The Cinema File #370: "Jodorowsky's Dune" Review

The new documentary Jodorowsky's Dune chronicles the famously failed attempt by an eccentric Chilean filmmaker to adapt the classic science fiction novel by Frank Herbert into a surrealist epic nearly a decade prior to the David Lynch version. As a film about film, it is a fascinating look at what might have been, and like many documentaries about something as subjective as art, it manages to succeed in spite of its skewed perspective. I do not refer to the obviously skewed mind of its star the director himself, though he is certainly a lovably odd personality. Rather, I refer to the entire premise of the movie, which proves even more insightful than it thinks it is by either not realizing or deliberately ignoring the fact that everyone in the movie is bat shit crazy and wrong.

The point of view of the doc is quite evident throughout and obviously propelled by the personal biases of its interview subjects, many of whom directly worked on the original project and naturally assume it would have been nothing short of a masterpiece if only it had been fully realized. That the first person to express this assumption is Jodorowsky fan Nicholas Winding Refn should be your first sign that maybe you should question it. If the director of the unbearable soul raping that is Only God Forgives thinks an idea is great, that’s a pretty blaring warning sign right off the bat. Not that you’d need it, as a majority of the film is devoted to showing us just how much we dodged a bullet by not having this movie debut when it was intended to.

This might sound odd considering all the things the proposed film had going for it on paper, which the doc details extensively. A committed cast including Mick Jagger, Orson Wells, and Salvador Dali, a soundtrack by Pink Floyd in their prime, and conceptual design work from luminaries like Dan O’Bannon and H.R. Giger, where could it go wrong? Well, for the answer to that you have to go back to the ringleader of the whole thing Jodorowsky himself, a surrealist director most well known for the films El Topo and Holy Mountain, who notes that at least prior to pursuing the project he had not even bothered to read the book, and gives no indication throughout his interview that he ever did so after the fact. The production basically gave us the people who would later bring us Alien, and a montage towards the end shows all the elements from his treatment that have been used in other films, but these examples only prove to make it more conspicuous that the only part of this failed film that didn’t go on to greater success was the man himself.

Beyond the explicit descriptions of what the film would have been, there are two moments in the doc that perfectly encapsulate how misguided this whole enterprise was. The first is one of the artists working on ship designs, who talks about his introduction to Jodorowsky’s work as being the movie Holy Mountain. He watches a scene where Jesus Christ shits out a turd made of solid gold and says “I need to work with that guy,” clearly not seeing the obvious unintended metaphor. Later on in the doc, Jodorowsky himself talks about how he strayed from the source material in his script, comparing it to how one should treat a bride on their wedding night. Specifically, he says that one must rape the original story just like one must rape their new wife, as respecting them too much will ruin the fun of it. You might be thinking that his tenuous grasp of English is to blame for this, but trust me, he goes on this track way too long to excuse it as a mistranslation.

It should be no surprise then that everything fans hate about the Dune film we actually got would have only been magnified in Jodorowsky’s version. Its easy and convenient to imagine the failed project as automatically better and infuse it with all the things you might want the perfect Dune movie to be, but there’s no reason to think it would have actually been better, and we now have documented evidence that it would have been so much worse. You don’t like the whole magic rain thing at the end? How about that plus Paul dying and his soul possessing every Fremen worshiper, who then magically compel the entire now verdant planet Arrakas to travel throughout space spreading the messiah’s message of peace throughout the galaxy? Kinda makes the whole Weirding Module and voice over thing seem kind of picayune by comparison.

One of the director’s fan’s ominously suggests that by debuting before George Lucas’ Star Wars series, that Jodorowsky’s Dune might have irrevocably altered the direction of science fiction away from mainstream Speilbergian entertainment and towards a more arty, intellectual paradigm. I very much doubt this, but the possibility is chilling. Sure, maybe we’d get less Michael Bays, but just imagine if every science fiction film were as heady, slow moving, and impenetrable as 2001. Like it or not (and I don’t), mainstream appeal is what keeps high concept genre fiction in business. A geek culture so high brow and esoteric that it completely refuses to let the outsider in is one that doesn’t get the acclaim and the resulting budgets for a Marvel Cinematic Universe or an annual slate of summer movies catering to our weird taste. Its a double edged sword, but I’m thankful to be cut on the shallow, flashy end of it.

Jodorowsky’s Dune misses the forest for the trees in its knee jerk acceptance of the premise that this batshit director’s vision was inherently superior to Lynch’s, but because the lie is so self-evident, it still serves a purpose of disabusing anyone of the notion that any of this was a good idea. Its sort of like America: Imagine A World Without Her in that sense, just for pretentious movie nerds with their heads too far up their asses instead of right wing conservatives with their heads too far up their asses. They’ll nod along no matter how much pressure it puts on their colons, but those of us in the real world, outside of the hipstery bubble, will understand just how flimsy the arguments are. Thankfully, this is much more well made and entertaining to watch than America, and if only as a rare glimpse into the mind of madness and an interesting examination of how one charismatic loon can amass so much talent around him for such a faulty purpose, I’d highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in film.

The Cinema File #369: "Tammy" Review

I want to love Melissa McCarthy, I really do, but she’s not making it easy for me. With her latest film, she has officially burned through her remaining lifetime allotment of caveats lamenting her obvious talent in the wake of yet another terrible movie she’s chosen to be in. And at this point we have to assume that it’s her choice, right? It can’t just be typecasting and studio pressure, can it? McCarthy would seem to be at a point in her career where she could do pretty much whatever she wants, and of all the things she could have done, she’s regrettably decided to unleash Tammy upon the world. I just give up...I can't do this anymore.

This is usually the point where I would give a brief synopsis of the film, but to do so here would only be to disingenuously suggest that this movie had a plot. Now, I've called movies plot-less before, but evidently I have been ill-prepared for just how inconsequential a story could be and still qualify as a movie. You might think based on the advertising that Tammy is a simple road movie, a traditionally flimsy pretext that practically writes itself, and technically you'd be right, but even within that framework, Tammy doesn't even do the bare minimum of establishing a reason to care about any of it. Tommy Boy, for example, might just be a shameless riff on Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, but at least they took the time to throw in a central conflict. Hell, even Bad Grandpa had more reason to exist than this movie. Tammy begins with the title character about to give mouth to mouth to a dying deer on the highway, and I almost thought this was going to pan out into a Freddie Got Fingered style gross out fest, but even that was giving it too much credit.

In this way, Tammy is the quintessential Melissa McCarthy movie, stripped down to its very essence of that same character you've seen a dozen times now improvising her way through one arbitrary scenario after another. Tammy herself is simply a redressing of the obnoxious in your face lady from Bridesmaids, Identity Thief, The Heat, and so on, only now with a slightly dirtier shirt, driving cross country with her grandma with no need for a script and only the most routine and disposable character development possible. By the time the movie finally gets around to shooting for some substance in the third act, its almost insulting to watch what had been an endless stream of unfunny schtick turn into a weird dramatic piece about alcoholism and family dysfunction, after an hour or so of the thing deliberately keeping us from giving a shit about any of the people involved.

And most of those people are way too good for this movie by the way. Kathy Bates, Susan Sarandon, Mark Duplass, Gary Cole, Allison Janney, Nat Faxon, Toni Collette, Dan Aykroyd. This is a list of names that when brought together into one movie should have been something magical. To say that they are under-utilized doesn't even cover it. These are actors that can turn the dumbest material into gold, or at least one would have thought so before the challenge of doing so here proved too much for even their collectively awesome talent. I'd ask what they possibly could have seen in the script to this piece of shit, but there is no way in hell there ever was one, or rather if there was, it was one page that just read “Melissa McCarthy does that thing she always does for another 90 minutes. The End.” Excited yet?

Hollywood is like that kid that you see hopefully begat to other parents who are not yourself, precocious but not necessarily intelligent, who keys into something adults find momentarily amusing about them and proceeds to repeat it ad nauseum until you want to kill yourself. Worse than any Transformers movie or millionth remake/reboot, Tammy is the twisted bastard Omen child of that childish system, and like all children birthed by children, the result is riddled with deformities. I know this analogy has gotten away from me, but fuck it, that's how much this movie sucks, that even that strange stream of consciousness is the only thing that can adequately describe its awfulness. If it holds any distinction, it is only as the first movie of 2014 to be so unbearably bad that it knocks Ride Along off the top of my list of worst movies of the year (once again, for the record, Dinesh D'Souza's America doesn't count as a movie). I guess congratulations are in order. Excuse me while I vomit.

The Dirty Sons Of Pitches - Episode 89! Now Available!

New DSOP is up, this week talking Monkey movies with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and America: Imagine a World Without Her (a movie designed to appeal to the stupid money in all of us). We really monkey the crap out of this one folks.

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Saturday Night Jive, Episode Twenty Eight - Out of Bounds

Sorry I keep disappearing, but last week's unexpected vacation gave way to this week's annual 48 hour film festival. My group of amateur filmmakers Edwin J Hill produced a sweet little short called Home Grown that I'll be posting as soon as it is available (have to wait until after the first public screening). Anyway, things should be back to normal this week, and in the meantime, here's the latest episode of my Saturday Night Jive podcast, all about the Anthony Michael Hall movie Out Of Bounds. Enjoy.

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The Cinema File #368: "Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes" Review

The original Planet of the Apes famously began in medias res, throwing a human ostensibly like us into a strange topsy turvy world the beginnings of which were only hinted at in one of the most iconic twist endings in film history. Later sequels would employ time travel to fill in the gaps of just how human civilization would give way to an ape dominated world, but thanks largely to test audiences and studio interference, the series never fulfilled its promise of developing a truly cyclical, and thus utterly hopeless, narrative. The new series seems to be trying to tell more or less the same story in roughly chronological order, only updating the pseudoscience to exploit modern day fears of viral apocalypse that have superseded nuclear paranoia. The result is entertaining in the short term, but I can’t help but wonder if this approach may doom this franchise, ironically enough by forgetting that doom should always be the central conceit.

Dawn of the Planet Of The Apes should really have been called Rise of the Planet of the Apes in retrospect, with the first film in the reboot series bearing the new title. Of course, I say reboot, but then exactly what we should call this series has always been a bit confusing. Is it a reboot, a prequel, or some combination of both? Its certainly a different take on the story in its own universe, and yet similar enough that there are certain expectations tied to it. Whether it is fair to saddle this essentially original timeline with the standards of a completely different and much older series is a tough question, but then they shouldn’t have tried to play in the sandbox of such a well known property without allowing for this kind of analysis. As the modern series progresses, it becomes more important to ask just what it owes to the original films that inspired it, and how closely it must hue to what we know of the previous story in order to remain faithful to them.

Rise, for example, has often been compared to the fourth film in the original series Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and in many ways its sequel feels just as much like a remake of the fifth and final original film Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Both feature Caesar leading a more fledgling society of post-revolutionary apes struggling to maintain a fragile peace with what is left of the human population, only to find territorial conflict between the two groups to be inevitable. The problem is, Battle represented the end of a saga, while Dawn is only the beginning of a new one, and with its connection to the other series being so nebulous, its hard to see where this one can go from here that doesn’t either mire the story in stagnant ape on human warfare, or so radically change the setting and structure of the story in such a way that its core audience might not be prepared for the shift in tone or sense of realism. Its hard to explain exactly what I mean by this without excessive spoilers, but in effect, Dawn runs up against the need to expand this world from the experience of one small group of apes crossing a bridge to a whole civilization overtaking what was once the human world, and doesn’t quite know how far it wants to go.

The biggest problem with the movie is that it doesn’t really progress the story of Caesar and his ape army any further than where we left them at the end of the previous film. Assuming that you were as ready as I was for the inevitable coming war between apes and a virus addled human race, you might be forgiven for being somewhat underwhelmed upon discovering that Dawn does not represent that war in its entirety, as much as the first of what is implied will be many battles to come. In the end, the apes are still exactly where they were at the beginning, waiting for the war they started to escalate. A friend of mine who also saw the film defends this by describing the skirmish in Dawn as the proverbial shot heard round the world, that point of no return promising an escalating conflict to come, but here I kind of thought a bunch of monkeys taking over an entire forest and inadvertently reducing the world’s population to a frightened fraction of what it once was already did that. Sure, Caesar learns a valuable lesson about not assuming apes can’t be just as evil as humans, but did we really need a whole movie just for that when we could have been setting up time loops, psychic mutants, and hot monkey on astronaut romance?

But there I go again, holding this new series to the standards of the previous one, when I should just be thanking my lucky stars that it was able to somewhat miraculously wash out the taste of Tim Burton’s terrible remake out of our mouths with seemingly little effort. Its just that the thing that made the original series so great is that it was actually about the Planet of the Apes, which is to say it was more important than any one protagonist. Heston is the hero, then a minor character, then Zira and Cornelius take over, only to be replaced by their son Caesar. This new series is far too married to Caesar as its focus, due in large part to Andy Serkis’ much heralded performance, and I question whether it can sustain a time jump refocusing on a different character. At the moment, it almost feels like they want to show us the evolution of apes from beasts to intelligent creatures in real time as if that will somehow make the idea more plausible, but at some point you have to just leap forward and show us their world in its full madhouse glory. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe we never have to see the crash of the ship hinted at in a quick scene in the first movie. Maybe we never have to expand outward at all, but then is it really the Planet of the Apes at that point, or just, like, the Town of the Apes? Doesn’t really have the same ring to it.

Then again, we do get monkeys on horseback wielding double machine guns and riding tanks, so on some level all of this is just nitpicking. Purely as an entertaining summer blockbuster, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is certainly satisfying and perhaps more thoughtful than most, even if the fourth Transformers movie managed to show more promise for future installments. Though we never quite move forward, its still fun just to watch this innocent forest dwelling society slowly develop a more complete and complex understanding of the world that came before and the world they will be helping to create (assuming we ever get there). For better and for worse, this is Caesar’s story, and you couldn’t ask for a better ape to latch onto for an emotional arc (though personally I found his second in command and would be antagonist Koba just a bit more interesting and dynamic, but then I’m a sucker for Judases, or Brutuses as the case may be). Here’s hoping the next movie manages to be at least as entertaining AND actually have a point to it. Or at least mind controlling subterranean mutants. They were awesome.

The Dirty Sons Of Pitches - Director's Cut: Stanley Kubrick

So...I'm not dead as it turns out. Had to go out of town on short notice, sorry for the lack of updates for anyone who cares. Anyway, here's the latest episode of my podcast, The Dirty Sons Of Pitches. This is a special Director's Cut episode devoted to the career of Stanley Kubrick. Enjoy.

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The Cinema File #367: "America: Imagine A World Without Her." Review

Even though I actually took the time to see it, in theaters no less, I didn’t bother to review Dinesh D’Souza’s last feature, 2016: Obama’s America. It wasn’t that I didn’t have more than enough material to sift through, but rather, I didn’t write it for the same reason I was hesitant to write about his latest effort, America: Imagine A World Without Her. It’s the same reason I didn’t even include 2016 in by top and bottom films of that year, even though it would have certainly been at the bottom of the list had I done so. In short, I didn’t even want to dignify that garbage with the bare minimum qualification of considering it a film, and the same goes for its newly released spiritual successor.

America: Imagine A World Without Her, is disingenuous even before you find out that it doesn’t actually try to imagine a world where America doesn’t exist. More crucial even than that is that it dares to call itself a documentary. A documentary can have a point of view and even a bias, it can even be mostly polemic, but at its core, there has to be something more to it than that. The films of Michael Moore that D’Souza pathetically tries to counterbalance certainly present themselves with a liberal perspective, but they also present information as well as argument that would be of interest to the laymen walking in on the street. A documentary can’t just be preaching to a choir. That’s called propaganda. America is as much a documentary as Triumph of the Will, and not nearly as well made.

I will not waste time attempting to delve into the alternate reality of Conservative America the right wing has had to create in the post Bush II era to justify being so proudly wrong about everything, as that would require a level of intellectual engagement that even this “movie” is too lazy to summon up. I don’t just mean that it is intellectually bankrupt, which goes without saying. I mean that it doesn’t even establish the pretense of pseudo-intellectual debate that the previous “film” did. 2016: Obama’s America was all about providing really terrible but barely plausible sounding arguments to back up the craziest of crackpot right wing causes, but this new one doesn’t seem to have the energy even for that, and instead settles for an emotional ploy.

No, this movie isn’t about making you think (incorrectly), it’s about making you feel (stupidly). Specifically, its about making you feel proud to be an American in a very particular, immature way, and by American, I of course use the official conservative definition of that term, signifying white male Republicans at or above a certain comfortable level of wealth. You know, “Real Americans.” The first half is completely devoted to refuting the idea that America has ever done anything wrong ever, providing a comfy rationalized context for the slaughter of the Native Americans, the annexation of Mexican territory, and the institution of Slavery, not to mention American Imperialism and Laissez Faire Capitalism. Oh, and once he’s convinced you that all that stuff was okay, he throws in a reminder that Hillary Clinton partied with Saul Alinsky, so you better not think about doing anything crazy like electing her president should the opportunity happen to come up at some point.

That’s not to say he’s that convincing. Naturally, trying to justify slavery and genocide to make white people feel better would be a pretty steep task for anyone, but the most offensive thing about this attempt is that he has the balls to set out to make this sort of counter claim, and then almost stubbornly fails to argue his case. I don’t just mean that he makes bad arguments, though in many cases he does, but on the essential questions he poses to himself to answer, he literally doesn’t even try to make any arguments. He asks if Slavery represented a theft of labor from African Americans, then talks about a black guy who owned slaves, and mentions how before and during slavery, white indentured servants were used too. And then he moves on. He doesn’t even make the bullshit non-connection you would expect him to make, no doubt because he assumes like all dog whistling propagandists that his slack jawed audience has already made it for him in their heads. The closest he comes to an argument is his proposition that because Spaniards and disease killed a lot of Indians before we started, and other countries had slaves before we did, that somehow our part in those injustices weren’t so bad. Really?

The way he presents the indictments against American history, or rather the simple historical facts that complicate his suggested child-like view of it, you would be hard pressed to come away thinking he made his case unless you already agreed with him. I know, that sounds obvious, as all conservative media is just more howling in the echo chamber, but the whole point of creating straw men is so you can easily beat them, and here, he builds them, can’t find the strength to shoot them down, and then skips on to the next thing, pretending he won. Often he will present a point of view the film obviously disagrees with, and then just lets it go as if we’re meant to actually take stock in it, like Noam Chomsky’s unchallenged assertion of America’s coups against other countries or Elizabeth Warren’s famous speech on the common good aiding entrepreneurship, and you almost want to think this might be some sort of balance, until you realize that he doesn’t need to argue anymore, because the people he’s playing to have already heard the bullshit a million times and accept it without question.

D’Souza’s greatest skill and his greatest asset as a charlatan is his ability to feign a sort of “awe shucks” naïve optimism even while catering to some of the worst, most paranoid, bigoted, and jingoistic impulses of the modern American right. He uses his own history as an immigrant to talk about how wonderful it is that we are a nation of immigrants in the same week that members of his target audience shouted at a busload of impoverished Mexican children to go back to where they came from. He argues that the abolition of slavery rather than its ahistorical expansion is what we should focus on, that the Civil War to end the practice is a hallmark of our moral character, conveniently forgetting that most of his fans believe that war ended with the wrong side winning, or is just in intermission as they say in the South. By attempting to absolve America of its past sins, D’Souza is not simply combating shame as his screed asserts, but instead seeking to justify further sins, validating a worldview that we’d all be better off back in some imaginary version of the Leave It To Beaver 1950’s where everything was great as long as women stayed in the kitchen, gays stayed in the closet, Mexicans stayed in Mexico, and blacks stayed at the back of the bus.

And do I even have to say that on top of everything else, it’s extremely bad on a technical production level? Every scene that isn’t D’Souza looking ponderously at something patriotic or ominously unpatriotic is an incredibly silly re-enactment of history performed by some of the worst actors I’ve ever seen. He can’t even settle down long enough to create a narrative that connects anything he’s talking about. As craven and deceitful as 2016 was, at least it told a story, a lie supported by many other lies, sure, but a cohesive series of them nonetheless. America begins by asking an interesting question – what would the world be like without America, and then completely forgets about it. It then bounces around the historical revisionism for a while, only to lead into an unrelated diatribe against right wing boogey man Saul Alinsky. By the end, we finally get to what I highly suspect is D’Souza’s main point, where he has the gall to bring in his own recent legal troubles, placing them in the context of the now thoroughly debunked IRS scandal as if to imply that his looming prison sentence for campaign finance fraud is the result of a tyrannical administration punishing dissent, and not the fact that he, you know, fucking knowingly broke the law!

Al Franken once observed that, while liberals and conservatives both love America, they love it in different ways. Liberals love America like an adult loves their parents, seeing them not just as mom and dad, but as complex individuals with strengths and flaws. Conservatives love America like a baby loves his mommy, who in the child’s eyes can do no wrong, and anyone who says so is a lying bastard. Of course, he made this observation long before Obama took office, after which the American right dropped the entire pretense that their love of our country wasn’t conditioned on their running it. Still, when did Patriotism become synonymous with pretending America is perfect? The right always talks about personal responsibility, but what about national responsibility, or historical responsibility? The only reason one would have to mitigate the evils of the past is that these people don’t actually think genocide, slavery, and conquest are in fact evil, and if that’s the case, just say that. Please, say it over and over again, right up until Election Day. And don’t forget to tell us all what you really think about contraception and the legitimacy of rape as well. Cause that always works out.

If there’s any saving grace in all this, it’s that if the average age of my audience is any indication, what we used to call the Culture War, now escalated into a conflict over the terms of rationality itself, has officially become a war of attrition. Eventually, enough of these morons will die off, with smarter, more tolerant young people rising up to take their place in greater number than the next generation of dullards. This demographic edge that will one day decapitate the beast of modern American conservatism will not sharpen overnight, so we probably have at least one more D’Souza joint in our future. I look forward to his first post jail time movie, all about what it’s like for an ex con living in a world created by Hillary Clinton after she resoundly trounces whichever drooling troglodyte and/or Randian sociopath they manage to put up against her in 2016. No doubt by then, the right wing will have degenerated even further, perhaps far enough that he will be making the case for why we shouldn’t be too hard on that delightful German fellow with the little mustache. Now that’s a re-enactment I want to see.