Deborah Lipp

Groundhog Day (1993) 10/10
Self-centered weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) travels from Pittsburgh to Punxsutawney to report on the Groundhog Day festivities. When he wakes up the next morning, though, it is still Groundhog Day. And every morning thereafter, it is Groundhog Day. While the day is new to everyone else, Phil knows he is living the same day over and over, and gradually comes to know every moment of his one day by heart.

Why, you may ask, have I never seen Groundhog Day? It’s simple, and gives great insight into the functioning of my feeble mind: I thought I already had. See, I really loved Caddyshack. And in Caddyshack, Bill Murray plays a golf course groundskeeper who is having an escalating war with a groundhog (or woodchuck or gopher or something). So then, people would say to me “Have you seen Groundhog Day?” And I’d say “The one with Bill Murray and the groundhog” and they’d say “Yes” and we’d agree that it was funny and there you are.

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Trembling Before G-d (2001) 10/10
An exploration of the lives of gay and lesbian Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. (Documentary)

Trembling Before G-d presents us with people who, on the face of it, are suffering massive cognitive dissonance. The Ultra-Orthodox and Hasidim featured here believe in the Torah as God’s word, and in obedience to Jewish law. As an Orthodox rabbi explains, no matter how much compassion he may have for gay Jews, he cannot tell them it’s okay to do something for which the Torah prescribes the death penalty.

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The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)10/10
When Josey Wales’s (Clint Eastwood) wife and child are killed, and farm burned, by Union soldiers (Kansas Redlegs, to be precise), he joins the Confederate army (Bill Anderson’s Missouri Bushwackers). When the war ends, he refuses to surrender, and becomes a wanted man, bent on vengeance. As he journeys, he draws to him a band of other disconnected outsiders. Directed by Client Eastwood.

The Outlaw Josey Wales is complex and layered. It has multiple levels of symbolic meaning, but is never heavy-handed—it ain’t Pale Rider, hammering its Important Meaning home.

Look at this: Josey Wales is an iconic Western hero. He poses in perfect symmetry with the landscape, with the hardened, iconic face of Clint Eastwood, he’s the best shot in the West and his only goal is vengeance. But look at this: In the end, Wales sues for peace with the local Comanche chief (the wonderful Will Sampson) and agrees, with his pursuer (John Vernon) that they will put the war behind them and give up their mutual quest.

As Lone Wattie, Chief Dan George has primary charge of busting the Western myth. When Lone Wattie pronounces something with gravity and wisdom, he is generally proven wrong. He is neither a buffoon nor a noble savage, but an aging man who wishes, ruefully, that he could live up to the white man’s image of the Indians. And he’s pretty funny, too.

Everyone in this film has images that will be busted. Kansan Granny Sarah hates Missourians, but must trust Missourian Josey Wales. Little Moonlight is marked with the Cheyenne sign of the “dirty nose,” but it means something different than it appears to. Laura Lee (Sondra Locke) is thought to be “odd” but holds her own. In wartime, everyone has painted the enemy in broad strokes. To live in peace, each person must learn to see individuals. No one says this, gives a speech about it, or even notices it, but it’s an observable part of the arc these characters take.

The theme that touched me the most when I first saw this movie was that of created families. Josey Wales draws to him a group who have nothing but their wounds and their loss. Like Josey, each has lost family, is cut off from home, and has no way of restoring his or her pre-war life. The Indians in the film are even more displaced than just being Indians would make them. By coming together and creating their own family, they can heal one another. This is a theme Eastwood will return to in myriad forms (Bronco Billy is a comedic version).

In addition to all of this, IMDb commenter A-Ron-2 points out that the movie serves as commentary on the end of the Vietnam war, an idea I had not previously explored. It is especially interesting when you learn that the Redlegs and Bushwackers fought a guerilla war, making the parallels to Vietnam even more stark.

Bamboozled (2000) 3/10
An African-American television executive (Damon Wayons), frustrated with his inability to get interest in his scripts about intelligent blacks, creates a minstrel show, complete with a tap-dancing star (Savion Glover) and broad, Amos & Andy-style stereotypes. When the show is a hit, things spin out of control. Written & directed by Spike Lee.

Bamboozled opens by defining “satire”. In case you didn’t get it. In case you thought a Spike Lee film that humiliates blacks, especially every form of black entertainer, in every possible way, was meant to be taken seriously. Ultimately though, it’s not a satire, it’s a train wreck. Or maybe a satiric train wreck. What it’s not, is a satire of train wrecks.

To begin with, Damon Wayons is absolutely terrible. His over-mannered “Pierre Delacroix” is a stiff caricature, and stands in uncomfortable contrast to the naturalistic performances of Jada Pinkett Smith, Savion Glover, Michael Rapaport, and the rest of the cast. I’m not neglecting the possibility that “that’s the point” (which is, of course, the answer for any complaint about satire, therefore making all satire theoretically impregnable by criticism), but it doesn’t work. Especially at the half-way point, when Delacroix is supposed to be asking himself serious questions, his obnoxious buffoonery is nothing but interference.

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So if I don’t like it, I blame pretty much everyone I know.

Inside Man (2006) 10/10
A bank robber (Clive Owen) has planned the perfect crime, but must deal with hostage negotiator Frazier (Denzel Washington), the bank owner (Christopher Plummer) and a high-level political fixer (Jodie Foster). Directed by Spike Lee.

Inside Man opens with a monologue by Dalton Russell (Owen’s character) spoken directly to the camera. Quickly, we learn that Russell is smart, cocky, forceful, and interesting. He has the audience on his side, without any special pleading—we’re ready to go, so let’s watch the robbery!

From there, we follow his trip from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan, as he picks up his gang. As fabulous Bollywood dance music plays (I’ve already bought the album), Lee’s camera pays attention to detail; to road signs, to architectural facades, to streets, to traffic. This is all very particular, we are in this place, with these people, and it looks like this. It sets the entire movie up; there’s mystery, excitement, and particularity. A bank robbery movie with two big actors as cop and robber, respectively, sounds generic, but there’s nothing generic about Inside Man.

The opening music also establishes a Spike Lee trademark: Ethnic diversity, both with and without hostility. At one point, Detective Frazier’s team cannot translate a crucial audiotape, because they cannot identify the language. ‘Hell, this is New York,’ the detective says, ‘Put it on loudspeaker, someone in the crowd outside will know.’ And he’s right.

Although Inside Man isn’t predictable, there are things you can predict. As I sat in the theater, knowing that this would happen, or that wouldn’t happen, it was because I was coming to know the characters, not because the plot was transparent. Tightly written, the plot only gives itself away when it wants to, but it is not just plot construction that is well-written. The people are well-written; the actors live in their skin, the director gives them room to breathe, and the screenplay never asks them to betray themselves. At one point, a news reporter says that ‘a planned robbery spiralled into a hostage situation,’ which is a typical sort of thing to say. But we know better, Russell’s plan included taking hostages from the beginning—we don’t know why, but we saw it happen, and we also saw that Russell is careful, calm, methodical. Nothing “spiralled” here.

Later, when we are shown something that is unbelievable if the characters are who we think they are, we know we have been tricked. We are meant to know; the late-movie reaveal of the trick is underplayed; it’s more confirmation than revelation. We have been led to trust the characters more than the looping and surprising machinations of the plot.

Surprising it is, and there is significant pleasure to be had in watching it unfold. Also in watching the characters unfold, watch Detective Frazier get smarter, watch the interviews with the fifty-some hostages, any of whom might be the bank robbers—the police just can’t sort everyone out. Minor characters—a hostage with a few lines about noticing a woman’s breasts, a grandmotherly hostage who was humiliated by having to remove her clothes—are all well-drawn. The filming is excellent; everything we look at is worth a second look. This is the sort of movie that will be worth watching again on DVD, because the visuals are rich and intricate.

Bitch, Ph.D. lends considerable insight into Brokeback Mountain and Westerns in general. An excerpt:

Brokeback, like every other Western out there, is about the suppression of male emotion for the greater social need. Will Kane just got married, but no mind: he has to take care of the bad guy, all by himself, because he is the hero, and he understands that his personal emotional needs are less important than the Greater Good.

Read the whole thing.

Zardoz (1974) 6/10
In a post-apocalyptic future, “brutals” are hunted by trained “exterminators,” while immortals live in protected Vortexes and contemplate beauty. The exterminator Zed (Sean Connery) breaks into a Vortex and begins stirring things up. Directed by John Boorman.

This week, cheese with nipples!

If there was ever a movie impossible to define, that movie is Zardoz. Is it cheesy camp fun? (“The gun is good! The penis is evil!”) Is it a fascinating vision of a dystopic future? Is it pretentious? Creative? Interesting? Dull? Satiric? Over-influenced by a quantity and quality of hallucinogenic drugs not seen since 1978? To all of the above, yes.

You will from time to time hear people talk about Zardoz as if it’s the worst movie ever made, which it really isn’t. It is full of clever ideas and powerful visuals. There are scary partying old people. There’s Sean Connery and his cohorts in red bikinis and thigh-high boots. There are the “apathetics”—immortals so bored of life they have stopped responding to stimuli at all, and just stand there and stare. There are tribunals to punish negative thinking.

The brutals and exterminators have been manipulated and managed by an immortal called Arthur, who pretends to be the god Zardoz. Zardoz creates miracles for the exterminators and demands they kill brutals in exchange. As the movie begins, Zed has stowed away in Zardoz’s giant idol/ship, killed Arthur, and come seeking answers in the Vortex. Zed is easily captured, but some immortals, want him kept alive to study him, while others want him killed as a potential negative influence.

That utopia is boring is not as interesting a theme as Boorman imagines, but here it is layered with the tyranny of peacefulness, the tedium of democratic committee meetings, and the idea that sex is a hostile force which has to be eliminated for peace to exist (no wonder they’re bored!). These are fun things to satirize, and long stretches of Zardoz are genuinely fun to watch. Unfortunately, as with his later, and more popular, Excalibur, Boorman doesn’t seem to know what will make the story fun. He knows it’s a good story, but he basically flounders around with the fun components and the suckful components all jumbled together.

The biggest mistake the movie makes is to try to explain itself too much. By the end, we have been given a complete history of how mankind got where it is, step-by-step. That’s a lot of exposition, particularly considering that the immortals use mental powers and invisible forcefields to fight—things that aren’t very visual. They stare, they hold up their hands, there’s a sound effect. Thus, long sections are static. And static is somehow harder to tolerate in a weird future with Connery in a pigtail and, as I said, nipples.

Connery is terrific. Charlotte Rampling is, as usual, dull. Except, not as usual, in a weird futuristic hairstyle. Some of the science fiction is excellent, and some of the social satire is sharp, so that when things get dull or pretentious, you want to say “Hey! You! This was a good movie a minute ago!” But the TiVo is not listening.

This is one movie that really should be remade, because a lot of its potential is squandered. Like Westworld, I think it would benefit from 21st Century special effects and a re-examination of a rather cool concept.

Frankenstein Unbound (1990) 6/10
In the 24th Century, a scientist (John Hurt) invents a weapon with the unfortunate side-effect of creating rips in the space-time continuum. Falling through one such rip, he lands in the 19th Century, where he meets Victor von Frankenstein (Raul Julia), his monster, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (the future Mary Shelley—Bridget Fonda). Directed by cheese-master Roger Corman.

This is the sort of movie that is very hard to review. An objective rating is impossible, as one’s love of bad camp, high corn, and general silly antics must come into play. The movie combines some extremely pseudo-intellectual philosophizing with enthusiastically gruesome violence. The sex is, sadly, underemphasized in favor of the gore and Deep Meaning.

Personally, I prefer my cheesy movies with nipples.

None of the philosophizing makes all that much sense. Hurt makes a maddeningly unscientific scientist. He doesn’t care a damn bit about the repercussions of time travel, and never notices that every other scientist who has ever discussed the subject has been concerned with changing the future by introducing modern technology into the past. His character, Dr. Buchanan, is simply delighted to show anyone who’ll look his cool car, his cool watch, and even a printout of the book Mary Shelley has not yet finished. Having created a horrific phenomenon with his laser weapon, he has no apparent compunctions about using it again, even as it becomes more and more destructive to reality. All this while acknowledging that he, too, is a Frankenstein, having created his own monster. Maybe the point is that mad scientists love their monsters. Despite all the verbal rumination, they never got to that idea, but Raul Julia expresses it indirectly in a mad, look-at-my-crazy-eyes sort of way. Julia was cool.

Dr. Buchanan is incurious about the past, he just wants to have fun in it. He thinks it’s cool to meet people he’s read about, and he thinks he can save people from their errors (ignoring, again, the time paradox) simply by saying, quite forcefully, that he’s right. It’s amusing how John Hurt is so emphatically not an action hero. In scenes where he’s in a hurry, where Bruce or Arnie or Clint or Pierce would race like the wind, Hurt sort of gently trots, at a pace just enough above walking to convey he is concerned.

Buchanan’s characterization is problematic, the stupid enormous plot holes considerably less so. One doesn’t watch a movie like this because it is smart. Dumb would be great if the hero were not so much a dork.

But hey, Frankenstein Unbound has fun moments. You have to admire a movie that has the future Mary Shelley say “Byron and Shelley preach free love. I practice it” before getting the hero into bed. And my heavens he looks so happy afterwards! That is one fine post-coital moment. And any movie in which a monster rips off his own arm in order to beat someone with it has got to earn points for enthusiasm. Way to go! I don’t usually find “funny” gore funny, but come on, that’s a riot!