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SIMON SAYS: What is a “bad” movie? Not GREEN LANTERN. And definitely not ZARDOZ

SIMON SAYS: What is a “bad” movie? Not GREEN LANTERN. And definitely not ZARDOZ



[Editor's note: This piece marks the debut of SIMON SAYS, a weekly column about popular culture.]

By Simon Abrams
PressPlay contributor

When Roger Ebert first reviewed Zardoz back in 1974, he half-heartedly dismissed the film as being, “an exercise in self-indulgence (if often an interesting one) by [director John] Boorman, who more or less had carte blanche to do a personal project after his immensely successful Deliverance.” My mind reeled as I read this line: how could an “interesting” film be so easily dismissed? Ebert complains that Boorman puts a lot of heavy concepts into Zardoz, but seems reluctant to take them seriously himself. He then lists a series of wacky things that happen in the film; there's a passing mention of an erotic “sight gag” and a “combination shoot-out and mercy-killing spree.” From his review, it’s hard to tell what Ebert meant when he wrote that the film is "interesting" considering that he’s mostly listing elements he finds hard to take.

Of all the superlatives one can use when praising a film, to say a film is “interesting” is the most non-committal. It is also, in some ways, the most peculiar. Surely a film cannot be all bad if it is interesting. And if its interesting parts are truly worthwhile, then why treat it like just another mediocre film?

This is the fate that befell Green Lantern. Metacritic's consensus ranks it with a meager score of 39 out of 100, as opposed to X-Men: First Class’s score of 64 and Thor’s 59. The difference is even more pronounced on Rotten Tomatoes, where X-Men: First Class has a score of 87%, Thor 77%, and Green Lantern trailing with 27%. My taste must be out-of-step with consensus; I found the uneven eccentricity of Green Lantern — which was directed by Martin Campbell, of No Escape, Goldeneye and Casino Royale — vastly more "interesting" than the other two films' machine-tooled smoothness. Give me Campbell's film, with its overstuffed plot lines and gaping plot holes, over a slick but lifeless super-hero movie like Thor or X-Men: First Class.That takes an ephemeral inspiration that I never saw in either of the two aforementioned Marvel Comics films. For a movie to be bad — to be truly worthy of being dismissed outright as a “bad film” — I need to feel as though the filmmakers don’t believe in whatever they’re peddling. Thor and X-Men: First Class don’t strike me as works where the screenwriters or the directors involved cared enough to invest some part of themselves in the script. There's no unique identity to either movie — no idiosyncratic traits that make them worth revisiting later.

At least Green Lantern has the guts to be flamboyant, and has a couple of spectacular set pieces and two very strong lead performances from Ryan Reynolds and Peter Sarsgaard. Though the film often struggles to take off, the juxtaposition of Reynolds' fearless Hal Jordan and Sarsgaard's Hector Hammond is a fruitful comparison, one that the film's screenwriters were wise to make. Furthermore, the film feels like it's more of a piece than the Marvel Comics films: there may be a subplot or three too many in Green Lantern, but all of the inside references to mysterious people or objects that old fans should get a kick out of are actually incorporated into the story as plot points. Thor and X-Men: First Class, in contrast, are watchable and feature commendable performances from their respective casts, but they lack the ambition or central pathos that drive Green Lantern. And as boilerplate origin stories, they just don’t stay with me after a point. As a comic book nerd, I don’t particularly need any of these films to tell me who their characters are—I already know. But when a movie is good enough to show me a character or a story in a new light — as Green Lantern does — no matter how troubled it may be in other aspects, I don't think it can be considered "bad."

But what about a film whose reputation as a “bad movie” precedes it? What about the films that are supposed to be so flat-out bad that any attempt to defend them is automatically considered suspect? What about Zardoz?

How exactly do you solve a problem like Zardoz? John Boorman’s psychedelic sci-fi opus has become infamous, regarded more as a curio than an honest-to-goodness landmark of ‘70s cinema because it’s still dismissed outright as a bad movie. The film’s token status as a wonky kooky crazy film has been established for decades now. There seems little chance that it will ever achieve mass acceptance. At best it's treated as an ambitious failure: apparently, its themes are sprawling and its humor is too off-puttingly kitschy. Take this piece, which just name-drops Zardoz and assumes that readers will automatically understand it as shorthand for "indisputably bad film." How can one even argue with unqualified assumptions like that? Surely Zardoz is too interesting to be truly bad.

Admittedly, many of Zardoz’s fans have inadvertently done more harm than help to the film by treating it like a specialty cult item. There’s a reason why whenever you mention the film to someone who’s seen it, they’ll chirrup a loaded line like, “The gun is good; the penis is evil.” It’s like a secret handshake for fans who probably don’t even remember the meaning of the line anyway. I’m not trying to suggests that Zardoz’s cult is witless, nor am I trying to sweep the out-there-ness of Zardoz under a rug. You can’t make a movie where Sean Connery runs around with a ponytail, a loaded pistol, a bikini bottom, go-go boots and a bondage harness look normal. Still, the tendency of even the film's fans to repeat lines such as “The gun is good…the penis is evil…” suggests that even admirers have bought into the idea that Zardoz is more of a camp artifact than a potently strange film that happens to be worth serious consideration. The movie needs rescuing from detractors and defenders alike. Its revolutionary stance is only tempered by its intensely strange dedication to a continually devolving scenario. Boorman deliberately made it impossible to ever feel completely comfortable with Zardoz by concluding it with the end of human civilization. Connery’s character is an agent of chaos who can only create a brand new world by first destroying all the cultural treasures that the futuristic civilization he infiltrates has hoarded and kept to themselves over time. To expect a film this volatile to be tonally consistent is like expecting a Stan Brakhage film to have a linear storyline: it’s never gonna happen.

I suspect that Ebert was reluctant to outright dismiss Zardoz partly because it’s a Boorman film. He mentions Leo the Last and Deliverance in such a way as to suggest that Boorman was stepping away from the qualities that Ebert believed made him great. But I don’t understand how one can appreciate Boorman’s earlier explorations of man’s self-destructive tendencies and the power that comes from devolving and embracing one’s animal instincts and not care for Zardoz. It is in many ways the most vibrant expression of Boorman’s fascination with the problems and advantages of becoming more feral in order to become more civilized. In that sense, it's an incredibly personal film, just a few steps removed from Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain in its incendiary, get-out-your-pitchforks-and-start-a-revolution message. Its frothing-at-the-mouth madness needs context to be fully appreciated. That’s what criticism should strive for: making films like Zardoz, or a vastly more mainstream but still eccentric superhero film like Green Lantern, look good — and in general make films whose faults and/or merits might otherwise be inaccessible more accessible.

Yes.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

One Flew Over the Transformer’s Nest: or, What Michael Bay could learn from Randle P. McMurphy

One Flew Over the Transformer’s Nest: or, What Michael Bay could learn from Randle P. McMurphy

By Steven Boone
PressPlay contributor

Have you ever been subject to someone in a position of authority who denied you a basic adult right, as if you were a child?

Of course you have. It’s a universal frustration we’ve all experienced at one point or another. In One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, a guy named Charlie Cheswick wants his cigarettes. He’s a voluntary patient at a mental institution in 1963, and the ward supervisor, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), serenely refuses to let him have his smokes. She’s been punishing him in this manner for a while now, and he’s nearly fed up. Adding fuel to the fire, fellow patient McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) asks other ward mates to let Cheswick bum a smoke.

Cheswick loses it. “I don’t want his cigarettes, or his, or his, or his….” He turns his fury back to the nurse. “I want my cigarettes, Nurse Ratched! What gives you the damn right to keep our cigarettes piled up on your desk and to squeeze out a pack only when you feel like it, huh?” He’s in a rage of understandable frustration (and nicotine withdrawal), but Nurse Ratched exploits the situation by remaining inhumanly calm, making him look like the unreasonable crazy man that violence-prone attendants standing nearby are all too happy to believe he is.

“That’s just wrong,” said a young man standing next to me, staring up at the movie and shaking his head. “Give that dude his cigarettes.” We were gathered at an outdoor screening in midtown Manhattan, part of Bryant Park’s summer movie series. On the giant screen, Charley Cheswick, played by the great character actor Sydney Lassick, continued to throw a tantrum (“I ain’t no little kid! I want something done! I want something doooonne!”) until McMurphy rushed over to the nurses’ station, put his fist through its thin plate glass window, and grabbed a carton of Lucky Strikes. The crowd, at least a thousand strong, erupted in applause. McMurphy shoved the carton into Cheswick‘s arms, but it was too late. Attendants dragged him away. Nurse Ratched won this round. Boooo.

There would be a lot more applause, catcalls and dismayed head-shaking from this Bryant Park movie crowd, which was Standing Room Only that night. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, an allegorical drama adapted from Ken Kesey’s novel, played like a non-stop thrill ride. Originally released in 1975, it’s the most thrilling summer movie of 2011.

The park was packed, in part, because the movie was free. HBO, apparently out of the kindness of its corporate heart, shows free classic films in Bryant Park every summer since the early 90s. But what struck me was how the place stayed packed, standing room only, for the film’s duration. I was standing alongside the great lawn in the middle of the park, where I could see the multitude staring up, barely blinking—and, at times, crying, grinning madly in unconscious pantomime of Jack’s ridiculously charismatic smile; or resting a head on the shoulder of a loved one. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest doesn’t let you look away. How does it do this?

Surely, Michael Bay knows. He didn’t direct Cuckoo’s Nest. Milos Forman did that when Bay was 10 years old, playing with toy cars and army men. Bay’s new film Transformers: Dark of the Moon apes a basic understanding of why people flock to the big commercial movies. We don’t seek escape so much as communion. In theaters, strangers come together as at church, to experience something that spells out what fears, strengths, joys and frustrations we have in common. You can’t get an “amen” in your living room. The Transformers movies genuflect toward this phenomenon by building their tale around an Everyman hero who overcomes everyday humiliation and adversity in the manner of Buster Keaton or Peter Parker. The plots may be about an endless battle on earth between good shape-shifting robots (The Autobots) and evil ones (The Decepticons), but the heart of the franchise is likable Sam (Shia Leboeuf). Previously, Sam struggled to get out from under his loving but suffocating parents and maintain a relationship with an affectionate love doll (Megan Fox). This time he faces the same struggles while going through a mortifying recession-era job search and tending an even more affectionate love doll (Rosie Alice Huntington-Whiteley). What young soul, in Cairo or Austin, can’t relate?

Or so Bay seems to think. It’s clear that the director assumes we’ve developed some kind of relationship with Sam over the years. All Bay heroes are the kind of simple, red-blooded American boys that McMurphy encouraged virginal Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif) to be in Cuckoo’s Nest, the kind who “oughta be out in a convertible bird-dogging chicks and banging beaver.” Except that Sam’s coming of age across three deafening Transformers movies has been like watching American Graffiti staged during the Battle of Fallujah. Despite Bay’s clear intention to bring us all together, there is no communion to be found here. All of the Transformers films are oppressive wonders, but I was impressed by how Bay left me so little with which to dull my pain this time around.

Granted, the entire series is nonsensically plotted and crammed with the kind of humor shared between Marines sitting in adjoining latrine stalls, so what was I expecting? Bay has, from the start of his career, demonstrated that his attention span lasts about .000005 seconds. The man has no concept of suspense or accumulation of detail. But the previous entries at least had a few majestic one-off images and fragments of montage that suggested that Bay’s connection to Steven Spielberg transcended the simple executive producer/director relationship. The shots of rollerblading Decepticons or somersaulting tanks in Bay’s work grooved like Spielberg in pure showman mode. But Dark of the Moon says: Enough of that shit. It is one clanking, crowded, homely image after another, in what is supposed to be a simulation of three dimensions but looks more like one of those faux-holographic Jesus cards you find in religious bookstores. Vehicles perform a lot of gymnastics that defy physics here, but this Real-D thingamajig makes them seem more toy-like than even CGI can guarantee. One potentially astonishing shot of soldiers free-falling in winged flying suits looks like a bunch of dolls dangling on fishing wire. Transformers: Dark of the Moon cost $150,000,000.

But the real horror in Dark of the Moon is the way it expresses a newfound ambition in Bay, one that surpasses even Armageddon and Pearl Harbor in devouring history, space and time. Here Bay recruits for his purposes CGI effigies of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Obama; flesh-and-blood master thespians Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and John Turturro; the real Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Fox News crusader Bill O’Reilly, NASA and, as usual, a large swath of the military industrial complex. Megan Fox, the franchise’s signature eye candy, is not in this one because, according to gossip, Spielberg fired her for comparing Bay to Hitler in a press interview. Dark of the Moon tells me the comparison is apt, but only in the sense that Bay has a truly amazing ability to bend armies to his infantile will. Sitting in the dark, staring up at Dark of the Moon through flimsy Real-D glasses, I felt as if we were all being jumped by a vicious street gang or recruited for terrorism. The theater became a cattle car to certain doom. Michael Bay will be President of the United States one day, you mark my words. Or at least governor of California.

If we last that long, that is. Dark of the Moon seems to herald a definite end of the American empire, delivering, amidst a third-act frenzy of rockets and robot breakdance-fighting, one-liners that cut deep. “We are all working for the Decepticons now,” says Patrick Dempsey, as a slimy tycoon who sells us all out to the rogue Transformers, Lex Luthor-style. Like Avatar and the Star Wars prequels, this flick somehow critiques megalomania and totalitarianism while making vigorous, sweaty love to them. We are all working for the Decepticons now, and with Nurse Ratcheds like Bay denying us our cigarette while pretending to want only what’s best for us, 1975 seems like a lost planet.

Steven Boone is a film critic and video essayist for Fandor and Roger Ebert’s Far Flung Correspondents. He writes a column on street life for Capital New York and blogs at Big Media Vandalism. You can follow him on Twitter.

SIMON SAYS: Shout Factory Delivers George Peppard in Scifi Double Bill and Not Much Else

SIMON SAYS: Shout Factory Delivers George Peppard in Scifi Double Bill and Not Much Else

By Simon Abrams

Though I love many films that are often described as “cult films,” I can’t help but feel bad for my fellow cult cinema connoisseurs. It’s like being the cinephilic equivalent of a drug addict. The more devout a cultist you are, the more dedicated you are to hunting for new highs in the most irregular places. Obscurity is often conflated and even confused with quality and no matter whose opinion you turn to for advice, you’re bound to wade through a lot of crappy movies before you stumble upon something great.

Shout Factory!, a budding DVD line that’s release shiny new “Collector’s Editions” of Roger Corman-produced gems, caters to cultists. That’s a double-edged concept if ever there was one. Shout Factory! goes the extra mile to provide commemorative features for most of their new DVD and Blu Ray releases. But the copious special features with which they supplement their films are usually pretty skimpy when it comes to providing some much-needed universal context as to what uninitiated viewers are looking at.

For example, take Shout Factory!’s new release of Battle Beyond the Stars, which just hit stores this past Tuesday. Shout Factory! not only commissioned a new anamorphic widescreen transfer of the film, but they also commissioned several worthwhile bonus features, including audio commentaries by screenwriter John Sayles and producer Roger Corman. The trouble with this DVD release isn’t with the supplementary features that were included with the film but rather the ones that weren’t. Excluding Sayles, Corman and James Cameron completists (Cameron served as the film’s art director; no wonder everything looks so chintzy) and anyone else that already enjoys Battle Beyond the Stars, Shout Factory!’s release doesn’t make an especially convincing case for the film.

This is probably because the film doesn’t really matter after a point. Battle Beyond the Stars is an intermittently clever but mostly lousy rip-off of Star Wars by way of The Seven Samurai. Within Corman’s oeuvre, the film is only really important as one of his most expensive productions. Battle Beyond the Stars is not going to blow down anyone’s doors. But maybe it has just enough to offer cult film buffs that are either looking for an ephemeral and insanely specific something to latch onto or just an intermittently funny Star Wars rip-off. After all, don’t you want to see George Peppard dispense scotch and soda from his belt buckle?

If the answer to that rhetorical question is “Uh, no,” I wouldn’t waste my time with Battle Beyond the Stars. Though Sayles gives almost all of his characters a decent one-liner or two, the film’s dumbed-down combination of The Seven Samurai and Star Wars’* storylines is pretty unremarkable. Today, an uninitiated viewer should watch Battle Beyond the Stars for Sayles’s quips and the film’s dated but satisfying production values, not for its acting, plot or characters.

The same is true about Damnation Alley, another cult item with a fairly modest reputation that Shout Factory! released for the first time on DVD this past week. Based on a novel by the great “New Wave” scifi writer Roger Zelazny, the film has a novel, even frightening, premise. A nuclear strike from parts unknown decimates most life on Earth. A trio of American Air Force men, led by (wait for it) George Peppard, travels cross-country all the way from California to Albany in order to find the source of a radio signal. Along the way, they fight giant cockroaches and almost drown in a flood in a giant armored tank (It’s got missile launchers, kids! And a decal of Captain America’s shield on the side! Buy yours today!). The rest isn’t particularly memorable.

With the exception of Zelazny’s potent post-apocalyptic scenario and some cheesy but memorable scenes, including an early confrontation where a young Jan-Michael Vincent rides around dodges enormous irradiated scorpions on his dirt bike, Damnation Alley is also unfortunately a dud. Even if you really like any of its cast members, including a very young Jackie Earle Haley, you’d have to be already seriously obsessed with the film, its cast or crew to pick the film up. There’s no buried treasure here, though Battle Beyond the Stars has its moments. And the search for the next unsung cult hit continues…

*I tend to doubt Corman or Sayles were even thinking about The Hidden Fortress, the Akira Kurosawa movie George Lucas based Star Wars: A New Hope on, when they made Battle Beyond the Stars.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

TREE OF GAGA, BRANCH 7: Best Buy

TREE OF GAGA, BRANCH 7: Best Buy

What you can’t see is what happens after this troubled young man leaves. What happens is Gaga struggling with the heavy import of what the man said, struggling to regain her strength after giving so much to him. It takes a good 15 minutes before she’s re-Gaga-fied.

She often wonders in interviews why we’re content to accept pop stars who give us so little. Clearly, she isn’t part of that problem.

TREE OF GAGA, BRANCH 5: “Killer Queen”

TREE OF GAGA, BRANCH 5: “Killer Queen”

“The killer queen inside me
Coming to say ‘Hello’!”

How much Freddie Mercury is in Gaga’s DNA? Lots. Was I surprised when Brian May lent his super massive guitar to “You and I”, the power ballad that follows “The Queen”? Naw—it was inevitable.

Plus, “The Queen” is followed by a song that uses the “We Will Rock You” sample and the real Brian May’s supermassive guitar. That crazy, super-meta uptown girl.

TREE OF GAGA, BRANCH 2: STREETWORK PROGRAM

TREE OF GAGA, BRANCH 2: STREETWORK PROGRAM

SAFE HORIZON

I was walking up First Avenue in the East Village where I live when I saw this super-butch girl at 12th Street who looked like she’d been through some hard times and clearly didn’t have much money. But what she had, she wore well: a clean wife-beater, old but ironed roll-up jeans, hair pulled back in a good bun.

She made me think of the kind of brave kids you see at Safe Horizon. This corner was desolate for some reason. She had an MP3 player’s ear buds in her ears and she was singing Gaga’s love letter to Alexander McQueen, “Fashion of His Love”, real loud, and she did not give a half fuck who cared.