BUFFALO ’66 – vincent gallo – 4.9 / 10

Vincent Gallo is one charismatic dude. At least, I think he is. I’m not really sure. Everyone seems to treat him as if he is (in his own films anyway) so maybe it’s true. Myself, I don’t see it. I just think he’s a dick. He’s more compelling than your average dick but a dick nonetheless.

Let me briefly recap the film for you: Gallo’s character gets out of prison, kidnaps a girl, forces her to come with him to his parents’ house and pretend she’s his fiancé then abandons her at a hotel while he goes off to kill the place kicker for the Buffalo Bills that cost him a bunch of money ten years ago. Even though he doesn’t end up killing the guy, is there anything in that synopsis that would make you think this was a good and decent person?

And that’s not even taking into account his behavior during all this. He is at best recalcitrant and at worst outright belligerent to his parents and to the girl he kidnapped who, for some reason unbeknownst to me, likes this guy. She likes him even though he kidnapped her and treats her like dirt. To me that doesn’t say something about her character, it says something about how Gallo sees himself. Namely that everyone loves him no matter how he behaves towards them.

This film, while it has some interesting camera angles and compelling asides (not to mention a downright thrilling climax), ends up being little more than one man’s extended love letter to himself. It takes a bold, brave artist to put himself in his own film. It takes a fearless artist to make the character he plays in the film unsympathetic and unlikable. And it takes a borderline delusional one to have everyone therein love him. And that, my friends, is Vincent Gallo of Bufflao '66, brave, fearless and delusional.

CLICK – frank coraci – 1.0 / 10

Leave it to Adam Sandler and his band of merry men to take what could have been an interesting concept and turn it into an excuse to make dick and fart jokes (literally dick and fart jokes and more than a few sex jokes as well). By making this into as broad a comedy as possible, they turn Click into nothing more than another high concept comedy in which the world contorts itself around in increasing unbelievable ways at the inconvenience of countless other people just so some privileged white guy (usually an architect) can learn to appreciate his life (that is already far better than 99 percent of the rest of the people on the planet). Huzzah.

It’s the same plot that we’ve seen in Sandler’s own Spanglish as well as Bruce Almighty and the recent Breaking and Entering. I guess it’s easier to just make a film like countless others (especially if it’s a proven money maker) but it sucks when they take what could have been a good concept for a serious minded movie and run it straight into the ground.

The most egregious error the filmmakers indulge in here is in making the universal remote ruin Michael’s life in a completely nonsensical and ridiculous way. They have to have things go wrong, of course, since this is that sort of film, but the way they do it is just silly. It involves the remote learning Michael’s “preferences” and then fast forwarding through every future occurrence of something he’s fast forwarded through once (fights with his wife and showers, for instance). Eventually he’s skipping so much of his life that he’s very near the end of it.

The problem with all that, besides the obvious fact that remotes don’t learn preferences and that, even if they did, there would have to be some sort of override control, is that it makes the device the scapegoat. Sure it’s reflecting Michael’s initial choices but after that he’s fighting the remote the whole time. Thus, when Michael is given a second chance at the end of the film (in that tired cop out to end all cop outs: it was all a dream), he really hadn’t changed all that much. Rather than learning to appreciate the little things in life, it’s far more believable that he would just have learned to distrust creepy men with strange haircuts who talk like Christopher Walken.

Add to this nonsense the fact that Michael is, for some reason, a huge dick to a neighbor’s kid (named O’Doyle in a reference to Sandler’s earlier and much funnier though no less puerile Billy Madison) and you get a very disturbing portrait of the man Sandler is playing here. This despite the fact that he’s certainly become aware of his critics’ descriptions of his man-child characters as monsters (witness his attempt to rehab his image in Spanglish and Reign Over Me). He and his band of cohorts are just not smart enough to realize that making Michael a “family man” does not absolve him of his sins. That’s far too subtle a concept to grasp for these Neanderthals. And as long as the filmgoing public at large doesn’t catch on anytime soon, I guess we’ll be stuck with an endless parade of these grinning assholes like Michael. Once again, huzzah.

DIRTY DANCING – emile ardolino – 4.3 / 10

I was halfway into this movie before I figured out that it was set in the 1950s (and really, I’m still not entirely sure). So poorly is the past recreated in the film that I just thought Patrick Swayze’s dance instructor was driving an old car because he wanted to be like James Dean. Though how a guy in tights with a penchant for twirling could think himself James Dean, I don’t know.

Anyway, the plot of the film revolves around the two-- possibly three-- week vacation a rich Jewish family from New York takes in the Catskills. It’s interesting to watch from the modern perspective where the idea of a rich successful doctor taking the better part of a month off to hang out and learn to dance and golf in the mountains is laughable. It’s like summer camp for grown-ups. Indeed, the resort in which the film is set and the archetypal characters that populate the film remind me so much of the same era’s slasher flicks that I half expected someone to get violently assaulted. The aesthetics are so similar, in fact, that I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the film was directed by a slasher film veteran. (Alas, it wasn’t.)

Don’t get me wrong, the film is bad. It’s just bad in a more interesting way than most other bad films. For instance, although it’s central love plot is never in much doubt, the obstacles that are thrown up between Swayze’s character and Jennifer Grey’s are a lot more interesting and serious than the contrived nonsense of something like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days or The Wedding Planner.

I also find it curious that this sort of straightforward romantic movie is hardly ever seen anymore. Considering the runaway success of this film and the minor classic status it's attained over the years (and that women still make up fifty percent of the filmgoing public), it seems strange that the only place you can find romance these days is in a romantic comedy or absolute dreck like The Holiday or Something’s Gotta Give. Or it could just be that I’m watching this film from a far enough remove that I can’t quite poke as many holes in it as I might otherwise.

SIXTEEN CANDLES – john hughes – 3.3 / 10

I was reading an article in Time the other day that was talking about the aging Baby Boomer population. It mentioned in passing that Generations X and Y are, if anything, prematurely nostalgic which, in my experience, is absolutely true. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself except for the fact that they (or is it we?) are nostalgic for racist, misogynist crap like Sixteen Candles.

It’s bad enough that the whole plot of the film revolves around a young girl’s desire to be wanted by a man but the Long Duck Dong subplot is so abhorrent as to be unforgivable. The only thing the film has going for it is that it’s one of those so bad it’s good movies. Even the most blockheaded lunk notices the rampant racism that finds Dong’s every appearance accompanied by a gong on the soundtrack. And with the racism so obvious, you can’t help but be tickled by it, though, it should be said that you’re laughing not at the film but at the idea that someone would think this was funny. I mean, how did they ever get away with that? I guess you laugh because there’s just no other response to something this ridiculous.

DOMINO – tony scott – 2.4 / 10

What must it be like on the set of Tony Scott film? The behind the scenes documentary on the DVD release of this film indicates that Scott routinely has five or six cameras shooting at any given time. But the logistics of that must be a total nightmare. How do the actors know where to look? How does the DP light for six cameras? Are all the operators told to just shake the shit out of their cameras and zoom in and out at random intervals? And the editor, christ, he must want to shoot himself in the head.

The thing is, even if the film turned out to be good (which Domino really really isn’t), could Scott realistically take credit for its artistic success? I mean, there’s no way he’s sitting on set watching six monitors so there’s no way he’s even seeing all the footage he’s getting. (Dailies must be a fun little surprise for him.) Of course, he guides the overall artistic vision for the film but it seems overly generous to think of him as an auteur despite the fact that his films have a very unique and distinctive look.

I guess what I’m saying is that with so much chaos swirling around and so many cameras shooting on so many different film stocks with so much crazy movement and quick cutting, what could possibly be the artistic thought behind the film? The only thing effectively conveyed by all this nonsense is a feeling of sensory overload and that things are moving very quickly. But that’s really all.

GRINDHOUSE: PLANET TERROR – robert rodriguez – 3 / 10 DEATH PROOF – quentin tarantino – 7.0 / 10

The first thing I want to talk about, to get that out of the way, is the fake trailers that play before and between the two films that comprise Grindhouse. I guess the idea for the trailers makes sense on a superficial level. And without thinking about it very much, I was excited to see them. But as they unspooled in front of me, I began to realize just how terrible an idea they were. The problem is that they serve no purpose. A trailer is supposed to get the viewer excited to see the film advertised (since they are, after all, advertisements) but since everyone watching this film knows that these trailers advertise nonexistent films, no one is going to want to see the film. Obviously the directors making these trailers were aware of that, so instead of making a trailer that would get people excited about a nonexistent film, they went for humor instead. But if the fake trailers are funny they are not fulfilling the role of trailers and thus become a new thing altogether. In other words, the fake trailers are pretty much a failure as trailers and are thus just short films that comment archly on trailers which, to me, is not very interesting.

A similar problem afflicts Robert Rodriguez’s half of the double feature, Planet Terror. Though he does a much better job of mimicking the experience of seeing a cheap movie in a cheap theater in the 1970s than Tarantino does, there’s a disconnect here between the aesthetic of the film and the substance. Sure it looks like it was shot on 16mm film and had been through the wringer a thousand times (there are hairs and burns and all manner of scratches flickering across the screen) but at the same time there’s so much that is clearly computer generated in the film that the whole thing shakes out as the very definition of disingenuous. To have the film look like it was a legitimate grindhouse picture but then to have clearly spent millions to make it that way makes the film almost impossible to like.

The very first scene, for instance, is of Rose McGowan’s Cherry Darling stripping (or go-go dancing which is, apparently, different). This scene infuriates for a number of reasons. First, McGowan remains clothed throughout. Now I’m not looking to be prurient or to see McGowan naked (really, I’m not that interested) but to make all this hay about the fact that this is a throwback to the boobs and blood splatter pictures of the 70's and then not show any boobs just makes no sense. (Couple this scene with a moment later in the film in which a sex scene “burns up” and the film jumps ahead ten minutes and you get a pretty clear picture of just how Puritanical and un-grindhouse Rodriguez is when it comes to sex). Second, anyone who has seen any commercials or trailers for the film has seen the moment wherein McGowan receives a prosthetic leg machine gun. But in that first go-go dancing scene, she clearly has both her legs intact. So, right from the get go it’s clear that there’s going to be an awful lot of CG work in the film to make it look like she only has one leg. (If this had been a real grindhouse picture, Cherry would have been played by a woman with one leg who would have had a pretty bad prosthesis the whole first half of the movie.) Thus it’s clear from pretty much the first minute of the film that Rodriguez is going to be faithful only to the superficial aspects of a grindhouse picture and not at all to the spirit of the thing. It’s no surprise then that he completely fails to absorb the audience into his nonsensical, meandering zombie picture.

Tarantino on the other hand, clearly set out to be more loyal to the spirit of the grindhouse than to the aesthetics of it (though he does a pretty decent job in that regard as well). Rather than try to make a film that looked like it was being shown in a cheap theater in the 1970s, Tarantino made a film to which the modern audience would respond the same way he did as a kid in that 1970s theater. Basically he chose the much harder path and got a lot closer to success than Rodriguez.

His half of the double feature, Death Proof, concerns a serial killer named Stuntman Mike (played wonderfully by Kurt Russell) who uses his invincible car to kill helpless women. The film is basically two terrific action set pieces separated by two extended conversations between groups of female friends. Though the lack of action for the first forty minutes of the film strikes me as not quite representative of the grindhouse aesthetic, when the action does come, it is fantastic and brutal and damn entertaining. It is also noticeably free of CG work and uses only techniques that would have been available to a filmmaker in the 1970s. Thus, even though from all appearances Tarantino approached his half of the film with a completely different goal than Rodriguez (to be inspired by rather than just imitate the exploitation films of the 1970s), he actually gets a lot closer to making a believable grindhouse flick.

Still, the lengthy dialogue scenes in the film continue the worrying trend Tarantino’s been on since he and Roger Avary parted ways after Pulp Fiction. Whereas he used to be content to have only a scene or two be entirely about his free associative pop culture ramblings (with the other scenes having this mixed in, of course, but not being the exclusive purpose of the scenes), he’s now making films that, anytime anyone opens their mouth, all that’s coming out is ephemera. Take away every last bit of dialogue from Death Proof, for instance, and you don’t lose much of the pleasure of watching the film. Indeed, it's probably increased since you don’t have to wait forty minutes in between action scenes.

I’m not saying that these long rambling conversations are boring because they aren’t. They just aren’t about anything. They exist outside of and apart from the rest of the film and are completely unconnected to the violence that surrounds them. Maybe that’s the point, but the whole enterprise has the same sort of feeling as when, in the end of the second volume of Kill Bill, the whole picture grinds to halt so Bill can talk about Superman for a while. What I’m saying, I guess, is that Tarantino’s banal insights into pop culture and relationships, etc. are just not interesting enough for their own sake. They need to be tied into a larger narrative or it becomes just Tarantino showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of the ephemera of modern life. And while that might have been interesting enough to sustain my interest in his work for a while, I’m starting to grow weary of it. And judging by other reviews of this film, I might not be the only one.

That’s the thing, really. Tarantino makes Tarantino films. He is not capable of doing anything else. Even when he assigns himself the task of mimicking another style of filmmaking, he can’t help but pour his own sensibility into the film and turn it into something uniquely his own. Indeed, he is of that rare breed of filmmakers who present a sui generis aesthetic to the world. The problem is that even though his aesthetic and worldview are completely unique and unlike anything anyone else is doing, there’s no escaping the fact that it is still more of the same in film after film. And I, for one, find the bloom to be off this particular rose. What was lively and intoxicating five films ago is now becoming commonplace and predictable. It’s almost as if Tarantino’s become a genre unto himself. There are worse things, I guess, than being completely unique in the same way film after film. But I had expected more from the video store wunderkind and patron saint of film geeks.