Hey, readers! Hope you all had a great 4th of July.
I’m on Scene-Stealers again this week, with a review of the movie “Black Death”, featuring nasty diseases, witchcraft, and more of Sean Bean rockin’ broadswords and chain mail. Check out the trailer for the film below:
I have a strange relationship to Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, a relationship I suspect at lot of people share. I know his movies are bad. I do. But the love I have for them transcends the typical bad movie ironic enjoyment. I legitimately count “Blood Sport” and “Timecop” among my favorite movies of all time, despite the fact that they are awful; full of wooden acting, bad writing and ridiculous action scenes that exist solely to let Van Damme show off his fighting prowess. These are movies for which the term “so bad it’s good” was invented. There’s just no other way to put the way I feel about them into words. Hating JCVD would be like hating a homeless puppy, if that homeless puppy could also do split-kicks. You just can’t do it.
Suffice it to say that I will watch any Van Damme movie. But when there’s one that features not only JCVD, but Mickey Rourke and Dennis Rodman? Count me in. That movie is “Double Team,” and it’s what I’m reviewing this week.
The plot (such as it is): Jean-Claude plays the oddly named Jack-Paul Quinn, another in his long line of American action heroes with Belgian accents. He’s a CIA agent who’s retired to live the quiet life in Europe with his pregnant wife. But one day, he gets called back in to help track down and eliminate Stavros (Rourke), a baddie with unclear motivations other than being violent and generally nasty. Obviously, things get complicated. Stavros kidnaps Jack’s wife, and Jack is exiled to what appears to be an island peopled by discarded James Bond villains. To break out and get his wife and unborn baby back, Jack enlists the help of arms dealer Yaz (a spectacularly awful Rodman).
Van Damme is his usual no-nonsense, ass-kicking self in this movie. But he’s not the reason to watch it. The real reason is Rodman, whose wacko persona is perfectly encapsulated in the movie. “Double Team” was released right around the time that Rodman was inducted into the NBA hall of fame, and in the midst of the Chicago Bulls’ three-peat repeat between 1996 and 1998. As with Michael Jordan in “Space Jam,” Rodman was considered a bankable star despite his lack of acting experience, simply because everyone on that team was huge at the time. As with Van Damme’s kung fu, the role of Yaz exists solely to showcase Rodman’s bizarro style and attitude. He changes his hair color more times than I could count, and definitely more times than should be physically possible, given the movie’s time line. And then there are the numerous not-so-subtle basketball references. They’re shoehorned into the script, even though Rodman’s character isn’t a basketball player. He’s even got a basketball-shaped parachute, just in case you still weren’t aware of Rodman’s day job.
Another (unsung) star of the movie: product placement. In addition to Rodman essentially being a product placement for himself, the movie also manages to include Coke and the tiger from the Mandalay Films logo in a final confrontation scene that starts out ridiculous (a showdown between Van Damme and Rourke in a landmine-rigged Coliseum) and just builds from there (Van Damme also has to defeat a man-eating tiger, and a Coke machine is used as a shield to save Van Damme, Rodman and Van Damme’s newborn child from fiery doom). Apparently there are soda machines at the Coliseum. Who knew, right?
Double Team is a hot mess of a movie. The script contains so many plot holes that you’d be forgiven for confusing it with Swiss cheese. The way it zips along nonchalantly despite Grand Canyon-sized gaps in logic, the movie feels like it was constructed by a group of play-acting elementary school kids. But that’s why I kind of love it. Movies like Double Team are the perfect example of a flick that not only requires the audience to suspend disbelief, but to turn off their brains completely. It goes about its jaw-droppingly absurd work with a sense of infectious glee. As is the way with all Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles, it’s perfectly dumb fun. It’s a split-kicking homeless puppy: it just feels wrong not to love it.
Random observations:
There’s once scene in “Double Team” that is either a blatant rip-off or an homage to the hospital sequence at the end of John Woo’s brilliant “Hard Boiled,” I can’t decide which it is–and unfortunately can’t find a clip to play for you here. But if you’ve seen “Hard Boiled,” you’ll know what I’m talking about. The scene involves a maternity ward, and endangered infants in bassinets.
Another classic moment: Van Damme and Rodman go “undercover” at one point towards the end of the film. Here’s what they come up with:
Could’ve fooled me.
Finally, listen to the song that’s playing over the credit sequence. It features Rodman on vocals, and it is one classy piece of music.
Link:
Scott Tobias’ “New Cult Canon” essay on Double Team gave me the inspiration for this week’s review. For a more eloquent review of the film, as well as some cultural context, check it out.
Hollywood is a world dominated by trends. Once it’s discovered that a particular concept sells, you can bet that the movie moguls will keep on pushing it to within an inch of its life–and sometimes, as we’ll see today, even for a good while afterward. Right now, for instance, we’re in the Superhero phase. In past years, we’ve been through a movie-musical phase, a western phase, and a revisionist Shakespeare phase, among others. Studios like predictability, until a predictable success becomes an unpredictable tank.
In the early 90s, Hollywood was fixated on dinosaurs. 1991 saw the premiere of “Dinosaurs,” a pre-historic sitcom about a working-class family of… Dinosaurs. It was kind of like “Roseanne” or “Married: With Children” except that it starred a bunch of life-sized reptile puppets. In 1993, we got “Jurassic Park,” which you already know my feelings about, and “We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story,” my other favorite movie of that year (don’t judge me, I was 5).
Anyway, around the time all this dino-hoopla was winding down (two years after Jurassic Park, one year after “Dinosaurs” finished its run) the powers that be decided to flog that horse one more time. The result was “Theodore Rex,” a bizarre straight-to-video release that has to be seen to be believed.
Here’s the premise: In the future, a tough-talking cop named Katie Coltrane (Whoopi Goldberg, wearing a body suit for which the descriptor “ill-conceived” is a polite euphemism) gets a new partner: sneaker-wearing, cookie-loving dinosaur Theodore Rex. Someone is killing prehistoric creatures, and it’s up to Katie and Theodore (or “Teddy”) to find out who’s behind it, and also thwart a mad scientist who’s trying to bring on a new ice age, with the help of his ridiculous henchmen. Throw in performances by the likes of Armin Mueller-Stahl, “Pontypool’s” Stephen McHattie, and Bud Cort (of “Harold and Maude”) and you’ve reached a whole new level of weird.
What’s even crazier is the legacy this movie has left behind: In his “My Year of Flops” column (required reading for any bad movie aficionado), Nathan Rabin writes that “Theodore Rex” is the most expensive direct-to-video movie ever made, with a budget of around $35 million (that was two years ago—I haven’t heard of anything topping it since then). In addition to that sad fact, Whoopi was actually forced to make the movie after trying to back out of an oral agreement to star, and was sued for $20 million. Eventually she settled for a $7 million payday. Daaamn. However, one does have to wonder under what circumstances that oral agreement was made. I imagine it involved a loud party, a lot of drinks, and a conversation where at least one person wasn’t paying full attention.
This monument to terrible filmmaking starts with a really poor script. It’s aimed at a child audience, so, as you can imagine, the lines aren’t exactly sophisticated. To show you what I mean, here’s a collection of highlights:
“Citizen Kane” it ain’t.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the acting is in a class of its own. Whoopi is sleeping her way through the role, hoping someone will wake her up and she’ll discover it was all a bad dream. At times, it seems she laughs because she just can’t do anything else. Armin Mueller-Stahl seems to be doing much the same thing, just kind of waiting around until the end of filming so he can collect a paycheck (side-note: I like Armin Mueller-Stahl. But the man should be a little more discerning when it comes to his projects).
But the real stunner here is Bud Cort. “Transformative” might be the right word to describe his performance, but I don’t mean it in a good way. God bless the man for putting forth some effort, but someone really should have told him to stop. As I watched “Theodore Rex,” I compared this performance to the Bud Cort I know from “Harold and Maude” and “The Life Aquatic.” Who was this whiny-voiced, prancing troll? It baffles me, frightens me, even, to know that he has a performance like this in him.
Then there’s the puppetry. Good Lord, the puppetry. If “Jurassic Park” was an example of great creature effects work, “Theodore Rex” is an example of why that practice died. All the dinosaur characters look like the results of dumpster diving on the “Dinosaurs” backlot. The puppets flap their gums along to poorly timed voiceovers, and are about as graceless as a ballerina with stiff joints and cinderblocks for slippers. It’s obvious that little to no effort was put into any level of this production, and New Line Cinema, who released the movie, knew it, deciding to cut their considerable losses and send it straight to video. It’s one of those movies that may have seemed like a bankable (if questionable) idea at the time, but blew up in the face of everyone involved once they realized there was no saving it from utter disaster.
Rabin, in his review of “Theodore Rex,” writes that the experience of watching it nearly destroyed him. That’s saying a lot, coming from a guy who’s devoted a big chunk of his career to watching unsuccessful movies. But I don’t think it’s that bad. Sure, it’s a class-A example of uncreative people shoving garbage at the audiences, but realizing later that not even the unwashed masses would put up with it. But because this movie fails, and fails so spectacularly on every level, it’s actually kind of mesmerizing. I think it’s time for “Theodore Rex” to have a cult revival. It’s a special kind of bad movie, a jaw-droppingly awful product of its time.
In today’s cynical culture, it’s so much easier to tear things down than it is to build them up. Think about it: how many times have you tried to explain to your friends why you love your favorite movie, but failed because you just can’t describe it in words? Conversely, how often have you completely bashed a movie you hate (or love to hate) and found exactly the right things to say?
It’s my belief that in art, appreciation is a personal, unique experience. You may love a book, movie or piece of music for completely different reasons than the person next to you. That’s what makes art great, and also what makes it hard to describe. Dislike, on the other hand, is a unifier. While, like every good piece of art, every bad piece of art is bad in its own way, it’s easy for people to agree that it is, in fact, awful.
This is why we love movies that are laughably bad. They bring us together through agreement that we’re watching something of poor quality, but also evoke feelings of enjoyment because the film is uniquely and ridiculously terrible. The viewing experience is always fun, but differs depending on when and where the movie is viewed. Audiences get the best of both worlds.
So, here on “No More Popcorn,” I’m devoting one of my rotating regular topics to what I call “Plan 9 Cinema” (in honor of Ed Wood’s famously terrible “Plan 9 from Outer Space): movies that are truly and wonderfully awful, so bad they’re good.
Our first pick is 1969’s “Hercules in New York,” starring loads of people you’ve probably never heard of, but one person I’m sure you have, because he’s…well…
That’s right. “Hercules in New York” stars a post- Mr. Universe, pre- “Pumping Iron” Arnold Schwarzenegger (here billed as “Arnold Strong”) as the titular demigod who takes a quick vay-kay from Mt. Olympus to mingle with mortals in the Big Apple. During his trip, he falls in love with a professor’s daughter (appropriately named Helen), becomes a successful pro wrestler, and makes friends with a pathetic-but-sweet alcoholic pretzel vendor called Pretzie (Arnold Stang, who should have sued Schwarzenegger over name rights). It’s a ridiculous premise but, surprisingly, I think it could have made for an entertaining family film, except for a few major obstacles: the script, Schwarzenegger’s acting, and the god awful production values. Basically, it was a decent idea, horribly carried out. The result is a jaw-dropping train wreck of a movie.
We’ll start with the star. This was Schwarzenegger’s first-ever acting gig. He’s given the most basic of basic lines, akin to “Yes” “No” and “Hulk smash.” This is because a) Arnie can’t act his way out of a paper bag and b) at this point, his Austrian accent was still so thick that he was barely intelligible. It would probably be appropriate to note here that there are two versions of “Hercules in New York:” one with Schwarzenegger’s original accent (the better one) and one with his lines dubbed (the lamer one). Due to Arnold’s total lack of ability to make his lines do anything but fall out of his mouth like lead, bits that would have been clever are completely lost. This is a problem that plagues the film only in its first few scenes, so I imagine director Arthur Siedelman arranged for some rewrites once he figured out any potential for witty repartee was lost on his leading man.
Arnold’s acting also creates a weird dichotomy between the scenes among the gods on Mt. Olympus and Hercules and his friends on Earth. In the New York scenes, the actors seem to be well aware that Schwarzenegger is wooden (when they can understand him), and just kind of go with it. But the actors in the Mt. Olympus scenes, many of which are Arnie-free, behave like they’re in an entirely different movie. These guys seem to think this movie is something like “Jason and the Argonauts,” except for Pluto, who’s under the impression that it’s a Bob Fosse production:
Of course, it doesn’t help that the script is ridiculous and the production values are just slightly better than a home movie. In the Mt. Olympus scenes, you can clearly hear traffic going by in the background. There are continuity issues by the busload. And then, of course, we have this gem:
This is scene is a perfect little snippet of “Hercules in New York” because it captures just about everything that’s wrong with the movie. From the lighting, this scene apparently took place simultaneously at night and mid-afternoon. A supposedly 600-pound grizzly bear is played by a man in an animal suit. Helen (who’s an exceptional screamer, by the way) shouts not for her man to escape the bear’s clutches, but to beat him up as though the animal were a pervy drunk that had just tried to goose her at a bar. It’s classically bad.
But you want to know the one thing that’s not wrong about “Hercules in New York?” Pretzie, Hercules’ loser pretzel-vending best buddy. Despite his kooky name, Pretzie’s actually capable of some pathos. There’s an alternate version of “Hercules in New York” in my head that stars Pretzie as the main character. It’s all about how Hercules comes to Earth and changes his life for a few glorious weeks before taking off without warning and leaving his friend to resume his lonely life. This version, my version, is an entertaining but somewhat-deep exploration of the banality of life, and the existence of people for whom life is a series of disappointments.
But of course, the actual film barely even hints at poor old Pretzie’s hidden depths. There are two scenes that look like they could go somewhere, then just…end. Watch for the one after Hercules abandons Pretzie at the Empire State Building. What starts off as a surprisingly touching monologue (given the nature of everything that’s come before it) trails off and ends with quite possibly the weirdest closing line I have ever heard.
So, that’s “Hercules in New York,” the little movie that couldn’t. It’s really kind of amazing that Arnold Schwarzenegger managed to have a career after this. Who’d have thought that the guy nobody could understand in a worthless movie would eventually become Governor of California? It just goes to show you that some folks always manage to land on their feet.
Links:
While it may be a little tough to find a DVD copy of this movie, both versions are easily available online:
Davis Guggenheim, director of "Waiting for Superman" at Silverdocs
So, I’ve been interning at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for nearly a month now, and so far DC has been pretty good to me. I’ve seen all kinds of interesting sights, and met a plethora of interesting people. Because CPB is such a fabulous organization (they’re the ones who put up the money for pretty much most of what you hear and see on NPR and PBS) I sometimes get to reap the benefits of working for them. For example, on Wednesday I got to go to Silverdocs, a documentary film festival put on by AFI and the Discovery Channel in Silver Spring, Maryland. Because CPB helped sponsor the event, I got to carry around a sponsor’s pass that allowed me to do pretty much whatever I wanted for the whole day. And what I wanted to do was see movies.
I went to two screenings on Wednesday: “Into Eternity” and “The Red Chapel.” Both were films by Danish filmmakers, Michael Madsen (No, not that Michael Madsen) and Mads Brügger. Both were really interesting films, in distinctly different ways. I’m going to offer reviews of each, starting with “Into Eternity,” below.
“You are now in a place where we have buried something from you to protect you.” That’s the opening line of “Into Eternity,” which is all about Onkalo, a facility under construction in Finland that will house the world’s nuclear waste. The film, as you might expect, is fairly grim, with lots of footage of desolate, snow-covered barren landscapes suggestive of a nuclear winter. Director Michael Madsen creates a kind of Lynchian atmosphere, switching between shots of talking head scientists and executive officers at Onkalo and shots of the facility itself, deep underground, with crews blasting their way further and further down to create a space for the radioactive waste. The film plays like a subterannean environmental doc-horror movie. It’s dark, frank, creepy and cold. It seems to reflect the director’s own attitude towards his subject: that Onkalo is a bizarre, unbelievable, complex and scary entity.
Madsen’s goal seems to be to make “Into Eternity” a letter to the future. He addresses the camera directly from time to time, out of the dark, lit only by a match. The point here is that the radioactive waste that Onkalo will house will remain dangerous for about 100,000 years, which, generally speaking, is a pretty long time. Madsen asks questions of his “future audience.” What is it like during their time? Have they gone into Onkalo? Why?
Although the presentation and style of the film is fairly potent, the premise wears pretty thin after a while, which is saying something, since the movie only lasts about 87 minutes. After the first couple of instances, Madsen’s matchlit monologues feel a little bit pretentious. And, after the introduction of the idea of a nuclear waste disposal facility as big as Onkalo, the only other theme of the film seems to be how our current civilzation will communicate to future civilizations about what is buried deep beneath the ground in Finland, and why they should never go there. It’s an interesting question, but one that never really goes anywhwere, and feels a bit circular by the end of the film.
On the whole, “Into Eternity” is a pretty interesting piece of work, though, in spite of its flaws, and does some interesting things with the documentary form. If you’d like to find out more information about the movie, you can check out this Science Friday interview that host Ira Flatow did with Madsen.
It’s hard for me to sum up my feelings about “The Red Chapel,” director Mads Brügger’s film about North Korea. Simply describing the film doesn’t quite do it justice. The trailer helps a little, but doesn’t really encompass the whole scope of the film. What I can say is this: it is one of the best films I have seen so far this year, and if you are interested in documentaries as an art form, or even just the art of satire, you cannot afford to miss it.
I’ll do what I can to explain the movie, which has already been getting a decent amount of buzz (it won the World Cinema Jury Prize at Sundance). Mads Brügger is a Danish journalist who sets out on a crusade to expose the evils of the North Korean dictatorship of Kim Jong Il. He wants to go to the country to make his film but, of course, he has to do it in a way that won’t get him stopped or killed by the North Korean government. So he sets up a comedy troupe, named The Red Chapel (after a group of Nazi Germany-era communist spies) and sets them up as a sort of cultural exchange to teach the North Koreans about Danish comedy. The troupe consists of two Korean-born, Danish-raised comedians named Simon and Jacob. Jacob is a self-described “spastic,” a visibly physically handicapped man. Brügger uses Jacob as his lynchpin, because North Koreans do not tolerate physical handicaps, and the country’s handicapped babies (Brügger tells us) are usually either killed or sent to camps where they die fairly quickly. The rest of the film, which plays out like a weird mix of investigative journalism, “Borat” and “Waiting for Guffman,” follows Brügger and company’s journey in North Korea, their interactions with their handlers, and rehearsals for their cultural presentation. Phew!
The most impressive thing about “The Red Chapel” is that any of it ever happened at all. As cheeky as Brügger appears at the start of the film and through the narration, it’s just as obvious that he’s aware what he’s doing is dangerous and a little unethical. Jacob suffers an emotional breakdown during the course of filming, and it’s up to Brügger and Simon to try and keep up appearances in front of the Koreans, all the time fearing that the lot of them may get carted off to one of Kim Jong Il’s death camps hidden out in the North Korean countryside. Brügger has got to have a lot of balls to be able to pull off the stunt that he did, and I love him for it.
The other impressive element of the film is the way it presents the relationships between the Danish troupe and their Korean handlers, particularly Mrs. Pak, the government functionary who accompanies the troupe everywhere they go. The communications breakdowns between Brügger, Simon, Jacob and Mrs. Pak are pretty absurd, but all genuine. Mrs. Pak’s relationship to Jacob, too, is weird to watch. She constantly says that he feels like a son to her, even though she’s only known him for a few days. Does she really feel close to him? Or is she trying to put on a good face for the sake of her “dear leader?” It may be a little of both.
In any case, “The Red Chapel” is a fascinating film to watch. It may not be perfect (the end falls a little flat), but it’s a thrilling, funny, poignant and pretty much unprecedented look into a bizarre, two-faced society.
To find out what other folks have to say about the movie, check out this review from Cinematical’s Eugene Novikov.
