Justin

| by Justin Thomas |

Saying Cool Hand Luke is a great movie is hardly a newsflash, is it.

It’s already been included in the National Film Registry. It includes the key performance of one of the key movie stars in the history of Hollywood. It’s been analyzed for fact on The History Channel and has been targeted by the Mythbusters to see whether a bloodhound can be thrown off a scent through the use of curry powder. In its 43 years of existence, Cool Hand Luke has been applauded just about as much as a film can be applauded not only in its filmmaking but as an example of the national mindset of the time in which it was made.

Cool Hand Luke isn’t just a great movie. Cool Hand Luke is a cinematic treasure.

If I may, Luke’s ascendency to mythological status within the prison more closely mirrors that of Brian’s ascendency in Life of Brian than it does to Jesus Christ. Brian just happens to be on the periphery of the action and, without it being a goal, winds up gaining a following. Luke becomes the prisoners’ proxy not because he wants to show them the way, show them the light, but because he was bored, the same conscious act that got him in trouble in the first place. They see him as showing them the light, the way, they desperately need him to not break in the prison yard while digging his grave, but Luke is not a messenger. He doesn’t see himself that way. Until the Captain unleashes the rebel in Luke, Luke did nothing other than try to find a way to pass the time.

Cool Hand Luke doesn’t hide its hand at all. When we first learn about Luke, we know he became a war hero and progressed through the ranks but left the Army the same rank as when he entered. Long before he decapitated authority by decapitating the parking meters, he fought back against the military authority enough to have them take steps against him. So a character with known problems with authority is put into a prison. Where can that possibly go? He’s in the yard when the other prisoners first take him during the boxing match with Dragline. To help the audience along, Luke does his digging in the yard with the other prisoners watching. The Captain gives the “What we got here” line and then Luke gives it, too. If you can figure out the end of Barton Fink, I applaud your ability to comprehend a frustratingly difficult concept. Cool Hand Luke is more accessible.

Saying Paul Newman was a good actor is hardly a newsflash, is it.

He hides well what Luke is really after even though he puts it right on the table. Does he at any point in the movie see it as his responsibility to help set free the other prisoners minds and souls? Until his mother tells him he was boring the Hell out of everyone maybe, maybe not, but once he determines he should stop being boring there is no doubt he’s not there to start a revolution. He just wants to make the time slightly more enjoyable as it passes. Would he have gone through the escapes if the Captain hadn’t taken the preemptive step of putting him in the box? Maybe, maybe not, but once the Captain takes that step there is nothing short of escape or death that will allow Luke to function. Newman had the smile and the eyes to, well, make Dragline’s final lines about that cool smile plausible. But he could also suggest things going on behind both the smile and the eyes without using a sledgehammer to make the point. In this role, Newman’s ability to do things without doing things helps sell it and sell the idea that Newman had something few others had.

He wasn’t just a great actor. He should be included in any conversation where people try to determine the best ever.

“Way to step out on a limb there, jerk,” is how most people respond when I offer that idea.

This week I got a chance to watch Newman in three movies and two of the three are hardly stretches into his filmography. Cool Hand Luke is a necessary film to not only see but know and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a ton of fun. Newman’s parts in those movies are career-defining parts and it happens to be the career of Paul Newman. Now and again I’ll go back and go a little deeper into his body of work, but where I started is a good place to start. Nearly two years after his death I came to one conclusion over the past week: the world is a little less interesting without Paul Newman in it. He certainly wasn’t boring.

| by Justin Thomas |

On another day I might argue any movie with both Paul Newman and Bruce Campbell in the cast must be the Greatest Movie of All Time, but today is not that day.

If Joel Coen and Ethan Coen aren’t the most discussed filmmakers of their generation they certainly should be on the list. When they hit the mark, their films are dizzying in quality and sure-fire bets to be evidence as to why they’ll share lifetime achievement awards in twenty years or so. When they miss the mark, they miss it wide by miles and even though the Coen style and quality might remain, they ask too much of their audience to laugh at a joke it is not in on at all. But the point is, of all their films, there are precious few that can’t inspire discussion from joy to anger and every emotion in between.

Their films I divide into two categories – Normal Movies and Indulgent Movies – and while some might straddle the line between the body of work really shakes out that way. Normal Movies would be Blood Simple, Fargo, Intolerable Cruelty, No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man. Indulgent Movies include Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There and the contemptible The Ladykillers. Barton Fink I still haven’t figured out and for some reason can’t get through Miller’s Crossing but of the ones I can get my head around I slot them as such. When they decide to play with a genre rather than make a movie is when the Coens go places where it’s easy to cast them aside if they fail with the audience but, if the movie resonates, then it finds an audience that will defend it and them to the ends of the Earth.

In that filmography are two certifiable masterpieces, as good a cinematic debut as I’ve seen and a movie anchored by a White Russian swilling genius that could just as well be used as a gospel it’s so brilliant. But there are also dogs, truly awful movies that I scratch my head and argue about with others who find something to applaud in the Coens. The Ladykillers is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, a misfire on every level, one that could make the Star Wars Holiday Special look like freakin’ Gone with the Wind. Where a Coen film shakes out between Normal Movies and Indulgent Movies doesn’t indicate its quality but it does indicate the types of characters and performances will be featured.

It took a long time to get here, but Paul Newman as Sidney J. Mussburger in The Hudsucker Proxy illustrates well what’s necessary to ground the “eccentric” characters featured when Joel Coen and Ethan Coen decide to indulge themselves.

Newman plays Mussburger over-the-top as per the script and direction but he’s not playing Mussburger as aware of the fact that he’s an eccentric Coen character. Both Jennifer Jason Leigh and John Mahoney, as dependable an actor as there is, fall into that trap. They don’t only go for it, they go beyond it and don’t realize they somehow need to be grounded more than they are.
Newman absolutely gets it in every single frame. Yes, he gives the wide eyes and chomps on the cigar just enough to be big, but then he also knows there is such a thing as giving wide eyes the right way. When the explanation as to why the glass in the boardroom no longer shatters, another actor in that role might have gone bananas but Newman simply says what happened and helps sell the joke, which is quite funny. It’s not that Newman goes subtle because he doesn’t; it’s that Newman understands the difference between going over the top and going over the top the right way.

There are more examples of what Newman does across the other films by the Coens. In other hands all three main characters in The Big Lebowski – The Dude, Walter and Maude – would be Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Amy Archer in The Hudsucker Proxy, all weirded up for no reason other than to be weirded up. But Bridges, Goodman and Moore absolutely nailed their parts just as Newman nailed Mussburger. Frances McDormand could have taken Marge Gunderson somewhere else but didn’t and was rewarded, rightfully, for the effort. George Clooney’s Everett in O Brother goes just about as far with a weird character without going too far as humanly possible. Tom Hanks pulls a Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Ladykillers and completely botches it; if it’s not the worst performance of his career it has to be close.

Not even Paul Newman or the incomparable Bruce Campbell, but specifically Paul Newman, can save The Hudsucker Proxy. The film fails because the Coens made a self-aware screwball comedy; they made one that tries to be a screwball comedy rather than understand the things that made the screwball comedy work in the 1930s, the mindsets, the people, the era itself, didn’t translate sixty years later. A screwball comedy could have been made in 1994 in The Hudsucker Proxy but it couldn’t be a 1930s screwball comedy in 1994. It’s the same thing that torpedoed The Happening because it was made “bad” like the old B Movies and the same thing that prevents any modern movie attempting to be film noir to be anything other than an imposter.

Twice in their careers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen didn’t make movies they are capable of making and at the time I might have agreed with Moriarty at Ain’t It Cool when he suggested they take a break from making movies after The Ladykillers. The Hudsucker Proxy was the first time they bombed. Of course, they also followed The Hudsucker Proxy with Fargo and The Ladykillers with No Country for Old Men, so thankfully, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen ignored Moriarty. It’s good advice to ignore the insane ramblings of an Internet movie writer and it comes straight from the Coen Brothers.

| by Justin Thomas |

Parts of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid haven’t aged well, which isn’t surprising when the most-recognizable sequence features a song penned by Burt Bacharach sung by B.J. Thomas. The ham chop sideburns that defined the 1970s, visible in the movie from 1969, date it too. The middle montage, after they’ve decided to head off to Bolivia, wherever that might be, probably shouldn’t be stills because we’re missing too much of Butch and the Kid but it’s “edgy filmmaking” for 1969.

Some parts of it hold up just fine, parts that could be called timeless, which is what happens when a timeless actor such as Paul Newman performs a role like Butch Cassidy.

Who else could have pulled off Butch and had it work? Who else has a smile so instantly recognizable and defining that all the camera needs to do is catch it for a moment to have it work completely and utterly? Who else could talk smack to a bicycle and have it not only add plausibility to the ridiculousness of it but make the audience say, “Well, that’s what Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy would say?” Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would be nothing more than a cute little safe Western from 1969 had anyone else been cast as Butch.

If Butch didn’t know he was the poster boy for the end of the outlaw era then he certainly did know it after Sheriff Bledsoe informs him of as much when Butch and the Kid try to get amnesty. We already heard from Butch that he once wanted to be a hero, and he’s as affable an outlaw as there was, but he didn’t know the curtain was about to drop and his death would be the final act. Rather than adjust his behavior and go straight, the idea is to head off to a place where the era might live on for just a little while longer. He didn’t want the future, the lousy bicycle could have it, so the only thing left to do was go where he wouldn’t have to acknowledge it.

After they’ve finally given the posse the slip, Butch says, “If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him,” and that line gives everything necessary to know Butch because Butch believes it. Not only does he believe it, but in his mind it makes complete sense. None of Butch’s ideas seem ridiculous to him or to the Kid, who gives lip service to them being ridiculous but always follows along and would have been on the boat to Australia if not for the army waiting to butcher them. If they ever would have put his ideas to serious scrutiny they probably still wouldn’t have seen them to be ridiculous because Butch just couldn’t think that way.

Butch might not have been much of a stretch for Paul Newman, which is a polite way of saying he might not have done much acting in the movie, but it works. The lines don’t need to be said with conviction but with a wink indicating thought’s been given. The right course of action is to try to apply rules to a knife fight in order to win the knife fight. Newman could deliver that wink and not have it be detrimental to the movie.

There isn’t a case to be made that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the “best” anything type of movie. It’s a good movie to put in with a friend or two when things aren’t going smoothly. It’s a good movie when you want to spend an hour or two in the company of bona fide movie stars.

| by Justin Thomas |

The theory is known: George Lucas and Steven Spielberg did nothing more than make exceptional B Movies early in their careers. That would be the worst type of Wikipedia entry because I can’t attribute it to anyone, but if someone wanted to theorize as to what Lucas and Spielberg did, makers of exceptional B Movies would be a good theory.

Right.

B Movies weren’t very good. Matinee and the Mant! movie-within-the-movie show how bad B Movies were and why they worked. The brilliance of Lucas and Spielberg isn’t that they made B Movies as they were but B Movies as they remembered them because if they’d made B Movies as they were, we wouldn’t know their names. It’s the fundamental flaw of Shyamalan’s The Happening because he made a movie based on the quality of the B Movies and not how they were viewed by audiences at the time. Mant! enjoys of having the luxury of making a B Movie of B Movie quality because it’s necessary to tell the story of Matinee so Mant! can have the ridiculous exposition, the terrible acting and the ludicrous idea and have it work. There’s simply no way Mant! could be a standalone “real” movie today, which is one reason why The Happening failed.

What Matinee wants to do is show a part of the movies that no longer exists where showmanship played a key role. John Goodman’s Lawrence Woolsey not only wants to be Alfred Hitchcock, straight down to the silhouette and introduction of his movies to their audiences, but he also gets Hitchcock because he thinks about the audience. A lot. To the point of putting buzzers beneath their seats. This existed but it does so no longer, and if you wonder if it might still be around, ask yourself when you last saw a trailer where the director introduces his movie.

The Cuban Missile Crisis serves a backdrop to Woolsey bringing Mant! and his version of 3D to Key West and he uses the heightened state of tension to his advantage. Should he be concerned about showing an atomic bomb blast complete with manufactured heat and smoke to an audience viewing it 90 miles from Cuba in October 1962? Nope. It’ll help sell the experience, which is what he needs because he has the next big idea in movie showmanship. It’s not a lack of concern for his fellow man but a prioritization of his needs slightly above concern for his fellow man, which Woolsey shows he can reprioritize when necessary when he gives up the gate money to save his girl from a knife-wielding, ant-costume-wearing JD.

Goodman is good as Woolsey but it’s not much more than John Goodman as a character named Lawrence Woolsey. It doesn’t seem as though there’s much acting going on, but Goodman is so likeable he doesn’t need to really act. Goodman as Woolsey works just fine. He has the ability to act, which he’s shown on occasion, but Goodman on screen just being John Goodman is sometimes worth the price of admission. Walter Sobchak is just John Goodman written with a lot of caffeine in his system and weird personal experience stories in his background. The point: he might not be of the order of Daniel Day Lewis but John Goodman has a place in the movies and one need only see Matinee once to know why.

Does Matinee work as a movie? Yes, in the same way A Christmas Story works but without the backbreaking laughs. Matinee is also 10% better than it would have otherwise been because it includes John Sayles in the cast. I first saw it in 1994 and remember loving it to the point of always mentioning it and my affinity for it during conversations about movies. Then I watched the movie again but didn’t love it as much. It didn’t work as well, or I’d changed, or something happened and it wasn’t as good as it was in my memory, which is interesting given Matinee is about B Movies. There’s a joke in there somewhere.

| by Justin Thomas |

Lora Kennedy either had a tremendous grudge against the Tombstone production or was told to go cast as many bad actors as humanly possible. If the direction were the latter, then she pulled a Hank Aaron and knocked the ball clean out of Milwaukee County Stadium because it’s a veritable Who’s Who of absolutely crap actors.

Here’s the list of garbage: Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Stephen Lang and Thomas Haden Church. I didn’t include Sam Elliott and Charlton Heston in the list of trash only to keep from getting torched but let me tell you, they nearly made it.

Tombstone desperately wants to be a good, old timey Western, and it succeeds. After the opening narration by the Bad Ass To End All Bad Asses Robert Mitchum (look it up, that’s his official title), it goes right into the Cowboys laying waste to a wedding in which Johnny Ringo takes aim and helps a priest pass along to eternal bliss. There is no gray in Tombstone: you’re either good or you’re bad and the end of your story will be written accordingly. Doc isn’t gray although the movie might want you to think he is; he’s there for Wyatt far too often to truly believe in his hypocrisy. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and anyone wearing a red sash is going to die.

Where Tombstone runs off the tracks is in the performances from the aforementioned Big Five of Shite: Paxton, Boothe, Biehn, Lang and Church. They’re given lines such as “I want your blood, and I want your souls, and I want them both right now,” and “Listen, Mr. Kansas Law Dog, law don’t go around here, savvy?” Those hyper-macho lines, which have a place in a Western actually attempting to be a Western, are dangerous lines when put in the hands of people who can’t handle them because they think they’re a joke. There’s something behind the eyes, and in the smirk, that says Biehn and Lang both understand just how ridiculous they sound, and rather than do anything to try to sell them, they wink at the camera through the entire movie.

So then enters two honest-to-goodness Movie Stars. Capital letters. Guys who would have done just fine in the 1940s or 1950s heading up studio picture after studio picture. Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer also know they’re in a movie where the testosterone needs to be visible and they’re both given equally if not more ridiculous lines to say, but what separates them from the rest of the production is they know how to do it. They don’t wink at the camera. They don’t acknowledge through a smirk how they aren’t necessarily being asked to play Hamlet.

In Russell’s key scene, Earp sees his family off at the train station. He knows the Cowboys will be there to end the conflict. He intends to send a message. He’s given lines where he has to put the fear of God into Ike which crescendos from “So run, you cur, run, tell all the other curs the law’s comin’,” to “And Hell’s comin’ with me, you hear, Hell’s comin’ with me!” Under no circumstances would that win an Academy Award for Best Writing, but Russell pulls it off. There’s no rolling of the eyes or “Gimme a break” from it. Nope. It’s just Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp preparing to bring a reckoning to those who wronged him, and he gives the line in such a way there is little doubt he means to accomplish it. A nuanced performance it is not. It’s simply what a Movie Star does when he’s given a part he wants to sink his teeth into.

As for Kilmer? He disappears into Doc. He’s easy going, intelligent, devil-may-care unless it’s time to throw down then there’s little hope for the guy on the other side, and he’ll oblige you with a learned quote as you pass along to the other side. His lines aren’t as questionable as “You skin that smoke wagon and we’ll see what happens,” but they also aren’t in the realm of authentic to anything Kilmer could possibly know.

Tombstone isn’t a particularly good movie as measured by being anything other than being a two-hour amusement park ride. It’s probably best viewed in the television room of a frat house with rules established as to when one takes a drink or when someone needs a Dana Delany fix and is upset Netflix doesn’t have China Beach or Exit to Eden on instant download. It’s best suited to illustrate the difference between Movie Stars and guys who stand in front of a camera. How I hate, hate, hate Bill Paxton.

| by Justin Thomas |

MTV did more than kill the radio star when it debuted in 1981. MTV also started editing on its path to the seizure-inducing 0.05-second cuts currently masquerading as style. Gregg Toland had style. People wishing to make long-form cinematic works would have been better served watching TCM than MTV.

The two Dawn of the Dead films, the original by George A. Romero and the remake by Zack Snyder, show the dramatic difference between filmmaking in 1978 and filmmaking in 2004. Romero lets his cuts and sequences run long, which wouldn’t have felt out of place upon release but seems slow today. Snyder has a bit of Bay in him and he also goes the handheld route during intense action sequences that, even only six years post-Saving Private Ryan, was overused.

Both films have essentially the same stories: survivors of the zombie apocalypse seek shelter in a mall. They feature characters of the respective eras. In the original, Francine sits in a room separated from the men while they discuss her pregnancy and what to do before she later tells the father she wants to have a say in it. The remake has Ana as a tough-as-nails nurse who screams at CJ, “Get that fucking gun out of my face.” They both have A-Team sequences where they must build things to stop the zombie attacks be it a false wall to keep secret their hideout in the original or A-Team vans designed to get the survivors from the mall to the marina. There’s enough in Snyder’s film to look at it as taking the original and making it applicable to the era in which it was made while leaving just enough to see they both sprang from the same source.

Romero’s film is slow. Once the survivors lockdown the mall and even go so far as to put the corpses in a freezer, the film moves into character development mode. For what seems like an hour, they build a nice little apartment in their hideout, ice skate, have a date or two and Francine even learns how to fly a helicopter, but with the zombies outside all but neutralized, it fizzles. There’s no urgency driving the movie forward until the biker gang finds the mall. From the end of securing the mall until the bikers show up, the film is in “let’s play house” mode and it’s long, long, long.

Snyder’s film sacrifices time to round out the characters to keep things moving. They lock down the mall and then have the obligatory shopping scenes, but there are other things to do. A second group of survivors forces them to understand how the bite works and how even a dad needs to be put down if he’s been bitten. There’s not just a pregnancy but a birth. There’s a friend across the parking lot stranded alone in a building who needs help. There are things to do and Snyder’s film can’t be asked to wait around.

They’re products of their times, but if an entire world populating having turned into the living dead is what they share then Snyder’s film makes better use of the situation by not allowing for much time to breathe. The situation that drives the breach in the mall that forces the survivors out is less contrived in Snyder’s film. Romero has the satire down pat, which is completely abandoned by Snyder, but if constructing a plot in such a way to keep the audience’s interest is the measuring stick, then Snyder has a leg up on the original. It’s not blasphemous to suggest Snyder did something better in the remake of an all-time classic because the original has issues. The remake also has issues but improvements in certain aspects were made.

Every single aspect of Romero’s film is dated. There isn’t a single thing, straight down to the Penney’s logo, cripes, even it being called Penney’s and not JCPenney, that isn’t locked down in the late 1970s. Snyder’s film will one day be just as dated based on how he uses the camera and maybe it will be just as unsettling and foreign thirty years from now as Romero’s film is to watch now.

So there you have it: you can tell MTV launched and completely destroyed Western Civilization between Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Snyder’s remake.

| by Justin Thomas |

In 1996 I traveled from the little cow town in Missouri in which I found myself to the Big City of Kansas City? Ever been to KC? It isn’t really a Big City like New York is a Big City, but when twenty years of life had been lived in towns with populations ranging from twelve to seventeen thousand, even something as “big” as Kansas City is a Big City.

I digress.

In 1996 I traveled to KC and did the entire KC thing. The Plaza? Cool. Did you know KC has incredible BBQ? I wouldn’t because the guy with whom I was staying insisted on giving me my first taste of Chinese food. Arrowhead Stadium? It’s about as good a place to see a game as there is. But that wasn’t what got me uber jazzed for the trip. I was going to get to go to the AMC 20 in Independence, Missouri and I’d never seen a place with twenty screens! I’d never seen a town with twenty houses so you can imagine how my mind had difficulty comprehending the bigness of that Big City with its twenty screens. In my little hometown we had a little theater with three screens. Three! Add seventeen to that and asking me to comprehend it would be akin to asking me to explain quantum mechanics.

(Want to hear the best part of the trip to the AMC 20? I got carded for The Frighteners, didn’t have my ID and was turned away. At the time I was twenty but couldn’t convince the pimply face behind the counter I could handle the show.)

So we had a little theater with three screens, but it’s past tense, “had” now. The theater, which was the first thing rebuilt after a massive fire destroyed the town in 1931, closed its doors on Sunday night and is no more. The marquee now reads, “Thank you for the memories” and for the next week or so people will reminisce. They’ll drive past and shake their heads lamenting its passing. Maybe one or two will say, “It’s a damn shame,” but it’ll be forgotten by the time Hawkeye football rolls around.

It is indeed a damn shame.

There’s no way I’d be able to calculate how much time I spent in that theater. In 1978 or 1979 my mom took me there to see Superman: The Movie and I can even now see the destruction of Krypton and remember wondering why the people in white weren’t Storm Troopers. I can remember the lobby, which at that point was then newly remodeled. I can remember going to the bathroom, which looked the same then as it did when the theater closed. Maybe I’m forcing different memories into that first one but, as far back as I can remember, Spencer’s theater is there and part of my life.

My best friend and I would see E.T. each summer when the cheap matinee was shown during the town’s Crazy Days. I frequently went there to see a movie to escape from the Midwestern heat to the comfort of the air conditioning. In 1993 I saw The Sandlot by myself and saw Jenny there with her boyfriend knowing my love would be unrequited that night but not knowing it would be eternally unrequited. I saw Jurassic Park there five times, all alone, marveling at the CGI, thinking I might be seeing the thing that would make the best movies of all time not knowing it would be the downfall of the medium. The night after my last day at high school was spent not huddled around a keg with the rest of my class but at the theater watching Maverick. I saw The Phantom Menace there four times including a 9 p.m. Wednesday show in which I was the only soul in the joint; the only time that’s ever happened. Those are the big ones, the ones I remember.

That little theater made me love movies. It provided an escape from a place where there was a cornfield eight blocks from my front door and made me wonder. It made me think I could write something that might one day appear on screen, and it still might happen because there are still two scripts I cowrote out there with people trying to make them into movies. If not for that rinky-dink little movie theater, I’d have chosen to waste my life in marketing and never wonder about whether I could write a story worth reading.

Oh.

A trip home over Memorial Day allowed me to see one more movie at Spencer’s theater: Iron Man 2. It will be my last so superhero movies opened and closed my experience with the theater. Superman is the vastly superior movie based on the short Smallville sequences alone but I’m not disappointed Iron Man 2 is the last. This week I got a chance to step inside to see the smallest screen completely demolished and the woman who’d worked there for thirty years, one who would have worked the day my mom took me took my first show, didn’t even try to keep from crying.

No one will rally ‘round the marquee to save it, and the marquee with its simple “Spencer” will be replaced by a Verizon sign or something similar before year’s end. Sadly, this is reality and not a movie, so the city fathers and farmers have sold their soul for the sake of getting the newest Android phone on release day. Change is inevitable, I guess, like death, some divorces and the Taxman, who cometh and that right soon; but I wish this change hadn’t occurred. The marquee is dark, soon it will be gone and Hawkeye football is only weeks away. I hear they have good tailbacks this year.

There will be no “Save Spencer’s Theater” campaign unless you or someone you know is a billionaire industrialist looking for a million-dollar toy smack dab in the middle of nowhere. Then I know of a project that can be turned into a money pit for the sake of me one day showing something I wrote to my fourth-grade teacher.

Please, think of Mrs. Keck, open your huge wallet and save the damn theater.

Spencer’s theater reopened seven years before Hitler invaded Poland and this is what the marquee looked like. This is what the marquee looked like on what is to date my saddest day of 2010 (and 2010 is nowhere near over):

| by Justin Thomas |

Are you annoyed with the frequent hints of anger directed at George Lucas dropped in these posts now and again? Are you annoyed with how an attempt to build suspense, to get people saying, “Wow, he really hates that guy, and I’m very interested to know why so tell me already,” completely failed? Are you annoyed with the shoehorning of vitriolic prose directed at the man responsible for two of the largest film franchises in history into essays where it decidedly doesn’t belong? Do you wish I’d just get on with it or stop dropping the not-so-subtle hints?

Wait for it…

Let me tell you, dear reader, what I’m annoyed with, and that’s two little boys who demand a Star Wars movie be on the television at all times of the day and night. Oh, it started out pretty cool, “Hey, look, there’s a bit of nature and nurture in how well they’re taking to Star Wars.” That remained for a month or two. Then I desperately wanted something else to do than watch a Star Wars movie. Anything else. I’ve even worked on some writing, which is something I’ll do anything to get out of up to and including buying a movie theater 500 miles from where I currently reside. Then the questions started. “Daddy, why is the top of Luke’s fighter pilot uniform a different orange than the bottom?” “Daddy, where did Wedge go to college?” “Daddy, what is the socio-economic system of the Wookies on Kashyyyk?” You know, stuff absolutely no one ever needed to know, or wondered about, when it comes to the Star Wars movies.

At this point I feel it necessary to apologize to the dozens of people I know who have been subjected to any thought, question, idea, feeling, rant and/or terse e-mail sent regarding the Star Wars film franchise. If I was as bad with the questions, I’ve really annoyed a lot of people.

But let me tell you something else that annoys me and that’s the continual defiling of the Star Wars film franchise by the man responsible for its existence. “Here we go, more Lucas bashing…” Yes and no.
Mostly yes. Okay. Completely yes.

The most-recent viewing of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back Version 2.4 got me worked up. During Vader’s teleconference with the Emperor, the newest version of the movie would make one believe Vader was on the hunt for Skywalker but didn’t know he was the Son of Skywalker. I need to break that down a bit.

Someone named Skywalker blew up the Death Star.

The Empire completely mobilized its fleet to find the Rebels and, specifically, someone named Skywalker.

Darth Vader said something like “the Rebels are there and I’m certain Skywalker is with them” so finding Skywalker was of greater importance than finding the Rebels.

But it wasn’t until after the Battle of Hoth when the Emperor informed Darth Vader that Skywalker is the Son of Skywalker. We are to believe everything up to that point was just Darth Vader searching for someone named Skywalker without knowing Skywalker was someone’s son even though every male in that universe, save Anakin Skywalker, had a father and was therefore someone’s son. Vader expresses amazement during the conversation as though he had no idea and the Emperor advises him to search his feelings. Then we get the if he could be turned, he’ll join us or die, blah, blah, blah father-son crap to end the conversation.

Okay.

Just how stupid is Darth Vader? If the entire saga is watched Episodes I-VI, as I believe we’re to watch them, then Darth Vader is a complete moron. Look, Chief, the dude has your name and was raised on your familial farm by your half-brother and his wife! How can those dots not be connected?
Or how stupid does George Lucas think we are as an audience? Do we really need such a ham-handed handling of the reveal that Darth Vader is Luke’s father in the same movie an hour before the reveal of the single-greatest bombshell in the history of the movies? Are we that dumb that if we’ve watched the movies in order, we won’t know the kid named Luke, born to Padme, fathered genetically by Anakin Skywalker, isn’t Darth Vader’s son? Is that telling of something already shown quite clearly in the other movies necessary? Set aside for a moment the new conversation is nowhere near as good as the original nor is matching the Emperor in Episode V to the Emperor in Episode III any more necessary than having Ewan McGregor reshoot all the Alec Guinness scenes to match. It’s absolutely terrible storytelling and illustration of nothing but contempt for the audience and its intelligence.

It isn’t nitpicking because it’s a huge deal. In the context of the saga it’s a huge moment and one that sabotages the contract between the filmmaker and his audience where one side doesn’t care for the other. How on Earth can someone think it’s an improvement by spoon feeding information a three-year-old already knows if they’ve watched the saga in order?

It’s the right of the artist to finish a work when the artist feels it’s finished, but being the audience of this work of art and seeing it continually changed by someone who has lost sight of what the art means and how to execute that art is difficult. The dude’s done. He has no idea what he’s doing and is so wrapped up in “Well how did Vader know Luke’s his son” that he has lost sight of how asking that question of one moment in one film completely ignores whether the arc of the saga answers it.

The version of The Empire Strikes Back released in 1980 was perfect. There isn’t a single problem with it, it’s a gorgeous movie, there isn’t a single boring shot and it’s an incredible Act II in the three act Original Trilogy. It made the Star Wars franchise. I really wish George Lucas would watch the damn movies before deciding to change something like The Empire Strikes Back.

And I totally know I overused the word “annoy” in this post.

| by Justin Thomas |

Raditude and porn are similar. I don’t know how to define either but I know them when I see them, and I know Ron Perlman doesn’t have raditude. Before 2004, I would have said he didn’t have the chops to anchor a $66 million picture, but then Hellboy hit the screens and I have to admit I completely underestimated the raditude-free actor.

How in the world did Hellboy get made with Ron Perlman heading the cast? Who in their right mind thought Ron Perlman would be strong enough to make back the budget and provide some sort of profit? Is Hellboy evidence that people go to see movies, not stars, or is it evidence adapting a property virtually guarantees success of the property even though there are examples where mining comic books failed? Is it evidence everyone involved slightly lost their mind and from the insanity came a movie worth watching? Or am I way over thinking Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army?

It might sound ridiculous but there is courage in how Hellboy made it to the screen. It’s a weird property and one with a narrow target; I just don’t see much in there for fourteen-year-old girls. It has a cast completely free of A and maybe B list actors. It was directed by a director known in certain circles but by no means a household name. Did I mention it stars Ron Perlman? Somehow this seemingly standard Hollywood practice of adapting properties with only known audiences also shows what can happen when risks get taken.

Perlman, under all that makeup and costume, not only brings a character to life but gives a compelling performance in the process. Hellboy doesn’t fit in but wants to when we meet him in the first film and by the end of Hellboy II he’s decided to stay with the freaks. The man-boy nature of Hellboy comes through it all and that’s the strength of Perlman as an actor. Does he pull off Hellboy so well because he can identify with being not normal in appearance? Is Perlman actually a freak who ages emotionally at a much slower rate than normal people? I don’t think that’s the case but he connected with something in the character. Hellboy is a difficult character to pull off convincingly but Perlman does and his performance is proof movies can exist, even higher-cost adaptations, with someone other than Nic Cage as the lead.

What would Hellboy II be if Guillermo del Toro hadn’t made Pan’s Labyrinth between the two movies? Hellboy II has such a different feel, it’s far more grounded in fantasy than Hellboy, and I can’t watch it and not think, “This is del Toro completely unleashed and, if nothing, else it’s visually interesting.” Hellboy is more for the fans; there are elements of other geek films in it and some of those elements feel like nods to the audience. The entire opening sequence is there for geeks to geek out about. Hellboy II feels more like an examination of the collision of the natural world versus the technological and self-identification, which I wouldn’t anticipate from a movie with the word ‘Hellboy’ in the title.

While he utilizes CGI, del Toro doesn’t completely walk away from the world of practical effects, and while both are noticeable, I don’t think of them as “CGI movies” or “old-fashioned effects movies.” It’s a good blend of both techniques and utilizing practical effects kept the CGI from being overbearing. The blending isn’t seamless but it’s a lot better than other films. When Professor Broom tells the young Hellboy his story about the Golden Army, the young Hellboy is clearly just a person in makeup. The movements of the mouth aren’t overly convincing but they aren’t overly convincing with Yoda in Empire, either. Would CGI have been able to precisely replicate what a demon’s mouth looks like when a demon speaks? Probably, but I appreciate del Toro’s use of people in actual costumes when others might animate the character entirely because it feels more real.

These aren’t great movies. They’re fun and probably a little disposable, but they also aren’t a run-of-the-mill execution of a comic adaptation. Even with something as safe as going the adaptation route, risks can still be made. Courageous filmmakers can still execute some sort of vision and not fall prey to the big explosions, big CGI, big box office mandates from the dudes worried about shareholders more than character development. If the Original Idea is as dead as it appears to be, at least let people who can execute an unoriginal idea interestingly have a film or two. It has worked with Hellboy so far.

| by Justin Thomas |

Hey, Rocky, watch me get from Weezer to Edgar Wright in two paragraphs.

Ooh, how I’ve gone bananas for the Blue Album and wish I could borrow a time machine, skip back to 1994, give my 18-year-old self a copy and say, “listen to this you f-ing moron because it’s going to be important down the road and you might as well learn it now because it might help.” All of this contemporary geek ruling of the world can be traced back to the Blue Album and its message of being okay with who you are. “In the Garage?” That’s where I feel safe even if I’m listening to Kiss and playing D&D while ogling panel after panel of Kitty Pryde. That’s a life-altering message for anyone who remembers a time when there were scary things on the other side of the Berlin Wall and personal degree of popularity to worry about.

Flash forward six years post Blue Album and the Web explodes with a bunch of Comic Book Guys writing about movies and how they remember that one packet of Junior Mints they ate during Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and how it changed their world view.

Continue on as Hollywood abandons the original idea to adapt anything filed under “C” for “Comics” and Geekdom rewards Hollywood with the annual shattering of the previous year’s box office record.

Observe as Geekdom seeks out its Chosen One.

Watch as we go gaga for the films of Edgar Wright.

Damn. It took more than two paragraphs. Sorry.

If you’re with me, you doubt whether Edgar Wright will make a modern-day Bridge on the River Kwai or Taxi Driver. I can’t see him attempting to reinvent himself as the Modern Day Hitchcock even though we were wrong about the real Modern Day Hitchcock and said position remains open. It’s also highly unlikely he’ll be tapped for Sex and the City 4.

An attempt to peg Edgar Wright down might be to say he’s going to be a good Michael Bay, and that is absolutely a compliment. We all want to like Michael Bay but his movies are such crap you have to shamefully admit you like them just like in 1993 when you shamefully admitted to a kid one year your junior that yes, we were playing Risk at Burger King, and that kid announced to the rest of the Burger King, “Let’s go, there are only losers here.” That type of shame. So Wright might be a good Michael Bay and, for that, we should all hug him or embrace his work if suggesting a literal hug is creepy.

Bay shows the same action from multiple angles, insanely quickly, because he thinks it looks cool. Wright must think it looks cool, too, but he attempts to make it serve a storytelling purpose. In Hot Fuzz, Nicholas and Danny hop in their car for the high-speed pursuit we get three insanely quick cuts punctuated with Nicholas screaming, “Punch that sh*t.” Tied to the dialogue the quick cuts of hitting the lights, slamming home the seat belt and punching the gas to the floor serves a purpose and is more interesting than seeing it from a wider angle in one shot. Bay doesn’t put that much thought into his quick edits.

It’s not just the quick cuts where Wright reminds me of Bay and suggests he might improve upon Bay. Wright makes movies for people to enjoy, which is what Bay tries to do. Not every single reference to Shaun in Hot Fuzz is there because Wright thinks it’s cool but because he wants to care for his audience while tying together the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy. The video game noise just before Nicholas and Danny attack the pub? That’s for the fans. The bit of Cornetto wrapper tossed on the counter at the service station? That’s for the fans, too. He’s not pandering to his audience but caring for it, and that’s a breath of fresh air when people exist who hold contempt for their audience. Yep, I’m looking west at Skywalker Ranch with that one.

Wright uses a lion roar sound effect for Frank in the aftermath of the pub battle and gets away with it. Is that him being self-indulgent? Yeah, maybe. A more interesting way of asking the question and illustrating the idea would be to ask, “Do you think Wright giggles when he sees Nicholas write the word ‘cock’ in his official report of the shoplifting sequence,” and the answer is probably yes. That’s okay. It is funny.

If style were the only thing that mattered, Wright and Tim Burton would be fine bedfellows. If making movies for his specific audience were the only thing that mattered, Wright and Kevin Smith are buddies. If self-indulgence were the only thing that mattered, Wright and the Coen Brothers might as well move in together. But those aren’t the only things that matter and Wright shows he’s got the basics down too. Hot Fuzz has a lot going on in it. Not only do we have to learn the complexities of the red herring plot but we have to see the real reasons why the murderers happen and both have to be plausible and not get in the way of developing Nicholas and Danny. It’s all understandable, doesn’t require repeat viewings to figure out and is light years away from whatever the incomprehensible mayhem of Transformers was and how it was filmed, particularly the last battle. He better handled the Hot Fuzz plot than he did the Shaun of the Dead plot and it’s refreshing to see a director growing and not regressing.

You bet I’m silly excited for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Three times in the first 10 seconds of the first trailer, the camera closes in on the characters after a person walking in front of the camera serves as a wipe. And each wipe includes Wright’s signature “whomp” or “whoosh” or whatever it is, and any doubt as to who was responsible for that trailer is erased 10 seconds into it. That’s the mark of a director with a mark or maybe I’ve seen Shaun and Hot Fuzz way, way too many times. I don’t know Scott Pilgrim but I do know Wright’s two movies and I know Scott Pilgrim will be cared for well. Waiting for Edgar Wright’s next movie is like waiting for Christmas morning and August 13th can’t get here soon enough.

Where does Hot Fuzz shake out against the movies to which Hot Fuzz is the two-hour love letter? I don’t really know. It’s a good borderline great example of the genre. I know it’s the best movie Edgar Wright has released to date and raises expectations for his subsequent films. With an Edgar Wright movie comes expectations and so far he’s met or exceeded them. He is the filmmaker I’m most excited about because he makes movies I enjoy and he makes them incredibly well so there’s reason to get jazzed.

Oh, and go listen to the Blue Album. It’s good, too.