Movie Review: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998/Universal Pictures/Dir. Terry Gilliam)

There are books that are difficult to translate into movies, and there are books that are more easily translated. I’m not exactly sure where Fear and Loathing fits in there, but it was at least fairly accurately translated. Not 100%, several things prevent it from reaching the full and complete accuracy that fans were hoping for. While some of them are choices made by Gilliam, many of them are just rights and budget concerns. However, as an adaptation of the book, it works. As something to get you interested in the greater works of Hunter S. Thompson, it is an excellent device. How does the movie hold up compared to the book? Let’s find out together, shall we?

Avengers Review - In Bullet Point Form!

So we saw The Avengers...

- I lost count of the amount of times people stopped using rifles during firefights because Pistols Is Better!

- Every time the characters started fighting, I wanted someone to pick Ryu so that the Marvel Vs Capcom feeling would be complete. Every big scene felt empty and flaccid to me, it had all the impact of watching someone else play a video game.

- Am, I only person who said "Tell me about the lambs" during the big tell me about the lambs scene?

- What military sky boat (a supremely stupid idea in the comics and worse in the movie) would have less failsafe and fall back precautions than a modern airliner?

- Does no one in New York City have any kind of self preservation sense at all? 15 minutes into a full blown alien attack and people are still gaping by windows hoping to get glass shards in the face.

- Those sky serpent things, were they some kind of left over design that Michael Bay decided not to use for the Transformers movies?

- A lot of the lines in this movie make no sense when you think about them. "They'll come." "How can you know?" "We'll need them." That's no kind of answer!

- I have a nifty shield! I have a magic hammer! I have super strength! I have a full blow Deus Ex Machina suit! I have a... 9mm pistol... I'm just here for T&A aren't I?

- So many of the jokes and quips fell flat for me that I started to resent the idea of laughing when one actually amused me. By the time Hulk punched Thor, I just sighed and looked away from the screen.

- And the guy who got Jossed was totally Jossed. That was not story supported, it was a cheap trick performed by a bad writer with no other way to make people care.

- Over all Joss Whedon remains a rather cheap hack with a rather shallow bag of tricks. If you like his bag of tricks, it's probably fine. I hate his bag of tricks and the movie was chock full of the things I don't like about his work.

Otherwise it was okay. I didn't want to kill anyone, I didn't want to ram chopsticks into my eyes, but Joss Whedon is still a shitty writer and I don't like his works, but this is the closest I've ever come to not hating every minute of it. If we'd been watching at home though, I would have walked out less than halfway through and not finished it.

Movie Review: Mobsters

Mobsters (1991/ Universal Pictures/ Dir. Michael Karbelnikoff)

We’ve probably talked about this before, but movies that took place before the fifties and featured guys in hats doing guys in hats things were very cool for about twelve minutes when I was a kid. For reasons I’ve never been quite clear on, I was very VERY into the time era that went from the 20s to the 40s when I was between the ages of 11 and 16. Maybe it was an obsession with old Warner Brothers Cartoons, maybe I got a taste of some really good Film Noir, maybe I just liked fedoras. Who can say? No, it’s probably not just the hats, I think it has to be the time period. You can’t just say “This has guys in hats” and get me interested, but you can say “It takes place in 1935” and I am THERE! Case in point, this movie. I pretty much have to put this thing into context, because without context it almost doesn’t/shouldn’t exist and in many ways it fails to make sense on its own. It’s not a good movie, but it’s too well made to be on any “So bad they’re good” lists, mostly it’s forgotten. Again, without context, you fail to understand why such talent would go to such wretched waste.

We can’t stop here Dave, this is Dalek Country.

We can’t stop here Dave, this is Dalek Country.

I was thinking of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for a review, but I had a problem. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson dropped a seed into my brain, and I can’t think about the movie without dealing with that seed.

Allow me to quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

Sci-Fi was basically mired in that self-same belief for decades. If you read all of the Space Odyssey books, you find that there are more Monoliths are more numerous than just the movie makes them seem. There are many monoliths and the reason for them is that a super-advanced race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings sent them to earth was to advance our evolution from one stage to another. Eventually they decide we’re cool and let us into their mouse club just like a Monty Python sketch!

Now, do me a favor and go read the bit about the acid culture again.

I can’t get this idea out of my head that Arthur C. Clarke fell into the same sort of trap along with a lot of other writers. Star Trek does it, B5 does it, Dr. Who does it. Asimov doesn’t do it as directly, but he does some. So many of the writers, names and stories I’ve mostly forgotten now, so many aliens and supercomputers playing as a stand in for God. There seems to be this need to reach out to a god, or a super-advanced race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, or possibly just a really smart robot. Star Wars doesn’t, and I’ve noticed that’s one of the reasons some sci-fi fans hold it in contempt. You could argue that The Force is appealing, but I argue that it’s just a sort of unfocused spiritualism. More of a way to define the walls of the tunnel than any sort of light tender.

I have noticed though, that it happens a lot more with older sci-fi than the newer stuff. By newer I mean the mid 90s or so, because… you know. I remember some of Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick being very down on the idea of religion as a whole. English movies and TV shows were much more apt to say either there was no God, or we were alone in the universe during the 80s. Red Dwarf and Hitchhiker’s Guide come to mind. Rationalism came to Sci-Fi in the way the genre always pretended it subscribed to. A wave of atheism rolled in after a while, and then rolled back as people who should have embraced the idea of humanity doing it for itself drifted back into their deeply conservative ways while nominally holding liberal views. Gods and super-advanced races of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings were once again all the rage, lending a helping hand or leaving us in our purgatories with that unexplained polar bear.

So now, you can stand near a closed down book store, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see that high-water mark. The place where the wave broke and rolled back. Or maybe there was no wave, maybe it was just a small ripple of rationalism in an otherwise over-godded pond.

So yeah, Hunter S. Thompson and Arthur C. Clarke referenced in the same post. Not everyone does that. Next time I’ll talk about what My Little Pony and the Russian Revolution have to do with each other.

There’s Always a Villain in Every Movie

I have a game I like to play during movies. Not all movies mind you, not even boring movies, although I do find I play it more there. Just movies that tend to fall outside of the simple good guy/bad guy structure. The game is simple, and it leads to some odd places now and then.

I impose a classic Hero/Villain structure upon the movie.

I decide who is the hero, by the simple expedient of “they’re the one we spend the most time with” and impose a villain with the criteria “they’re the one who is the most antagonistic over all to our hero” and away we go. I don’t allow that a movie has man against the elements, or he’s really struggling against himself or whatever. Nope, there is a good guy and a bad guy. Yes, in pure story telling terms I’m breaking down and over simplifying things, but it’s my watching experience and I can do what I want inside my own head. I’ve got a lot of processing power in my bean, if I don’t occupy it with trivialities; I turn back to evil again.

Take something like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Is there a hero? Well, yeah, Raoul Duke is the hero. It’s told in first person, he has to be the hero. So who is the bad guy? Well, the antagonist he spends the most time with of course. Dr. Gonzo is about a villainous as you can get, when you start to look at it that way. He is a demon that Raoul has brought along with him on this trip. Less so in the book than in Gilliam’s movie, but he is still portrayed this way in the film and that’s what we’re talking about.

You can change the dynamic of a movie when you start to watch it like this, because a villain is supposed to be evil. Once you’ve got it in your head that say Joe Pesci is the villain of Casino, that movie has an entirely different vibe to it, as it becomes the tale of a gangster deliberately screwing over a man he calls his friend, instead of inadvertently doing it. Yes, you’ve got to wonder how well he’s doing it, seeing how he turns out, but he could be doing it is the point.

Now of course, there is the opposite side of the game. Not exactly taking a movie that has a traditional good guy/bad guy structure and pretending there isn’t one, but looking at it from the other guy’s point of view. Let’s take Rollerball, for example. Flipped over like that, you have the tale of a tired and worried executive, trying to get on with the business of running the world for the benefit of all involved, and this prima donna sports star keeps screwing things up. Not only is he screwing things up, but he’s doing so for no better reason than his own self aggrandizement. It’s not always easy to do, because some actors play up being the bad guy too much. Anything where James Earl Jones plays the baddie is easily adapted to this idea, because he always played the bad guy as if he were the good guy.

Sometimes, these are the only things standing between people being able to enjoy a movie, and having to listen to me bitch about how substandard a movie is and how it fails on every step of the Bechdel Test. Most movies fail to pass that one, so it’s a depressingly easy go-to.

Movie Review: Rollerball

Wait, I've been away how long? It's been when since I last wrote a review? Where was I during that time. Oh yeah, that. Well, if I don’t get back on that horse, I may never get back on. The problem of course is that the longer you’re away, the bigger your return needs to be. I need to go either really obscure or really popular. The problem is that I also need to get back up to speed, so I’ll go for something in between. This is both obscure and popular.

Rollerball (1975- United Artists - Dir. Norman Jewison)

So this one has sort of an odd story. Rollerball was mentioned in the essay “You think that movie is bad?” and since then, Rollerball has become third in the list of search terms used to find this little blog. I found it sort of depressing that people might be coming here looking for a review of the movie and not finding one, despite it being one of my Sci-Fi Greats. So let’s talk about one of the truly great sci-fi/corporate nightmare movies. Really though, it’s just a dystopian movie because, there isn’t much that’s really advanced technology in the movie. Take away the strange TV sets and one scene with a laser gun and it could have happened in ‘75 when the movie was made. The only things that are required for this to become a reality are all social developments.

Movie Review: Der Schuh des Manitu

Der Schuh des Manitu

Der Schuh des Manitu (2001/ Constantin Film/ Dir. Michael Herbig

Native Americans are a dicey subject in fiction, mainly because of the stereotyping. There is also the problem that the term Native Americans can rub a cheese grater over the nerves of their souls. But really, it’s the stereotype that bothers most of us, I think. I mean, think about it a moment. I said Native American, and what did you think of? Buck skin wearing, noble savages with long straight black hair and a rudimentary grasp of language at best? Well, shame on you! They also talk about the Great Spirit at the drop of a hat and want to sing you the song of their people. Them and the Orientals get that weird, condescending attribute of being strangely wise, or mystical while also insulting them with the old ‘but of course they’re like children’ refrain as well. I’m not going to go into a lengthy discussion on it, but I sort of am because I’m talking about a movie that is set in the old west and involves made up Apaches. But it’s made by Germans, so they have like no connection to the actual history of the Native Americans and the movie is actually pretty funny since its jokes rarely ever touch on the known stereotypes beyond basic visuals and the Apache characters are the heroes. The best way I can describe it is that it’s like watching a hilarious movie about slave conditions in the Antebellum South made by Italians in blackface. You know that there is something terribly wrong with what’s being done, but the people who are doing it can’t begin to understand, and they’re being genuinely funny anyway. Look, maybe its better if I explain from the beginning…