Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
It’s my understanding, after thirty seconds of cursory research, that Warner Brothers gave director Joe Dante the keys to the kingdom for The New Batch. Dante wasn’t interested in another gremlins movie, the studio tried to proceed without him, nothing went anywhere, so they granted him the right to do whatever he wished with the property. The result is probably the most anarchic picture Joe Dante has ever made. The original Gremlins is a witty, surprisingly vicious mating of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and every monster movie Dante has ever seen. Gremlins 2: The New Batch is lighter, more self-aware (the outright horror dialed down), and even more insane. The pretense of human feeling, that leftover E.T. pathos that executive producer Spielberg always seems to instill (even, most ridiculously, in Transformers) has been dropped, any conventional three act structure discarded.
The New Batch sets itself a daunting task: to sustain the delirious, deranged cotton candy high of the first film at its best for the entire running time. This Dante picture, made at the height of an earlier wave of blockbuster testosterone fever, could cynically be reduced to the formula that was on all ambitious studio execs at the time. Dante had essentially given Warner Brothers Die Hard with Gremlins, or, more accurately, a tongue in cheek screw you to everyone who wanted a Die Hard with Gremlins. Or, even more accurately, an affectionate tongue in cheek screw you to everyone who wanted a Die Hard with Gremlins. The trick that Dante pulls in picture after picture is an affectionate, silly, satirical vibe that somehow manages tonal coherence. The New Batch fully plays to Dante’s strengths, a seemingly never ending trip-wire invention laced with an intoxicating love of movies that many don’t take too seriously.
One could draw parallels between The New Batch and Batman Returns, which seems to have been made under similar “the first for you, the second for me” circumstances, but the truth is, while the Burton films have an admirable personality that’s lacking in most expensive filmmaking, they don’t age that well. The New Batch mostly holds, melding a surreal, bent, soul consuming work environment that could have informed Office Space with a mischievous post-modern sensibility that precedes Tarantino’s later films by more than a decade. The picture even sports Christopher Lee before it was cool to cast Christopher Lee in anything beyond Hammer films.
The film, again like Batman Returns, seems to be an excuse for the filmmaker to unload all of the bric-a-brac that had probably been accumulating at the back of his mind for years. A likeable Trump daydream embodied by John Glover appears (though Dante’s goodwill doesn’t serve him here, Glover’s stoned Santa portrayal doesn’t jive with the cooperate hell the film has implied he created, the character should have closer resembled Glover’s shark in Scrooged); as well as a washed-up horror show host (Robert Prosky), harboring dreams of respectability, who lands a key interview with the talking “Brain” Gremlin (voiced, of course, by Tony Randall); we also get a spider gremlin; a bat gremlin (yes, the film elicits a laugh from a Batman parody); an electro-gremlin, and a starlet gremlin that is actually, and this is no mean feat, the ugliest of all the gremlins.
The film has the pleasure of a pinball machine, with Dante’s various hazards and inventions banging off one another in a series of vignettes of surprisingly even quality. It’s a testament to Dante’s mojo that he even ends his so-called children’s film on a triumphant note of bestiality without somehow compromising the overall good will of the endeavor.
I miss Joe Dante. He recently directed a doesn’t quite suck as much as the all others episode of Masters of Horror (though I didn’t see his second episode), and before that, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (that subtitle having the similarly inane on purpose ring of The New Batch), which, truthfully, I never caught either. Pauline Kael wrote, in a review of The Howling, that Dante seemed to be equal parts talent, amateur, style and flake. That’s precisely why his films are so engaging, he’s a talent with a child’s awe of genres many artists feel beneath them, capable of spinning his daydreams into an Americana rhapsody of monster-mania. Dante, similar to many of his characters, would seem to be an idealist from a past world, and I’m hoping that he hasn’t quite been swallowed yet. The horror film needs him. The comedy needs him. The bloated blockbusters could even use his teasing again, perhaps a third Gremlins, which I guess nowadays would be called something along the lines of G3. If anyone could make that idea tolerable it would be Joe Dante.
★★★½
Another Woman (1988)
An outstanding director’s misfire can be a bit like a relationship that has suddenly lost footing: everything you admire about that person becomes grating, an unintentional self-parody. As I watched a character casually expound on the latest Brecht production she caught over a glass of wine with long lost friends in Woody Allen’s Another Woman, I wondered, “Do people drink beer in Woody Allen movies?” Actually that’s unfair, a character drinks beer in that very scene, but do Woody Allen characters eat that pizza that supposed to be so good in New York? Do they shit? Do they screw? Do they read a, gulp, best seller, even behind doors that are safely locked so their friends couldn’t possibly uncover the truth? Maybe that’s why marriages are always disintegrating in Allen’s pictures: the people seek Brecht connoisseurs only to find that they’ve married Michael Crichton fans.
Another Woman aspires to address emotional cowardice, but it’s really about Allen’s ongoing fear of anything that could be interpreted as common or middle class, his occasional joyless atonement for making people laugh. The film concerns an intelligent, intimidating, successful upper crust intellectual named Marion Post (Gena Rowlands) who recently turned fifty, and, while renting a loft to start her latest book, begins to overhear the patients of the psychiatrist in the neighboring apartment. One patient in particular fires Marion’s imagination, a pregnant young lady called Hope (Mia Farrow) who speaks of her woes with a terror and confusion that has remained unknown to Marion her entire life. Marion is polished, urbane, never saying the wrong thing (depending upon your definition of wrong) and utterly miserable. Memories flood back to Marion, family members magically appear to essentially tell her they hate her and, for once, Marion finds herself vulnerable, regretful and human.
Many critics have compared Another Woman, positively, to Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and, while that comparison is unavoidable, Allen wouldn’t really get his Wild Strawberries right for another ten years with the underrated Deconstructing Harry. Harry is alive, and profane, playing to Allen’s authentic inner torment and surreal wild comedy. Another Woman is insecure and self-conscious, hypocritical even, as terrified of anything messy as its protagonist. The picture desperately needs contrast, instead it has Allen’s relentless, one note plea for Major Artist status: control and contrivance masquerading as brilliance.
This film has its moments though, and the one misery after another hammering eventually wears you down. The casting was a canny move on Allen’s part, it’s jarring to see Rowlands, normally so sensual, embodying such a suffocating character, she’s terrific in an unsentimental, tightly coiled performance, we feel the waste of life. Gene Hackman, as a would be lover who got away, is too forceful of an actor to submit to the repression; the second to final scene of the film, revealing how Rowlands and Hackman became close, achieves the electric longing the entire picture has been laboring for. Sandy Dennis, as a friend who has always privately resented Marion, is even harder to forget, she’s bravely, embarrassingly raw.
As with most Allen films, the picture is beautiful and meticulously crafted (it was shot by Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist) but that only highlights the fact that we’re essentially stuck in an occasionally moving tour through a very pretty wax museum.
★★½
The Ruins (2008)
This probably won’t strike many as too logical, but watching The Ruins brought me back to the 1980s, a time where there were, in addition to a bounty of slasher pictures, little biological curiosity horror films that always gave me nightmares (not that I would admit that to my parents, these movies were a hard enough sell as is). Biological curiosity movies are those monster movies where the human screws with a harder to describe than usual monster (you can’t just throw an ape or dinosaur label at these nasties) and turns into said monster themselves. The Ruins particularly reminded me of a strange, disturbing at the time film called Leviathan, where an underwater crew headed by Peter Weller drank ancient, drugged vodka and turned into fish men whose malleable, intangible design seemed, to me at least, to represent a mild theft of Chris Walas’ work on the Cronenberg Fly.
And again this might not seem too logical, because no one turns into anything in The Ruins, the young people of this film get off just a little easier comparatively. But The Ruins is similarly blunt and artless; lean and unpleasant in execution. Audiences who tire of the horror film for kids approach can at least be assuaged by that fact; the victims of The Ruins die, and quite hard. And the monster, while not capable of transferring his (or her, if you wish to be polite) identity to others, is invasive in other, at times unsettling, ways. The film, at its best, taps into one of those primal pressure points that can inspire sweat and insecurity at night: a festering something under the skin: the fear that you might pick up an unheard of malady while strolling through the woods one day.
On its own terms, The Ruins works, unfortunately though, I’ve read the book, so I’m inclined to introduce my own terms to the negotiations. The book and the script were written by Scott B. Smith of A Simple Plan, and in the book it was clear that Smith was trying to instill in the horror genre a bit of the character that made Plan so potent. The book built slowly, artfully, to a group disintegration that was unusually convincing for the genre. While they tend to be weak on characterization, the film of The Ruins could have used a bit of the slow wind of Carpenter’s The Thing or The Descent. The director here, Carter Smith, is choppy and matter of fact, intent on getting us atop the titular structure as fast as editing will allow. The misdirection of the book is still accounted for but considerably less elegant. The book leads us to believe that a Predator is about, only to sucker punch us with something more frighteningly banal, the film tips its hat a little early.
The characters, embodied by Jena Malone, Jonathan Tucker, Shawn Ashmore, and Laura Ramsey, remain surprisingly unsentimental though, and it’s in this department that the film scores its modest points. The most haunting death in the book, a self-mutilation, remains unshakably icky, but one can’t help but feel that it’s in the service of not too much. I don’t normally play the often unfair, generally irritating “but this isn’t like in the novel” game, but The Ruins was clearly conceived in cinematic terms to begin with, and promised a pop thriller that could’ve been in line with Jaws or The Silence of the Lambs, instead we got something closer to Jaws 2 (though better than that); not bad, scratches the itch, but that’s partially my issue with the film, there’s no itch left to ponder at night, when the things should really be eating at you.
★★½
Hanging with Otto.
No review today, have been stuck in Foster Hirsch’s wonderful Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King. If you’ll recall, I found Laura to be mildly overrated, but Hirsch’s impassioned analysis is going to force me to return to the picture (which, in fairness, I’ve always liked). I’ve always loved Anatomy of a Murder, a courtroom procedural that features a large cast doing what they each individually do best. Watching George C. Scott and James Stewart spar is a particular pleasure, and Lee Remick gives good sexy, untrustworthy dame.
No promises, but prepare for a mild Preminger fest whenever I finish the book.
Stop-Loss (2008)
Stop-Loss, regardless of whatever else needs to be said, has a terrific first act. Director Kimberly Peirce captures an intangible, free floating battle scarred anxiety that’s legitimate and fully felt. Peirce, as a few other critics have also noted, has a knack for wrestling a certain compromised caged animal masculinity on the screen. The Iraq veterans of Stop-Loss return to America after an ambush, and find themselves doing anything to purge that restless trigger fever that’s ping ponging within them like a ricocheting bullet. They fire guns, get hammered, get laid, and wake up the next morning without the slightest hint as to what to do next.
Peirce’s previous film was Boys Don’t Cry, and that picture had a staggering intensity, detailing a senseless, awful murder, but Peirce, and this is the mark of a major artist, didn’t let her outrage trump her empathy; her killers were allowed to be broken and confused, the killing feeling less about the victim than about some sort of blood passage that no one on either side understood. Boys Don’t Cry is an emotionally rounded, stunning picture, in league with the great true-life murder accounts, within spitting distance of In Cold Blood. Stop-Loss, at its best, details a similar, almost as convincing, emotional dislocation.
Peirce doesn’t hold the momentum in this new picture though, after about a half an hour, the titular inciting incident kicks in and brings with it a familiar formula; a melodrama that hits all the usual marks of the frustrated soldier without a cause. Brandon (Ryan Phillipe) learns that he is to return to Iraq after completing his contract anyway due to a stop-loss clause that allows for the military to extend soldiers’ contracts in a time of war. Brandon is accomplished, good looking, certainly “All American” but something snaps in him. He argues that, officially, we’re not in a time of war. The argument escalates with frightening speed, and Brandon soon finds himself on the lam, considering crossing the border to evade duty and as well as returning to the possibility that he might kill more innocent people in the name of said duty.
So, yes, Stop-Loss turns into a road picture, as well as a veteran coming to terms with the war picture, though the film both to its benefit and detriment, turns out to be less about the Iraq war than War in general. The film hinges on a conflict that’s admirably gray. Brandon’s actions are understandable, to a point, but they are also self-absorbed, and Peirce doesn’t let us forget that. Brandon’s actions take a toll on his fellow soldiers, most notably Steve (Channing Tatum) and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who feel as lost as he does and need their friend, their leader’s, support. Brandon argues that the stop-loss clause is a backdoor draft, but that comparison isn’t fair, the clause is, after all, in the contract he willingly signed.
There’s never really much doubt how the film is going to end, but Peirce’s first act builds considerable good will, and she’s too canny to ever totally squander it; the speech laden war picture clichés are side stepped (occasionally) in appealingly live wire ways. One of my favorite moments in the film, and probably one of the most truthful to pop up in this wave of Iraq pictures, happens about half-way in. Brandon is getting loaded at a dive with Steve’s girlfriend, who’s driving him to speak to a senator, and, as he’s about to launch into one of those self-righteous indignant speeches of which characters in these movies have a habit of launching into, she cuts him off, and says, simply, “let’s just get drunk.” There is nothing in In the Valley of Elah to rival those words.
There is nothing in any of the Iraq films that I’ve seen that rivals Brandon’s encounter in with Rico (Victor Rasuk), a soldier nursing severe injuries from the opening ambush who still maintains an air of (perhaps blind) let’s go over there and fuck them up patriotism. Rico does curls with his remaining arm, and sniffs the air for the beautiful woman he can tell Brandon has brought with him. Rasuk was memorable in Lords of Dogtown, but his practicality and optimism are devastating here, and has the odd effect of further discrediting our hero, who, after this episode, feels like a self-pitying prick. One of Rasuk’s final lines, about getting killed so his family can obtain legal residence in the U.S., should feel editorial, but there’s no shaking off his gleeful matter of fact delusion.
Stop-Loss’s biggest problem may be that Peirce has seemingly chosen the least interesting soldier in the squad to focus on. Phillipe is fine, delivering perhaps his strongest, most convincing lead performance after floundering in Breach last year, but it’s his friends that continue to haunt. Tommy and Steve are clichés (one is the unquestioning straight arrow, the other an alcoholic with a relationship and stability problem) but Tatum and Levitt, like Rasuk, get under the skin and play against expectations: they are quieter, livelier, more self-loathing and screwed up than the movies usually allow them to be. After two pictures it’s clear that Peirce is marvelous with actors, and she’s equally confident playing in the usually vanilla true life wannabe profound sandbox, she finds the humanity in old notes and conventions, and shakes them up and reminds us why we listened to them so much to begin with. Stop-Loss is a minor, messy, admirable, appealing movie; an old-fashioned curiosity of war picture that has the good manners to be an engaging story.
★★★
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