Hobo with a Shotgun

Rutger Hauer is a crazed hobo that runs around with a shotgun, cleansing his corrupt town (Hope Town) of the evil scum that inhabits it. This is done in interest of protecting a wayward prostitute named Abby that the hobo befriends.  Think Toxic Avenger meets Taxi Driver. “You can’t change the world with a shotgun,” she tells him. “It’s all I know,” he replies.

It doesn’t seem like the hobo actually has an action plan, other than to cause as much bloodshed as possible within Hobo’s 80-minute runtime. Oh yeah, he wants to start a landscaping business. Abby tells him they can do it together, move somewhere else and start over. “They have grass in other places,” she tells him. “Really?” he replies.

Actually it doesn’t seem like there is grass in Hope Town, just blood-soaked pavement. I didn’t say this is a nice looking film. It looks like shit. There are some brutal death scenes that keep things interesting, though. A guy gets stomped in two by a man wearing ice skates, a school bus load of children is fried by a flamethrower, someone’s hand is even minced to bits by a lawnmower and early on Ricky from Trailer Park Boys gets beheaded in a fun way involving a rope, a truck, and a man-hole cover.

For some reason the final showdown of the film takes place on a Running Man-style game show battle royal, where the hobo and Abby take on a tag-team of giant robot men called The Plague (sigh). I would have preferred for Hobo with a Shotgun to be less comic-booky, but whatever. In the end, it is a nice little Troma tribute kept interesting by the great Rutger Hauer, brutal violence and some funny characters (I forgot to mention the Santa Clause pedophile). It’s not bad for an inebriated midnight viewing.

On Sunday, the 82^nd Academy Awards will take place and the voters, of whom are 94 percent white and 77 percent male, will decide on best film of the year. The favorite is The Artist, while Hugo could provide an upset. Both are excellent films, I’ll be rooting for the upset. My top two picks of the year were not nominated, but I figured as a prelude to the show, I’ll post the Media Sickness top films of the year. No, I haven’t seen everything from 2011 yet. There was also no overwhelming favorite for me; I could change my mind tomorrow. The order these titles come in is almost interchangeable.

1. Into the Abyss: As usual, Werner Herzog was snubbed of a best documentary nomination this year, not once, but twice (see later in the list). As much as I’d love to see Herzog give an acceptance speech, it’s probably for the better. Werner is above such inane distinctions. This was a big year for documentaries about the death penalty, and the fascinating Paradise Lost 3 is up for an award. Few films, however, can carry the poetic weight that a Herzog doc does, and no film this year had a stronger emotional impact on me than Into the Abyss. Leave it to Werner Herzog to find beauty and vitality in a brutal triple-homicide.

2.Take Shelter: Michael Shannon may be the one actor around today that I would pay to see in anything. Fortunately for us, he almost always takes roles in excellent films (or television shows, see Boardwalk Empire). In Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, he offers up another harrowing performance as a blue-collar Ohio man who suffers from apocalyptic dreams. Take Shelter plays on modern anxiety about the environment, terrorism, and the economy to offer a terrifying portrait of a crumbling American family.

3. Hugo: Hugo was hands down the most fun I had in the movie theater this year. Maybe this is partly because I saw it directly after Clint and Leo’s drab J. Edgar. Whatever the case, here is an invigorating film, a product of Scorsese’s love of cinema. Hugo is brought to life by exuberating performances from all involved, including Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield and Christopher Lee. Sure this is a children’s movie, but not because it is for kids, it makes everyone watching it feel like a kid.

Well it’s Friday and it’s 5 o’clock. That means I’m going to stop writing and start cracking open PBRs, so I’ll cut to the chase. You have my three favorites of the year. Here are the runner-ups.

4. The Skin I Live In: Pedro Almodóvar at his most macabre.

5. Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen has as much fun here playing with his literary heroes as Scorsese does with cinema’s early history in Hugo.

6. Tree of Life: Disclaimer — not for everyone — but beautiful and deep.

7.Cave of Forgotten Dreams: The second best documentary of the year, same director.

8. A Separation: Wonderful Iranian film about morals and family. Ingmar Bergman would be proud of this. A Separation involves a dispute in which nobody is really wrong, but no one is really right. Everyone must suffer.

9. The Descendants: Clooney is on his a-game and Alexander Payne returns to show he is still one of the best directors of our generation.

10. The Artist: The Jack Russell Terrier in this film should have been nominated for best supporting actor.

Honorable Mentions: Moneyball; Ides of March; Life, Above All; Melancholia; The Interrupters; Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

Yet to see: Drive; Princess of Montpensier; a fuck-ton of others.

It has been a common misconception that Francis Ford Coppola lost his desire after going through the filming of Apocalypse Now. Of course this is not true. He still had some pretty strong outings (The Cotton Club) to go along with the massive disasters (Jack) since he went up the river in the Philippines.

His latest, Tetro, may not be as grandiose as The Godfather Trilogy or Apocalypse Now, but it is certainly a unique and wonderful work of art.

Tetro can be called operatic, or overly melodramatic. I’d call it Coppola channeling Almodovar. This is material that would only succeed when in the hands of a master (which it is) and with excellent acting (which it has).

Vincent Gallo is tremendous in the lead as Tetro, a playwright. He’s your typical reclusive genius. His performance is fierce and memorable. He approaches every scene, every line, and every movement with intensity.

Tetro has abandoned his family and fled to Buenos Aires where he hides out in his apartment with his girlfriend, played by Maribel Verdú in a lovely performance. The underrated Verdú is one of today’s best actresses.

One day his young brother Benny shows up at their door, much to Tetro’s annoyance, and starts to break him out of his shell.

What ensues is over-the-top drama, as Coppola slowly reveals the dirty history of the Tetrocini family. Shot in black-and-white, with a few flashback scenes shown in bright colors, Tetro is highly stylized. Every shot is a pleasure for the eyes.

The final act of Tetro has turned a lot of critics off for being over-the-top. It devolves into somewhat of a surrealist dream. I think this is the perfect touch. Notice the size of the body at the funeral at the end. It is tiny; the casket looks like a baby carriage. What is Coppola saying?

Tetro reminds me of an Almodovar film for both its stylistic touches as well as its melodrama. These characters have dark secrets and deep wounds from their past. Along with The Conversation, this seems to be Coppola’s most personal film. He may be done making epic blockbusters on massive budgets, but as an artist, he seems far from finished.

But enough about that lesser version, Fincher’s vision of the first chapter of this trilogy concerning Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant goth-chick hacker, is spot on. Rooney Mara is wonderful as Salander. She plays her as an angst-ridden bitch, with just enough humanity to make us care. This heroine is not someone to fuck with.

Her counterpart, the disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), is also a work of perfect casting. This is the kind of character I could see Humphry Bogart taking on in a 40s film noir. Blomkvist, the editor of the magazine Millennium and an investigative financial journalist, has been convicted of libel. He was set up, of course, but he can’t prove it.

In an effort to pass time, make money and eventually get back at his enemy, Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, a highly corrupt corporate mastermind, Blomkvist takes on the project of investigating a murder from 40 years ago for Henrick Vanger, CEO of the Vanger Corporation, whose niece disappeared one day without a trace.
When he needs help, he calls on Salander, and together they piece together clues, blah blah blah, you read the book right? No? Ok whatever.

After dropping the turd that was Benjamin Button, Fincher reached his artistic peak last year with The Social Network. Here he gets back to his roots. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fits in well with Seven and Zodiac as proof that Fincher is Hitchcockian in his mastery of suspense.

The industrial score by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame (who contributed a great score to The Social Network) is a perfect fit for this film. Not only does it fit the evil happenings of the plot, but it is likely the kind of music that Salander herself would listen to. Her friend Plague is even seen where an NIN. Reznor’s career has found a second life as a film composer, and him and Fincher make a great duo. Perhaps his sounds will be a staple of many Fincher films to come.

Lars von Trier has spent his career striving to be unconventional, and to push limits. Lately this has made him probably the most controversial director in the world. His recent film Antichrist, an exercise of grotesque masochism, divided audiences and offended many with its graphic scenes of genital mutilation. This year during a Cannes press conference, von Trier came off as somewhat of a Nazi sympathizer (he later apologized and said he would no longer talk to the press).

What can easily become buried in all of this madness is the fact the Dane is an extremely talented filmmaker. With Melancholia, this talent shines through. Here, von Trier is not trying to offend anyone, stir up controversy, or send viewers into a deep depression. Here he is executing his vision beautifully.

That’s not to say that Melancholia isn’t a dark movie. It is, after all, about the end of the world. The rogue planet Melancholia is headed for a collision with Earth.

Obviously, von Trier is not Michael Bay, and Melancholia is far from being a disaster movie. The film starts with a wonderfully shot introduction, a slow motion montage set to bombastic Richard Wagner music, which works as chilling foreshadowing. Following this the film is split into two halves. The first is about the wedding of Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst.

The wedding takes place on the lavish estate of Justine’s brother-in-law, a wealthy astronomer named John (Keifer Sutherland). Throughout the first half, there is no mention of the approaching planet. Instead, von Trier builds a mood of impending doom. This is a wedding absent of joy. Von Trier regulars Udo Kier and Stellan Skarsgård help add to the weirdness. Justine seems to suffer from a mental illness, some kind of extreme depression. She drifts through the wedding, is unresponsive to her husband, has sex with a random stranger, and at times seems barely functional. I was reminded of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character in Antichrist. Clearly von Trier has an interest in depressed women.

The second half of the film also takes place at the home of John and his wife, Justine’s sister Claire (Gainsbourg). Justine arrives at the house in shambles. Her condition is far worse than it was at the wedding; she now barely speaks or moves. The approaching planet has now become the focus. John assures everyone that it will merely pass closely by Earth, and will provide a most beautiful site. Claire is terrified that it will not miss, thus wiping out all life. Curiously there seems to be no communication with the outside world. We don’t know what the media says, or how the rest of the planet is reacting. Is John delusional? He forbids Claire from looking at the Internet, though she disobeys. I found it strange that she had to search Google, with little success, for Melancholia. If a rogue planet was about to destroy life on earth, I would think it would be easy to find news stories.

By focusing only on John’s vast, empty estate, von Trier creates a feeling of isolation and dread.  All the characters can do is sit outside and watch the massive planet in the sky. Is it getting closer or moving further away?

Justine has no emotion about the predicament. She welcomes the end of the world. She believes that human beings are evil and deserve it. Perhaps von Trier feels the same way. One day, life on Earth will come to an end. When it does, should we be proud as humans of what we’ve done?

Now, nearly a quarter-century later, with state-sanctioned killing still going strong, Herzog himself has traveled to Texas to make a film on the subject.

With Into the Abyss: A Tale of Life, A Tale of Death, Herzog focuses on a triple homicide that occurred one night in Monroe, Texas.

Herzog interviews the two men convicted of the crime in prison. Michael Perry is sentenced to death and will die eight days after the interview. His accomplice Jason Burkett is serving a life sentence. Though both men claim they are innocent, it does not appear that an injustice has been done, and Herzog seems to believe they are guilty.

Herzog goes into great detail on the murders. He visits the scenes of the crime and interviews the police chief and several acquaintances of the convicted as well as family members of the victims. He paints Monroe as a kind of hell on earth, a place where civilization has broken down. Education seems to be absent, and drug use and alcoholism is the only way of life. It seems everyone in town has been to prison at some point. You are lucky if you can learn to read and earn an hourly wage.

We meet Burkett’s father, also serving a long prison sentence. He has been in and out of jail his whole life, and takes responsibility for failing to raise his son. “I don’t know what those boys did or didn’t do, I wasn’t there,” he says, “but they don’t need to be killed, it won’t change a damn thing.” This is the underlining theme of the film. These were kids that never had a chance in life. They ended up doing horrible things. But what is killing them going to accomplish? It won’t bring any lives back, and it won’t stop anyone else from committing a crime.

Herzog is great with finding fascinating characters, or making fascinating characters out of ordinary people. Herzog interviews Burkett’s wife, who met him only after he was sent to prison. They have only been able to share brief hugs when she visits, but somehow she is now pregnant with his child. There is also the death row chaplain, who cries when Herzog asks him to recite a story about seeing a squirrel on the golf course. He shares a time when a bushy-tailed rodent stopped in front of his golf cart and stared at him. He stopped the cart—saving the squirrels life. “But I can’t save the lives of any of these people,” he weeps.

This is a film as sad and depressing as a film can be, but it serves as a reminder that life is a delicate and precious thing. The United States is the only civilized western country that still carries out the death penalty. Why? Does state sanctioned murder really solve any problems? Herzog dedicates the film to the families of the victims of violent crimes. The way I see it, all murder is a crime, legal or not.

Moneyball, directed by Bennet Miller, ranks with the great Bull Durham as one of the best baseball movies ever made, and there may not be five minutes worth of actual baseball scenes.

No, this is a movie about the front office and the statistical revolution that occurred at the turn of the century in Major League Baseball. It’s about the new guard versus the old guard. The new guard is lead by Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, the esteemed Oakland A’s general manager.

What Beane did was throw the old method of scouting players out the window and follow the teachings of stat-wiz Bill James to build his team based on statistics such as on-base percentage as opposed to batting average. It’s like what my dad used to tell me after a little league game where I went 0-3 with a walk — a walk is as good as a hit, right?

One scene shows Beane in a heated meeting with his scouting department over which players the team should pursue. Beane and his assistant, a Yale-educated numbers geek, played by Jonah Hill, tout the merits of inexpensive, outcast players like Jeremy Giambi and Scott Hatterberg. The surly, tobacco chewing, old school scouts scoff at what they believe is insanity. Beane retorts by repeating one simple fact, they get on base.

The film presents the theory that because Beane used his moneyball strategy, he was able to put together a team on a $40 million budget that was able to win the same amount of games as the Yankees did with $120 million. It makes for a nice story, but that is not exactly the reality.

The 2002 Oakland A’s won 102 games because they had three of the best pitchers in the game with Mark Mulder, Barry Zito and Tim Hudson. Helen Keller could put together a playoff baseball team if you gave her those three pitchers. They were also lead offensively by a roided up Miguel Tejada who drove in 131 runs and hit 34 homers. He only walked 38 times. That ain’t money ball. These players are hardly mentioned in the film.

That being said, regardless of how well moneyball may actually work, and how good of a GM Billy Beane actually is, he did change the game. Now almost every MLB team follows Beane’s method.

Pitt’s performance is one of the best of his career. He plays Beane as a ferocious competitor. His intensity won’t allow him to actually watch the games, he needs to be active while the games are going on. He’s either working out or doing doughnuts with his pickup truck in a parking lot while switching the radio on and off. Aside from his team, all that matters in his life is his daughter. When he turns down a huge contract to work for the Boston Red Sox, a team where he would no longer be the little guy, he turns it down to be close to home.

Moneyball is a film about economic disparity. It’s about big markets versus small markets, the rich versus the poor. The capitalism of baseball is in many ways a massive failure. Now that the big money teams play Beane’s game against him, perhaps he must reinvent the wheel again. Or maybe now that his daughter is grown up, he might consider making that move to Boston. They have an opening again.

Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest

Beats, Rhymes & Life serves as a reflection on A Tribe Called Quest’s journey, beginning in the mid-to-late 80s when Kamaal Ibn John Fareed, then known as Jonathan Davis, better known as Q-Tip, befriended Malik Taylor, better known as Phife Dawg, near Linden Boulevard in Jamaica, Queens. Rapaport interviews all of the groups’ members as well as a cast of other noteworthy artists from hip-hop’s golden-era including members of De La Soul, The Jungle Boys, and The Beastie Boys.

The film does a great job of presenting how Tribe rose to prominence, and then succumbed to the egos of its members. The biggest ego, as portrayed by the film, is that of Q-Tip.

Q-Tip is painted as a brilliant artist, a control freak and an obsessive perfectionist. One record producer explains that if it were up to Q-Tip, we would still be waiting for the 1993 classic album Midnight Marauders, which they had to fight to pull it from his clutches. For Q-Tip, music is his life. There is nothing else.

The other group members are different. Phife was bothered by Q-Tip’s high demands and strict rules. “We’re just in a group together,” he says. For Phife, music is something he does, but it does not define him. Today he is pursuing his passion for sports and working as a high-school basketball recruiter. Part-time Tribe member Jarobi comes across as an interesting character in the film. Jarobi, who is clearly extremely close to Phife, left the group after their first album to pursue a culinary career.

The strife between Phife and Q-Tip seems to be a result of several factors. At times it appears as if Q-Tip is frustrated and perhaps a little ignorant of Phife’s struggle with type-1 diabetes. At one point Q-Tip is shown on stage yelling at Phife to bring up his energy level during their 2008 reunion tour. This sets Phife off because he claims he was exhausted due to diabetes.

It also becomes clear that Phife did not appreciate Q-Tip being so demanding of him, and particularly demanding of him to live a healthy lifestyle in order to fight his diabetes. Maybe this is the fault of Phife, who struggles with a love of sugar, which perhaps lead to his need for a kidney transplant.

In many ways their feud parallels that of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. The film portrays Q-Tip’s love of the spotlight and celebrity lifestyle much like Richards portrays Jagger’s in his recent autobiography. It is interesting that in their interviews for the film, Phife is usually seen at home in a jump suit. Contrarily, Q-Tip sports a p-coat, scarf, and fedora seemingly provided by an Italian designer. Phife resents the way Q-Tip covertly went about embarking on a solo career. Richards resents Jagger’s similar move for the same reasons.

Rapaport catches Phife and Q-Tip nearly coming to blows backstage before a 2009 show. This scene has garnered a lot of attention. Q-Tip has denounced the film. Phife supports it. Perhaps Q-Tip’s anger comes from the fact that this is something, for once, that he does not have control of.

However despite their feud, A Tribe Called Quest continue to perform shows for the right price. A touching scene near the end shows Q-Tip and Phife rehearsing a dance for a show before the 2010 Rock the Bells tour. Despite all the preceding drama, here they look like brothers just doing their thing.

Between 1990 and 1993 A Tribe Called Quest released three of the most important rap albums of all time. Like Jagger and Richards, because of this body of work, Kamaal Ibn John Fareed and Malik Taylor will forever be tied together. They haven’t released an album since 1998 but they continue to tour. Don’t be surprised if 20 years from now they are still playing to sold out crowds.