The Gold Rush

The second of Chaplin’s feature films (after 1921’s 'The Kid') loses nothing over time, easily gliding past all technical innovations (sound, colour, widescreen, 3D). And with Chaplin’s natural gifts as a filmmaker and performer, he crafts a hilarious adventure epic with heartbreaking emotional sentimentality.

The Gold Rush (1925) dir. Charles Chaplin
Starring: Charles Chaplin, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Georgia Hale

By Alan Bacchus

In this adventure the Tramp finds himself traversing the Rocky Mountains to join the throngs of treasure seekers during the Klondike Gold Rush. The first set piece occurs when the Tramp seeks shelter from a storm in a small shack along with a fellow prospector and a wanted fugitive. The physical hijinks include the famous storm sequence, which has the Tramp being blown throughout the cabin. The sequence ends with the fugitive killed and the prospector knocked unconscious without any memory of the location of his gold cache.

The next stop on Chaplin’s journey is the prospecting town, where he has given up prospecting and instead tries to find any kind of work. His next gig has him house sitting a cabin, where he falls in love with a local comely gal. The miscommunication of affection between the two is agonizing for us. At one point the Tramp gets a date with the gal on New Year's Eve, but he gets stood up when she attends a local dance instead. The result is earth-shatteringly emotional and heartbreaking.

As perfect and effective as his performance is, Chaplin the director tantalizes us with some bravura cinematic sequences and stunning visual compositions. The Tramp’s entrance into the dance hall for instance, looking at the hundreds of frolicking youth dancing in the barn, is stunningly composed with Chaplin in the centre framed underneath the support beams of the building (see still above).

The dancing sequence features some of Chaplin’s best physical comedy, which can overshadow his directorial skills in choreographing scenes of a massive scale, specifically the final tilting house sequence that shows Chaplin’s panache with spectacle and grandeur.

Three of the most famous scenes in all of cinema include; the dancing of the buns, wherein Chaplin entertains his female guests by sticking his two forks in pieces of bread and dancing a jig to entertain them; Tramp serving and eating his boots for dinner; and the rambunctious frozen Tramp sequence, which has the fugitive throwing a frozen solid Tramp around the room like a pole.

But it’s Chaplin's innate precision with his emotions that makes him a genius. His remarkable simplicity of movement and performance, moving us from extremes of laughter to heartbreaking pity and lasering in on his own core emotions, is a gift only a handful of filmmakers could ever match.

****

The Gold Rush is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Magic Mike

Steven Soderbergh is at it again, subverting our expectations with a conventional commercial film - a male stripper movie featuring Channing Tatum as a top-drawer stripper who really just wants to start his own furniture business and leave the often sordid, yet sexy and fast-paced lifestyle behind. As usual, Soderbergh is able to make the ordinary seem somewhat interesting and unique with his relaxed directorial style. It partially succeeds, but it often falls victim to inconsistency in tone and character. But as a vehicle for Tatum and his talents as an actor, dancer and hot bod movie star, the film succeeds.

Magic Mike (2012) dir. Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, Alex Pettyfer, Olivia Munn
By Alan Bacchus

The plotting takes us through the familiar route to fame and fortune in the seedy entertainment business, situating itself somewhere between Boogie Nights and 54. Channing Tatum plays Mike, an entrepreneur and hot shot in Tampa Bay, Florida, who tiles roofs, runs a car detailing business and aspires to be a creator of premium furniture. But his best talent is dancing, as he leads a team of male strippers in a very popular nightclub. Before we even see Tatum flash his wares we see him meet Adam, a young man with no career prospects, on his roofing job site. Mike takes him under his wing, and through Adam's virgin eyes we see the world of the strip club. Eventually, Adam finds himself on stage learning the ropes of stripping.

Tatum’s presence and charisma are so strong that he overwhelms everyone else, specifically Alex Pettyfer as Adam. Adam's side plot as a green newbie who finds himself on the dark side of the business engaging in drug use and gangster activities falls into the background. Even the romantic plotting of Adam’s sister, Joanna (Munn), who harbours a contrived fraternal overprotection of Adam, is undercooked.

Soderbergh directs the film with his typical understated and relaxed style. It results in a unique situational realism. Soderbergh’s tone is undermined by Reid Carolyn’s script, which turns melodramatic much too suddenly in a number of places. It forces Soderbergh to reluctantly turn a corner when he wanted to go in the other direction. Matthew McConaughey’s character, seen largely as a fun and affable boob, turns inexplicably sinister for one scene, and Adam’s betrayal and Mike’s subsequent bailout feel like they're from another film Soderbergh forgot to make.

But it’s the half-dozen or so tremendously exciting choreographed dance scenes that anchor the film. The sequences showcase the talents that launched Tatum in the film Step It Up in 2006. The raunchy bass-pumping music laid over the reaction shots of screaming girls deifies Mike as a near godlike embodiment of masculine allure. It's an attention Tatum accepts with a strong sense of humility as well - a unique quality in a movie star.

And really that’s all anyone wanted or expected from the film.

That said, it brings up a consistent frustration with Soderbergh, at one time one of the most exciting American filmmakers. It now seems like he's coasting on substandard and forgettable material. Will we ever see a film like Traffic or Sex, Lies, and Videotape again?

***

Cauterizing the Wound, and Other Forms of Self-Medication in Cinema

So, you’re a character in a movie, and you’ve just been in an action scene. You’ve been fighting off either the hero or the villain of the picture and mostly likely you’re on the run from the law? Or you have no access to a hospital or any sort of medical practitioner. What do you do? Your only option is self-medicating, whether it’s self-surgery, self-suture, bullet removal, etc.

The most common form of cinematic self-medication is 'cauterizing of the wound', the act of burning the wound to stop the bleeding, a method most dramatically demonstrated to us in Rambo III:

Removing shrapnel from Stallone's waist in RAMBO III

After some mondo action and bloodshed, John Rambo finds himself with an annoying piece of shrapnel embedded in his waist. Unfortunately, he’s without his trusty needle and thread, but he ‘MacGyvers’ a solution with a little gunpowder and a flame. Rambo carefully pushes the metal out of his body, then tears apart a bullet and (yikes!) pours the gunpowder into the open wound. He then inserts an enflamed twig into his body to ‘cauterize’ it.

Cauterizing Chow Yun Fat’s Wound in THE KILLER

After the famous cabin shootout and escape from the white jumpsuit-wearing gunmen, John and Inspector Li venture into the woods to rest. Li helps John fix the bullet wound on his arm with the same Rambo technique - opening up a shell casing, pouring gunpowder on the open wound and lighting himself on fire. Thank God for the twig John clenches in order to relieve the pain of having one's appendage partially exploded.

Arrow wound in TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA

Going back to 1970, Don Siegel's western Two Mules for Sister Sara may have been the first use of cinematic cauterization. The unlikely heroic duo is Clint Eastwood as a mercenary and Shirley MacLaine as a nun, both travelling to Mexico to help in their revolution. After an attempt to blow up a train, Clint is shot in the shoulder with an arrow. But it's nothing a simple cauterizing technique of pushing through the arrow along with some lit gunpowder can't fix.

Arrow Wound in BRAVEHEART

After the Battle of York, that old Scottish dude, the elder Campbell played by John Cosmo, gets a nasty arrow in the shoulder. With some whisky to dull the pain, his fellow warring lads proceed to pull out the arrow, then blast the wound with a red hot poker. Ouch.

Thank God for the basic element of fire, which seemingly can seal up just about any wound. In real-world practice, you may want to think twice before applying that hot poker to your skin or lighting yourself on fire with gunpowder. Here's the real medical take on cinematic cauterization, courtesy of Toronto-based doctors, Dr. Michael McDonald and Dr. Jennie Johnstone:

In the setting of a penetrating trauma wound with a non-sterile object (arrow, bullet, shark bite), the major immediate concerns are hemorrhage and infection. Severe hemorrhage can be fatal within minutes while infection is more insidious, claiming victims within 72 hours. Cauterization in the Rambo sense of the word refers to the application of a heat source directly into the wound in an attempt to stem the blood loss and sterilize the region of any bacteria. Although theoretically attractive, this practice paradoxically creates more injury; even if large blood vessels are spared from thermal damage, layers of surrounding inflamed and necrotic tissue coalesce into an ideal medium for harmful bacteria to grow and spread.

Anecdotally, cauterization may have been used with some measure of success prior to the availability of antibiotics and antiseptic surgical techniques (approximately 100 years ago) in rare circumstances. For example, in the amputation of a limb, the benefit of cauterizing the stump to control bleeding from large arteries, which was almost always fatal, exceeded the risk of dying from subsequent septic shock. Today, however, an individual forced to self-manage a penetrating injury in the absence of immediate medical care should instead focus his/her efforts on damage control. This is best accomplished by 1) applying continuous pressure to any accessible wound until the bleeding stops and 2) moving any dirty external debris and keeping the surrounding area clean with alcohol or boiled water. These simple measures may offer the best chance for survival until proper medical attention has been found.

Cauterization isn't the only method of self-medication we've seen on screen. Here are some other, though not necessarily medically sound, techniques:

Anton Chigurh’s Knee (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN)

During the impeccably choreographed street shootout scene Moss manages to throw a hail of buckshot into Chigurh’s knee. When the opponents crawl away injured but alive they both have to repair their own damage before continuing on their journeys. Watching Chigurh direct the attention of the pharmacy staff away with a gasoline tank explosion outside makes us think that he’s done this before – scary. This allows the mop-headed villain to steal his tools and go about his business. While at his hotel room, the procedure of cutting off his pants, cleaning the wound, injecting painkillers into his injured knee and removing the bullet fragments is given squirm-inducing bold close-ups from the Coen Bros. I can’t even imagine how he would repair his broken arm at the end of the film.

Stitches for Rambo (FIRST BLOOD)

After a violent escape from the Sheriff’s office of Backwater USA, the soft-spoken former Green Beret, John Rambo, retreats to the woods fending off the ineffectual National Guard and local police. After falling 100 feet from a rock cliff, Mr. Rambo is left with a nasty slice on his arm. Since he’s alone out in the woods, suddenly that needle and thread kit, which always seemed useless in a compass, has a purpose. With precision we watch as Rambo sews up his arm, as the wound oozes out some wonderful blood squirts.

Removing Arnie’s Eye (THE TERMINATOR)

Perhaps it’s not fair to use Terminator as an example because he’s technically a robot, but what the hell? With patient skill, James Cameron shows his Terminator perform some masterful surgery to his damaged eye. The grossest moment is no doubt when Arnie puts the scalpel into his eyeball, thus freeing it up for removal. Of course, Stan Winston’s animatronic special effects make it all look so real and gruesome, and nothing a handy pair of black sunglasses can't hide.

Ash’s Chainsaw Arm (EVIL DEAD II)

One of the greatest fanboy scenes ever is Sam Raimi’s hilarious satire of Hollywood ‘montage scenes’. While fighting off the evil spirit that took control of his own arm, Ash ‘wins’ the battle by chopping off his own arm. This leaves our hero missing one appendage. No need to worry, as a trip to the tool shed will fix that. With a series of quick cuts we watch Ash construct his now-famous chainsaw arm out of scrap metal accompanied by his sawed-off boomstick. Groovy.

Fluorescent Flesh Wound (PREDATOR)

Midway through Predator, Dillon and his overmatched commando unit manage to fight the Alien off. In a wonderfully edited sequence, once again realized by the master of physical and mechanical effects, Stan Winston, we get to see the vulnerability of the Predator for the first time. Alone in the trees, the Predator opens up a neat little first aid kit on his arm, which has just the right instruments to heal his nasty fluorescent blood-filled leg wound. The sequence is capped off with a loud bellow of pain, which reverberates throughout the jungle.

So think twice about emulating the methods used by these cinematic action heroes. Consult a doctor before performing any of these techniques.

Jaws

Bored with over-hyped, under-delivered summer flicks? TIFF Bell Lightbox's antidote is the return to the big screen, in pristine Spielberg-approved digital print, of dare I say his BEST film, 'Jaws'. The verve of a youthful filmmaker from the then 'wunderkind', Spielberg is in every frame of this film, a ripping yarn and pulpy cinematic comfort food at its best.

Jaws (1975) dir. Steven Spielberg
Starring: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton

The film opens with a great death scene. A drunken, skinny-dipping female swimmer gets mauled in horrific fashion by some kind of creature of the deep. We then meet Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), a man who is afraid of the water, yet is the chief of police on the island of Amity. He’s there for the peace and quiet, but when he learns the girl was attacked by a shark, he's quickly thrown into the deep end of island politics and shark hunting. Though there's no disputing the shark bite, the stubborn Mayor (Murray Hamilton) refuses to close the beaches. Another kid dies and Brody takes the blame. But when his own child nearly becomes a victim, the gauntlet is thrown down.

Brody teams up with college-bred oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and an old-school, shark-hunting curmudgeon named Quint (Robert Shaw) to hunt down and kill the shark. The beast is as tough an opponent as the trio thought. It’s a 25-footer, too big for Quint’s small boat. However, he refuses to go back and takes on the shark in a live-or-die duel.

The success of Jaws was famously aided by, ironically, the film’s production problems. The making-of documentary on the DVD and the old laserdisc chronicles in entertaining fashion the hell Mr. Spielberg went through to get the film made. Shooting on water is never easy, but shooting on water with an electronically gimbaled shark inside the water is just crazy. With the shark not working, Spielberg’s directorial and storytelling instincts were put to the test. As we all know, the shark isn’t revealed until well into the second half, but using some classic cinematic techniques of suspense Spielberg generates more fear in not seeing the monster.

Spielberg was not even 30 when he directed the film and yet most of the hallmarks of his trademark style are on the screen. He's a master of camera movement. Watch how he moves his actors in and out of frame and how the camera moves to follow. In Jaws especially, the camera, motivated by the characters, prowls the scenes like the film’s antagonist. Watch the opening shot, a long take, which slowly dollies across a campfire site before settling on the shark’s first victim.

In other situations where he can't possibly move his camera, Spielberg creates the illusion of movement from a locked-down position. On the boat Hooper spots the shark in the distance. Ordinarily, a director would ‘push in’ to emphasize a reaction. On a moving boat, it’s much more difficult. Spielberg achieves the same effect by having Richard Dreyfuss move from the back of the frame, climb a couple of steps and put himself mere inches from the camera lens, thus achieving his push in without moving the camera. Spielberg would repeat this a number of times throughout his career.

Other than a perfect script, perfect casting and perfect direction, the icing on the cake is the coming out party for John Williams and his classic score. Williams was already a veteran composer before getting the Jaws gig. He had been scoring feature films since the mid '60s, and before that he completed a decade of television work (he wrote the theme song for Gilligan’s Island!). He was already an Oscar winner for Fiddler on the Roof. But for all intents and purposes, Williams' career started with Jaws.

How would a young person view Jawstoday? It's hard to say. Summer blockbusters are buoyed now more than ever by big-scale production value. Though there's only one explosion in Jaws, Spielberg's flare for action and cinematic momentum still trumps most of anything produced today. Jaws still is and always will be a remarkable piece of celluloid - one very big 'happy accident' for Steven Spielberg.

****

Sling Blade

Despite the ornery moodiness and general public strangeness of Billy Bob Thornton, his breakout film, 'Sling Blade', still lingers as a quiet and haunting masterpiece of Southern American gothic cinema. Billy Bob willed this film into being, first by shooting a short film, then using it as leverage to make the feature version, then covering three of the main roles of writer, director and actor - a solo creative effort which still stands as one of the most uniquely personal stamps in recent film history.

Sling Blade (1996) dir. Billy Bob Thornton
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Lucas Black, Natalie Canerday, John Ritter

By Alan Bacchus

Billy Bob Thornton plays Karl Childers, who, after 30 years, is recently released from the local mental institution and forced to reintroduce himself into regular society. Karl is mentally slow and has trouble socializing with the Arkansas locals. But he gets a job fixing engines at a local body shop and meets a young kid, Frank (Lucas Black), who becomes the older brother and father figure Frank lost years before. When Karl ingratiates himself into the home of his kindly mother, Linda (Natalie Canerday), he's now forced to deal with her abusive boyfriend and monstrous redneck, Doyle (Dwight Yoakam). As Karl’s friendship with Frank deepens he realizes the danger Doyle presents to the safety of him and his mother, forcing him into a heroic act of self-sacrifice that will affect everyone’s lives, including his own.

Sling Blade essentially plays out like a modern Of Mice and Men. Billy Bob's guttural voice, forced overbite and lumbering gate visualize the gentle giant characterization of Steinbeck's seminal Lenny character. Same goes with the threat of violence that blankets Steinbeck's story. An increasing sense of dread accumulates as Sling Blade gains momentum, and the brief moment of violence which results is quietly disturbing and powerful.

Billy Bob sets the story in a peculiar place in rural Arkansas, a world he appears to love and hate. The slow pace and southern charm of the townsfolk are captured with poetic beauty and warm feelings of nostalgic memories, contrasted with the ignorant and lingering racist leanings of the old world. Dwight Yoakam, the foil for Karl, doesn't exist more than as a cancer in Frank and Linda's lives. It's a base characterization, which is boiled down as pure evil for the purposes of the film's simplistic narrative.

The young Lucas Black is a marvelous discovery. His sadness as a neglected, fatherless child living in a regressive world with little hope is instantly recognizable to both Karl and us. John Ritter as Vaughan, Linda's homosexual best friend, is played with subtlety. We admire his nobility standing up to Doyle after a drunken fight in Linda’s home. In many ways Vaughan is as much of a hero to the family as Karl is. Without Karl in Frank’s life we assume Vaughan will become the ‘in absentia’ father figure.

The other star of the film is Daniel Lanois's pitch perfect dreamlike musical score. Some may know him as a respected producer for Brian Eno, U2 and Bob Dylan, but he leaves a unique stamp on Sling Blade - a wave of melancholic southern gothic sounds, sliding guitars and ethereal bible-belt chanting.

Other than acting, Billy Bob hasn’t had much success since. His All the Pretty Horses was such a disaster professionally, personally, commercially and for the most part critically. Has anyone seen Daddy and Them with Laura Dern ‘released’ in 2001 but actually shot before All the Pretty Horses? Billy Bob does have a new film completed, Jayne Mansfield's Car, which premiered at Berlin early this year, unfortunately to humdrum reviews.

****

Beverly Hills Cop

'48 Hours', the original Eddie Murphy vehicle and his first feature film, which helped rocket him into stardom outside of his SNL fame, hasn't survived well over the years. With today's eyes it views as a tired, clichéd action-comedy that represents most of what was wrong with '80s cinema. 'Beverly Hills Cop' is in a similar genre but is a far superior film, which, unlike '48 Hours', still generates laughter and arguably shows Eddie Murphy at his absolute best.

Beverly Hills Cop (1984) dir. Martin Brest
Starring: Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Steven Berkoff, Ronnie Cox, Lisa Eilbacher

By Alan Bacchus

Opening up in Detroit, we first see Axel Foley fast-talking his way through an undercover cigarette smuggling deal, which ends with a raucous chase between an 18-wheeler truck and the entire Detroit Police Force with Axel being thrown around the back cab. It’s a fantastic action scene set to the fine '80s pop hit Neutron Dance by the Pointer Sisters. As is customary with the genre, Foley’s actions land him in hot water with his police chief, and he’s put on probation.

After the murder of his best friend, Foley goes against the chief’s orders and follows the investigation trail to Beverly Hills, where he is a fish out of water as a streetwise black man in the snobby, stuck-up and surreal world of California. Foley’s radical policing style runs counter to the conservative by-the-book attitude of the Beverly Hills cops, resulting in much hilarity along the way.

Using his street smarts, Murphy shines in his individual comic set pieces of disguise, using his quick wit and exploiting the LA-wanker naiveté to get cheap hotel rooms and nuzzle his way through the offices of the high-powered white collar criminals.

This film, made by Paramount, then headed by Michael Eisner, was produced by Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer, one of the master duos of '80s pop cinema. The trio of Beverly Hills Cop, Flashdance and Top Gun make up three of the most recognizable pop culture landmarks in '80s cinema.

Martin Brest does little to get in the way of Eddie Murphy and his act. His opening chase scene still looks great compared to newer and more technologically advanced car chase scenes. But other than that, there’s surprisingly little big-scale action. The final gun battle in the mansion is from the pre-John Woo era and is thus rudimentally choreographed.

Harold Faltermeyer’s electronic score is so recognizable and surprisingly not dated. And though I’d never go out and buy or download the soundtrack, it’s actually kind of catchy. The film itself survives just as well, showing off the best of what Eddie Murphy was to comedy and movies.

***

The Mystery Team

It’s a great success story for this trio of ambitious online sketch comedians known as the ‘Derrick Comedy Group'. For years before the film was made, the trio of actors listed below and their director, Dan Eckman, had been building a viral fan base via a series of youtubed comedy short films. On the heels of this success they shot and delivered their first feature, which was screened at Sundance. The film is a clever, though flawed, comic noir and already a bit of a minor cult classic.

The Mystery Team (2009) dir. Dan Eckman
Starring: Donald Glover, D.C. Pierson, Dominic Dierkes

By Alan Bacchus

Inspired by those kids vs. adults kids flicks of the '80s (anyone remember Cloak & Dagger with Henry Thomas and Dabney Coleman?), The Mystery Team tells the story of a trio of teenagers who solve ‘mysteries’ around town for their local community. There’s Jason, the ‘master of disguise’ (Donald Glover); Charlie, the 'strong man’ (Dominic Dierkes); and Duncan, the 'boy genius’ (D.C. Pierson). While this was a cute endeavour when they were kids, as teenagers they are seen by their peers as pathetic losers. Their latest mystery is their most challenging and dangerous, one which will test their dedication to their hobby and their bond of friendship.

It’s a very difficult film to crack. Using John Williams-esque music strings, Spielbergian camerawork, soft pro-mist filtered frames and heightened noir/gumshoe performances, the actions of the kids are seen through the filter of their fantasy bubble of self-reflexive irony. Unfortunately, most of everything comes off more like a corny parody of the Hardy Boys or Ace Ventura without Jim Carrey.

Standing out amongst the Goonies wholesomeness are a number of "fucks" and penis and pussy gags, which made me think, who is the audience for this film? This raunchiness combined with the TV sitcom ‘set-up and deliver’ comic timing are like oil and water - a tone which never evens out.

The comedy troop hangs its hat on the same simple joke for too long before delivering the real laughs. At one point the trio enter a strip club and engage in a lengthy sequence of nudity and graphic sex jokes, including a farting milk fetish. Finally, some edge we expect from a cultish film.

What started off as mostly insufferable in the first half becomes mildly tolerable in the second. A number of gut-buster laughs, specifically Donald’s drunken party experience and his burgeoning romantic relationship, score some points. It’s all a little too late though.

The Mystery Team suffers from the same problems as Reno 911 and those Broken Lizard films. There’s clearly some cohesive talent within the group, but unfortunately there are too many misses than hits. Therein lies the dilemma of sketch comedy in the feature film medium – that unquantifiable cinematic element the big screen demands and what makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

**

The Towering Inferno

I LOVE 'The Towering Inferno' - the best disaster movie ever made. Admittedly, I hadn’t seen it since childhood, and it holds up beyond my memories as a child enraptured by the fire engines. A fire engulfing the tallest building in the world; top notch, near-invisible special effects; Paul Newman and Steve McQueen occupying the same space. Plus, William Holden, Fred Astaire and OJ Simpson! 'The Towering Inferno' is a supreme guilty pleasure.

The Towering Inferno (1974) dir. John Guillerman & Irwin Allen
Starring: Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden, Faye Dunaway

By Alan Bacchus

Irwin Allen made a career out of cinematic spectacles, an entertainer at heart who, despite his kitschy subject matter, knew the movie business inside and out. Made in 1974 perhaps in response to the skyscraper battle between the World Trade Centre (1970) and the Sears Tower (1973), Allen’s story is set at the opening of the world's tallest building in San Francisco. Paul Newman plays the building's architect, Doug Roberts, who arrives to attend the lavish party arranged by the builder, Jim Duncan (William Holden). It doesn’t take long before the building engineers discover a fault in the electrical capacity of the wiring. All it takes is a spark from a cut-rate wire barely above safety code to start a fire.

Upon discovering the shoddy craftsmanship Roberts pleads to Duncan to delay the party, but with the dignitaries already getting smashed on the 135th floor, Duncan chooses to save face. The small fire soon turns into a big one, thus trapping the party-goers above it. Chief O’Halloran (Steve McQueen) commands the fire fighters with an intense workmanlike manner using his creativity and experience to get everyone to safety.

As typical with the disaster genre, the antagonist is the environment, which strikes usually in response to man’s efforts to tame Mother Nature. In this case, the fire rages and grows uncontrollably. And often the moments of jeopardy can seem like overtly manufactured contrivances resulting in a fragmented collection of conspicuous set pieces. Conflict inevitably arises between the characters at the expense of common sense relationships. Allen and Guillerman manage to avoid these trappings admirably.

Take the Richard Chamberlain character. He's the corner-cutting engineer and son-in-law to Duncan, the builder. While he’s written to be a clear antagonist, his backstory as the working-class social climber looking for appreciation from his upper-class father-in-law anchors him in the real world. It's this concerted effort toward realism that elevates this disaster pic above most others in the genre.

Steve McQueen’s immersive performance as the chief exemplifies Irwin Allen’s throughline of integrity. When McQueen arrives on the scene, he systematically goes through the procedural details of the job, retaining an unbiased professionalism and never losing his cool. A working man just doing his job, McQueen stays consistent to the very end, right up to the final shot even when we see him exit the building, nonchalantly hop into his car and drive away – like punching out of the clock.

In these final moments screenwriter Sterling Silliphant includes a blatantly expository moral message about the dangers of architects and builders erecting skyscrapers higher and higher above their reach – “You know we were pretty lucky tonight, body count's less than 200. You know, one of these days you're gonna kill ten thousand in one of these firetraps, and I'm gonna keep eating smoke and carrying out bodies…” – a statement which could have caused audience groans in 1974 but resonates prophetically in a post-9/11 world.

We shouldn't over analyze The Towering Inferno for profundities though. Instead, watch and appreciate it as a great epic adventure picture and blockbuster cinematic spectacle.

***½

Lakeview Terrace

When neighbours go bad is the theme of 'Lakeview Terrace'. Neil LaBute’s take on a familiar story has moments of the thought-provoking storytelling we expect from the director, but a couple of wrong turns lump the film into the standard throwaway thriller genre.

Lakeview Terrace (2008) dir. Neil LaBute
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, Kerry Washington

Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington play Chris and Lisa Mattson, an interracial couple that moves into a middle-to-upper class Los Angeles suburb. But it sucks to be them because from the moment they drive into their driveway they get dirty looks from their neighbour and curmudgeon of all curmudgeons, Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson). Abel is a single parent to two young kids and since his wife left him years ago, it's left him in a really, really bad mood.

Abel breaks Chris’s balls with some unsettling psychological torture. He introduces himself by pretending to carjack Chris on his driveway and later that day installs some blinding security lights to shine in their bedroom. Chris nervously shakes it off as good ol’ neighbourly eccentricities. Since Abel is a cop, Chris feels safe for a brief moment. But as the days and weeks go by it’s clear that Abel has a fundamental hatred of the couple. His behaviour escalates to more than mere nuisance. Suddenly, Chris and Lisa find their life in danger.

Neil LaBute works best when he explores the dark side of ordinary characters. Think about the heinous psychological games of his monstrous Chad character in In the Company of Men or Rachel Weisz’s manipulative Evelyn in The Shape of Things. Abel Turner fits that mold.

The fact that Samuel L. Jackson is black and someone who resents the Mattsons interracial marriage is meant to twist and prompt some kind of expectation. It reads as obvious manipulation, and the portrayal of Lisa’s father as an uptight upper class conservative wreaks of that same overly sophisticated portrayal of Sidney Poitier’s character in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The fact is, the Mattsons are saintly as hell and lacking in any edge. So the Turner vs. Mattson battle is a dichotomized good vs. evil characterization with grey areas left unexploited.

If the writers or LaBute imbued any goodness or goodwill in Abel Turner the film could have been more The House of Sand and Fog and less Pacific Heights or Single White Female. We expect LaBute to subvert around our expectations and when that doesn't happen here, it becomes even more frustrating.

And like most thrillers, if you’ve seen the trailer you’ve unfortunately seen the entire film.

**½

Prometheus

Thinking about this film tears me apart. For each of its 120 minutes, Prometheus is fascinating with a palpable feeling of cinematic momentum, leading to where we all (kind of) know it’s going to go – connecting somehow to the revered and cherished-to-many Alien franchise. Prometheus fulfills these expectations. And yet the film is filled with glaring common sense deficiencies, shamefully inadequate characterizations and a narrative flow that was perhaps meant to be artful ambiguity but comes off as just plan chaotic and confusing.

Prometheus (2012) dir. Ridley Scott
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Logan Marshall-Green, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce

By Alan Bacchus

In terms of theme, style and tone, there’s very little that connects the two films, which makes this picture even more interesting. While each of the Alien films was an action/suspense film to the core with smatterings of feminism and themes of corporate malfeasance, Alien was about that reptilian creature with two jaws stalking and killing human beings. Prometheus is a story about the search for one’s creator, the existential discovery and first connection to extraterrestrial life.

The concept, build-up and overall arc and payoff of this story are epic and cinematic. Never was I bored or not on the edge of my seat anticipating where the story will lead. Yet the details of the actions, motivations and relationships between the characters were surprisingly ill-conceived, sloppily-written and downright appalling. This oscillation between fascination and frustration is difficult to reconcile.

The metaphor of creationism to our own desires to search for our makers is front and centre. There’s little subtelty in linking theme and plot here, right down to the crucifix prominently worn by Elizabeth Shaw (Rapace), the film’s heroine, as well as the prominent artificial intelligence character played by Michael Fassbender.

The aliens are not what we expect, revealed in the opening as some kind of large humanoid introduced as our own creators on Earth, and who by the end of the film, for some unknown reason, want to destroy our planet. In 2039, after Shaw and her husband/’scientist’ Charlie Halloway (Marshall-Green) discover ancient cave paintings that could only have come from aliens in space, a team is sent away on a spaceship to find answers.

Cut to the Prometheus, the name of the ship, and its motley crew of Shaw, Holloway, lazy blue-collar pilots, cynical geologists only interested in ‘the money’ and the snarly company-woman, Meredith Vickers (Theron), whose company funded the trip. Once on the Earth-like planet they find an underground layer terraformed to house some kind of devious experiments. Experiments, I think, about the creation of life, but creationism gone wrong resulting in a whole bunch of monstrous creatures looking to kill and survive – one of whom might just be the Alien we all know and love.

I can usually forgive lazy science for the sake of entertainment, but the lapses in basic common sense in this picture are inexcusable – like why the multi-billionaire (or trillionaire) Peter Weyland (played inexplicably by a young Guy Pearce in old makeup) would hire such a disorganized, grumpy group of ragtag scientists. And why they would be kept in the dark about their mission until they are in space, years into their mission. The scientific methods employed by these so-called scientists are shockingly amateurish, certainly nothing resembling the professionalism of the characters in Alien, Aliens and the other entries in the series.

The sloppiness in the editing of the picture is even more troublesome. In the final hour, when the shit hits the fan, every character inexplicably seems to be on their own, unable to communicate with anyone else. In previous films Scott, Cameron and the other directors took care to explain the geography of their surroundings, but Scott’s pacing is so off, characters appear and disappear conveniently and without explanation. Also, large chunks of information seem to be missing.

In the end, after-theatre discussions are less about connecting the dots than trying to piece together a fractured, incomplete narrative, which feels more like a collection of scenes than a uniformly constructed story.

**½

Accident

This TIFF inclusion from 2009 finally emerges on Canadian soil for public consumption on Blu-ray via Shout Factory almost three years later. While not widely known, Soi Cheang's film has one of the most clever conceptual plot hooks since 'Infernal Affairs': a group of assassins-for-hire specialize in elaborately choreographed murders made to look like accidents, thus absolving their clients and themselves of persecution or retribution. It makes for a stimulating, small-scale thriller ripe for a bigger, more spectacular Hollywood remake.

Accident (2009) dir. Soi Cheang
Starring: Louis Koo, Richie Ren, Shui-Fan Fung, Michelle Ye, Suet Lam

By Alan Bacchus

Hong Kong star Louis Koo plays Ho Kwok-Fai, the brain of the team, a foursome not unlike something we'd see in a Mission Impossible film. They're introduced overseeing their latest orchestration: a car accident on a busy Hong Kong street. Seemingly random details, such as a rogue balloon flying in the air covering up a street camera and a blinding flash of reflected light from a mirror, combine to create a perfectly constructed domino effect that results in their pre-planned fake accident. But on their latest job, when a bus seemingly runs out of control, killing one of Ho's colleagues, Ho suspects he might be the target of someone else's accident orchestration.

Director Soi Cheang keeps the action and plotting contained, making Accident a relatively small picture and focusing in on Ho's character and his obsession, paranoia and isolation. Not unlike Gene Hackman's Harry Caul from The Conversation or Leonardo Di Caprio in Inception, Ho's life of clandestine deception has altered his perception of reality. This boils over into a paranoia-fuelled search for his assassin. He rents an apartment directly below his suspect, maps out his floor plan on his ceiling and listens in on his telephone conversations. Doubt and confusion create an obsessed mania akin to the destruction of Hackman's apartment in The Conversation or Guy Pearce's tattooed notes in Memento.

Louis Koo's performance is delightfully intense and focused, portraying Ho as a broken man plagued by the nightmarish memories of his wife's fatal car accident (or potential murder). Koo's attire complements this intensity, as he wears constricting clothes, a form-fitting jacket and large, industrial sniper glasses.

Cheang imbues a distinct visual palette using long lenses almost exclusively to convey a voyeuristic feel and visually compressing the world around Ho.

If anything, where Cheang leaves us short is in detailing the procedural aspects of his characters' schemes, something a Hollywood remake, as made by Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese, would map out and visualize with greater fastidiousness and care. But the work presented here is still an intriguing conceptual film that stands on its own, a sharp little gem to find in the glut of other new home video releases.

The Shout Factory Blu-ray features a decent making-of documentary and curiously, a faulty 2:35:1 anamorphic transfer, which appears as a vertically stretched 16x9 full frame aspect ratio. It's difficult to say if this fault applies to all the Blu-rays in circulation, however.

***½

This review first appeared on Exclaim.ca

Shallow Grave

A sublime introduction to a consistently entertaining filmmaker in a genre (contemporary film noir) used by other great filmmakers (Coen Bros, Wachowski Bros – OK, debatable) as their first foray into feature films. With Boyle’s high energy style to burn, John Hodge’s cynical and laceratingly funny script and Ewan McGregor’s career launching first performance, Shallow Grave fits in well with the overachieving quality of other 1990s indie classics like Sex, Lies and Videotape, Hard Eight and Reservoir Dogs.

Shallow Grave (1994) dir. Danny Boyle
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccelston

We can’t help but watch Shallow Grave now without viewing it as a sort of testing ground for this filmmaking team’s more popular, successful and pop-culturally memorable second film, Trainspotting. From the opening first person confessionary voiceover to Leftfield's foot-tapping, head-bobbing club music we know we’re in the head of Danny Boyle and his writing partner, John Hodge. Like the four Edinburgh lads in Trainspotting, writer John Hodge introduces his three leads as a group of self-obsessed, slightly annoying Scottish hipsters whom we come to love for their forthright, don’t give a fuck attitude on life.

Here they’re interviewing prospective flatmates to make a foursome in their spacious top floor apartment complex. McGregor plays a lowly tabloid writer, Alex Law; Kerry Fox is a demure but alluring doctor; and Eccelston plays David a workaholic lawyer. However assholish it may be, we can't help but indentify with the obsessive, condescending critique of the roll call of losers and weirdos showing up to be considered as a flatmate. They eventually find their mate in a handsome, mysterious gentleman whose cool demeanor easily breaks through the wall of insecurity of the threesome. However, it doesn't take long before the trio find him dead of an overdose in his bed. Before they can call the cops they find a briefcase full of money, ready for the taking.

It wouldn't be a movie if they didn't take the money, dismember and bury the body in a ‘shallow grave’, and agree to keep quiet before splitting the cash. Eventually, a pair of Scottish hoodlums come looking for the money, resulting in a violent confrontation, which sends the normally meek David into a psychotic downward spiral into oblivion.

Borrowing the same darkly comic tone of, say, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry, Shallow Grave revels in the despicable. The dismemberment of the body, for instance, like in Hitchcock’s films, makes for an absurdly humorous set piece, starting with the trio shopping for tools in the local hardware store to the completion of the dirty deed, unfortunately randomly assigned to David.

Danny Boyle’s visual panache is front and centre, laying the groundwork for his distinct visual palette of the pre-28 Days Later period of his career. Wideangle lenses and off kilter, portrait-style compositions expressively place his characters as mere pawns in their environment.

In hindsight, Shallow Grave and its characters are a product of their environment, the post-Thatcher world of decay and extreme capitalist individualism and selfishness, a point articulated by Boyle in The Criterion Collection liner notes. There’s no doubt the cruelty enacted on Alex’s character is a comeuppance for the society’s shameless First World hubris.

But this is all periphery to the delightful plot machinations and youthful filmmaking style of Boyle and the bunch, skewering the expectations of stodgy British cinema as much as anything else.

***½

Shallow Grave is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Goodfellas

What are the best uses of voiceover in film? Terrence Malick's 'Badlands' or 'Days of Heaven' perhaps, or 'The Magnificent Ambersons' maybe? The use of omniscient narration describing off-screen action, motivation and characters' inner thoughts can be seen as a lazy tool for screenwriters. But when it's done right, it can be a magical thing. Few can argue the tremendous effect of the voiceover from 'Goodfellas', one of the great pop cultural landmark films of our time.

Goodfellas(1990) dir. Martin Scorsese
Starring: Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino

By Alan Bacchus

Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas is a return to the streetwise, low-level gangster characters of Raging Bull and Mean Streets. It served as kind of an antidote to the Godfather effect, that is the glorification and romanticism of the mafia as charming, well dressed pseudo bourgeois aristocrats. Scorsese's gangsters are working class bullies who use the tantalizing temptations of capitalism to the extreme, living a life free of all control.

The opening scene in 1970, finding the body of Billy Bats still alive in the trunk of Henry Hill's car, is a classic, parachuting us into the narrative, then doubling back to continue the scene midway into the picture. And it’s not just an arbitrary scene, but the key decision in the film by the main characters, which ultimately spelled their downfall. After this prelude, Scorsese's hero, Henry Hill, opens up the story with one of the best lines - "As far back as I can remember I've always wanted to be a gangster". It begins the amusing, violent, grotesque and bystantine epic story of the New York/New Jersey mafia in the '70s and '80s.

Henry Hill's voiceover provides an intimate entry into the world so familiar in movies and TV, yet it's completely fresh and authentic. In the opening act, Henry moves from child wannabe to a young hotshot hoodlum who ingratiates himself deep into the mafia. While he surrounds himself with two of the most ruthless gangsters we've ever seen in film - Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy De Vito (Joe Pesci) - watch closely and you'll see Henry characterized as an outsider who never really gets his hands dirty in the dirtiest parts of the business. With the death of Billy Bats, for instance, Scorsese is careful to show Hill's shocked reaction to Jimmy and Tommy's violent beating. This allows the audience to see the world through the eyes of a man with a conscience, and however delusional and drugged out he might be, he's the film's everyman.

Back to the voiceover...the great moments occur early in the film. Take the introduction of Karen. In the restaurant Scorsese switches from Henry’s voiceover to Karen’s voiceover, which comes completely out of left field. Yet, as cut by Thelma Schoonmaker and the sound editors, the transition is seamless. The voiceover reads not like inner monologue but documentary interviews. This style ties in so wonderfully in the end during the inspired moment when Henry Hill suddenly breaks the fourth wall while on the stand and starts talking to the camera. As if the entire movie were part of his confession to breaking the two cardinal rules told to him by Jimmy Conway, "Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut".

As much as the film is visceral and violent, Scorsese's mix of violence with humour has never been done better. Again, the Billy Bats killing is brutal. But watch the transition into the next scene, the riotously funny dinner scene with Scorsese’s mother, a contrast which keeps the audience oscillated between these two extremes - What is it, a paw? A hoof?

Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing compresses the time brilliantly, rendering an ambitious 20-year narrative into a elegant flow of image and sound that washes over the viewer like a bedtime story. One of the best scenes is the Bamboo Lounge sequence. In a matter of 60 seconds the restaurant is partnered with the mob, they make tons of money and then it’s a losing venture and is being torched.

But when they want to, Scorsese and Schoonmaker slow down the pace to highlight the key moments in Henry's journey. The best scene, and one of greatest ever set pieces in motion picture history, is the day that leads up to Henry's capture. After spending almost two hours showing the course of 20 years, Scorsese throws a microscope on one particular day in Henry's life. It's a thrilling sequence that shows Henry giving instructions to his brother over the phone on how to make pasta while being filled with paranoia and watching the skies for a helicopter that may or may not be spying on him. He then drives around town delivering guns for Jimmy Conway and oversees a drug deal while coking himself out to the max. In this one great scene, Scorsese sums up the lifestyle of Henry Hill playing on the edge at all times. He's a hair's breath away from being put away for life and this makes Goodfellas the greatest gangster film ever made.

****

The Witches of Eastwick

Time warp back to 1987. One of the higher profile summer movies of that year was the Witches of Eastwick, based on the 1984 novel by John Updike. It was a lavish production, very expensive for its time, with some '80s dream casting of Nicholson, Sarandon, Cher and Pfieffer. It brought decent numbers ($63 million), which in 1987 ranked it as the 10th highest grossing movie of the year. Looking back, the film is mostly forgettable - a silly horror/sex/comedy, which ironically is neither funny nor horrific, and features no sex or nudity. What cinema fans should take from this film is its place in the body of work of the great Aussie director, George Miller.

The Witches of Eastwick (1987) dir. George Miller
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Cher, Michelle Pfieffer, Veronica Cartwright

By Alan Bacchus

For George Miller, known best for his Mad Max trilogy, it was his first feature in Hollywood. His first taste for La La Land was his segment for Twilight Zone: The Movie, arguably the best episode, a remake of Terror at 20,000 Feet starring John Lithgow.

But with Eastwick, it was his first crack at the money, toys and stars of Hollywood in the feature realm. Those familiar with Miller's work will recognize his trademark visual flare – a constantly moving camera with expressive crash dollies and creative compositions, as well as lavish production design reminiscent of his later work on Babe: Pig in the City.

Unfortunately, other than these technical elements, there’s not much of a story to latch onto. The trio of lovely ladies, dressed in full-on big curly '80s hair, play three sullen single gals who fall victim to the seduction of Daryl Van Horn, a handsome ponytailed stranger played by Jack Nicholson. It’s not overt, but the ability of Van Horn, despite his chauvinistic attitude, is to easily swoon the women with a power presumably derived from Satan himself. Soon the ladies form a sort of coven, and they don’t really do much other than hang with Daryl in his luxurious mansion. When the local cynic, played by Veronica Cartwright, is killed off, the coven suspect Daryl is the cause, which leads to a violent and over-the-top finale featuring some cooky effects from The Thing's Rob Bottin.

I still can’t be sure if The Witches of Eastwick is a feminist or anti-feminist film. In the beginning the ladies desperately desire to find men in their lives to replace their divorced or dead former husbands, and the one who comes along to claim them happens to be the devil himself. The decadence of the '80s is front and centre, with Van Horn portrayed as the ideal '80s bachelor – a successful businessman with all the luxurious fixings, including a Mercedes, mansion, Matisses, et al. Naughty sexual innuendos and double entendres fly back and forth associating sexual conquest with business and money. Religion is mostly kept out of the hijinks, with the exception of Veronica Cartwright’s character, who is characterized as the Evangelical zealot, but who unfortunately gets killed off for her beliefs. Sounds pretty misogynistic to me.

There isn’t much about '80s cinema that is memorable. If anything, it’s the quality of cinematography from the likes of Vilmos Zsigmond. And Zsigmond’s work on Eastwick is typically lush, a beautified look with dense and textured frames and full of rich colours. The '80s produced some memorable film scores as well. And Eastwick has John Williams at his best, turning in a romp of a score, which skips along complementing the tone of fun naughtiness.

But if you're looking for '80s nostalgia, stick with Wall Street or Back to the Future. The Witches of Eastwick is for George Miller, John Williams and Vilmos Zsigmond fans only.

**