Tag: opinion

Jay’s Take: The Call of the Wild Double Feature

Two movie reviews.

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I hate CGI. I know it, you know it. I love animals, especially doggos. I hate CGI animals. What is it about animal movies these days where you can get an experienced wrangler and real animals but instead they cheap-out and generate everything in a computer? Has it gotten to the point where we need to be making movies where cute animals are subjected to such unimaginable hardships that the only way to film it is to fake it? Are we scared for the animals themselves? The actors? THE PRODUCERS’ INVESTMENT? We all know Lindsay Lohan is expensive to insure: what if you made a movie where Lindsay Lohan played Jane Goodall and went into the middle of the wood with a bunch of living apes to shoot one of those handheld iPhone movies? FORGET IT. You would have better luck posting your movie to YouTube to watch for free let alone wide distribution in the slowest audience-attendance period of the theatrical year. Hollywood is cheap and stingy, and if something works then they will do that thing into the foreseeable future until a cheaper alternative is found. They found their alternative in CGI. Soon you won’t even need mo-cap actors because there will be cyborgs who do a better job of imitating Carrie Fisher than her own daughter. SOON YOU WON’T NEED ACTORS AT ALL. It’ll all be dead people, vomited-up from the grave and reconstituted on IBMs. Plus side: you could then get the dead animal actors such as ALL THE DOGS from ALL THE PREVIOUS FILMED ADAPTATIONS of Jack London’s book and reanimate them and have an unscripted reunion special on HBO. Invite the holograms of the original Benji and Old Yeller while you’re at it. Live animal wrangling for film is looked-down on in today’s world the same as those who perform in the circus and it looks like it may completely go the way of the dodo, like puppetry (if the dour and pointless Dark Crystal prequel on Netflix right now is anything to go by. LOW DIG).

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Selected Scenes: The Canterbury Tales

A spoiler-heavy multi-scene film review & analysis.

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The late, great, Italian multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini wasn’t always about doom and gloom and the dark side of the human condition. His trio of films dubbed the “Trilogy of Life”, adapted from three prolific tomes of short stories, is as light and airy as your garden-variety Italian sex romp: something the filmmaker specifically hated hearing. But it’s true, and that’s not to fault it! His “Canterbury Tales” adaptation is wedged between his cinematic depictions of The Decameron and One Thousand and One Nights, respectively, and his detached filmmaking style lends itself nicely to the non-streamlined essence of the picture.

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Now Available on Laserdisc: Salo

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I’m an odd guy. I like odd movies; especially ones that elicit a reaction. For a long time, the late Italian independent filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film Salo – an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s final novel – was the defacto choice when it came to disturbing, shocking cinema. Sure, there have been more horrifying movies released since, depending on one’s own preferences: August Underground; I Spit on Your Grave (any of them); Irreversible; Hereditary, to name a few. Any one of these could be a “jumping-off point” for future-filmmakers with a skewed world-view, but my own entry-point was Salo. I couldn’t tell you how I first came to know about it – probably from some Internet forum – but I can tell you how I came to watch it. Salo is a part of the Criterion Collection: a maverick distributor that secures the rights to oft-forgotten classics and international cinema (and movies that no one else seems to want to deal with, like Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture and Bowling for Columbine) and releasing expansive special-edition sets that cost an arm-and-a-leg for. It seems they are contented now with putting out anything that isn’t tied down, but back in the day you could count on a Criterion release – whether that was Laserdisc or DVD – to be the definitive edition of an otherwise-lost film.

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Now Available on Laserdisc: Arthur 2

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Full confession: I have not seen the original 1981 “Arthur”. “OH MY GOD, a movie Jason HASN’T SEEN?” Wait wait wait. I have seen the 2011 remake with Russell Brand and from what I can surmise the two movies follow the same formula: a belligerent and wealthy playboy has to learn to live without money if he wants to marry the woman of his dreams. The 2011 film oozed sentimentality and I think that had more to do with Brand’s personal struggles at the time (and his subsequent Producer credit on the remake) then it did a changing of the times: it doesn’t matter how much money either Arthur has, because eventually you will run out of things to do with it. No amount of modernization can change this, and sadly makes Arthur’s rich boy antics irrelevant; especially when there have been so many movies since about the 1% acting like idiots (The Hangover series; Blank Check; Wall Street 2; Fracture, to name a few). But where Brand’s characterization had a pathos when confronted with responsibility, Dudley Moore’s original really is only concerned with having a good time. The guy is a fucking useless drunk, and he’s an asshole! There could very well be more lurking beneath the surface of his interpretation, but Arthur 2 never gives us a chance to learn more about him: why he’s a drunk; how he feels about getting older and still not taking control of his life; his lack of confidence at middle age. Answering these wouldn’t make for a very funny movie, though (and there’s a good chance they were answered in the first one and I simply don’t know what I’m talking about. I have the sequel, not the original. I have to work with what I’ve got here).

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Now Available on Laserdisc: The Hudsucker Proxy

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Before we go any further, I have to eulogize the elephant in the room: my trusty Pioneer dual-sided Laserdisc-slash-CD player. I’ve had her for years now and she is a shining testament to the durability of 80s technology: this shit was built to last.

And she has lasted. She is heavy and unwieldy and unless we have her own separate station set up beside the TV then she rests on top of my wife’s ten-year-old IKEA entertainment unit. Two years ago I forgot that the lid was ejected and I walked into it, dislocating the arm from the unit. It was easily fixed by snapping it back in but she hasn’t worked the same ever since. Now she takes almost two full cycles before she can eject the door; CDs get stuck inside her and require surgical removal; and there is an ever-increasing chance that one day she will lose the use of her tongue completely and never be able to speak again. But she has persevered regardless! And no matter how much longer she may last, her contributions to my cinematic endeavors cannot be overstated enough.

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