this has something to do with Akira, who may be a god or may be a bomb or may be just a guy but is definately responsible for blowing up Tokyo at some point in the past.

Confused? Right there with you.

What makes this movie worth watching, first and foremost, is the the amazing visuals used to tell the story. The streets of Neo-Tokyo are very real, even if they contain guys with laser rifles and punks on electric bikes. The characters are beliveable, with understandable motivations and reasonable reactions to situations both fantastic and mundane.

If you can get past the premise, Akira is worth watching once or twice. I won’t debate on dubbed versus subtitles, though the remastered version from 2001 may be worth a look. Also, this might not be a bad one to experience before they do a live action version, a project that has been in the works for some time and currently scheduled for 2011.

Akira gets a B from me, mostly for being almost incomprehensibly weird even if it is held together by unimanigable coolness. Check it out  for the experience, but if at the end you’re sitting on the couch wondering what exactly it was you just saw, don’t feel bad. Most of us, even those who liked it, felt just the same way.

Heinlein wrote “Specialization is for insects” after listing a long litany of things any individual should be able to do, including changing a diaper, writing a sonnet and planning an invasion. This concept travels to a certain archetype of capable hero who knows a little about everything and a lot about how to make use of what he knows. We see examples in Sherlock Holmes, McGuyver, James Bond, Dr. Gregory House and the pulp action hero Doc Savage.

In the 80’s, an new instance of this type of hero appeared in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

Buckaroo Banzai, played by Peter Weller (of Robocop) is a brain surgeon, a scientist, adventurer and rock musician. He has a band, a team of brilliant sidekicks and collegues and a private militia of volunteers who help him because he’s just that awesome. His list of talents and accomplisments makes the ideal set forth by Heinlien seem like little more than a morning agenda.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension starts with Buckaroo Banzai piloting a rocket propelled truck through a mountain by means of extra-dimensional travel. The technobabble filled trip takes him to the title referenced 8th dimension, a place he discoveres is full of strange alien lifeforms called Lectroids, exiles from a war on Planet 10. He finds out there are Lectroids present on Earth and they want to return to Planet 10 on a mission of conquest. Buckaroo Banzai and his team then take on the mission of stopping the Lectroids, whose mission threatens not only their planet but ours.

Sound convoluted? It is. Fun, but as twisted as a bag of pretzels.

The movie has a number of great performances by impressive actors. Jon Lithgow, Clancy Brown, Jeff Golblum, Ellen Barkin and Christopher Lloyd all show up in this film and each one makes their characters memorable and believable. They all play it straight, making the world that much more bizarre as the characters deal with aliens and super science the way most of us deal with coffee makers.

Twenty-five years after its release, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension has fans and fanatics. It has spawned comic books and novels (though we’ll probably never see the sequel promised in the credits Buckaroo Banzai versus the World Crime League, unless someone does a reboot). It has risen to the very definition of cult film and easily gets the B+ rating from me.

If you’ve never seen this one, fix that. Take it in and go back to a world that never was, maybe should have been but definately would be cool to be a part of. “Because no matter where you go… there you are.”

Some movies start off looking like they are going to be normal and then twist into something strange and wonderful, like Fight Club. Some movies start off weird and then become something more approachable, like Moulin Rouge. Still others start off weird and just keep going with it.

It is in the third category I place the 1998 cult film, Six-String Samurai.

The film starts in a setting that is one part alternate history and one part allegory: In the fifties, the Russians bombed the United States leaving it a desolate, barren landscape full of warring gangs and the desicated husk of the American Dream. To the west lies the Kingdom of Elvis, and as the movie begins Elvis has left the building died. Hopefuls from all over the country converge on Vegas to be crowned the next King of Rock and Roll.

Enter Buddy, as in Holly (horned rimed glasses and all), who is said to be able to “kill over a hundred men and play a mean six string at the same time”. With katana and Les Paul in hand, he heads towards Vegas to make his bid, but along the way meets a orphaned kid who Buddy reluctantly takes into his protection. As he walks on towards his destiny, Buddy will face suburban zombies, rock star wannabes, the Red Army and even Death himself.

Once you’ve accepted that this isn’t the history they taught you in school, Six-String Samurai is fun movie.  While I’m calling it Sci-Fi, it has elements of a martial arts film, a western, post-apocalyptic action and modern fantasy. The movie’s sword fights and bluesy guitar riffs are edged with comedy and thickly coated with symbols of an America that never really existed save on glossy magazine pages and black and white TV screens. The film uses rock and roll as a metaphor, representing what is best and fine in the culture of the US as well as what fuels the dreams of those who start off humble but hope to make something grand of themselves by the end of the story.

Six-String Samurai was made on a shoestring budget but that in no way hurts the movie. What does hurt the movie is that the fights get a little repetitive and that the strangeness of things like a guitar duel with Death threaten to alienate the less dedicated viewer. This movie looks at it’s subject matter like a kid with a pinhole camera watching an eclipse, a perspective that makes it interesting but at the same time obscures the film’s impact.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a biology class documentary on bees and 10 being a David Lynch film, Six-String Samurai falls at about 8.2 for weirdness.  It’s not a film I’d recommend just for background noise, but more if you’re willing to let yourself get sucked in to a movie and also willing to hang with it when the allure wears thin for a scene or two. In my more usual ranking system, that means Six-String Samurai gets a B.

But I don’t expect this movie to care that it didn’t get my top honors. It’s just too cool for that.

Monday, I reviewed a movie called Gangs of the Dead and spoke of the deep level of suck to which it managed to delve. What sticks with me about that film was how close it came to being cool and how much it had to work with versus what it actually did with it. This made me think of other zombie movies and what they did, both wrong and right.

Take for instance an 80’s classic, Night of the Comet.

Night of the Comet starts with a couple of Valley Girls, the prototypical 80’s girl who spent inordinate amounts of time at the mall, sported leg warmers and spoke in one of the most contagious slang dialects of the twentieth century (I’m sure there’s evidence to back me up on that last one somewhere). One is a cheerleader, the other works at a movie theater and at the opening of our film, they have no more concerns that shopping, having sex with their boyfriends and topping the high score on an arcade game (if you have to ask me what an arcade game is, I’ll have to slap you.)

As the opening exposition is kind enough to tell us, there’s a comet on the way and Earth is going to pass through it’s tail. This is cause for the masses to party in public and for a few more cautious souls to hide in bunkers. Turns out, of course, that the latter took the wiser path. The comet’s mojo turns people in to zombies, doomed to disintegrate but not before trying to maul the small remaining non-zombie population.

The girls manage to escape this fate by spending the night behind steel walls (the projection booth for one, the backseat of a car for the other). They meet up with a trucker who also survived and then go to fetch weapons from the National Guard Armory, which they know how to use because their dad is in the military.

The guns turn out to be necessary for more than mulching zombies as a group of scientists now want to capture the girls and figure out how to make a cure for the zombie disease out of their blood. Between zombies and rogue scientists, the girls and the audience are in for a bit of a ride.

The thing that made this stand out from other zombie movies, for me at least, was that it was more a period piece than a horror movie. It used the 80’s kitsch to connect with the audience and highlight some of the sillier aspects of the Valley Girl chic. This is true for about the first third of the movie, but that’s enough to set the tone.

Where the movie slacks off is in the last two thirds, in which it becomes more of a standard sci fi piece. If they’d kept the focus of the first part of the movie, it might have stepped beyond B movie territory and gone straight into genius. It didn’t, though and instead remained cute and entertaining.

While not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination,  Night of the Comet is a very watchable, enjoyable movie. It has almost no gore factor though which makes it more of an action film than horror, even if it does provide some deeply creepy scenes in the process (the guys in the mall and the game of “scary noises” stand out).

As of 2009, the 80’s are back in full force as evidenced by the teenage girls I’ve seen bopping about the mall in ripped jeans, tiger striped spandex pants and side ponytails. If anyone needed reference material for the look, this is one of the films I’d consider required viewing. Night of the Comet get’s a B from me, and a deserved one at that. Totally. I mean like gag me with a spoon.

Cyberpunk is a genre of fiction, mostly revolving around the idea of society reacting to technologies coming at us so fast that we’re unable to comprehend their impact fully before we have to become proficient in their use. Generally, cyberpunk drew upon dystopian visions of the future along with the symbolism of replacing body parts, either with bionic or artificial organic parts, representing man’s descent into inhumanity when confronted with the pressures of living in the modern world. Cyberpunk was also declared dead by one it’s finest authors, Neal Stephenson.

I have to wonder what he thinks of Repo: The Genetic Opera.

The world of Repo: The Genetic Opera is one in which organ failure is a common and ubiquitous problem, the same as bad vision or wisdom teeth might be today. Necessity being the mother of invention, a company is born which produces designer organs which first are a medical miracle but soon become a fashion statement. The problem is that organs are expensive and most have to buy them on credit. If you default on too many payments, they do more than wreck your credit rating: they send the Repo Man to come collect their property.

Enter Shilo (played by Alexa Vega of the Spy Kids trilogy), a young girl who has grown up to the age of 17 constantly hampered by a blood disease, inherited from her mother. She is guarded by her father day and night (played by Anthony Stewart Head of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer). As a parent and doctor, he provides as safe world as he can for Shilo, but cannot tell her that he has another occupation. He is a Repo Man, the one the company calls directly when important organs must be taken from important people.

Adding to this melodramatic tragedy in the making is the family who runs the organ making company, GeneCo. They are composed of the cruel family head, the rage filled eldest son, the face-stealing younger son and the scandalous, wannabe singer daughter (played by Paris Hilton… what a stretch). There’s also a grave robber who gets drugs out of the brains of corpses, an opera singer (played by Sarah Brightman) who has effectively sold herself to GeneCo and a whole parade of scarred, gun toting figures to fill out this violently surreal setting.

Did I mention it’s a musical?

With its Wagnerian scope, Shakespearean themes and George Romero-esque imagery,  Repo: The Genetic Opera was either going to be awful or awesome. I prepared myself for awful. Which may be why I got awesome.

From the first moments actors start taking the screen, I couldn’t look away. Sometimes, it was because I couldn’t believe what they were showing me. Sometimes it was because I couldn’t wait to see what was next. But scene after scene, the movie kept throwing visuals at me that stunned and amazed backed by music that flowed with the story and didn’t, as it does in so many musicals, seem tacked on.

The highlights for me were Blind Meg/Sarah Brightman, who played her role flawlessly as well as the Grave Robber, who serves as the story’s narrator in addition to being a playful yet morbid in-story purveyor of recycled drugs.

This is a movie bound to produce strong reactions, the sort of film that must have the right sort of gallows humor to enjoy or at least have a strong stomach to experience. There were some choices that the director made that might lose those not attracted by the imagery: the pace of the movie is a little off in the first third of the film, for instance. Part of the story is also told with flashbacks and drawings where one might expect a movie with “opera” in the title to tell these plot points in song. The movie is not flawless, sorry to say.

But I wasn’t hoping for flawless. I was hoping for B+.

Repo: The Genetic Opera may not revive cyberpunk as a genre, but it certainly does suggest that it lives on in the sick imaginations of at least two screenwriters. If the movie gains the cult status that it truly deserves, those imaginations have suggested the possibility of a prequel and a sequel. I hope this movie gets the attention required for those projects and that, like this one, they hit that perfect balance of bizarre and watchable that so many would-be cult films fail to achieve.

To make a long commentary one question and answer longer, is Repo: The Genetic Opera B+? You bet your mortgaged liver it is.

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.

The world of visual entertainment is changing. Not the way that we thought it would in the early 90’s, with interactive movies and virtual reality, but more in how we receive our media. It’s unlikely that if you’re reading this blog, you’ve not streamed video or downloaded a movie to your computer. Despite this, the industry that produces those neat moving pictures has not really altered how it makes it’s movies in light of the new viewing technologies.

What may herald the next generation of visual storytelling is a viral project called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

Many things set the tale of Dr. Horrible apart from other films. First of all, it is a production that was meant to be seen on the web first, before DVD or the big screen.  Second, it was a pretty low budget piece with name actors (Joss Whedon, director and producer, said that it was in the “low six figures” to make). And it’s advertisement was primarily by word of mouth.

The story itself is a catalog of B Movie staples that could have rendered it a horrid steaming pile of cliche’s but instead, by virtue of the talents involved, turned it into something amazing. Our story begins when would-be, big time supervillian Dr. Horrible (played by Neal Patrick Harris of How I Met Your Mother) plots his entry into the world’s premier group of supervillians, the Evil League of Evil. His chief obsticle is superhero and consumate jerk named Captain Hammer (portrayed with cheesy goodness by Nathan Fillion of Firefly and Slither). Also complicating matters is Dr. Horrible’s love for Penny (brought to life by actress Felicia Day), a kind hearted woman who doesn’t seem to know that he exists.

Clocking in at 45min or so total,  this story has everything you’d expect from most feature length movies and more than some TV shows have in a whole season: drama, romance, revenge, violence, comedy and singing. Oh yes, the singing. The music in this story is incorperated well, neither detracting from or overtaking the spoken dialogue, but instrumental in establishing the mood and pace of the story. The music from the second installment alone was enough to make me want to accquire the soundtrack.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog doesn’t give you a lot of time to overexamine it, which is good because if there’s anything that can be checked off in the “suck” column for this one, it’s that it requires a fair suspension of disbelief. It’s a four color comic book world we’re dealing with, which could be hard to get into for people not already familar with the feel and absurdity of such a setting. It might be easy to lose the passion and emotion of the characters when you have to first accept that Dr. Horrible’s current project is a time stopping freeze ray.

But if approached with even the slightest allowance for nonsense, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is the very definition of awesome. Starting with the absurd task of making something moving out of the spare time of a few entertainers and a shoestring budget, Dr. Horrible achieves and exceeds every expectation.

Keep in mind that people were buying it off of ITunes when it was still available for free on the internet. For that matter, people are buying it on DVD, though in truth that may have something to do with the special feature Commentary: The Musical.  Whedon has said he’d like to do more Dr. Horrible and I can only hope that he gets the chance, as I can use more things to put a B+ on.

Just like I’m putting on this installment of the story; Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is a B+ feature and if you haven’t checked it out, I recommend taking the time to do so.

In fact, here’s the link: Watch it!

The early seventies saw an explosion of enlightened self interest as millions of Americans were starting to lose a little of their national identity and start asking who they really were. It seemed for a time like it might turn into a real raising of consciousness, riding on the enthusiasm and hopefulness of the late sixties, but instead turned into a kind of an indulgent mess. While self help gurus got rich, disco became popular and superficiality became acceptable the seeds of the movement did survive, but only barely.Proof: The original Rollerball.

The movie revolves around the sport of Rollerball, in which men roll around a track on roller skates, occasionally being towed by guys on motorcycles, chasing after a heavy metal ball which they attempt to scoop up and put in a goal before the opposing team beats them into a mushy wet spot. This is all produced, funded and run by the nameless, faceless mega-corporations much the same way that the NFL or NASCAR is run today if Wal-Mart was also the government. The star player of this team sport is Jonathan E., played by James Caan.

After putting his team within tasting range of the championship, Jonathan is approached by the team’s sponsor and told he’s not to compete. Not taking this too well, Jonathan continues to play. In response, the game starts to lose rules about unnecessary roughness and personal fouls. As the game gets deadlier, Jonathan gets more determined and eventually we get to find out why it is that they want him not to play.

Rollerball looks dated, from the old style skates to the 70’s era “futuristic” decor. If you look past that, you get to see a powerful tale about the triumph of the individual, something akin to the core of what the “me” movement in the 70’s was trying to accomplish at it’s best. The message remains relevant, especially today as more arenas get named for cell phone companies than war heroes and advertising becomes more and more inescapable.

The pace of the film suffers a little from the passage of time and no doubt people watching this in the 21st century will find their patience tried a little, but beyond that there’s little to criticize in this movie.

Rollerball, I proclaim the B+. I recommend checking this out, even if you saw the critically panned 2002 remake. I can understand why a director might want to redo this movie, just for the wide collared polyester suits alone, but there is no reason to update this movie’s message. Like Gloria Gaynor, it will survive.

When you think post-apocalyptic action movie hero, your mind doesn’t usually jump immediately to Patrick Swayze. Dancing with girls who can’t be kept in a corner, yes. Messily making pottery while making out, yes. Swinging a sword at guys in biker leathers in a hellish future of our own making, not so much.

But then agian, that’s because you’ve never seen Steel Dawn.

Swayze plays a wandering swordsman named who walks the deserts of what’s left of world after World War III. World weary, he takes up the mission of a fallen mentor who was going to a small town with a lot of trouble brewing in it. He hires on with a lady farmer named Kasha who has a secret that makes her farm very valuable, attracting the attention of a local bully/landowner who wants her land. When she won’t sell, he hires someone to persuade her, a nasty, death dealing  piece of work named Sho, the man who made Swayze’s mentor “fallen”, and who sports a hairdo that makes you wonder if World War III wasn’t justified.

If this  plot line sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the plot of about every third western in existence.

If anything can be said for Steel Dawn’s story its that while it lacks anything resembling complexity, it uses it’s cliches as well as it can. In addition to the aformenetioned excuse for a end of the movie showdown, we also get Kasha’s son helping to soften up Swayze’s world weary exterior and adding some humanity to the movie. There’s also a bit of conflict with Kasha’s right hand man, played by the late B movie virtuoso Brion James,  who feels replaced by the new man in his boss’s life. Without watching this movie, I’m guessing you can guess which one of these guys gets kidnapped and which one gets stabbed.

This movie is a bit of a Frankenstien’s monster, a film cobbled together from existing movie plots and sewn together in a working if not terribly pretty package. While not the worst post apocalypse film to come out of the 80’s, there’s not alot to distinguish it besides having the star of Dirty Dancing in it.

Steel Dawn gets a C as it walks off into the sunset. It’s worth renting or even purchusing if you find it on the second half of a double feature DVD. Even without  going MST3K on it, it’s an interesting film.

Just please, somebody explain the hair to me.

Ah, the prison film. This staple of B movie plot and setting has been around for almost as long as there have been movies. It sets up so many elements right off the bat: an enclosed setting full of bad guys, a easy way to limit the options of your hero and a motivation that anyone who watches can get into immediately, the fear of loss of freedom.

What could make it better? Make the prison and island. Now you can add elements of Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies while maintaining the grit and powerlessness of the central genre. Now set in the near future so that you can add deus ex machina as needed and you have No Escape.

Ray Liotta plays a soldier who is sent to prison for killing a superior officer. Put at the mercy of a sadistic warden, he gets shipped off to Guantanamo 2.0, a place that on the books doesn’t exist and which the warden reserves for the true hard cases. He first encounters the bad criminals, a group of cannibals and murderers led by a group of gang leaders, the chief of which is Marek (played by Stuart Johnson), a guy who kills anyone who bugs him and thus keeps his people in line.

After narrowly escaping this camp, our hero meets the good criminals, led by The Father (played by one of my favorite actors, Lance Henriksen), an M.D. who has taught his people to live in a more organized and peaceful manner. He also keeps a diary of how the warden has been illegally sending criminals to the island and trying to secretly find a way back to civilization to blow the lid off of the secret.

No Escape has a lot going on it. There’s a kid who looks up to Liotta’s character, a murky secret that was the motive for his crime in addition to the Warden’s efforts and the war between criminal tribes. The main characters feel real and believable and the setting keeps the premise within suspension of disbelief.

The closest thing to a complaint I can say is that some of the side characters feel a little one dimensional, a fact I can overlook considering they are throwing backstory at us in double handfuls. If you can accept that there is a secret island prison, then everything else comes pretty easy.

No Escape didn’t make much at the box office. That’s sad because there is really so much in this movie to like. I give No Escape a B+ and will refrain from ending this review with a prison joke.