Sunday, August 6, 2017
Guess Who's Coming To Dinner 1967
I hadn't seen this in probably 20 years and avoided rewatching it because I didn't want to spoil my positive memory of it. Thank goodness that its still a top tier piece of Hollywood cinema that, while considered self-righteous and cutesy in its day, seems morally refreshing and artistically tasteful now. Stanley Kramer's film (masterpiece?) is probably as topical as it ever was but the sincerity and honesty redeems it, totally elevating and separating it from even recent films about racial or interracial themes because its about humanity and erasing ignorant lines of division. The masterstroke is Kramer's directing keeps a tight tension throughout the story but its not a brooding or acerbic film that will spoil your good mood. There may be some humor or stylistic choices that are dated or approach sentimentality, but nothing mawkish. Guess Who serves as a good snapshot of the lighter and more evolved side of cinema and culture at a very trying point in history. The emotional bravery and highly advanced craftsmanship of the film might be lost on young audiences who warmed up to the first biracial president, but today's adults will recognize how far we've come and how much has yet to change. Guess Who is still a bit of a romantic dream, but its also inspired the change that made it less of a fantasy and more a preview or call to peaceful racial harmony in American life.
Children of Men 2008
This was my first watch and I was both pleasantly surprised and rewarded with a socially progressive & technically ambitious low budget scifi film but also a little soured with its pretentiousness. Children of Men is full of fabulous camerawork and cinematography that is a bit overstated and distracts from many moments. Instead of dramatic they are so aesthetically pleasing or grand that they eclipse the acting or we are pulled out of the reality of the story. Its forgivable only because this is more of a preposterous, symbolic genre movie than seriousness high drama. Its even comedic and campy at times and only a little bit excessive in its kitsch and lightheartedness. Its a brisk, serious-enough and thoughtful diversion from the post-apocalyptic adventure films of its period. I highly recommend it as a fine middlebrow exercise in commercial art filmmaking.
Friday, August 4, 2017
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 - 1986
Hey! I took a few months off to watch a ton of films on Amazon Prime and focus on the new Twin Peaks. I'm reinvigorated at least when it comes to reviewing but I'm not really in a movie-watching mood lately, but I found time to revisit Tobe Hooper's infamous sequel for the lunatics over at Cannon. The film has always been a sore spot for me because I can never shake my initial negative opinion of it, but I warmed up big time on my last watch.
TCM2 wasn't the commercial or artistic success Cannon and Hooper wanted but its grown into one of the biggest cult horror sequels in these last 30 years. Horror fans have a great nostalgia for those campy, excessive, yuppie-inspired horror films of the 80s. There are some real gems like Night of the Demons and Return of the Living Dead, but I find a lot of them to be overrated and inferior to the 70s films that inspired them. TCM2 is probably the most grand, ambitious and genuinely bizarre, but it lacks the entertainment value of the others. That would be ok if it wasn't so entertained with itself and full of flat moments. But something so chaotic is also full of redeeming bits and was probably doomed to be hit-and-miss, right? Wrong. In fact, Hooper clearly patterned this spoof of his gritty arthouse-meets-grindhouse classic after the films of his Poltergeist collaborater Steven Spielberg. Hooper was one of the earliest to embrace Spielberg's aesthetic of overly-directed, free-for-all camp thrills and he retains a lot of his own weird style, but there is only one Spielberg (as 40 years of constant imitation in the mainstream has shown us).
There's a disappointing cynicism to Hooper's return to the intellectual property that made him. Coming off the major failures of Lifeforce and Invaders from Mars, TCM2 was a safe but desperate risk for Hooper. He didn't have much interest in making it, as he was originally the producer only and again his 80s career was an attempt at big budget commercialism. TCM2 at times feels more like The Goonies or Raiders of the Lost Ark than anything horror, which is why its so unique and beloved by 80s kids. But thats not what it should've been. It has the tone and style down, but it lacks the carefully crafted script and direction that made those films immense crowd-pleasers.
TCM2 is essentially a spoof of TCM1 that subverts every expectation, which is cool but it doesn't have much intelligence behind its jokes. It recreates so many moments from the original and makes cute in-jokes that only movie buffs would get, but these payoffs are often lazy and too nerdy for their own good. Characters often echo events from the first film and mock them to point out its misunderstood ironic humor. So the film ends up an epilogue or winking deconstruction of TCM, what Young Frankenstein was to the James Whale classic. But it would've been smarter to meet it halfway like Bride of Frankenstein by creating a narrative we can take somewhat seriously. To its credit, TCM2 is modeled on Bride as Leatherface falls in love and the fate of the villains is answered, but its so drastically different in tone and logic that you can't place this film in the chronology of the original, which is why we've suffered through endless sequels when TCM2 could've wrapped it up perfectly.
The story takes a backseat to the jokes which are more conceptually clever than well-executed. Themes from the original are underlined but not expanded. I guess Hooper wanted to de-mystify and kill the characters, not invest anything else in them. I think it was a big mistake. It works somewhat, but there isn't enough horror to support the humor as the humor served the horror in Part 1. But the film has plenty of great ideas. Leatherface's sexual crisis is fun and could've been poignant and Dennis Hopper is the film's highlight as a stereotypical Western hero out for revenge. But nothing comes of this stuff besides a cheap laugh or two because Hooper loads the film with excessive FX, sounds, colorful lighting and stuff that distracts and bogs down rather than intensifies mood. He's trying to be Richard Donner and Zemeckis, but he totally misses the method behind their cinema. I actually think the film would've been a brilliant classic if Hopper and the female lead were the slapstick-y focus of the action, given more sympathy and motivation, leaving Leatherface and his family as the dead-pan, sincere monsters to be mocked. The humor is just way off.
But you gotta admire the inventiveness and weirdness that Tobe Hooper brings to this thing. TCM2 is highly stylized as a cool little time capsule of late 80s Austin, TX culture and the polished but "foreign" Cannon production style. Its full of gore, a terrible musical score, oddball extras, way too much 80s neon and plenty of lame 80s dad humor. In my review of Dan Aykroyd's ill-fated "Nothing But Trouble", I mentioned the similarities to TCM2 and Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China. You get to witness the transition from gritty exploitative art to big, mass appeal pop entertainment. These films don't work as either but are interesting hybrids that are grandfathers of the scatter-brained, trying-to-sell-out genre fanboy epics Hollywood has been making in the 2010s. TCM2 is more admirable than those because its such a coke-fueled bad experiment that would never be greenlit today. And its at least a sequl that stands apart from the original and other sequels of its genre. Tobe Hooper probably helped inspire Evil Dead 2 and I think its the better sequel, although it doesn't have half the fame. TCM2 gets my respect but is it a great sequel? I still can't tell.
TCM2 wasn't the commercial or artistic success Cannon and Hooper wanted but its grown into one of the biggest cult horror sequels in these last 30 years. Horror fans have a great nostalgia for those campy, excessive, yuppie-inspired horror films of the 80s. There are some real gems like Night of the Demons and Return of the Living Dead, but I find a lot of them to be overrated and inferior to the 70s films that inspired them. TCM2 is probably the most grand, ambitious and genuinely bizarre, but it lacks the entertainment value of the others. That would be ok if it wasn't so entertained with itself and full of flat moments. But something so chaotic is also full of redeeming bits and was probably doomed to be hit-and-miss, right? Wrong. In fact, Hooper clearly patterned this spoof of his gritty arthouse-meets-grindhouse classic after the films of his Poltergeist collaborater Steven Spielberg. Hooper was one of the earliest to embrace Spielberg's aesthetic of overly-directed, free-for-all camp thrills and he retains a lot of his own weird style, but there is only one Spielberg (as 40 years of constant imitation in the mainstream has shown us).
There's a disappointing cynicism to Hooper's return to the intellectual property that made him. Coming off the major failures of Lifeforce and Invaders from Mars, TCM2 was a safe but desperate risk for Hooper. He didn't have much interest in making it, as he was originally the producer only and again his 80s career was an attempt at big budget commercialism. TCM2 at times feels more like The Goonies or Raiders of the Lost Ark than anything horror, which is why its so unique and beloved by 80s kids. But thats not what it should've been. It has the tone and style down, but it lacks the carefully crafted script and direction that made those films immense crowd-pleasers.
TCM2 is essentially a spoof of TCM1 that subverts every expectation, which is cool but it doesn't have much intelligence behind its jokes. It recreates so many moments from the original and makes cute in-jokes that only movie buffs would get, but these payoffs are often lazy and too nerdy for their own good. Characters often echo events from the first film and mock them to point out its misunderstood ironic humor. So the film ends up an epilogue or winking deconstruction of TCM, what Young Frankenstein was to the James Whale classic. But it would've been smarter to meet it halfway like Bride of Frankenstein by creating a narrative we can take somewhat seriously. To its credit, TCM2 is modeled on Bride as Leatherface falls in love and the fate of the villains is answered, but its so drastically different in tone and logic that you can't place this film in the chronology of the original, which is why we've suffered through endless sequels when TCM2 could've wrapped it up perfectly.
The story takes a backseat to the jokes which are more conceptually clever than well-executed. Themes from the original are underlined but not expanded. I guess Hooper wanted to de-mystify and kill the characters, not invest anything else in them. I think it was a big mistake. It works somewhat, but there isn't enough horror to support the humor as the humor served the horror in Part 1. But the film has plenty of great ideas. Leatherface's sexual crisis is fun and could've been poignant and Dennis Hopper is the film's highlight as a stereotypical Western hero out for revenge. But nothing comes of this stuff besides a cheap laugh or two because Hooper loads the film with excessive FX, sounds, colorful lighting and stuff that distracts and bogs down rather than intensifies mood. He's trying to be Richard Donner and Zemeckis, but he totally misses the method behind their cinema. I actually think the film would've been a brilliant classic if Hopper and the female lead were the slapstick-y focus of the action, given more sympathy and motivation, leaving Leatherface and his family as the dead-pan, sincere monsters to be mocked. The humor is just way off.
But you gotta admire the inventiveness and weirdness that Tobe Hooper brings to this thing. TCM2 is highly stylized as a cool little time capsule of late 80s Austin, TX culture and the polished but "foreign" Cannon production style. Its full of gore, a terrible musical score, oddball extras, way too much 80s neon and plenty of lame 80s dad humor. In my review of Dan Aykroyd's ill-fated "Nothing But Trouble", I mentioned the similarities to TCM2 and Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China. You get to witness the transition from gritty exploitative art to big, mass appeal pop entertainment. These films don't work as either but are interesting hybrids that are grandfathers of the scatter-brained, trying-to-sell-out genre fanboy epics Hollywood has been making in the 2010s. TCM2 is more admirable than those because its such a coke-fueled bad experiment that would never be greenlit today. And its at least a sequl that stands apart from the original and other sequels of its genre. Tobe Hooper probably helped inspire Evil Dead 2 and I think its the better sequel, although it doesn't have half the fame. TCM2 gets my respect but is it a great sequel? I still can't tell.
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