Speed Racer (2008)

 

If ever the phrase "eye candy" was appropriate, this would be the movie to apply it to. This is a cotton candy, lollypop version of a cartoon, that assaults you with color and and motion. There are visual gags in every frame and it would be easy to be overwhelmed by the images. If you have seen those notifications about flashing lights and rapid images before some streaming show or movie, none of them compare with the bombardment that you will experience here. 

When this movie arrived in theaters in May of 2008, it should have been a big hit. It came from the Wachowski Brothers, who had made the visually stunning "The Matrix" just a decade before, and it featured state of the art photography with special cameras to create clear images at multiple depths in the frame. There is an innovative style that is clever and very funny, and the film is based on a well known anime that spans decades of fans from the 1960s up to the Cartoon Network of the day. Instead, it tanked at the box office and was critically dismissed as being incoherent and headache inducing. 

The film has however been embraced by the gamers, anime fanboys and computer nerds of the world. It seems to have gained cult status and I would say that it's original style and sense of humor was misunderstood and it has become clear that people are catching on.  The camera is in constant motion in the races, which look like they are filmed as a video game with real people in the place of gaming avatars. The cartoon nature of the film is exaggerated as the colors pop off the screen and the acting of the characters gets more and more outrageous. In addition to the racing sequences, there are fight scenes that feature kung fu, WWF style wrestling and machine guns. Oh Yea, there is a kid with a chimp as a companion, inserting himself in situations that are comic book ridiculous and also a lot of fun. 

The look of the movie could be seen as an evolutionary step in film design. With computers, the early special effects of "Tron" and "The Last Starfighter" have given way to something much more complicated and reflective of imagination rather than replicating real world environments. The color palate of the film feels like a step taken from Warren Beatty's 1990 Dick Tracy, with singular colors contrasted with darker or more complex backgrounds. 

The costumes accentuate those contrasts and make the characters stand out. Also, the images of the characters, especially the villain, scroll across other scenes as they speak, suggesting constant activity, there is rarely a static moment in the film. The layering of scenes on top of one another makes the artifice even more noticeable. Of course gravity, physics and common sense are not part of the movie, it is a cartoon presented as live action, and it looks cartoony. 

There are a bucketload of familiar faces in the film, John Goodman, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon, Matthew Fox, and Hirouki Sanada, who I just saw in John Wick 4 and Bullet Train in the last year. Emile Hirsh stars as Speed and he has the right look and a little bit of charm to carry it off. In the late 2010s he was the next big thing. He still works and is in several movies I have blogged about, but he is not as prominent as he once was. Maybe this film's failure to launch cooled off his career a bit. That would be too bad because he was the right fit and the movie deserves to be re-evaluated. 

We went to see this at an Alamo Drafthouse screening, and it would be easy to tell who the audience was that made this film a cult object of affection. Sorry for the stereotypes, but if you get an image in your head of gamers and anime fans, in their 30s, that is probably accurate. Our screening was packed, and 80% of those in attendance looked like they had just put down their controllers and Mountain Dew, for a few minutes to enjoy this film. Everyone was laughing and clapping at the film, we all had a wonderfull time, the eye strain was completely worth it. 

 

John Wick 4

 

Much like the title character, the film of John Wick 4 is bulletproof. No one is going to care that the physics in this film are nearly as wack as those in the "Fast and Furious" franchise. No one is going to care that hundreds of people dancing at a club will ignore multiple murders among them on the dance floor and keep dancing, until it is time for the lead character to make his escape. No one is going to wonder why every law enforcement agency in the world is ignoring the greatest serial killer on a spree in history. We want to see the damage that John Wick can do with a gun, a sword, hell even nunchucks. Let the mayhem commence and pass the popcorn. 

The original John Wick was a revenge story, centered around the theft of a car and the murder of a puppy. It had the advantages of being fresh, bloody and reminding us why we enjoyed Keanu Reeves in the first place. John Wick Chapter Two is a Universe building, action sequel that indulges our fetishes' for cars and guns and lots of hand to hand death.   John Wick Chapter Three Parabellum does the best job of taking characters and giving them something to do, and giving us interesting characters, who are both opposed to Wick and allied with him. John Wick 4 extends the choregraphed mayhem effectively, but falls flat on creating new characters, with one major exception. In my ranking, this would be the weakest entry of the films, but that does not mean it is unworthy, it simply means that you need to keep a little perspective. 

Of the things that this film has going for it, the first would be the incredible stunt team. There are four or five sequences, where the technical level of excellence just keeps climbing. I thought that they had peaked with the scene at the Arc de Triomphe roundabout. The cars move in a ballet of collision and surprise. [Once again, the fact that anyone, much less our lead who has multiple hits, survives one of these moments is irrelevant]. Yet right behind that fantastic sequence is the best fight sequence of the film, and maybe the second best in the series. The stairs at the  Sacré-Cœur’s church are many and high, and John has to get by dozens of assailants, at least twice. Sure there is going to be plenty of CGI enhancement, but it looks so much more like a practical shoot than some other moments in the film, and that sells it even more. 

There are three significant new characters introduced in the film. The Marquis played by Bill Skarsgård, is an effete antagonist who is never very interesting and never feels threatening. Donnie Yen, a martial arts film legend, is on the other hand, compelling in almost every scene he is in, even when he is simply having something to eat while everyone else is getting their asses handed to the. Shamier Anderson is a character called a tracker, but he refers to himself as nobody. "Nobody" as a character idea is ok, but there is so much ambiguity about him that we never care that much about the resolution of his story, his dog on the other hand is awesome. 

The late Lance Reddick gets a nice tribute slide before the film plays, and his character is only in the movie for a brief amount of time. Lawrence Fishburne is in the movie because his character was in two previous movies and that's about it. Hiroyuki Sanada, another martial arts star, plays a part very similar to his character in "Bullet Train". I am always happy to see Clancy Brown in a movie, "Rawhide" is a welcome sight to this Blue Blaze Irregular. If the characters had gotten half the detail that is given to imagined culture of "The Table", the nearly three hours that this film takes up might be a little more reasonable. We have to go down a rabbit hole of crime families, rituals, rivals, and "ancient ways", just to get to the third act. And still most of this is rushed by so there can be another action sequence. John Wick 4 sometimes feels like a better version of "Shoot 'Em Up". It is better, but after a modestly paced openings few minutes, everyone can see the roller coaster highs and drops that are coming. 

I know this sounds like I am down on the film. This is a terrific action piece that will satisfy fans of the series, and I think the story arc is sufficiently closed for us. Keanu continues to generate good will with these movies, it just doesn't feel fresh to me, and after having had three previous servings of the main course, it might have been nice to have a different entrée, rather than just putting a better sauce of the one we have already had. 

TCM Film Festival Dreams 2023

You always have to make some hard choices at a festival, because you can't see everything. Amanda has a different agenda than me on Friday Morning, but otherwise, we will see most of these together. House of Wax may fall by the wayside if Allison can come down to the hotel on Friday night for late dinner. You will get plenty of updates here when the Festival begins. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975 "Rollerball"

 

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

Rollerball

This was one of the films from my original project back in 2010. I was writing about films from the summers of the 1970s, my formative years, and this movie came out the same week that "Jaws" hit the marketplace. In spite of mixed reviews, I suspect it would have been a big hit except that it was overshadowed by the competition. I chose the film this week because it was referenced in a television series I am currently streaming. "Daisy Jones and the Six" is a fictional look at a 70s era band, along the lines of Fleetwood Mac. Two of the band members are obsessed with "Rollerball", actually calling it brilliant, and they are on their way to see it for the eighth time. That fictional enthusiasm was enough for me to go back and watch the film again for Throwback Thursday. 

When I went back to my original post, I was happy to see that it expressed my feelings about the film almost exactly as I was experiencing them this week. You should read that post here. The strength of the film is in the design of the game the movie is based on. The combination of roller derby, soccer and football plus the acceptance of violence that goes well beyond that in hockey and rugby, is a great show that will hypnotize the masses. The production design of the film starts off with a bang by showing off the track, the ball, the teams with their motorcycles and some futuristic fonts that seem to be realistic from the perspective of time. 

The color schemes of the teams are the only distinguishing element. I guess a logo might imply more choice than the proles are entitled to. The combination of the high tech track and the traditional fugue music sets an ominous tone that we will feel every time the game commences. I thought the teams individual struts on the track as they were entering also sets a martial tone and a sense of inevitable clash. 

Houston, the team that Johnathan E (James Caan) plays for, has the simple Houston stride, an in-line synchronized march that is direct, elegant and feels very determined. Other teams seem to have been more artistic, for example the Tokyo team has an arrow wedge that looks fearsome, and as they break out of the formation, they drop down to the center of the rink in a kamikaze style flourish.  The film comes to life the most in the three matches that we see. Of course as the rules are being changed to force Johnathan out of the game, the clashes become more elaborate, violent and ultimately deadly. 

Obviously, the script and the director were trying to say something about the dangers of corporate control over the world. Unfortunately, there are few places other than the game and Johnathan's personal life, that we see the stilting effect of corporate decision making. There is a sequence where Johnathan attempts to discover how corporate decisions are made. His wife had been taken away from him in what he sees as an arbitrary action. He wants to know why. 

The computer system that has replaced all the books, is limited in access and intelligence. There are not really librarians, just clerks who try to direct people but have no ability to find information on their own. It's as if Wikipedia had to be accessed through a human, who did not have any understanding of the information they control access to. Later in the film, Johnathan goes to Geneva, to the main data storage facility. If the director had spent less time at the idyllic party of drug addled executives, there might have been an opportunity to do some interesting exposition with the main computer "Zero". A video of the corporate wars or a quick summary of the current social conditions might have made Johnathan's individualism seem mor meaningful. Instead, there is a mildly amusing Ralph Richardson, playing word games with an A.I. that has a defective memory. It is a lost opportunity to do the thing the film purports to do. 

Early on there was a moment that I thought could be contrasted to the world of today in an interesting way. As the corporate anthem is being played before the first game, all the players are lined up obediently standing at attention, but Johnathan is clenching his fist and lightly pounding it against his leg. It is certainly not the act of defiance that kneeling on the sidelines or staying in the locker room for the anthem would have been. It sems the smallest act of individuality that could exist in the corporate world. 

Throughout the film, Director Norman Jewison uses classical music to set the mood, in a way that seems to deliberately invite comparison to  "Clockwork Orange." The use of some interesting architecture in West Germany (at the time), which is modernistic in the way a futurist might have suggested does the same thing. 

As I said earlier, my original post expresses my feelings about this film perfectly, but I hope that the few extra note here made your visit worthwhile. 

 

Shazam! Fury of the Gods

 

Frankly, they would have had to screw this up really badly for me to lose my enthusiasm for the character as created by the first film in the series. Fortunately, they not only failed to screw it up, they found a very reasonable approach to extending the story and then they cast some new characters that just tell you, the film is going to work. I can't say it is perfection, but I can say I had a great time, and enjoyed the movie almost as much as the first film. "Fury of the Gods" turns out to be a blast and a worthy successor to Shazam!. 

In the original film, our young hero is struggling to find a family that he lost. The gut punch of his Mother's brush off was one of the darker moments in an otherwise sunny story about a kid who gets superpowers. Billy this time is having a different crisis with family, he is struggling to hold on to the newly acquired group that has become his family, and to paraphrase Princess Leia, " The more you tighten your grip... the more that will slip through your fingers." A family of heroes working together is great, but each foster brother and sister needs to be their own person, and Billy gets frustrated as he tries to keep everyone together and antagonizes Freddy, his foster brother and best friend, and alienates Mary, who earned admission to Cal Tech but has sacrificed a dream for the core group of heroes. There is still fun to be had as we are learning of these troubles. The opening rescue on the bridge is only halfway successful and the Lair in the Rock of Eternity gets explored with some funny moments. Eugene's quest to map all the doors that lead to and from the rock give us plenty to laugh at. One of the best reminders that we are dealing with children in the form of adult heroes, is the utilization of "Steve", the magic pen that records their words on parchment, but does so literally and as a result we get to be reminded that these are kids. When Helen Mirren's character, Hespera, reads the note out loud, it is a moment to relish.

Mirren and Lucy Liu as Kalypso, are the daughters of Atlas, one of the gods whose powers, the kids have been imbued with. Their desire to reclaim the powers and inflict punishment on the human race for taking the powers in the first place, becomes the driving force of the plot. It does get a bit convoluted when n additional McGuffin, "The Seed of Life" is introduced. It is relatively easy to follow the plot, but there are many permutations that result from this device. For example, the city of Philadelphia, gets encased in an impenetrable dome,  and a plethora of monsters from mythology get released on the town. One of the things I liked is that the production design between the two films remains consistent when the monsters are a part of the story. Yes, it is a CGI sellout in the last part of the film, but at least it is interesting. Oh, and Unicorns are terrifying not cute. The biggest laugh I had in the film comes when a product placement slogan gets used in a non-PG form by youngest sister Darla.

For the most part, the film is family friendly. The bad guys are easy to identify, the monsters are scary but the violence is not particularly explicit, and there are some fun family themes that run through the movie. When the foster parents get in on the action, there are also some heartwarming moments, including one that addresses Billy's big fear about his new family, that he will lose them when he ages out of the system. However, there are some dark moments that might caution families a little bit to make sure their kids are prepared for some bad things that happen. A new character, who is supportive, friendly and easy for us to like by the way he connects with Freddy, is dispatched in an unpleasant manner and the tone seems at odds with the rest of the film. The climax of the film has a few moments of remorse and sadness, that you will find in a lot of films. We have an apparent loss that ultimately gets repaired, but for a few moments it feels more real than some of those Disney fake outs. 

Zach Levi is terrific as Shazam!, the hero at the center of the story. Asher Angel, who plays Billy, the kid version of the main hero, is appropriately angsty, but as he has gotten older, his immaturity will be a harder sell. Jack Dylan Green, who is Freddy, has to carry a pretty big emotional load for the film and he is clearly capable of doing so. I also thought that Rachel Zegler as Anne, was pretty effective as a love interest and as a fulcrum in the fight with Hespera and Kalypso. Djimon Hounsou returns as the wizard who gave the powers to Billy in the first place, and his interactions with Freddy during their time imprisoned by the sisters, was a lot of fun. To be honest, everyone here seems to know what this movie is and how to play their parts. The director David Sandberg, and the writing team, stick to the goal of the first film, let's have fun with this and worry about how it all fits in with the DC Universe, some other time. We do get a couple of references to the world of heroes and meta humans, but they are mostly just for fun rather than trying to build a bigger story.

I think superhero/comic book burnout is a real thing. There is a point at which, the audience will stop caring about the overarching end of the world scenarios that keep coming up. If comic book movies are going to get through this period, it will be because of films like this and "Guardians of the Galaxy", where the fun and laughter are at least as important as the plot, and are more important that the latest villain. I was happy to see a range of people in the audience for the show I went to. There were teens, families and older couples. A film that can cross a lot of sub groups and bring them together for two hours of fun in the dark, together, has got to have something going for it. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975 "Shampoo"

 

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

Shampoo

This is a social satire from 1975, set on Election night 1968. In spite of the references to the events in the news, there is really no political content here. The satire is about social mores and behaviors, not about public policy and politicians. It starts out as a comedy, but the closer it gets to the end, it turns into a cautionary tragedy.

Warren Beatty plays a self absorbed hairdresser, probably modeled after real life celebrity hairdressers like Jay Sebring and Jon Peters. George seems to have chosen the profession because it gives him access to beautiful women while at the same time deflecting the attention of their husbands because after all, hairdressers are all gay right, so what's to worry about.The comedic component comes in the form of all the love triangles that George ends up in. He has a girlfriend, who sort of dates a producer who might cast her in his latest movie. George is having an affair with the wife of a well known businessman, who is himself having an affair with Georges ex-girlfriend, who George still wants to be with. It never quite turns into a farce, but all of the figures do cross paths at some point and George can hardly catch his breath to keep up with his own libido.

Ther cast of this movie is stock full of well known players. In addition to Beatty, there is Lee Grant, Jack Warden, Goldie Hawn, and Julie Christie. The characters all fit some pretty easy stereotypes and the casting gives us a shorthand in their emotions. Hawn is a neurotic innocent, Grant is a clingy harpy and Christie is a conflicted ice queen. Jack Warden was nominated for supporting actor playing a businessman who is thoughtless of his family and mistress. You would almost assume that George is going to be some kind of hero. In the end, George is the one who after hurting everyone else, discovers that he is growing up a little late in life. 

Beatty plays George as a sexual Peter Pan, excited by all the women he meets, at least for a moment. He claims to care for Jill, his girlfriend, but he can't be bothered to listen to her when she is trying to ask him about a career choice that could alter both their lives. Lee Grant's Felicia is someone he can use and then dash off to meet another woman. Jill, the woman played by Christie, is someone George thinks he needs, but it is only coincidence that brings them back together. He nearly breaks up an opportunity for her to find the security she has always looked for, and his emotional manipulation leaves him and her devested in the end. The script, which Beatty co-wrote with screenwriting legend Robert Towne, has George constantly speaking in some scenes, but never paying attention to the people he is speaking to or even himself. George seems to have an attention deficit and his conversation skills and the speed with which he blazes past everyone else (except Warden's Lester), might make you uncomfortable to watch. 

Carrie Fisher famously made her film debut in this movie as Lester and Felicia's daughter, another woman that George does not have the sense to stay away from. It seems pretty obvious that he has enjoyed the libertine lifestyle for a number of years, as he has a loyal cotrie of admiring women pursuing his profession service as a stylist as well as his side work as lover. He feigns respect for Jill and he convinces himself that he really does love Jill, but those emotions just don't ring true in the end.

There is an odd moment toward the climax off the story, when things start to fall apart for George and he goes to work to reassert some control in his life. He learns that the son of the shop owner has been killed. It is not clear if this is a moment that forces him to confront reality in his life or if it is another opportunity to deceive himself into seeing his place in the world as being special. The film seems to end abruptly, and we don't get the coda scrawl that is so typical of movies in the last twenty years. 

I sa this film at the Garfield Theater on the corner of Garfield and Valley Blvd. My friend Art and I walked down from my house to the movie, after I had a blow-up with my little brother and a temper tantrum that probably scared my Mom. There was a lot of tension in our house and I can't quite remember which side of a family tragedy this happened on. I just know I was embarrassed to lose it infront of my Mom and friend, and as usual, a movie was an escape for me from the realities of my own life. 

Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre

 I received a DMCA takedown order for the You Tube Trailer of the film. This is the First Time in 13 Years of Posting on this site, that a content company has requested that a link to their trailer be removed. The Counter-Claim Process is convoluted, So I will simply tell you that to see a trailer for this film, you will have to go somewhere else.

Either of the big names attached to this film would probably have been enough to get me into the theater for this. When you put the two of them together, it was impossible for me to resist. Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham collaborated two years ago on an action film released when people were still hiding from the pandemic, "Wrath of Man". Also present in that film was Josh Harnett, twenty years ago "the next big thing" but still around doing yeoman service in a variety of projects. He is much better used in this movie than "Wrath", but that does not mean that this is a better movie. 

Director Ritchie has a distinctive style, that when he lets it fly, elevates the action films he makes to art. That is not the case with this movie, it is product. The non sequential story telling that marks his best films, is mostly missing here. There are a couple of flashbacks but they only offer exposition, they don't drive the story or create surprises at all. The colorful characters that make movies like "The Gentlemen", "lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" or "Snatch" so enjoyable, are missing. The lead character played by Statham is the usual badass, but other than his hard guy stare, there is nothing. A hint of some of his eccentricities is offered early on, and then none of them show up or get used to provide any entertainment. The villain, played by Hugh Grant, at least is a little interesting. Grant seems slightly miscast as a cold blooded killer, but completely right with the quirk that the script has given him. If only that were the main character, this could have been a lot more fun. 

The two members of Statham's crew are Aubrey Plaza and  Bugzy Malone, who are given tropes to play but not really characters. Harnett as a dim witted Hollywood action star is better. He gets to lampoon the stuff going on in the story with his character's plot line. There was fun to be had when he and Grant play off of one another, but otherwise the humor in this movie is very weak, which is strange because Ritchie's films are often hysterical. The secondary villain has no character development at all which makes things less interesting in the climax. 

There are plenty of action beats but they rarely have any suspense to them. In most spy/heist/adventure films, there is a complication which comes up and requires  some improvisation on the part of our protagonists. Those complications are never anything that can't be resolved by an action moment, and that is one of the reasons that the film feels so mechanical. We are just moving from one moment to the next, and all of the killing at the climax has very little suspense to i. This is not so much a John Wick one on one as it is a less polished series of deaths when Wick kills 60 enemies in three minutes. 

I did not dislike the film, but it is clear that it was not something the director felt passionately about. The actors are moved through their moments without much effort to make their characters more engaging. The action is standard for the most part, and there is not the usual humor (with maybe a couple of exceptions) that you get in a Guy Ritchie film. If you are not in a very demanding mood, you can enjoy this and then forget about it.