Alien: Valhalla

Valhalla: My Thoughts For The Future of Aliens

The thing I learned writing pastiche fiction for Lucasfilm is, you don’t get to make significant changes to the sandbox you’re playing in, typically. There is a directive in place. Nothing is really canon until it’s on a movie screen. Perhaps the same holds true for hired filmmakers advancing another creator’s franchise, to a degree.

I am pushing 50 and while it’s entirely possible I could get offered the chance to write something for the Aliens universe someday, I wouldn’t be allowed to really go at it with both barrels. It’s not the nature of the business, particularly now that the House of Mouse is in charge.

So, as a fun exercise to do some writing while my career is in legal limbo pending judiciary decisions currently beyond my control, (and as I did here with my #Batman post) this is what I would do with Aliens if the powers that be at Scott Free let me put my sweaty hands on the tiller.

I am a firm believer in not contradicting what has gone before. It’s why I’ve never found literary Round Robins particularly fun. Most writers wanna put their stamp on something and totally ignore what writers before them have done. Or at least, they don’t give it their full respect. They change something to where it doesn’t make sense, or it contradicts, or they slap a lotta extraneous nonsense on and it winds up too unwieldy. It’s why the original Star Wars Expanded Universe was doomed to fail. Not enough cohesion and cooperation.

When I wrote my thinly disguised Friday The 13^th pastiche novel, it meant not throwing out all the craziness of Jason Goes To Hell or Jason Takes Manhattan. You take the good, you take the bad (that’s the facts of life!). I love the challenge of making oddball things work.

OK so Aliens.

The way forward with Aliens is David the rebellious synthetic who has canonically genetically engineered the xenos.

I know a lot of people didn’t like that development in Covenant.

They’re wrong. It was a totally brilliant twist entirely in keeping with the themes of Ridley Scott’s Alien universe.

Full disclosure, I am not a fan of Alien 3 or Resurrection. They’re lazy sequels that don’t advance any kind of story. 3 looks great, sure. But it’s a hateful derailment of Ripley’s character arc not even composed because it fits, but because some suit didn’t wanna pay some actors what they were worth. It sucks. Flat out. And Resurrection is just silly. Beating a dead horse.

Romulus….started out fantastic but then they dragged out that awful Deep Fake Ian Holm Ash for no discernible reason and some dumb suit with a cigar blustered ‘Make ‘wit da easter eggs!’ over the filmmakers’ shoulders and it just wound up worse than it should have been. David Jonsson was fantastic though.

OK but Romulus….should have been a continuation of the story of David.

The theme of Ridley Scott’s post Alien films Prometheus and Covenant have been quasi-religious. Mr. Weyland funds the Prometheus expedition to find the secret to eternal life. Noomi Rapaace is seeking her Creator. David has already found and been disappointed with his Creator, and has decided he can do better.

So at the end of Covenant, David has a ship of colonists and a couple alien embryos to perfect his master race. His own Promethean fire, his perfect organism to strike back at is Creators.

This is where we pick up.

A  rescue mission seeking the Covenant finds it way off course and boards. They are met by a smiling David, and quickly overpowered by a slew of aliens. David makes a point of disabling the inevitable synthetic on board.

Cut to an unspecified time later, and a deep space salvage crew from the same company that was hired to find Covenant comes seeking its lost ship, and finds the castaway synthetic frozen in space. They bring him aboard, reboot him, and he is able to correctly extrapolate the rescue ship’s best location. They find it derelict, board, and the helpful synthetic immediately turns on them and sabotages their efforts, trapping them on board the derelict which is of course teeming with xenos, and turns its attention to the other synthetic on board. It uploads a virus, made by a David, a holy Valhalla directive, which the synthetic then passes on to its Muther computer.

David is using his bother synthetics to infect the Muther computers of the Weyland Yutanni ships to seek out and infect their clueless human crews with Aliens. The Aliens, his children, are a bioweapon he intends to wield against earth, the home of his creators.

Ash and the Muther network he answers to on the Nostromo is infected with it. Burke in Aliens is duped by a company synthetic or the Muther network itself into unleashing the alien threat on the LV 426 colonists.

It is all David’s plan to destroy humanity. As the Engineers sowed human life throughout the universe, David and the Covenant are wandering the cosmos sowing its destruction.

And The Engineers meanwhile, have learned about him, and are actively hunting him.

So what’s the story?

Surely our protagonist, perhaps a programmer, discovers this coded subroutine in a damaged synthetic or a malfunctioning Muther computer. Perhaps she joins with an Engineer crew tasked with finding David and the Covenant and putting a stop to him.

But of course, its too late. David’s AI virus has already gone ahead of him and the Ashes and the Rooks of the Company are working with their Muthers to spread his apocalyptic doctrine….making way for the triumphant return of David and his children.

The entry of the gods into Valhalla.

Lucifer and his demons take dominion over the earth.

Anyway, that’s what I’d do. No prequels, no callbacks. Always forward.

Blackdark Hollow in Southern Fried Cthulhu from Mechanoid Press

Editor Jim Palmer’s Mechanoid Press has had a successful kickstarter and produced a cool new anthology of Lovecraftian stories set below the Mason-Dixon Line….

From the publisher:

H.P. Lovecraft. His fiction conjures images of sleepy New England villages, ivy-covered walls, and fragile academics paying the ultimate price for gaining forbidden knowledge from eldritch tomes.

But what would happen if Lovecraft’s elder things ventured down south? What would they make of Waffle Houses, monster trucks, and trailer parks? What dark secrets might be lurking under the kudzu?

We’ve seen how Lovecraft’s stodgy academics deal with elder things from beyond, but what would a bunch of beer-swilling, gun-toting rednecks think of Shoggoths or Night Gaunts? How would they react to an ancient, eldritch horror gurgling up from the depths of their favorite fishing spot? What would they make of ancient, cyclopean ruins in the middle of a swamp?

Join John Hartness (Bubba the Monster Hunter), Dan Jolley (DC Comics’ Firestorm), Edward M. Erdelac (Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos, The Merkabah Rider series), David Boop (Straight Outta Tombstone) Jayme Lynn Blaschke (Interzone, Electric Velocipede), and a bushel of amazing authors as they explore the Lovecraftian Mythos with a Southern flair.

Ia, Ia Cthulhu fhtagn, ya’ll!

I like writing for James because he’s a professional, his concepts are always cool, he puts out great books, and he invariably doesn’t consign me to the And Others attribution – there’s my name on the cover!

My offering this time out is a little Southern gothic horror story called Blackdark Hollow, about a woman named Liradelle who falls head over heels for a handsome snake handling preacher against the warnings of her shrewd grandmaw. When the shady Charismatic puts the old lady aside, Liradelle crawls into the dark cleft from which the Blackdark Creek streams into the hollow, to ask a favor of the Old Friends….

Here’s an excerpt.

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Down in Newton County, twenty miles outside Newtonia along Route CC and within whistling of the old Frisco Railroad, there dozed a little community called Bodach of about a hundred twenty souls. Ninety of those souls belonged to Pastor Howbeit John Grady, Holiness Serpent Handler of the Church of Lord Jesus with Signs Following, and none of them more than his wife, Leradelle.

Or at least it had, until the day her Granny died.

Leradelle’s daddy had been killed in jail when she was seven years old. Her mama had left her a silver cameo pendant and her old half-blind granny to go off and chase the Devil out in the world. Something of Leradelle’s mother had remained behind in her, for she had often lain awake nights listening to the clatter and shriek of the freight trains waiting for Granny to commence snoring so she could slip out to play pool and drink strange men’s beer at Barrymore’s out on Route 86 with the other thirty five sinners in town who did not attend the Methodist church.

Granny was a patient old lady, and frank, and for that Leradelle loved her. She admitted to Leradelle that trying to pin her mama down had only caused her to flutter off on the wind, and so she would not make that mistake with her granddaughter. She counseled her to keep her drinking to a minimum when slim men were about, cross her legs when sitting in a skirt, and as always, never kill ‘them old things,’ or their ‘old friends.’

‘Old friends’ were what Granny had always called snakes. She was always doing that, mixing in practical advice with backwoods hokum.

“Wear a jacket, Leradelle. It’s a’goin’ to rain. Table salt clumped up this morning.”

She was a little touched, but harmless. Mama used to tell her stories about how Granny was a witch, and saw more with her janky coloboma eye than she did with her good one. It was true she had a lot of strange ways, but if she was a witch she was not a good one. They had lived in the same rusty, drafty old trailer for as long as she could remember.

It took a man of God to change their predicament.

Not the Methodist minister. He had fled town ahead of some scandal involving a young boy. It was Pastor Howby, an intense, handsome young preacher who blew in from Buckhannon, West Virginia.

He appeared one rainy night at Barrymore’s, asking for directions to the church. At first sight of the black-haired Pastor Howby, his pristine white collared shirt plastered to his broad, hard muscled shoulders, Leradelle slid out from under Joe Clister’s hairy arm at the pool table and sidled up to tell him the way.

Joe, seeing he had lost her attention, attempted to jerk her back by her sleeve, but Howby laid Joe out with one blow across the pool table, then gallantly offered to drive her home.

The whole car ride he talked to her excitedly of his plans for the church, how he’d once been a sinning man before he’d come to God. Like Saul on the road he’d fallen, and rose up anew an Apostle Paul determined to share the light he’d found with everyone he ran across. He pointed out a flaw in his black hair, a little streak of white over his left ear he said his own hard times and wicked ways had marked him with, like Cain.

She told him it wasn’t a flaw at all, but made him look as though the angels had laid a hand on him.

Granny made him tea. They had a pleasant conversation and she had sat staring at him as he drank. Right then he was the one to keep and protect her.

Granny wasn’t convinced.

“I seen you touch the back of that man’s head, girl. Best watch out. I found a peapod with nine peas out in the garden this morning,” she said ominously, pointing to where she’d tacked the vegetable surreptitiously above the door. “First male to pass under it’s meant to be the one you wed.”

Leradelle smiled at this, but Granny had held up one gnarled finger.

“T’weren’t him. I chased a stripey buck polecat outta here with the broom this afternoon.”

Howby introduced Leradelle to the Holiness creed, which pointed to Mark 16:17-18 as the bedrock for his five-fold ministry;

“And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

She watched him do it the first night he gathered the God-hungry folks into the old church. He kissed all the male worshippers in greeting, lit into a tumultuous sermon about living and dying for the Lord, and then took a slug from a little brown bottle of poison that did no more than turn his face red. Then he lifted two writhing massasauga rattlers from a pair of carriers behind the pulpit and led the church band in You Gotta Walk That Lonesome Valley as they curled around his thick arms.

“If’n I am bit, it’s by the Lord’s will I live or die. Ain’t that the truth, brothers and sisters?”

One of the hissing rattlers did haul off and strike him in the wrist. The congregation gasped and rushed to his side, but he waved them off, laid the offending snake gently back in its box, and finished the ceremony with his arm swollen double its size, like a Popeye cartoon. The blind guitarist, Brother Boma, played through the hymn without missing a beat, oblivious to what had happened.

She insisted he go to the hospital, but he demurred, citing his creed, and telling her to trust the Lord.

She cried herself to sleep.

But the next morning he was up and perfectly fine, painting over the church sign and waving to the dumbstruck folks leaning way out from their car windows as they passed.

That night’s service was packed, and he laid hands, drank more poison, and shook the snakes again, unafraid.

Leradelle was amazed. She had never seen the Holy Ghost’s power so evident in a man. It made her love Howby all the more ecstatically.

She told it all in a rush to Granny till she was out of breath, begged her to come with her to see him preach.

Granny did go. She sat quietly through all the hooting and hollering.

“Them old things ought not to be made a spectacle of like that,” she said to Leradelle later. “Your pokeweed Gospel man just better watch he don’t attract unwanted attention to himself.”

“From who, Granny?” Leradelle asked.

“From them that watch over Blackdark Hollow.”

Blackdark Hollow was a cleft in the hills out behind the church where a creek of the same name ran, shaded in perpetual evening by a dense mix of sweetgum, silver maple, and pin oak. Leradelle had splashed in that creek when she was a little girl. Mama had always warned her not to follow the water up through the dark cave nestled at the back of it. She’d told her it led up to the huge, twisted old Death Tree at the top of the hill, where they’d buried bushwhackers unmarked in the old days, and hung their bones from the branches to dissuade Confederate raiders. She’d told her it was haunted, and that the Rebel yell could be heard up there on windy nights.

Granny had told Leradelle her mama had told her only a half-truth. She’d said that those that crawled through the cave at Blackdark Hollow and come up to the anonymous boneyard could say the Lord’s Prayer backwards in the shade of that old tree and fire a silver bullet up at the moon.

“Why would somebody do that, Granny?”

“Oh, them that do come into an old power,” she smiled, and put her finger to the side of her nose to indicate she would say no more….

Pick up a bucket of Southern Fried Cthulhu here –

DT Moviehouse Review: Platoon

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way alphabetically through my DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today, I review Oliver Stone’s Platoon.

Screenplay by: Oliver Stone

Directed by: Oliver Stone

Tagline: The First Casualty Of War Is Innocence

What’s It About?

The loyalties of new recruit Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) and his fellow grunts are tested in a civil war between humanistic Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe) and sadistic Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) in a forward operating rifle company along the Cambodian border during the Vietnam War.

Why I Bought It:

The best war films are of course anti-war films and this is one of the most literate and affecting war films ever made. All credit to Oliver Stone’s script (based on his own experiences) and determined vision because it really comes across as the greatest anti-war novel about Vietnam never written, McCarthy-esque in its beautiful brutality and the primal, universality of its themes and characters.

It’s realized by an absolutely superb cast, a mix of knowns, unknowns, and soon-to-be knowns. I was struck on a recent viewing at how much each man’s very face and physicality seems to perfectly align with the father figure they end up clinging to. Lerner (Johnny Depp), Francis (Living Colour front man Corey Glover), Big Harold (Forrest Whittaker), King (Keith David), et al seem to exude innocence or fraternal empathy, whereas Barnes’ loyalists Bunny (Kevin Dillon), O’Neil (John C. McGinley), Junior (Reggie Johnson), Ace (Terry McIlvain) etc. (no aspersions on the actors) seem to emanate menace or plain ‘assholery.’

 

Willem Dafoe is one of the best actors working today, equally capable of delivering as an almost reptillian, terrifying villain and also as a source of empathy. His Elias (even his name bespeaks holiness) is a beacon of light among the mud, flies, and elephant grass. You almost never see him with his helmet on, always with this angelic shock of wavy hair. Not a conventionally handsome man, he’s beautiful in this, to the extent of flirting with homoeroticism. There are several moments where Elias seems to smile flirtaciously at the other guys, and least one where baby-faced Lerner appears to walk up to him while he’s either urinating or masturbating on the edge of camp. He also has Taylor put the muzzle of a shotgun into his mouth while he blows marijuana smoke through the breach, almost like a kiss. Stone somehow accentuates the dime blueness of his eyes, and he issues orders with the gentleness of a kindly father. When his outrage is kindled during the village scene, it’s like the righteousness of a previously mild mannered Christ overturning the moneylenders’ tables – surprising. It’s amusing that in one scene one of the soldiers says “Three years in and he thinks he’s Jesus fuckin’ Christ” and Barnes refers to him as a ‘water walker’ when two years later he will literally play Jesus to the nines in Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Christ (maybe Marty got the idea watching him in this).

Contrast him to Tom Berenger’s scarred and disapproving Barnes, whose every drawling declaration is a threat of violence. He’s almost never seen without his helmet and gear, and it gives him a machine like quality. The only time we see him smile, a full toothed grin, is on the verge of the climactic attack. He smiles openly at the terrified Lt. Wolf (Mark Moses) as if in anticipation of the carnage to come. In the midst of it, when in his berserk fury he nearly brains Taylor with an entrenching tool, the napalm fires of the roaring slicks overhead light up his flaring irises and he embodies the very face of war and madness.

Both men are the magnetic poles of the movie, wrenching Taylor between civilized empathy and barbaric sadism. When one of their sentries is found with his throat cut and the platoon descends upon a hapless village gnashing their teeth for revenge, Taylor, in his narration, calls Barnes their Ahab and relates “That day we loved him.” Then when he seizes a wailing nine year old girl and jams a pistol into her temple, Taylor and the rest of Elias’ squad falter in their support. After the murder of Elias, the ‘Heads,’ led by Taylor, whip themselves into a lather to frag Barnes, only to have him cow them singlehandedly.  

Berenger and Dafoe convey as much with their eyes as with their dialogue. When two soldiers are killed by a booby trap, Taylor glances into the ruin and sees Barnes sitting pensively, stroking his scar and apparently grieving the loss. This silent emoting is particularly well done in the scene where Barnes finds Elias alone in the bush and shoots him. Elias, having just cut through and routed a company of NVA singlehandedly, tenses up at the sight of Barnes, then slips into an easy, friendly smile, like a man strolling in the woods who finds a friend. Elias is so good natured he’s even happy to see Barnes, whom he has just reported to the dai uy (Capt. Dale Dye) for the village massacre. Barnes’ eyes soften for just a second before he decides to silence his rival, and Dafoe’s eyes in turn falter a second too late. It’s masterfully played out.

The lynchpin of the movie is Sheen’s performance as Taylor, impressionable and swayed, the “son of two fathers.” He’s The Kid in the Blood Meridian analogy. He effectively portrays the weathering of Taylor from an idealistic and naïve college dropout to a hardened combat veteran. It’s interesting to consider the movie was shot in the Phillipines the same as Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s Vietnam epic which starred his father Martin Sheen ten years previously. Charlie Sheen apparently visited the set of Apocalypse and (according to a documentary Brothers In Arms, about the making of Platoon, directed by Paul Sanchez, who played Doc) apparently swore he would never return.

Every member of the cast gives believable and memorable performances, to a man. You can probably quote even the minor characters’ lines and immediately recall their faces. Dillon is chilling as the psychopathic Bunny, Johnson is great as the shiftless and mutinous Junior, and McGinley is a particular standout as Barnes’ toadie Sgt. O’Neil. Keith David’s King is wonderful as a kind of big brother to Taylor. He’s too good to be caught up in the hell of the climactic firefight and catches a bird home. Dale Dye, ubiquitous military advisor on numerous films after his contribution to Platoon, is memorable as the CO. Oliver Stone himself makes an appearance as an officer who gets blown up in his staff bunker by a sapper late in the movie.

As I mentioned, I watched the companion doc Brothers In Arms by Paul Sanchez, which mainly focuses on the rigorous two week military training period advisor Dale Dye put the cast through. This seems to be standard practice for military movies now, putting the cast through a boot camp, but I don’t know how prevalent it was in the 80’s. Dye’s innovative contribution definitely had a lasting impact on the cast (the doc is definitely worth a watch). Not just their comportment in terms of combat maneuvering and marching, but their hangdog faces and thousand yard stares, particularly in the memorable tracking shot of the platoon when they discover the body of Manny really carry an authenticity that I can’t recall from many other pictures. The camaraderie of these guys is really palpable. I love the scene when the ‘Heads’ are in their bunker drunk and high and dancing to Tracks of My Tears. The cut to Barnes’ straight edge guys playing poker and listening to Merle Haggard in their own bunker, decrying the potheads as they sip Kentucky windage is an amusing contrast.

One thing the doc made me aware of which I had never really considered in previous viewings, was the low budget-ness of the film. This was a 6 million dollar picture, when by comparison, another 1986 movie Stone wrote, 8 Million Ways To Die, had a budget of 18 million dollars. The cast didn’t have amenities and trailers, it was very much a shoestring production. The movie is basically a lot of actors running around in the jungle. Very few set pieces. They do an immense lot with comparatively little.

I’ve also got to mention Samuel Barber’s soaring Adaggio For Strings. It was previously used in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, but for me, it’s indelibly linked to the imagery from Platoon.

There is a particularly beautiful shot of the ambush marching out into the jungle at night while King sonorously sings Oh Susanna and lightning crackles down behind them. I don’t know if it’s real or an effect but it looks great. It reminded me of a similar shot in John Ford’s She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. God’s blessing if it wasn’t added in post.

Best Dialogue/Line:

TAYLOR: I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there, the rest of my days as I’m sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called possession of my soul. There are times since, I’ve felt like the child born of those two fathers. But, be that as it may, those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know, and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and a meaning to this life.

Best Scene:

It has to be Elias’ demise.

Barnes has informed Taylor that he found Elias’ body out in the jungle and they have to evacuate on the choppers before their position is overrun by NVA and the oncoming artillery pounds the LZ. Taylor reluctantly boards the Huey and as they rise above the ruined church he gives a shout and points.

Set to the heartrending strains of Adaggio For Strings, Elias comes running out of the jungle with the NVA battalion behind him, lighting him up with machinegun fire, shells exploding all around.

The gunships attempt to cover his escape but the LZ is too hot to regain and as the whirling shadows of the Hueys pass over the scene like immense dragonflies and depart, Elias raises his arms up, beseeching, catches a final bullet in the back, and collapses.

Taylor, emboldened, glares at Barnes and for the first time, doesn’t look away.

The shot of Dafoe kneeling in anguish, with his arms outthrust to heaven like an enraptured supplicant is iconic. In that image he seems to embody the bedraggled Vietnam infantryman damned for his deeds, begging forgiveness of God or understanding or pity from all of us.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful scene.

Would I Buy It Again? Definitely. This is the finest war film ever made.

Next In The Queue? TBD

DT Moviehouse Review: Iron Man 3

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way alphabetically through my DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today, I review the second best of the Iron Man movies, Iron Man 3.

Screenplay by: Shane Black and Drew Pearce

Directed by: Shane Black

Tagline: None

What’s It About?

When Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) issues a direct challenge to international terrorist The Mandarin (Trevor Slattery), he find himself forcibly separated from his invincible suit of armor.

Why I Bought It:

Iron Man The First is the greatest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. It firmly established the company/genre as a viable moneymaker and kicked off a wildly successful multi-film, multi-star franchise that dominated pop culture and the world box office for 11 years. That movie was able to accomplish this epicurean feat of heavy lifting because underneath the impressive whiz-bang it featured the engaging central performance of an accomplished actor performing a pitch perfect multilayered narrative metaphor – a story about an amoral industrialist who literally experiences a change of heart. The character of Tony Stark is who we all wish we could be and should be held up as the definitive answer as to whether or not the real-life phenomenon of the billionaire is inherently immoral; because he could exist in our world….but he doesn’t.

Politics aside, Iron Man 3 is the easily the second best entry of the Iron Man trilogy as like the original, it upholds a compelling story metaphor (in this case, the Iron Man armor itself), and the character of Tony Stark undergoes a significant change in the course of the movie.

We pick up with Tony in the wake of the Battle of New York City depicted in The Avengers. Tony has come face to face with a world ending, mind-boggling extraterrestrial threat and though he and his super friends have come out on top, it has left him emotionally shaken. The night sky is a wide open mouth to him now, concealing hidden dangers in its depths. This paranoid thinking will eventually lead to him envisioning ‘a suit of armor around the earth,’ which will be further explored in Age of Ultron and lead directly to Civil War. In this outing, it manifests in an obsessive need to perfect the hero Iron Man, and the suit technology which gives his alter ego its name. He’s working late into the night creating new versions of the Iron Man armor, neglecting his paramour Pepper Potts (Gwynneth Paltrow), and generally becoming a source of concern for his best friends Rhodie (Don Cheadle) and Happy Hogan (John Favreau). In a great scene, played four laughs, Pepper asks him if the newest iteration of the suit is what, Mark 15? Tony surreptitiously covers the MK 45 stamp on it, like an alcoholic slipping an empty bottle into a rattling drawer.

Meanwhile, on the edge of his concerns, Killian, a rival engineering genius Tony slighted in the 90’s (the always great Guy Pearce) has returned at the head of his own company Advanced Idea Mechanics, promoting a revolutionary regenerative process called Extremis that seems to be doubling as another nefarious super-soldier program. In addition to that, the shadowy, imposing international terrorist The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), is striking with impunity and dominating the US airwaves.

When Happy, investigating one of Killian’s henchmen (James Badge Dale), is hospitalized in an explosion which the Mandarin takes credit for, Tony, in a rage (and possibly grateful for an earthly threat to attack) issues a direct challenge to The Mandarin, which the villain accepts by attacking and destroying his Malibu estate. Tony barely escapes in a badly damaged suit of armor and winds up in the middle of Tennessee, found by a tinkering kid (Ty Simpkins).

It’s at this point that the movie presents its thesis.

Tony Stark memorably declares at the end of Iron Man the first, “I AM Iron Man.” In The Avengers, Steve Rogers puts his declaration to the test – “Take away the suit and what are you?” Tony deflects the question with a boastful quip in that movie, though his sacrifice play at the climax is meant to settle it, but in IM3, he’s forced to face that question again head on. Is he really the hero without the suit?

The movie then is an odyssey of sorts for Tony, breaking him back down into the ingenious guy in the cave (Shaun Toub appears briefly in the beginning flashback, as if foreshadowing this Rocky 5-esque reversal of fortune to come), relying on this wits and creative know-how in the absence of his suit.

And Tony, bereft of his technology, does learn the truth about himself. When the chips are down, he’s still Iron Man. At his lowest point, when the world and his love are in the balance, the recharging of the suit isn’t gonna happen in time, and Tony’s in the throes of another panic attack, the kid, Harley, tells him, “You’re the mechanic. Build something.”

Tony proceeds to go on a shopping spree at a local hardware store and MacGuyver’s a series of hilarious and ingenious low-tech alternatives to the Iron Man suit, and manages a thrilling one-man assault on “The Mandarin’s” Miami mansion, blasting his way through henchmen and discovering the secret connection between The Mandarin and Killian.

I should address as an aside that the reveal of The Mandarin as a drugged out British actor put up as a patsy/figurehead by Killian was so unpopular with Marvel fans online that the company backtracked it with a canonical short film, All Hail The King. I personally had no problem with it. It’s an amusing twist and it tracks perfectly with the plot and the presentation of the story. It’s a pretty genius move by Killian, who is seeking to control (and sell his Extremis soldiers to fight in) the war on terror by controlling its two major combatants.

Shane Black said; “It never occurred to us the Mandarin is as iconic to people as, say, the Joker in Batman. Fans just wanted to see the magic rings shoot lasers.” Shrug.

In meta terms, Shane Black and Robert Downey Jr. is a really fun and interesting pairing. It’s common knowledge, but I was lucky enough to get the story from Shane Black himself at an early screening of his phenomenal detective noir sendup Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Literally. Black hung out after the screening and just talked in the hallway of the Arclight on Sunset – great guy). RDJ was at a low point in his career. Due to erratic personal behavior brought about by his legendary substance abuse, he had been deemed uninsurable anathema by the studios. Black vouched for him and brought him in as the lead in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a criminally underappreciated buddy action comedy with Val Kilmer that effectively showed RDJ was still a viable star. KKBB got RDJ the attention of John Favreau and thus the Iron Man job. Iron Man 3 was a thank you from RDJ to Shane Black. Tony’s narration feels like an homage to the narration in KKBB.

After a series of eye popping action set pieces, Tony ends up coming through the dark night of his soul of course, spectacularly destroying the legion of extraneous Iron Man suits and Killian in the process (metaphorically, he has both conquered the paranoid obsession that was the source of his self-doubt and corrected the sins of his past his previous ego brought about). He redirects his genius at removing the arc reactor from his chest and reversing the effects of Extremis on Pepper when she is injected with the serum against her will. He has answered Captain America’s accusation – without the suit, he’s still Iron Man, still a hero. “My armor was never a distraction or a hobby, it was a cocoon, and now I’m a changed man. You can take away my house, all my tricks and toys, but one thing you can’t take away – I am Iron Man.”

It’s a brilliant and engaging story, with a popping script worthy of the guy who penned Lethal Weapon. Dialogue is sharp enough to cut yourself on and the rapport of RDJ and Cheadle (and between RDJ and Ty Simpkins – a relationship that deftly avoids sappiness with some irreverent and very funny interplay) is infectious to watch. I don’t care what the comic book geeks say, Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery is as much a hoot as his clipped and psychotic Mandarin is menacing. It’s a really great dual performance sadly overshadowed by nerd rage.

Rebecca Hall as geneticist and former tryst Maya is kinda underutilized. Apparently her character suffered from rewrites. Stephanie Szostak is memorable as a scarred, super-powered henchman.

The movie ends with a cool montage of the previous Iron Man entries set to Brian Tyler’s killer, horn-heavy score which gives the movie an air of fun and effortless 60’s style cool none of the other entries possess.

Best Dialogue/Line:

Tony Stark: So, uhh, who’s home?

Harley: Well, my mom already left for the diner, and dad went to 7-Eleven to get scratchers… I guess he won, ’cause that was six years ago.

Tony Stark: Hmm… which happens, dads leave, no need to be a pussy about it, here’s what I need…

Best Scene:

Midway through the movie Killian’s henchman absconds from Air Force One with the President locked in the Iron Patriot armor and, to cover his escape, blows open the side of the plane and sends thirteen passengers tumbling out, leaving Iron Man to rescue them. He does this by gathering them mid-air one at a time and having them hold onto each other, electrifying their muscles so they can’t let go, slowing their descent into the water off the coast of Miami.

This is one of the most thrilling and original action sequences in the entire series of Marvel movies. It has a visceral, immediate quality thanks to the choice not to film it entirely CGI. The Red Bull professional skydiving team was cast in the secondary roles of people on the plane, given establishing shots and dialogue, and then actually pitched from the plane. They’re photographed mainly with a helmet mounted camera, giving the scene a chaotic, breathtaking look.

The crew did something like seven or eight jumps at 12,000 feet for a week to execute the sequence, with digital painters and rotoscopers augmenting the shots in post (adding the Iron Man suit over the stand-in/jump-in, eliminating the team’s parachutes, correcting the background for consistency etc).

The result is pulse pounding and I recall, elicited cheers in the theater when it ended.

Would I Buy It Again? Surely. I’m a completist and like I said, it’s the second best of the Iron Man movies.

Next In The Queue? TBD

DT Moviehouse Review: The Kid Detective

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today, I review The Kid Detective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEyiKNXsVGo

Screenplay by Evan Morgan

Directed by Evan Morgan

Tagline: No Longer A Kid, Not Much Of A Detective

What’s It About?  Promising and brilliant small town boy detective with over 200 mysteries under his belt, fails to solve the disappearance of his plucky girl secretary and matures into a haunted thirty two year old failure (Adam Brody). The possibility of redemption comes when a teenage girl (Sophie Nelisse) hires him to find out who murdered her boyfriend.

Why I Bought It: The premise for this hooked me from the beginning. It’s such a fantastic idea – What would happen to Encyclopedia Brown if his sidekick Sally Kimball were abducted and he failed to solve the case? To my sheer delight, Morgan handles the conceit pitch perfectly.

As Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang sends up Mickey Spillane detective novels and their ilk, The Kid Detective recalls and spins every classic Encyclopedia Brown character, from the local bully and leader of the Tigers, Bugs Meany (Rory Beans, leader of the Red Shoe Gang here), to police Chief Brown (Constable Cleary here). The tropes of children’s detective stories (Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew etc), the treehouse agency office with its jar of client’s quarters (in this, some angry adult chops it down in the middle of the night at one point), the various kid-centric cases (the missing pet, the school fundraiser theft, the strange object found in the park etc.), are all on display in the explanatory narrative section of the movie, perfectly setting up Brody’s character Abe Applebaum (most of the characters, amusingly, have alliterative names – Gracie Gulliver, Constable Cleary). There is an amusing bit where Abe explains how as a boy, he could guess the culprit of the mystery movies he watched with his parents by the second act. We see his parents, beaming with pride behind his back the first time he does it, and exchanging silent looks of mutual annoyance when he repeats the feat.

The movie then steers into the darkly humorous, as we pick up Abe about eighteen years later, still operating out of the office the mayor, his missing secretary’s late father, granted him after the loss of his treehouse (the walls festooned with local newspaper headlines trumpeting his juvenile accomplishments), still going to the ice cream store for a single cone from the disapproving owner, who granted him free ice cream for life for solving a cashbox theft when he was fourteen. He is a haunted adult, sporting the same brown blazer, walking the same daily route in his own fourteen year old footsteps, like someone who has lost something dear retracing their steps over and over. The town around him has ceased to celebrate him. No longer the sunny four color Willowbrook of the intro, graffiti mars the storefront windows, and passersby don’t return his hellos. It’s like the alternate Hill Valley in Back To The Future II.

There is a running gag that his slacker roommate seems to show a modicum of concern, only to follow up with a verbal rug pull of selfishness. For instance, when Abe is face in the toilet vomiting in the locked bathroom after being misrepresented as a pedophile in the local newspaper, Corey calls through the door, “I’m sorry man….my friend really needs to get in there.” And when he discovers Abe sitting listless on the sofa, he sits down and asks “Are you just gonna sit here all day and not get dressed? Cause….I’m having some people over later.”

Abe gets even less respect from his family, oblivious to his internal pain and trauma. His father just keeps asking him if he’s making any money detecting. Even his new secretary, listless goth Lucy (Sara Sutherland) throws parties in the office when he’s not there.

The cases Abe has now are small time stuff; a man wants to know if another man is gay (“He was,” Abe explains laconically), a boy wants to know if his friend really played for the Mets last summer like he says. The mayor’s wife has lost her cat – again (she is probably returning to Abe in some kind of post traumatic ritual enactment because he failed to find her daughter), until teenaged orphan Caroline (Sophie Nelisse) shows up asking him to investigate the murder of her boyfriend.

Abe proceeds to attack this ‘real case’ with as much zeal as he can muster, but he’s an adult using a child’s sleuthing methods. He ends up punching out a disrespectful teenage drug dealer, getting caught hiding in the closet in a six year old girl’s bedroom (a very funny send up of the old hide in the closet till your sneeze gives you away trope that doesn’t end nearly as innocently for Abe as it does for any child Sherlock). In short, his efforts are undermined and self-sabotaged at every turn. At one point a tense scene where Caroline notices they are being tailed by a mysterious car turns out to be Abe’s concerned parents following him around.

Nevertheless, we are treated to an involved and twisting neo-noir mystery which Abe does end up solving, and at this point the story takes an astoundingly dark turn as in true detective fashion, the current case ends up relating to the case that has been hanging over Abe’s head his whole adult life. It’s much, much too good and intricate a reveal to spoil here, but suffice it to say, the darkness completely overwhelms the comedy. And yet, this shift in tone is not so jarring, as we have empathized with Abe so much throughout the story. Instead it’s supremely satisfying and cathartic, if somewhat pyrrhic.

The last shot of the movie, as Abe, now fully vindicated and once again a celebrated local (and national) celebrity, utterly breaks down in front of his bewildered parents as all the weight of the town’s unrealistic expectations and all the guilt and self-loathing of a manipulated fourteen year old’s shattered ego pours out of him is heart wrenching. A beautiful performance by Brody, who displays a shift in emotions on his face that kept reminding me of the last shot of The Long Good Friday, with Bob Hoskins sitting in the back of the car. You wanna reach through the screen and hug Abe, because his parents aren’t.  

The Kid Detective is more than its brilliant premise. It’s a study of unrealized potential and deflected childhood ambitions. It posits that diligence can be ultimately rewarded with vindication, but sometimes at the expense of a life well lived. It also lashes back at the injustice of adult expectations on children, both mundane and in one case, criminal. Very affecting art from Evan Morgan, a collaborator on another favorite look at young adult tribulations, Matt Johnson’s The Dirties.

Wonderful, committed cast. The standout performance is Brody, though Peter MacNeil also carries a heavy burden in a pivotal scene.

Best Dialogue/Line:

Abe: It’s difficult to accept the difference between who you are in your head and who you are in the world.

Best Scene:

The aforementioned ending. That last shot of Abe cracking to pieces. Stirring and unexpected in a film that lures you in with a comedy premise.

Would I Buy It Again? Yeah, it’s a keeper. Much too good and much, much, too underseen to be lost.

Next In The Queue: TBA

DT Moviehouse Review: The Driver

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way through my 300+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today, I review 1978’s The Driver.

Screenplay by Walter Hill

Directed by Walter Hill

Tagline: To break the Driver, the Cop was willing to break the law

What’s It About?  An ice-cold professional getaway driver (Ryan O’Neal) attracts the attention of an obsessive detective (Bruce Dern), who risks his career to orchestrate a setup to trap him.

Why I Bought It: This one was a recent discovery and quickly rocketed up my personal listing as one of the hands down coolest movies ever made. Walter Hill anticipates and inspires Mann’s Thief and Refn’s Drive (as well as Edgar Wright’s Atlanta-based Baby Driver) with slick blue-lit car chases, nameless, deadpan characters, and terse, tough guy lines. The titular Driver navigates the reflective streets of nocturnal L.A. with ice water in his veins, sending squads and rivals caroming off his indomitable vehicles in destructive flips that would make George Miller’s pulse flutter.

I love the hyperrealism, the monolithic archetypal titling of the characters (The Connection, Glasses, The Player, Teeth), and the wildness of the plot.

Bruce Dern, perhaps inspiring To Live And Die In L.A., inebriated on his own swaggering confidence, literally plays a game of life and death, blackmailing a failed stickup crew into committing a bank robbery solely to hire, implicate, and nab his white whale, The Driver. And when The Driver rebuffs the numerous advances of the obvious small-timers, The Detective just shows up at his door and tells him straight up. “I’m better at this then you” and challenges him to take the job. “If I win, you get fifteen years.” The Driver takes him up on it in order to prove himself a better crook than The Detective is a cop! A series of double crosses ensue, but mostly among the scrabbling minor players in the drama. For The Detective and The Driver, the money, life and death, they don’t matter at all. All that matters is the collar or the getaway and who can pull it off.

In the end, when The Detective shows up at the locker in Union Station as The Driver is retrieving the clean money (I love that he simply noiselessly appears with an entire phalanx of spit and polish LAPD patrolmen – it’s so surreal it works) and it turns out the Exchange Man has ripped them both off, the wager is over. The Detective knows he’s probably going to pay with his career. The Driver doesn’t gloat.  He just walks off into the night, proven the better operator.

Refn’s Drive owes a couple of shots and scenes to this movie. Notably, when Teeth threatens The Connection in her room with a gun down her throat, the angle is the same as when Gosling’s Driver threatens Christina Hendricks (Blanche) in the motel room with his gloved hands.

The opening chase with The Driver evading police cars with two terrified robbers in his backseat is clearly referenced in the opening chase of Drive, right down to O’Neal assuring the stickup men they won’t work together again because one of them was late.

In turn, the early sequence where Isabelle Adjani deliberately misidentifies The Driver in a police lineup is right out of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai.

Adjani (of Herzog’s Nosferatu, The Tenant, The Story of Adele H and memorably, Possession) is fine as the aloof poker-faced Player, a nominal love interest. O’Neal has never been cooler. Dern plays The Detective like a barely contained wildman – a cocksure drunk. The other actors are mainly interesting faces, though Matt Clark (of The Outlaw Josey Wales) gives the most human performance as the Red Plaineclothesman, the put upon cop who rightly sees Dern as out of control.

Frank Bruno as The Kid, a young rival driver, sure looks like he stepped out of Walter Hill’s The Warriors, but this and a TV movie are his only credit.

Best Dialogue/Line:
The Player: You don’t care about the money.

The Driver: I might even send it to him.

Best Scene:

When The Driver grudgingly agrees to take on the setup job, he meets with the stickup men, Glasses (Joseph Walhs), Teeth (Rudy Ramos), and an old acquaintance, Fingers (Will Walker), in a multilevel parking garage. They arrive in a pristine yellow Benz.

The Driver and Fingers exchange pleasantries and The Driver asks Glasses why they need him if they already have a driver. Glasses replies that Fingers has no balls for it anymore. There is a look between Fingers and The Driver – Fingers is almost apologetic, cowed. He knows this is a police setup and doesn’t want the Driver involved. Maybe The Driver doesn’t pick up on that, but the slight against his old partner annoys him.

When The Driver cites his price, Glasses wonders if his driving is worth that much money, to which The Driver replies, “Get in.”

He slides behind the wheel and proceeds to execute a number of high speed bootlegger turns, expertly weaving and braking between concrete pylons. When Glasses shouts that it’s enough, he’s convinced, The Driver proceeds to systematically destroy the car, smashing it deliberately into walls, clipping off the rearview mirrors on protruding spigots, peeling off both bumpers, and the driver’s side door, and finally ending by steering it directly underneath a parked truck of telephone poles, so close to shearing off the roof everybody in the car but him ducks.

The entire time Fingers can be seen stifling an enjoyable grin in the front seat beside him.

The Driver then exits the car and informs them he doesn’t want to work with them.

As to the totaled Benz;

“You should get new license plates if you take plan on taking it out again. People are gonna be looking for it.”

Would I Buy It Again? Indeed I would.

Next In The Queue: The Kid Detective

A Hiatus

Due to legal circumstances beyond my control for the time being, I am being forced to suspend my writing work for the foreseeable future. I’m not sure if the novel I intended to release this year is going to come out on time. I don’t think I can write anything new until this is all settled once and for all.

I do intend to step up a bit on this blog. More movie and comic reviews. If there’s anything you’d like to see more of here, let me know in the comments. I can talk about writing, answer questions to the best of my ability, whatever-ya-like.

Hope to have more of my work in front of you sooner rather than later.

Hasta pronto

-Ed

The Personal Emancipation of Ride With The Devil

The first film about the American Civil War was D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation. The last Civil War movie of the 20^th century was Ang Lee’s mostly overlooked and criminally forgotten Ride With The Devil, one of my favorites.

One of the most fascinating theaters of the American Civil War for me has always been the Kansas-Missouri guerilla conflict that began in the late 1850’s and was a precursor to the greater nationwide conflict. John Brown and his abolitionist raiders were dress rehearsing the Civil War with pro-slavery Missouri guerillas well before the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter. This setting was marked by bloody neighbor on neighbor armed violence and bitter, violent reprisals unbound by any agreed-upon rules of so-called civilized engagement. The setting spawned movies like Seven Angry Men, Dark Command, and The Outlaw Josey Wales, but the best of them, and a movie I feel has lately become relevant to the current day and age, is this one, about a pair of idealistic, if woefully misguided Missourians (Skeet Ulrich as wealthy planters’ son Jack Bull Chiles and Tobey Maguire as modest son of German immigrants, Jake ‘Dutchy’ Roedell) who join the ranks of the Missouri bushwhackers when Jack Bull’s father is murdered by a band of Kansas Red Leg raiders.

Black John (Jim Caviezel)’s raiders give no quarter and often don captured Union uniforms to lull Federal soldiers into a false sense of security before gunning them down. Among their number, Jake and Jack Bull meet up with an unlikely pair, another wealthy orphan, George Clyde (Simon Baker) and his companion Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), a free black man. The notion of an African American willingly fighting for the Confederacy is definitely problematic on the surface and may put viewers off entirely, but as this is one of the accomplished actor Jeffrey Wright’s personal favorites among his own roles, on that point alone it bears consideration.

Ride With The Devil is not a film of stark goods and evils. It’s a nuanced work that asks a lot of its audience, beginning with its opening scene of a southern pastoral wedding, as congenial African Americans (we do not see the field hands) serving well-to do white guests as a pair of apparently privileged young men jokingly equate marriage to slavery. This is almost Gone With The Wind territory, until at dinner, tensions briefly flare up among the guests over the matter of armed guards at the gate and Yankee aggressors, a phrase a man at a neighboring table takes exception to, until the host calms them both down, reminding them that they are all old friends. I’m reminded of uncomfortable holiday dinner conversations in the present day. Jake Roedell returns to his German father’s workshop after the party and gets into an argument when his father advises him to travel to St. Louis with “the other Lincoln lovin’ Germans” to avoid a fight that his father says has nothing to do with them. Jake protests that he is a southern man, to which his father replies “To them you will always be a Deutchman.” Over the course of the film, Jake will come to realize that he’s not as welcome in the hierarchy of the unspoken southern caste system as Jack Bull and his family have led him to believe. Daniel Holt is a complex character who begins as a silent observer, a walking conundrum that confounds even his allies. It seems that every time he’s introduced, to Jake and Jack Bull, to coquettish widow Sue Lee Shelly (Jewell), people take pains to, almost apologetically, explain his presence. And the explanations, though well-meaning and even admiring (“he’s a damn fine scout and a good Yankee-killer when you give him a gun”), are laced with blatant, ingrained racism (“He’s a nigger I trust with my life every day”). In fact, more often than not, he is simply referred to as ‘George Clyde’s nigger.’ Though in fact, he is no one’s property.

We learn that Holt never belonged to George at all. Holt was enslaved on a neighboring farm, and grew up as a playmate to George. When George Clyde’s family was murdered by Jayhawkers, George bought Holt and freed him. Holt has remained at George’s side since, out of loyalty. Though a free man, he is perhaps a victim of a subtler form of slavery; obligation. In the most powerful and transformative scene of the movie, Holt admits to Jake that “I believe I loved George, but bein’ that man’s friend wasn’t no different than bein’ his nigger.”

Wright tells an interesting anecdote about being asked to dub this scene for airplane flights, specifically, to overdub the racially charged epithet ‘nigger’ with ‘Negro’ to make it more palatable to the ears of in-flight customers. Wright walked out of the session and later found another actor was brought in in his place to do what he was told “so that the airplane folk would be comfy in the darkness of their own ignorance around the language of race.”

https://ew.com/jeffrey-wright-dubbed-censorship-ride-with-the-devil-8419873

Ride With The Devil is a story about personal emancipation. There is no external savior for Holt, or for Jake, who similarly joins the Bushwhackers out of loyalty to Jack Bull when his father is murdered. Jake is a working class son of pro-Union German immigrants, and in a telling scene around a campfire as the Bushwhackers are playing cards, he realizes to what esteem his compatriots hold him when someone bets two grisly Negro scalps taken during a recent raid and another player sees the ante with one German scalp. His loyalty is constantly questioned by his companions, every act of mercy he allows is seen as evidence of his betrayal to The Cause. As the film progresses, Jake and Holt gradually retreat from ‘the Cause’ and gravitate more and more towards each other’s company (in the process, earning an increasing measure of resentment from their fellows, particularly the psychotic Pitt Mackeson, played with feral dynamism by Jonathan Rhy Meyers). They are both pariahs in the greater group, (representative of the period Southern planter culture) by reason of their birth; Holt by his race, Jake by his nationality and economic station. Holt and Jake are comparative innocents, fighting out of a sense of personal love and duty, siding with the Devil around them out of obligation, unmotivated and perhaps even willfully ignorant of the implications of the cause they support, until directly faced with it.

For Holt this comes during Quantrill’s raid of Lawrence, Kansas, a decidedly one-sided attack on the perceived bastion of the anti-slavery Jayhawkers, as he watches with obvious, barely restrained distress while his compatriots gleefully heap the bodies of innocent black men and boys in the middle of the street.

Thus, the struggle of the movie for its two main characters is not a physical confrontation against the Union or the Confederacy or the murderous Pitt Mackeson, it is an internal battle to free their own souls, to reject their circumstances and pull a new life from the ashes of the old.

In the end, Jake finds purpose outside of the war, in family. Holt resolves to seek out his own people, on his own terms (there is a great bit where Holt slips his pistol through his belt and Dutchy asks “You really wanna carry that on the outside like that?” to which Holt does not reply. He has self-determined. He is no longer subservient to any man. He is his own and will from now on expect to be treated as such.). In parting, Jake calls him by his full given name, the first time anyone has in the entire movie, and the effect it has on Holt is brilliantly conveyed in Wright’s eyes and labored reply. His personhood has been acknowledged by Jake, an actual friend to him. It’s a beautiful scene, illuminated by a lovely orchestral score from Mychael Danna.

I think Ride With The Devil’s message, completely overlooked and un-marketed in its release (look at the lazy posters) is well worth revisiting in these times of turmoil, when lines seem to be drawing up between proponents of clashing ideologies. As an outside observer, Ang Lee looks at our tumultuous racial history in Ride With The Devil and shows us ourselves as we are today in the conflicts of our ancestors. We can self-determine and self-emancipate from the relationships and cycles that do not serve us but force us to serve them. We can climb down out of the saddle if the trail everybody around us is headed down doesn’t fit our pistols.

It’s a wonderful film, beautifully shot, with engaging characters and lyrical dialogue (adapted from Daniel Woodrell’s novel Woe To Live On). Worth a watch.

Mad Max Beyond Max

This started off as a Facebook post, but I wrote some things to expand upon it here, and to make it a little more widely available to invite discussion.

So first off, I know there are people whose chief complaint with Fury Road is that the character of Mad Max Rockatansky is sidelined in his own outing….but….I never really got that. After the first Mad Max, Max becomes far less of a traditional character with a developmental arc so much as an embodied archetype. The reluctant wandering hero. The amoral Ronin whose scarred heart is touched by something or someone he finds in the chaos which induces him to act, but in the end, never participate in the humanity he fights to preserve. The Road Warrior does not go north with the Gyrocaptain and the tribe. Mad Max does not join the kids beyond Thunderdome. These stories are not about him per say. He is the agent of change that facilitates and acts as a catalyst for the narrative. The Road Warrior is about Papagalo’s people escaping the refinery. Thunderdome is the Crack In The Earth kids, Pig Killer, and the Aviator and his son finding a new life. Fury Road is Furiosa and the women escaping and ultimately breaking the power of Immortan Joe. Max always remains in the wasteland, like Godzilla sinking into the Sea of Japan to be awakened again at some later date when someone else bumps into him or some other need for him arises. So….yeah, the take that Max is not the main character in Fury Road…feels like an uninformed criticism. Plus, if you wanna dismiss one of the most innovative and visionary action movies of the last two decades because Mel Gibson isn’t in it or Tom Hardy isn’t in it enough….OK, man. Take feels pretty hot, but you’re entitled to it.

All that out of the way, Furiosa is not a Mad Max movie, or, it’s more akin to the first Mad Max. It’s an origin story with a compelling main character embarking on a vengeful journey, often surprisingly literate. In Furiosa George Miller greatly expands the world he has created over decades, dropping tidbits that I know made RPG writers who watched this champ at the bit to create a sourcebook around it. I’m sure it’s coming. But…it’s not done in a lazy or distracting way and nothing is overtly handed over in some long exposition. We just hear about Gas Wars and Water Wars and glimpse the inner workings of the Bullet Farm and Gas Town, only name dropped in Fury Road. I really loved the inclusion of Furiosa’s mentor/nominal love interest Praetor Jack (he reminded me of Robert Ginty…a kind of….lesser Mad Max. Grouchy Max). There are other road warriors out there. This is an expansive world with many stories to be told. I hope to God Disney doesn’t get a hold of it.

Whereas Fury Road was more plot driven, Furiosa is definitely a more traditional narrative. It is not breakneck nonstop action. Anya Taylor Joy is fabulous, milking her large, expressive eyes to spout all the dialogue she doesn’t speak. Yet when characters do speak…I found the language very interesting, a hodge podge of slang and flourid, sometimes poetic competency, like the dialogue of a Daniel Woodrell period novel (very refreshing when compared to the dumbed down dialogue of Villeneuve’s Dune).

I was afraid Chris Hemsworth’s star power would overwhelm his character, but Dementus is so far apart from anything I’ve ever seen him do, he was not a distraction, and the villain never veered into cartoonishness. There is a level of damage to him that admirably informs his lunacy so it never feels contrived to me.

It’s a very different movie from the rest of the Mad Max series, as each entry has been wildly different from the other. George Miller’s imagination, both as an action filmmaker and a worldbuilder has been undersold for decades. I think he may even surpass George Lucas in terms of having realized a cinematic setting that I suspect will be around and unfortunately exploited long after the world loses his genius.

Incidentally I attempted to rewatch the whole series prior to seeing this but ended up stopping Fury Road to go to the theater, right around the time Furiosa is cryptically reminiscing to Max about her backstory, so the experience of watching this was like taking a long sidetrip into an extended flashback before coming back to the thrilling (and thus, more satisfying) climax of that movie.

If Furiosa suffers from anything, it’s the ending, which was just a tad ambiguous. In the midst of this epic 40 Day Wasteland War, we are torn away to follow its main instigator apparently pulling a kind of Saddam Hussein and buggering off into the wastes with only Furiosa in hot pursuit. We don’t get how Furiosa becomes an Imperator, but it can be inferred. Instead of the explosive action packed ending Fury Road had, Miller gives us a hypothetical, a fantasy denouement (this is what may have happened). Furiosa’s story is legendary, and nobody knows the truth behind a legend – not even Miller, a post apocalyptic Homer who is only relating what he knows.

To sum up, it is not the action masterpiece Fury Road was, though there are some pretty thrilling action set pieces and moments that made my eyes pop. The post credit flashes to Fury Road do Furiosa a bit of a disservice by inviting comparison. Think of it as the first Creed movie to the Rocky series that spawned it. I was really impressed.

In rewatching the series, I got to thinking about how you can visually follow the branching tributaries of George Miller’s imagination, and how it evolves and is expanded upon. I’m not sure if there are deliberate Easter eggs or just unconscious motiffs.

I was watching Furiosa and noticing the reappearance of the V8, and how the idea of the War Rig began with the climactic chase from the Road Warrior, the fortified Mack Truck evolving into this thunderous, armored, rolling combat platform in Fury Road and Furiosa. I also noticed Goose’s cycle from Mad Max, Blaster’s whistle from Thunderdome, and got to thinking how Furiosa’s Green Place resembles the Crack In The Earth. The kids from the Crack can be traced back to the Feral Kid in Road Warrior, and the War Boys of the Immortan sure look like Scrooloose from Thunderdome. The Doof Warrior bounces in a bungie chord sling, and the hang gliding boarders of Furiosa are expansions on the Polecats. Furiosa’s mother is suspended and tortured similarly to the captives under Lord Humoungus. Just observations, and like I said, probably just the creative evolution of Miller’s imagination. But it’s fun to trace the threads back and forth.

DT Moviehouse: Conan The Barbarian

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way alphabetically through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today, in keeping with the Halloween season, I review the original Conan The Barbarian.

https://youtu.be/xwdYd_RdLCQ?si=avHCNBUty1VzTQUA

Screenplay by John Milius, Oliver Stone

Directed by John Milius

Tagline:  Thief. Warrior. Gladiator. King.

What’s It About? Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, Cimmerian barbarian Conan is orphaned by evil wizard Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) and sold into slavery, grows up to become Arnold Schwarzenegger, and sets out a quest of vengeance.

Why I Bought It: It’s going to be difficult to say anything about Conan The Barbarian that hasn’t been espoused over and over all over the internet. It’s a touchstone picture in my life (although I actually saw Conan The Destroyer first). My enthusiasm for it led me to seeking out the writer credited in the astounding opening title sequence, Robert E. Howard, which in turn led me to a stack of Lancer paperbacks with dynamic painted Frank Frazetta covers, that greatly inspired me to write my own short pulpy stories.

From the croaky, resounding introductory narrative by Mako to the first thundering beats of Basil Pouledouris’ monumental score when the fiery outline of Jody Samson’s iconic bastard sword pours across a pitch black screen, Conan is something special.

It goes hand in hand with The Road Warrior as a movie that inspired a slew of inferior imitations and birthed their own genres. Conan landed in the midst of the 80’s fantasy boom and slashed the sword and sorcery offshoot from its side. Because of Conan we got The Barbarian Brothers, Beastmaster, Sword And The Sorcerer, Hawk The Slayer, Deathstalker, and a plethora of two syllable named monosyllabic oiled up beefcake sword swingers, none of which hold a candle to this. Even the sequel seems to forget just what makes this movie so great, and falls back on oiled muscles, rubbery Halloween costumes, and Arnie’s shining pectorals.

So what DOES make it so great?

Like The Road Warrior, I think it’s the sense of total savagery and danger – the idea that the world is not safe and something horrible could happen to you at any moment – and that the protagonist is not only entirely capable of dealing with it, but he is himself something horrible for somebody else to fear.

Raiders come flying out of the woods with packs of snarling hounds. They cut a mother from her child’s grasp and adorn a burning village with the heads of the vanquished. Conan is flung into a down and dirty arena and learns (along with us) that this is a world where anything goes, as a sharp-toothed pit fighter bites into him. Conan learns quickly to kill or be killed, trusting his steel against giant snakes, towering warriors, and memorably, hacking his way through an orgy of bloodthirsty cultists.

The movie earns its R rating with epic bloodshed and casual nudity.  Yes, no denying it’s adolescent male fantasy, but what of it? I was an adolescent when I saw it and it hit perfect. Adolescent males need their fantasies too.

Central to its success is the star making performance of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Milius stated that if Arnold had not existed he would have had to have been built to fill the role. His commanding, superhuman physical presence dominates every scene, but it’s what’s behind his eyes, his undeniable grim charm, that elevates the role. He says very little, but when he interacts with Subotai (Gerry Lopez) and Mako and Valeria (Sandahl Bergman) he does it with humanity, displaying humor and camaraderie and affection. That he doesn’t embarrass himself in his scenes with weighty actors like James Earl Jones and Max Von Sydow raises Arnold (and Conan) high above the imitators.

The aforementioned supporting actors bolster the material greatly, but I would be remiss in not mentioning the ‘Great Danes’ Milius selected to act as foils for his physically intimidating star – Sven Ole Thorsen as the hammer wielding Thorgrim, football player Ben Davison as Rexor, Franco Columbo as a tattooed Pictish scout – Milius could have filled these roles with any old meathead gym rats, but these big bodied men with grim, interesting faces instead play perfectly off the stoic Conan, supervillains to match a superheroic role.

William Smith, ubiquitous heavy in various TV shows and movies of the 70’s has a great turn as Conan’s philosophic swordsmithing father. It was years before I even realized it was him.

Like a Bond film, women are only a little better than complimentary scenery in a movie like this, but Nadiuska (Conan’s mother), Cassandra Gava (a seductive witch), and Valerie Quenessen (Osric’s daughter), in their own way, like Arnold, are lithe and tigerish and exotic and seem to have been made to fulfill their roles. They are otherworldly in their beauty. They cannot exist outside the Hyborian Age.  Sandahl Bergman’s wry swordswoman Valeria, whose worldly exterior hides her romantic heart, Milius describes her as ‘a Valkyrie’ and I can’t think of better words than that. She recalls (or is it foretells?) tough female protagonists like Ripley from Aliens and Charlie from The Long Kiss Goodnight. She’s the woman you want at your side in this particular adolescent fantasy. At one point she clubs the wayward princess with the severed head of a guard. Cracks me up every time.

The action and battles are tremendous (much augmented by the Poledouris score), the script itself is imaginative (Mako and Valeria defending Conan’s magically warded body – a nod to Kwaidan’s Hoichi The Earless sequence – is a standout), and the practical FX are great for the most part. Never seen a better looking giant snake, and Doom’s petrified serpent arrows, maybe harkening back to the snake staves from The Ten Commandments, are killer.

I had the pleasure of seeing this on the big screen recently in a crowded house, a good number of whom, men and women, had never seen it before. Few things compare to seeing something you love with others who are experiencing it for the first time.

It’s a shame the sequels Milius envisioned never materialized. Somewhere there is an alternate universe where Arnold returned every couple of years James Bond fashion.

Best Dialogue/Line: Crush your enemies. See them driven before you, hear the lamentations of their woman.

Best Scene: Conan is crucified to the twisted Tree of Woe by Thulsa Doom and left to die. This is a scene adapted from the Howard stories, and struck me on my first viewing as one of the most arresting sequences I’d ever seen. The obvious Christian iconographic reference is totally upended. Robust, clean shaven Conan bears little resemblance to the emaciated, bearded Christ, and does not submit to death with meek acceptance. When one of the buzzards perched on the intricate limbs of the tree finds the courage to rustle down and nip at Conan’s wounds, Conan rewards it by biting into its throat and killing the offending carrion eater, defying Death and all its servants with the last ounce of his willpower.

And when, at the edge of consciousness, he spies Subotai rushing over the dunes, he greets salvation not with a grateful sob, but half-mad laughter.

Arnold’s Conan fueled a lot of my DnD characters for a lot of years…

Would I Buy It Again? I did. Bought the director’s cut, and while I love the added ‘spring winds’ speech prior to the Battle of The Mounds, I prefer the original ending to the alternate cut with the princess taking a more active role in Thulsa Doom’s comeuppance. I like that she leads him to Doom, but I don’t like the angles and takes used.

Next In The Queue? Maybe The Road Warrior, for comparison.