The Kids Are Alright - Review

Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are Alright deserves credit for a few things, not the least of which is that it treats gay marriage as a thing that exists even if it isn't legally recognized.  The lesson that Cholodenko should have learned was that this fact alone was not enough to propel a mediocre film to higher places.


Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) have been together for two decades.  During that time they have raised two children that they sired using donated sperm.  Shortly after Joni (Mia Wasikowska) turns 18, her 15 year old brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) talks her into contacting the donation bank to learn the identity of their biological father.  Meet Paul (Mark Ruffalo) a restaurant owner and one time sperm donor who will turn their world upside down.


Of course, Nic and Jules are reticent about inviting Paul into their lives and this tension begins to scratch the surface of a union that is already rocky.  Nic drinks too much.  Jules is flighty and doesn't have a regular job.  There are moments of cliched relationship criticism that are designed to not only draw attention to the issues of the connection between these two, but also remind us that marriage is hard.


Jules ends up having a fling with Paul.  It's not a question of her becoming interested in men, but she needs someone to have a connection with.  Here is where the film asks for narrative forgiveness because its set-up is so unique.  It doesn't work.  The first 30 minutes of the film do a very nice job establishing that this is a marriage like any other and when it begins to crumble under the weight of mistrust and infidelity it attempts to fall back on the crutch of their relationship's unique ingredients.  The problem is that it's difficult to care.


While Moore and Bening are perfectly fine in the film, there just isn't much there to work with.  These characters are simply not very engaging and the film plays like a lesbian retelling of a poor John Updike short story.  The kids are rebelling in the way that teens rebel against their parents whether they're black or white, gay or straight.  But it never goes anywhere.  No emotional wells are mined and no truth is ever revealed.


The Kids Are Alright just can't ever seem to make up its mind as to what it wants to grow up to be one day.  One moment it's two teens searching for a biological identity.  The next it's diving into the deep end of a lesbian marriage and a infidelity saga told like a low-level version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama.  It's a melange of good ideas and half-starts, but the film is lettered with disappointments, screw-ups and apologies that never seem to be truly honest.    Yes, marriage is hard no matter who is involved.  As it turns out, so is making a movie about it.

The Grand Illusion - Review

The Grand Illusion (1937)

directed by Jean Renoir

If someone ever made a Rupert Murdoch biopic, they’d have no choice but to compete with Citizen Kane  -- and they would come up short.  There is no other option; the story of a media tycoon has been told already, and it was done artfully and beautifully enough that in all likelihood no filmmaker will ever surpass it when making a film about a media tycoon.  It’s inevitable.  

Geniuses, auteurs, propangandists and budding filmmakers have been dutifully making war movies in the 74 years since Jean Renoir made The Grand Illusion.  Many of the films made in that time have been truly great, yet in one way or another they are forced to stand in the shadow of this World War I epic.

After their plane is shot down over enemy territory during a reconnaisance mission, Lieutenant Marechal (Jean Gabin), a blue collar pilot and his commanding officer, the refined, upper class Captain Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) find themselves in the custody of the German army.  Because they’re officers they are well treated and they find compatriots in their fellow French captives. Renoir displays a wonderful knack for using humor and music to convey the bond between the imprisoned men without giving his audience the mistaken impression that the life in camp is simple and easy.  Food is shipped in to their well heeled bunk mate Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) and they have blankets, books and a stove.  Things could be worse.  Yet, they are not free.  Naturally, they attempt to escape.  

Their plan is to dig a tunnel under the barracks (sound familiar?) that leads to the outside garden and from there they can sprint to their freedom.  However, before they can implement their plan to completion, the prisoners are packed up and shipped off to another camp deep inside the German lines.

It is in the new camp that Capitan Boeldieu has the added benefit of finding himself in the generous good graces of his captor Captain von Rauffenstein played with an elegant vigor by Erich von Stroheimm.  Rauffenstein senses an immediate connection with Boeldieu because they share a bond of old world class and all the proper social graces. The two share cigars and talk about life before the war.  These sequences not only reinforce the class warfare angle in the film -- which never becomes boorish -- but also help to greatly humanize the German captor.  Stroheimm’s effortless ease with multiple languages and his empathy for his new French friend make him seem the most cosmopolitan and gentle warden one could possibly imagine, furthering the sensation of absurdity in wartime mores.  It is also a marvelous device to display the identical nature of the day to day life of the French and German soldier before they were charged with killing each other.  These are just a hint of the brilliantly subtle masterstrokes used by Renoir to make his anti-war statements without ever stooping to soapbox aggrandizement.  

Boeldieu eventually uses cunning and his connections with Rauffenstein to give his comrades Marechal and Rosenthal an opportunity to escape.  The sequence that follows is a simultaneously thrilling escape scene and an exceedingly poignant display of selflessness.  In Renoir’s capable hands, the mood is never overstated nor does the action ever become didactic. Renoir doesn’t merely explore these themes of sacrifice, duty and the struggle of survival, he reinvents them; shattering preconceived notions on the barbarism of war and the cut and dried natures of its participants.

Gabin and Fresnay are wonderful together.  Their class differences supply the subtext for virtually every interaction they share without falling into tedium.  And while there is never any actual rift between the two, this separation of upbringing translates into wonderfully palpable tension between a pair of soldiers angling for the same gain; their own freedom.   

The supporting cast is astonishingly good, especially Dita Parlo who plays the lonely farm woman Elsa.  Her beautifully quiet presence is a beacon in the last third of the film and she shines within every frame that she occupies.  

This is Gabin’s film though, and he flourishes.  He is at times coarse and vulgar, other times lovable and humble.  It's an emotional honesty and profundity that is rare and almost non-existent in today's cinema.  Gabin’s Lt. Marechal contains a complexity so richly honest he forges a completely visceral presence on-screen. 

Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece is perhaps the finest film ever made about war, but maybe even more lastingly, it also defined many of the individual aspects of the entire genre.  There are prison break sequences that helped to set a course for films like The Great Escape.  The boredom and comraderie of POW life displayed so artfully here are echoed throughout Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17.  Many of Renoir's anti-war devices are also implemented quite well into anti-war classics like Breaker Morant and Paths Of Glory.  And these examples can only begin to scratch the surface of its sphere of influence.

Much like Casablanca after it, The Grand Illusion has been copied so many times because it is so perfect.  Every worthwhile war film made since seems merely to be an homage to this peerless classic.  And Renoir does it all with fewer than ten gunshots.  How's that for efficiency?  If war films were lightbulbs, Jean Renoir would be Thomas Alva Edison.

The Friends Of Eddie Coyle - Review

The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (1973)
directed by Peter Yates

Robert Mitchum’s quiet and shabbily dignified Eddie Coyle is well aware of the score; he is about to go to prison after getting busted driving a truck full of stolen goods.  The sentence is likely to be two years and when he goes away, his wife and children will have no choice but to go on welfare.  In Coyle’s eyes, needing a hand out for his family is a much bigger disgrace than a two year stay in the pen.  But he’s not bitter.  This is how things go when you’re in the business of small time crime.

Unlike other cinematic gangster types, Coyle has no appetite for the big score or the long con.  He leaves the machinations of big crime to the idea men.  In one of the film’s early scenes, Eddie tells a young buck gun runner about the time when his fingers were crushed in a drawer as punishment for a screw up on a job that landed the wrong guy in jail.  Mitchum relays this tale in an utterly non-dramatic and unsympathetic way.  To Coyle this is a lesson he learned the hard way and he plans not to repeat the experience again.  

The narrative weaves between a trio of bank robbers (one played by Alex Rocco) that Eddie is supplying guns to as he attempts to stockpile cash before he heads to prison; bar owner/Fed informant/gun for hire Dillon (Peter Boyle); a conniving US Treasury agent Dave Foley (Richard Jordan) and the youthful and brash gun peddler that Coyle gets his weapons from.  

It’s the treasury agent that becomes the thread that weaves all these lives in tighter with the cloth of Eddie Coyle.  A promise of reprieve from his prison sentence is held over Coyle’s head if he can prove to “Uncle” that he is working on their behalf.  The closer the prison stay gets the more Eddie considers handing some of his “friends” over to Uncle if only to help protect his family.  This inner dilemma becomes  interspersed with the comings and goings of Eddie’s colleagues to create a pitch point of culmination in the film’s final 30 minutes.

The Friends Of Eddie Coyle is a beautiful film to look at, despite its bleak and sometimes hopeless story.  Yates masterfully captures the early 1970s Boston crime world with peeks into parking lot meet-ups, stakeouts, pool halls and dive bars.  This is a blue collar crime world where these men would be going to work in a ship yard or a steel mill were they not gangsters.  The crime here is not elegant.  These are men of meager aspirations.  At one point, Coyle waxes poetic about being able to have enough money to retire to Florida.  It’s a humble goal and the subtext of Mitchum’s delivery belies Eddie’s own realization that the dream will never, ever become reality.

This is not a perfect film.  Too much attention is paid to the bank robber angle and the details of three separate jobs they pull.  Yates handles these scenes with a certain panache and they are done quite well for what they are, but they remove us from the Coyle story line and after more than one sequence they become redundant.  Dave Grusin’s score is also terribly distracting and utterly out of touch with the film’s make-up and characters.  A vaguely funk-oriented instrumental soundtrack that might have worked brilliantly in other films of the time, here just seems out of place and haphazard.

The film’s climactic sequences (no spoilers) seems almost anti-climactic by the time it arrives.  Yet Yates builds suspense and tension by incorporating a Bruins game at Boston Garden into the mix.  Dillon remarks at seeing Bobby Orr, “What is that kid, 24?  What a future he’s got.”  It’s a future that Coyle and his “friends” will never have.  It is a future of security, peace and prosperity.

In the world of Eddie Coyle, no one tells the truth.  At least not the whole truth.  The only real and genuinely ardent fact in Eddie’s immediate realm is that he’s stuck in his early 50s with a dead end dilemma that allows for no easy choices.  

Ultimately, it is Mitchum’s restrained and toughly honest performance that elevates The Friends Of Eddie Coyle to be greater than the sum of its parts.  Dignified gangsters who live by a jagged criminal code are a dime a dozen, but Eddie Coyle carves out a niche in the genre because he's not hunting for respect or hustling to move a rung up the ladder.  He is genuinely trying to do things the right way in the only ways he knows how.  The decisions are flawed and the results are doom-like.  The path to hell is paved with the best of intentions.

 

The Runaways

The Runaways (2010)
directed by Floria Sigismondi





There is a scene in The Runaways that takes place in a beaten down, gutted out trailer that doubles as a rehearsal space in which producer/guru/Rasputin Kim Fowley, played with verve if not subtlety by Michael Shannon, barks at his young teen girl proteges and instructs them in the ways that rock and roll is hard.  He intones to them that they need scream their feelings and they hit their audiences hard and with brutal and breaking honesty.  This scene is replayed at least three times throughout the film.  It's a schlocky mantra that becomes played long before you've heard the end of it for the first time.  More importantly, it also rings extremely hollow and contradictory as the story unfolds.


The story, if one can be so kind as to call it that, revolves almost exclusively on the relationship between Runaways lead singer, Cherrie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and guitarist Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart). We watch stock footage of their failures and their awkwardness as LA teens.  We see Currie's mother announce she's jetting off to live in Indonesia with her new husband, but Currie and her sister must stay behind.  A scene plays out in which Jett is accosted for attempting to play electric guitar in a lesson and she leaves in a huff offended by the sexism of her instructor.  Currie gets booed off the stage at her high school talent show.  In essence it's the distillation of dozens of biopics and coming of age tales told by rote in a rigid and unimaginative fashion.  While it's only exposition, by the time we get to any actual plot development, the film already seems bloated and floating face down in its own vomit pool.


Fowley happens upon the girls at a nightclub and hatches a plan to start the first all girl rock band.  This is the first of many instances in which the angle of "girl power" is wildly subverted.  Fowley, a creepy and selfish man if we're to learn anything from his on-screen portrayal, molds these young ladies into his nubile quintet of sex kittens for the rock and roll masses.  He's peddling a product even if they're aiming for something higher.


Fanning and Stewart are workmanlike in their performances and they can hardly be blamed for the film's numerous shortcomings.  It's quite obvious they are making the best of a bad situation and there are even a couple of moments where Fanning rises above the din to let out a spark of what's possible in there somewhere if only someone could eke it out to words on a page and good directorial note.  But the script paints nearly all of the major players as exaggerated one note versions of real people and creates almost no nuance or subtext to any moment or conversation.  If the actual Runaways were this vapid, drug addled and clueless, they'd never have made it out of that trailer.


The film does look quite good visually, though.  The deep red hues and golden touches in the set pieces in the film and much of the cinematography touch nicely upon an idealized version of 1970s America and it works well with the motif of the picture.  Several of the concert sequences are well filmed too, but none of this can hope to save The Runaways from being anything more than a hackneyed biopic with a pleasant plastic sheen over its top.


An glammed up look at the short life of the original Runaways lineup, on the surface, might have been a good idea at one time or another.  But, with this telling, the shine quickly fades.  Most of the storylines seem long exhausted before they ever get started and are riddled with cliche; drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, parental abandonment and the desire for a teenager to find her own voice all get the typical treatment without any sense of irony, self-discovery, true redemption or any greater meaning at all.  It is simply told as a straightforward, chronological tale of a band, of its rise and its fall.  It's either told all wrong, or its just a very boring and obvious story.

Le Samourai

Le Samourai (1967)
directed by Jean Pierre Melville





It takes a man with a great deal of self-confidence and a true sense of his own vision to invent a line from the book of Bushido and then use it as an ethos for his film.  Jean Pierre Melville is such a man.  At the outset of the 1967 hitman tone poem that is Le Samourai, Melville does just that.  The entire opening credits sequence is a static shot of a dilapidated apartment that contains seemingly nothing.  It's a simple shot of a man lying on a bed smoking in the dark.  The room is cold and dank.  There is no score playing.  Rain can be heard through the slightly opened window.  Cars drive by in the rain and their shadows bounce off the ceiling while a lonely bird flutters in a cage set upon a table just left center-screen.  After the credits are finished, a proverb appears in the lower right hand corner:

"There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it be that of the tiger in the jungle ... perhaps ... - The book of Bushido (Book of the Samurai)."

The line is a ruse.  Melville simply conjured the line as an umbrella for the film's primary theme.  Nowhere in the Book of Bushido does this proverb actually appear.  Yet, it is with this sort of mind game trickery that Melville begins his hard boiled opus.  And that is all the more to prove his point . . . perhaps.

The idea of killing simply for money is antithetical altogether with the code of the Samurai, who kills for his honor and with ethical conviction, but our anti-hero in Le Samourai is a paid assassin and he's a very good one.  While there is no way to know if Melville was aware of the contradiction between his main character and the actual philosophy of the traditional Samurai, in Melville's hands everything seems like a stylized mash-up as only he could see it.  In this way, the false Bushido proverb resonates almost more than if it had been real to begin with.

Our Samurai, Jef Costello is played flawlessly by Alain Delon.  At first blush Delon looks all wrong for Costello.  He's dashing, quiet and confident.  For all the reasons that Robert Mitchum or Yves Montand or Humphrey Bogart could pull off a role like this, Delon seems to be miscast.  And yet, because he looks so terrific he is forced to overcompensate with a stoicism, a lack of true expression and a detachment that translates perfectly to Melville's theme of solitutde and duty.  This approach also allows for Costello to become an almost voyeur of his own behavior bringing the viewer even closer to him in a co-dependent fashion.

Costello is hired to kill a club owner and the only reliable eyewitness to the crime is the club's pianist.  Yet, when a harsh interrogation yields nothing from the eyewitness, Costello is left to wonder why he's let of the hook - though he never interprets the pianist's failure to finger him as a gesture of kindness.  In essence, he plays the angles; curious as to what greater motivation would be the impetus to keep Jef on the streets.  

Costello has manufactured a nearly air-tight alibi with the help of his sometime girlfriend, Jane (Nathalie Delon) Costello and is still doggedly pursued by a Police Superintendent (Francois Perier).  It is in this duel of Costello vs. Cops that Melville's inner Kafka truly takes over and Le Samourai begins its transformation from simply a good crime film into something of a higher power.  The extensive visual groundwork thus far laid - images of a bird trapped in a cage, the lonely apartment room and Costello's detachment from society - excavate a deeper well of existential dilemmas.  Using the paid hitman as a foil, Melville explores the lonely concept of one man against the world and the futility of duty without a greater meaning.

In an interview for French TV in 1967 just prior to the film's release, Delon says that the film is about loneliness.  While he's very much on the mark with that statement, it's also like saying Babe Ruth was very good baseball player.  It's factually accurate, yet overly simplified.  Melville's exercises in exploring the characters of loneliness are always so damned artful and sleek and beautifully rigid the depth of them is lost - on the surface at least.  This is just one of the things that makes them truly great.

In a deceptively quiet and simple moment, Delon is dressing his arm after he's wounded in a scuffle.  He methodically cleans the wound, drapes it in gauze and wraps an outer layer of tape and dressing over the bandaged area.  He does not panic, though he is certainly emotionally affected.  He does not moan or wince though he is certainly in pain.  The scene is like watching a tribesman walk over hot coals.  The suffering is a part of the journey and there are lessons to be garnered within it.  Moments like these are myriad in Le Samourai and they're easy to miss or undervalue.  Melville is a master at creating so many of these moments that we are permitted to see beyond the window of the narrative arc even if it we don't fully realize it at the time.

There is an almost maniacal pathos in Melville's attention to detail as he creates an underworld that is largely a nod to American film noirnoir elements with the stark designs of late 60's Europe and a knack for a timeless sense of slick fashion with a private eye bent.  In short, it all looks utterly beautiful and dangerously erotic.

It's the beauty of the film and Delon's asexual power that allow the visual nature of LeSamourai to sneakily reinforce the overarching theme of the film, even if that theme is fabricated in Melville's own mind.  Loneliness, of course, is not an unusual subject for the cinema, nor is the lone man crime thriller.  However, in Melville's hands, this meta-mash-up of street crime, existential meaning, the loneliness of life and hyper-real set pieces comes off the screen as a genre all its own.  Le Samourai is an obvious influence on filmmakers like John Woo, Quentin Tarantino and served as an enormous inspiration for Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai.  It's hard to create a new language within the gangster movie genre and Melville does so brilliantly.  It seems even more impressive that he started just by inventing one little proverb for the Book of Bushido.

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Remake This: The "Foreign" Remake

The “Foreign” Remake
a.k.a. You’re Too Fucking Lazy To Read Subtitles - Can’t we just put Al Pacino in it and make sure they talk American all the way through it? Or maybe Tracy Morgan and Chris Rock could do it.  Them guys is funny.

Americans would rather not read.  This is not a supposition, it is incontrovertible truth according to Hollywood’s powers that be.  Reading requires effort and patience.  A simple and basic American ethos is that neither of those “skills” should have anything to do with going to see a movie.  Once Al Jolson yelped his vaguely racist, out of tune impression of Edward G. Robinson doing an off-Broadway musical in 1927’s The Jazz Singer the majority of the American movie-going masses ceased having to read title cards.  The talkies were here to stay and the necessity to read at the movies existed no more.  As of that moment the patience and the ability of the average American film watcher to read during a film has decreased exponentially.  Ever notice how a narrator will read a letter during an important plot point in a film  instead of letting the viewer read it?  You might get the idea this is done for dramatic effect - and that’s partly true.  It’s mostly done though to keep John Q. Jackass from having to read on his night off work.  

When a European or Asian film is very successful overseas, a film distributor who wants to show that film in the US can do one of two things.  They can a) Subtitle the film in English so the actors onscreen speak their original dialogue in its native language and the audience reads subtitles for the dialogue in the film.  American film distributors believe that this method has it’s place.  It’s called, New York/Los Angeles/Cannes/Netflix.  In other words, on about 4 screens for a sum total of six days and after that go hit up the folks at the Criterion Collection.  The second option is that they can b) dub in the dialogue.  This involves bringing in English speaking actors reading a translation of the dialogue and any inflection or verbal emotion included in the speaking portion of the original performance are gone and replaced with the new “English” version.  One could surmise that the primary complaint against this method would be to lose the authenticity of the original performance.  However, in the eyes of studio heads, the fact that the audio and the moving actor’s mouths do not match up can lead to only two conclusions: 1) The mouth to audio contrast draws a focus to the fact that this film wasn’t originally made in English!  Which of course, means it is sub-standard to American films.  2) It looks like a hokier big budget version of a Bruce Lee film.  In the eyes of the flick bosses, neither of those are good for receipts.

The conventional wisdom on foreign films breaks down something like this: “Why would I waste my time and energy on a Friday night watching something that I have to read?  I didn’t plunk down $10.75 to be dropped into sophomore year English class again.  I came to see a movie, not join a fucking book club!”  Therefore, distributors and studios are left with the option to come up with other original ideas that will gross better than these foreign options that have already done well in box offices around the rest of the world, or they can make American versions of said foreign films.  Hollywood, in it’s infinite laziness and crass assessment of the American populace has opted for the latter.  I’ll be damned if it isn’t often very, very successful.  A good example of this phenomena is the Al Pacino/Robin Williams remake of Insomnia.  Made in 2002, the film is Christopher Nolan’s directorial follow-up to Memento.  This film is actually pretty good but I can only speculate as to what possessed Nolan and the other principles to star in the remake of a film made just five years earlier in Sweden.  At its core, the issue has nothing to do with which is the better film.  That argument is moot.  It’s not about which is better, it’s about which is more saleable.  What is curious is why remake you'd remake it just five years later.  The themes, setting and plot lines are nearly identical.  One can deduce that language and “star power” are the only real discernable differences. Well, that and the fact that the original version grossed just north of $200,000 in the US while the remake raked in more than $67 million.  Perhaps that is all we need to know about that particular cinematic equation.

Now, let’s go so far as to agree with the general supposed studio belief that the American movie goer is an uneducated slob who is afraid to watch movies in a language he cannot speak, and that he is too lazy and/or dumb to be asked to sit through a film with subtitles.  I certainly know some folks who fall into this category, but I also know many, many people from Midwestern America so excited at the prospect of seeing an original idea they’re willing (or happy) to deal with the subtitles - but let’s just take it at face value that the average ticket buyer won’t abide subtitles.  If we accept even that as truth, then someone is going to have to sit me down, talk to me like I’m a 5 year old and explain what the fuck the remake of Death At A Funeral is all about.  

For those not in the know, Death At A Funeral is a 2007 comedic film that was shot in and takes place in the UK.  It was critically well received, did reasonably well at the box office and was directed by a man named Frank Oz.  That’s a name  you might remember if say, you ever watched an episode of the Muppet Show (he’s the voice of Ms. Piggy) or saw films he directed like Housesitter, In & Out, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels or What About Bob? just to name a few.  He also acted in a number of films including 5 of the 6 Star Wars movies.  In other words, this is not an industry outsider.  Yet, in 2010 Sony Pictures chose to remake the film.  At its peak the original was shown on 260 screens while the remake was plastered across 2459 screens.  Nearly ten times as much coverage.  Did Sony really think their version was 10 times better?  No, they just felt it was 10 times more sellable.  That’s all that matters.  Good has nothing, I mean absolutely jack shit to do with it.  Just line up the suckers and we’ll get their buttery dollar bills.  Though it's purely speculation on my part, I would guess the case is simply that this angle all a hell of a lot easier than writing an original script.

BTW, don’t even pretend that you like the Magnificent Seven better than the Seven Samurai.  That shit won’t play here.  Even Steve McQueen and Chuck Bronson know better.

Remake This: A Primer

I loathe the Hollywood remake from the core of my soul.  Every fiber of my critical being cringes at the hokey remake concept that the major (and sometimes not so major) cinematic shit-servers chuck into the multiplex Bouillabaisse. But why does this phenomenon aggravate me above all others? There are dozens of absolutely terrifically awful ideas that are vaguely original, or at least not outright copycat retellings that are at best a piss poor excuse for a movie, let alone actually worthwhile, or culturally fulfilling.  Is a dreadful live action/CGI retelling of the Underdog storyline going to be any worse than the most recent schlock-filled romantic comedy with Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher?  The easy answer (and probably the right one too) is NO!  This then, still leaves a fundamental issue hanging over the popcorn trough and butter spigots: Is the remake rage in Hollywood really worse than the myriad other offenses of the mainstream film-making market?  And, if so, why?

The best way to begin breaking down this quandary is to define what constitutes a remake and categorize the offenders.  Next, it’s imperative to determine if amongst those categories, there is a greater or lessor evil.  In other words, is it more dreadful to do say a shot by shot remake of a universally loved and respected film that defined an entire genre and begat at least three sub-genres or to “reinvent” (and I use that word in the most sarcastically liberal sense) a well loved or greatly appreciated sitcom?  While there is no “winner” here - because both scenarios are soul crushing - the actual answer to this question ought to be self-evident and if you find yourself unsure as to its answer, these periodic installments may provide some very bumpy reading for you.

For all the naysayers and “but-throwers” out there, please be reminded that simply because one or more given films in a particular category may be good, it does not in total validate the idea of rampant remakes.  Let’s say you really liked the 3:10 To Yuma remake with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale and you are determined to believe it is a far better film than the original version starring Glenn Ford.  I would disagree (only slightly albeit) but I would acknowledge that in the realm of remakes this isn’t that bad of a film.  It was reasonably entertaining, didn’t shit all over the original and managed to at least hold it’s own for the most part.  We’ll be generous and call this a success.  Now, let’s for the sake of this scenario we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and call 3:10 To Yuma a “good film”.  Again, this is a stretch but we’re dealing in hypotheticals here.  According to this thought process, 3:10 To Yuma now qualifies as a good film.  A stretch, but we'll go with it - for now.

I’ll be generous and say that 10% of the “remakes” that are foisted on the cineplex each year are “good films” - and again I am being generous.  That means that 90% of them are a celluloidal abomination.  The better way to think about this is you take an annual hunting trip with your chums.  The first year you bag a nice buck and get loaded around the campfire telling the story and bragging about your crackerjack aim and top of the food chain prowess.  That year is your 3:10 To Yuma year.  The next nine years you winnd up pulling buck shot out of your left ass cheek while your best pal tries to keep you from bleeding out.  Those years are akin to sitting through the Tim Burton/Marky Mark version of Planet Of The Apes.  Except that 48 minutes into Apes, you’re praying for someone and their merciful 12 gauge to end the agony.  Again, the 90/10 ratio is under the kindest and most forgiving of circumstances, so stop thinking of the remake that “wasn’t awful”.  It’s not an excuse.  It’s not a valid argument.  Shut the hell up.

Bean Soup Brothel

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The (Not So Great) Gazoo

This morning I couldn’t recall the name of the alien that was Fred’s pal on the Flintstones. My wife was no help either.  So after a solid four seconds of contemplation on the matter, I wiki-googlied the interwebs and was reminded almost instantaneously that the little green bugger who helped all of Bedrock jump the shark was none other than Gazoo.  The Great Gazoo if we’re being formal.  It is a floating green alien with an overly large head that has rabbit ears on it after all, so formality does seem to be in order here.  

The thing that troubled me here wasn’t that I failed to have instant recall of what The Great Gazoo’s name was.  It didn’t bother me that my wife was at a loss - though she is typically Johnny-on-the-spot in these situations. It bothered me that I gave the matter no intellectual (if we can refer to this endeavor at all as intellectual) even slightly.  In other words, I didn’t even try to think about it on my own.  I just lumped over to the old Apple Mac-a-doodle and waited the requisite .245 seconds for a meaty information sandwich to get shoved down my lazy, gaping gullet.

There was a time when I would have taken it as a point of pride to pull the Great Gazoo’s name from the ether when asked this sort of question, even if I was the one who asked it.  The rules of that game of pride would have also insisted that I be given a reasonable length of time (somewhere between 3 hours and a week) to come up with the correct answer without the benefit of using reference material.  An attitude something akin to: “The good lord did not put me on this earth to just look shit up. He put me here to remember it with my powerful pop-culture noggin - and eating a pint of Haagen Dasz chocolate chocolate chip while watching nine straight episodes of Happy Days in a row, all while playing Trivial Pursuit laying down.  In other words, don’t spoil it for me, I will get to it on my own, God Damn It!

Now, it’s either just too easy, or I’m too tired of playing the rough and tumble game of pop-culture Raymond Babbitt. I just don’t care that much anymore and the only reasonable scapegoat I can give you is the internet.

I am a 38 year old man with a family, a business, a reasonable amount of self-esteem and a still more than healthy first-hand knowledge of marginal television shows, Quentin Tarantino dialogue and expertise of Velvet Underground records.  So, how could I possibly have let myself lose to something like the internet?  I, unlike the internet, have a heartbeat, a soul and the pudgy/bookish good looks of the assistant librarian that works the closing shift on a Wednesday.  In summation, I am a man.  These qualities apparently cannot compete at all with the internet’s total recall of the TGIF lineup from 1999 even after I have had three Dogfish Head 90 minute IPAs.  My mushy frontal cortex “could” figure it out on it’s own like some 8th grade story problem, but it’s a helluva lot easier to jump to the back of the book, write down the answer and explain how we got there later.

More than once I have explained the lack of personal effort in this arena to age.  The late 30s (where I currently find myself clinging on with nothing more than a slight hold via poorly groomed toes) is when the memory begins to fade ever so slightly.  My schedule has certainly tightened since my peak performance years of my late teens to early 20s.  Furthermore, I used to subject myself to a fearless regimen of taxing and exhausting trials/trainings involving games of quick memory recall, movie title free associations and chronological actor filmographies.  Now it’s a miracle if I can make it all the way through the 10 pm rerun of American Dad.  Yet, inasmuch as I would like to blame time, practical application, the onset of my 40s and my rest home bedtimes, it falls directly at the feet of laziness.

I scurry to the internet to answer these important questions of life because I can, not because I have to.  With straight face and clean conscience I could probably swear that after 32 minutes of deep deliberation I just couldn’t come up with The Great Gazoo as Fred’s vaguely gay, green alien chum.  But the truth is that I gave it not 32 seconds of thought.  This is what is so truly troubling about this.  Complacency has run amuck, and I fear this could permeate (nay it already has) into my realm of things that are borderline important that I really should know.  More disturbingly, I can’t imagine why I would “waste the time” working at it on my own, when I could just let some wikipedia nerd do it for me.

While I was growing up, I was quizzed on the state capitals prior to meal time.  I had a nifty place-mat with all of the states and their capital cities on it.  My folks would quiz me and by the third or fourth grade I knew all of them by heart.  Now, the average 8 year old doesn’t need to know this stuff.  

Knowing trivial things won’t make you smart and it won’t make you money unless you’re Ken Jennings.  But, for me at least it provided an early lesson that any knowledge is inherently valuable - even if it’s trivial.  It’s a terribly useful skill like knowing how to balance your bank account or tying your shoes.  Even if what you know about is just a floating alien that helped a mediocre animated sitcom that ripped off the Honeymooners.  Stupid Gazoo.