The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: The Three Musketeers (1973), directed by Richard Lester

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: 'Detention' by Muskets

       There have been a lot of French people over the years, so it should come as no surprise that at least a couple of them have contributed to pop culture. Victor Hugo, Gaston Leroux, Jules Verne, the one guy who invented Lupin, Alexandre Dumas, and probably a couple of others. While Dumas may not be .a household name these days, his stories still get around; The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Corsican Brothers, in an age where most the population couldn’t read and the novel was the hip new fad Dumas was the Stephen King of his generation, pumping out story after story to great critical and commercial success. He was also known for having sex with dozens of women, so cheers to him I guess. 

        As a recovering literature nerd The Three Musketeers was indeed one of my conquests, right alongside Ivanhoe and Le Morte D’Arthur, but it’s been years and my memories of it have likely been crossed with that one Mickey Mouse movie, so this Marathon will also conveniently double as a refresher course. I also decided to go with the 70’s adaptation because hell, I’ve already got a truckload of 70’s genre movies under my belt, might as well add another to the pile.

       Released in 1973, The Three Musketeers was written by George MacDonald Fraser, produced by Ilya Salkind and directed by Richard Lester, based on the novel of the same name by Alexandre Dumas. Michael York stars as d’Artagnan, a young farm boy who travels to the big city in order to realize his dream of becoming one of France’s legendary Musketeers, like his father before him. He immediately fails at this, robbed and humiliated besides, but manages to make fast friends with three musketeers: leader Athos (Oliver Reed), ebullient Porthos (Frank Finlay) and graceful Aramis (Richard Chamberlain). His closest friend however is the beautiful Constance Bonacieux (Raquel Welch), but that might turn out to be a problem. Not because she’s married or anything like that, although she is, but because she’s close personal friends with the Queen of France, who herself is currently getting hot and heavy with the Duke of Birmingham, PM of England. Scandalous, or at least it will be if the villainous Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston) manages to get his way. d’Artagnan may not be a musketeer but he’s going to be getting some hands-on experience as he and his friends work to thwart the Cardinal and his agents and avert an international incident. ‘All for one and one for all’ is the rallying cry of the musketeer, and these men practice what they preach.

       Any preconceived notions that period pieces are clean, sterile affairs is thrown out the window with Lester’s Three Musketeers. Dumas’ novel is a classic of high adventure, and that’s exactly the kind of energy this film exudes -- a wildness that feels like when you’re just the right level of intoxication at a really fun party. When you get a fight scene in this movie, which is often, they aren’t the highly choreographed tests of skill that we might associate with these kinds of films, they’re more like chaotic brawls. Our heroes will fight with swords, sheets, sticks and fists, they’ll swing on ropes on top of foes and throw dirt in their eyes, and although it doesn’t look all that flashy in terms of fight choreography it makes up for it in its variety (every fight scene feels unique) and in its rough-and-tumble realism (they fight more as you’d expect people in those times actually would). You could probably paint a through-line between this and the action set pieces of films like Pirates of the Caribbean, but Three Musketeers is a lot more ramshackle in its execution, which I think is to its benefit. It really feels like anything could happen in this movie, and that is often the case.

        Lester’s Musketeers is also pretty damn funny, which is not something I expected going into it. Not unintentionally funny like older movies are sometimes judged to be, The Three Musketeers is built with comedy in mind and that comedy lands more often than it misses. You’ve got physical comedy as you might expect but then you’ve got some straight-up skits and running gags, like Constance being a klutz for no reason, in that zany, easy listening way that you only find in 70’s comedies. Screwball though it may be however it doesn’t go so far as to remove any sense of tension as a full-fledged comedy film would. There are stakes, these characters are fighting for their lives and they don’t always get away scot-free, and even if the situations the characters find themselves in can be goofy, the characters take the world as it is without a side eye to the audience. Which was the smart move, as even if Lester and the crew were taking the piss out of Dumas a bit they captured the freewheeling, barrel chested fun at the heart of his story as well, and based on what little I’ve read about Dumas as a person I think he would’ve appreciated the bawdy shine put to his work.

       This is a damn fine cast too, I’ve got to say. Aside from the folks I’ve mentioned you’ve also got Christopher Lee as the Count de Rochefort, Chinatown star Faye Dunaway as Milady de Winter, British comedy legend Spike Milligan as the elderly innkeeper and Constance’s husband Monsieur Bonacieux and Lester regular Roy Kinnear as d’Artagnan’s bumbling servant Planchet. Michael York was definitely the right person for the role of d’Artagnan, he’s got the physicality to pull off the stunts and choreography and his joy de vivre blunt attitude works for the action and comedy portions of the film in equal measure. I was most surprised by Charlton Heston as Richelieu however. Most of the film roles I’d seen him in up until this point had all the subtlety of a brick, but he’s quite subdued here and he pulls off the criminal mastermind role very well. 

       My main point of contention, aside from the fact this film set in France with French characters based on a French novel is packed with actors speaking in English accents, is one of pacing. This film is almost two hours long, and for the most part it manages its time well enough that you don’t notice it, but there was definitely a point around the midway point where I felt ‘god damn, how much of this movie is left again?’.Of course the plot kicks off properly after that, but I think the laissez-faire nature of the film leads to that impression. Anything can happen, but when will that thing be important, that sort of thinking. Also it’s never nice to sequel bait unless you’re serious about it, I’m still waiting for Buckaroo Banzai 2.

       The Three Musketeers gets an easy recommendation. Not since our last Jackie Chan film have I watched an action film that was just plain fun to watch. Not too violent, not too raunchy, not too goofy, Richard Lester strikes the pitch-perfect tone and gets just the right crew to pull it off. Put it on your watch queue if you have one, and if it’s already on there move it to the front of the line, you’ll be in for a great evening. Make sure to invite your friends too, because of the obvious Musketeer ‘all for one and one for all’ parallel. They won’t appreciate your wit but they probably will enjoy the movie.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: Ganja & Hess (1973), directed by Bill Gunn

 The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Drawn to the Blood", by Sufjan Stevens

      I’ve covered several movies on the Marathon that would be labeled as ‘blaxploitation’ films over the years, and while I’ve always strived to be as objective as possible I’ve been thinking lately that I might not have been properly mindful of the cultural context that these films were made under. I approach these films as genre films first and foremost, as that’s my bread and butter, and I tend to judge them based on that. To the Black community, while I certainly do not speak for them, I could understand the view that while getting to see Black actors on screen and Black directors behind the camera might have been considered a plus, because these were films that glorified negative portrayals of Black people (protagonists striving to become pimps, for example) while also pushing the sex & violence of other low budget movies, it might not have neccessarily been a source of pride. A source of tongue-in-cheek humor perhaps, as we see in films like Black Dynamite and Pootie Tang, but I can definitely see why it might be frustrating, and I apologize if I’ve come across like a dumbass in that respect in the past. Which is basically how I feel everytime my review for Coonskin gets another hit.

      So this year I wanted to find something a bit different, and I eventually found one: Ganja & Hess, released in 1973 and written and directed by writer/actor/director/playwright Bill Gunn. Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead fame stars as Dr. Hess Green, an anthropologist and geologist who is stabbed overseas while researching Myrthia, an ancient African civilization. Rather than dying however, Hess is instead cursed: Unable to die, and filled with an insatiable urge for human blood. Still it’s pretty manageable, the benefits of wealth and all that, but things start to change when his colleague George Meda (Bill Gunn himself) ends up killing himself during his stay at Hess’ house. It’s because of that secret suicide that Hess meets Ganja Meda (Marlene Clark), George’s wife, and quickly becomes intoxicated with her beauty. Is this a whirlwind romance, or a spiral into depravity? I guess that depends on if someone gets hungry.

      So what we have in Ganja & Hess is a vampire story, and in fact in some cases the film was repackaged under such titles as Black Vampire and Vampires of Harlem, although the only clue as to the film’s setting put it 20 or so miles north. You’ve got the wealthy, mysterious gentleman with an otherworldly charisma and the beautiful woman who is drawn into his world (although Ganja isn’t as chaste and meek as her peers in that regard). Yet unlike another film we’ve covered years ago on the Marathon, Blacula, Ganja & Hess stands on its own two feet. Blacula by its very nature cannot exist without Dracula, whereas G&H uses a couple aspects of vampire folklore (immortality, drinking blood, the connection to Christianity) in order to tell its own story. Hell Bill Gunn doesn’t even use the word vampire once, so if you wanted to you could excise any thoughts of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee from your minds and take it as its own thing, an erotic thriller with supernatural elements.

      Stylistically Ganja & Hess quite unlike your standard horror film as well. Heavy use of montage, odd camera angles, dialogue faux-pas (characters talking over each other for example) to give the impression of realism, there’s definitely an attempt here to do something beyond just a monster movie. Very much inspired by New Wave directors like Godard and Fellini it seems and from what I’ve read Bill Gunn seemed like a worldly, arthouse kind of guy, so that’s not much of a stretch. I think credit is also due to the cinematographer, which I don’t do often enough in these reviews, James Hinton. Hinton did a lot of documentary work during the Civil Rights movement, and that makes sense as there’s definitely a candid aspect to the film that reflects that, the scenes at the church in particularly feeling very off-the-cuff and improvisational  All done on a 350,000 dollar budget too, so I don’t want any grumbling from modern filmmakers about low budgets anymore.

      Of course if you don’t like that New Wave inspired cinema from that late 60/early 70s, your Zabriskie Points and what have you then Ganja & Hess isn’t really doing much to persuade you in that regard. I don’t know if I would point to the editing or what but it’s often difficult to ascertain the what, when and why of scenes in this film. Like at one point I believe we’re introduced to Hess’  son at a garden party, which seems to exist only to set up that Hess’ addiction to blood is socially inconvenient, as that kid is never seen or referenced ever again in the film. Then there’s another scene where Hess has gone the classic monster route of going after sex workers; The woman takes off her wig, they kiss for a second, then he stands up and is immediately attacked by the pimp character who was established a couple minutes prior. If the intention was to rob Hess, wouldn’t it have made more sense to rob him post-coitus, when he was most vulnerable? It’s so similar to a previous scene with George Meda that for awhile I thought part of his curse was that people just attacked him randomly. Then there’s the dream sequences involving people in masks that kind of just ends after a while, which is never touched upon. Is it Hess’ victims coming back to haunt him? No, because people appear that were never killed by Hess. Is it a statement on how people adopt ‘masks’ in society to hide who they really are? Maybe, but you would think the end goal of those sequences would be Hess recognizing that he himself wears a mask, considering he’s not exactly forthright on the whole ‘murdering people and drinking their blood’ front, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Plus the ending, which makes sense from a character standpoint but also seems to just arrive without much preamble. It feels like this movie is trying to say a lot of things but what those things are I’m not sure, and it’s taking almost two hours to do it.

      I also must admit that I wasn’t taken with Duane Jones as Hess Green. He’s easily the best part of the Night of the Living Dead because he was the most dynamic character; He was the one who had his shit together, unlike the rest of the characters in that movie, and you were drawn to him as an audience because he was getting shit done. Here he’s...sedate, for lack of a better term. I assume the intent was to portray him as guilt-ridden and haunted by what he has become, but in practice it comes across less like ‘vampiric PTSD’ and more ‘when are we done shooting for the day because I’m jonesin’ for some Thai food’. Even the relationship with Ganja (Marlene Clark is great by the way) feels off because it feels so one-sided in terms of the energy level. Hess says he loves her and is considering giving her his curse and I’m like really? You had one awkward talk with her and then almost immediately have sex, which she initiated and pursued (there’s probably a path you can go down regarding how Gana is portrayed and what that means, but I don’t think I’m smart enough to express it). That he looks into ways to destroy himself seems off, because again he shows little indication that he actually cares one way or another about what he does, besides not liking going through blood withdrawal. I hated Martin, another vampire-adacent movie, but I thought it did better at showing us why Martin was the way he is than Ganja & Hess does with Hess here.

      Is Ganja & Hess a film I would recommend? If you’re a Marathon follower and enjoyed films like The Shooting or A Boy and His Dog (or Witchfinder General for the nastier moments) then yeah, this is a film that you can get into. Is it a film I’d watch more than once? Probably not, in all honesty. As I said the film is almost two hours long, and while there are interesting ideas and performances, I feel like it putters around too long for those things to be as effective as they could have been, which I believe was my main point of contention with those films as well. If you’re running a cult film night this Halloween, consider throwing Ganja & Hess in the queue and seeing how you feel.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), directed by J. Lee Thompson

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Apeman", by The Kinks

      You never really know where something is gonna go it’s been set loose into the world, huh? When Stephen King wrote that one story about a dude getting killed by a lawnmower or whatever, cocaine is a hell of a drug, I bet he never thought it would end up a multi-film franchise based on virtual reality. Similarly when noted Frenchman Pierre Boulee penned his now famous short story about a simian-centric future I doubt he would have expected it to be the premier science fiction film franchise after the demise of Universal’s Horror line. In fact he probably would have hated it. Sure Star Wars gets all the love and all the big bucks these days, but years before Death Stars and droids and what have you, it was Charlton Heston yelling that we about how we blew it all up that got the blood a pumpin’. So now that we’ve taken our step into The Undiscovered Country over on Star Trek, it’s about time we did the same for our favorite set of flicks involving people in rubber ape masks.

      Released by Apjac Productions through 20th Century Fox, Battle for the Planet of the Apes is the fifth and final film in the original Apes series, directed by J. Lee Thompson (who did Conquest of the Planet of the Apes a year prior), with the story by Paul Dehn and the screenplay by John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington. It is several years after the events of the previous film, when Caesar formed an army of apes and led a revolution against the humans, and civilization as we once knew it has been destroyed by nuclear fire. Now Caesar (Roddy McDowall, one last time) is tasked with building a new society on the ashes of the old with the remaining apes and humans, one built peace and freedom. Not an easy task, in large part because humans now occupy a servile position not unlike the ones the apes lived in under the humans, when gorilla general Aldo is not actively campaigning for their extermination. Caesar is flummoxed over what to do, wishing he could get some clue on what to do from his long-dead parents, when Macdonald (same character as Conquest, played this time by Austin Stoker) reveals that he can: Just check out the interview tape made by the government when they first arrived back in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, conveniently located within the underground archives of the destroyed Forbidden City just a couple days away from the village. Which is exactly what Caesar decides to do, taking Macdonald and orangutan scholar Virgil (Paul Williams) along for the ride. Of course that ruined city might not be as deserted as it might seem, and enemies can take many forms. It may be October, but the Ides of March might be fast approaching.

      Well we’ve reached the bottom of the cash barrel this time folks. Planet of the Apes as a series has never been cash-flush, Rod Serling wanted a futuristic city in the original and they gave him some adobe huts instead, but never understood just how cheap movies can get. Technically speaking Battle has the same budget as Conquest, 1.7 million, but at least Conquest spruced things up a bit so it looked like they were in a future city rather than just a normal ass. Battle gives us one decent looking matte painting of the Forbidden City and some blackened, melted wreckage, but the rest of it is dark dusty corridors in a boiler room and a state park with some wood huts in it. Our film’s secondary antagonist, horrifically mutated humans living in the wreckage of a once great city, are ‘mutated’ in the least possible manner; A gray splotchy ‘scar’ that half the time you don’t even notice. Even the famous ape masks, which you could argue was a large part of what made the original film such a success in the first place are showing their limitations, looking really stiff on anyone who isn’t Roddy McDowall. It’s a good thing that those masks are there though, because it’s the only thing keeping a million dollar movie from being outclassed by an average episode of Doctor Who. The old Doctor Who.      

      Of course there’s the question of whether there even needed to be another film in the first place. The first four movies did a decent job of telling how and why the Planet of the Apes came to be, and I think ending things at Conquest would have fit in science fiction’s penchant for downer endings (for the humans anyway). Most of the things you might have wanted to see you don’t get anyway because they can’t afford it; The moment human society is destroyed, the Ape-Man War, how those psychic weirdos from the second movie got that ICBM, etc. The only thing they’ve really got left to work with is addressing the time loop, and I think they manage to do so in a way that pairs well with the original film. However the scale of the film is so small because of the budget that it really damages the suspension of disbelief. The titular Battle has a certain dramatic appeal, two sides consumed by hate throwing what little remains of themselves at each other, repurposing automobiles as war machines like a prototypical Mad Max, but when you actually get there it’s like the Road Warrior if George Miller could only afford three cars. Then there’s the fact that the one tape involving an interview with fucking talking apes from the future just so happens to be a day or so away from the village our characters are located, which apparently suffers no ill effects from being downwind of a city obliterated by nuclear fire (it’s a tiny ass city by the way), and that the mutants just so happen to be able to identify Caesar on site despite him looking and dressing exactly like every other chimpanzee in the movie. Also the amount of Apes that actually live in this village wouldn’t even fill your average convention hall by, so by the time Planet of the Apes rolled around it’d look like a hairier version of The Hills Have Eyes. Just a whole mess of narrative convenience because they can’t afford to do anything else, and I can’t help but feel disappointed.

      Does that make it a bad movie? No, I wouldn’t go that far. As I said, I did like how they addressed the time loop, and tied all the films together. It also has a decent amount of action for those interested in that, and the drama between the Humans and the Apes felt like it was built well. Way better than Escape that’s for damn sure. Does that make it a good conclusion to the series? On a certain level yes, but the reason The Undiscovered Country worked for me despite not being the flashiest film was because we followed the cast (who most watchers were familiar with already) across five films before that one. The only character that really works with here is Caesar, and he starts off Battle as a fairly reasonable guy and he stays that way throughout the entire film, so his arc is more of a straight line. Moreover, while both films deal heavily in previous films, Star Trek VI does it in such a way that it is unobtrusive and so works better as its own film than Battle. So it’s a part of the tapestry, but maybe a bit frayed on the edges.

      If you’ve gotten this far in the Ape game, then there’s no point in not recommending Battle for the Planet of the Apes, but it helps that it’s not complete dog shit. If you haven’t, then similarly there’s no point in seeing it. So now we find ourselves in much the same predicament that we did at the end of the last review: Will we see an Apes film covered next year? Furthermore, will it be the critically panned Tim Burton Planet of the Apes, or will we be digging into the much more acclaimed modern Apes trilogy. As it was with Trek, only time will tell. Pour one out for Caesar and the gang if you’ve got ‘em, and let’s move forward.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Heavy Traffic (1973), directed by Ralph Bakshi

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "On the Corner", by Miles Davis

       Of all the directors I name drop during these movie reviews, I feel like Ralph Bakshi gets the most mentions while simultaneously being one of the least featured. I mean David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Alfred Hitchcock, they each got 4 reviews to their name, which is a lot considering on average I only review 31 movies a year. Bakshi? Well, one of my first reviews was for his 1975 film Coonskin, a blaxploitation reimagining of Joel Chandler Harris’ racist Uncle Remus stories (which still turned out to be pretty damn racist), and then during the 2017 Marathon I covered ‘83’s Fire & Ice, of which I can recall little besides not caring for it. I’ve watched other Bakshi projects before and since, including his short-lived Mighty Mouse series, but for whatever reason I’ve always hesitated when it came to putting finger to button and hashing it out. So many movies and not enough time I guess, even though I’m constantly talking about how many familiar faces show up during the Marathon. We’re killing two birds with one stone in this case then, because today on the Marathon we’re going back to Bakshi.

       Heavy Traffic was Ralph Bakshi’s sophomore effort, released only a year after Fritz the Cat, the film which had earned infamy and controversy by being the first animated film to receive an X-rating. The film centers principally around Michael Corleone (Jonathan Kaufmann), a young man and aspiring cartoonist/animator (wonder where Bakshi got that idea from) living in New York City with his overbearing Jewish mother Ida and philandering small time hood Italian father Angelo. New York City is a rough and tumble town, full of colorful characters and even more full of sex, violence and crime, and Michael is getting none of it. That is until an incident with a legless bruiser named Shorty pushes him together with Carole (Beverly Hope Atkinson), a woman as street tough as she is street wise. The two have some big dreams, not the least of which is getting the hell out of New York, but to do that you need money, and to get that you need to hustle. Of course it’s never that easy, and even the simplest plans have a tendency to fall apart at the slightest provocation. Quite explosively, in this case.

        As it would be with Coonskin two years later, Heavy Traffic is a hybrid film featuring both animation and live action segments, most frequently blending the two together. Unlike, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? however, there isn’t really an attempt to unify the two mediums into a single reality. Rather the live action footage is used to give the impression of a setting, like the scene in the Samba Club where the use of old black & white stock footage and shadows in the background is used to create the atmosphere of a bawdy bar, occasionally delving into heavy surrealist territory like the female lingerie scene. The animation quality itself is fine, not as sharp as Disney obviously, but much snappier than some animated Marathon films in the past like Rock & Rule and Gandahar.

       I’ll give Rock & Rule credit however, in that it was trying to be this over the top fantasy movie and it delivered, even if it still wasn’t very good in the end . Heavy Traffic on the other hand is trying to be a drama, which means it’s trying to say something, while constantly undercutting any pathos it might’ve managed to generate. How about that scene where Michael’s acquaintances beat themselves into bloody unconsciousness for no reason? Or the scene where a bird shits on Angelo’s head after he’s just finished beating his wife’s face in with the butt of a pistol? Or getting to see all that slapstick while a trans prostitute is getting the shit kicked out of them? Isn’t that deep? Doesn’t that say so much about the human condition? Well maybe it was in ‘73, back when underground comix artists were drawing black people like they were the mascots for a minstrel show convention was considered hip and edgy, but nowadays where every other adultswim show is trying desperately to get you to believe they’re subversive it just comes off as a frustrating waste of time. Bakshi started his career in the 50s and yet apparently he still needs to grow the fuck up.

        Now some of you could point the finger and say ‘what about Coonskin?’, and it’s certainly true that a lot of Heavy Traffic made its way into that film. In the case of Coonskin however, which at the very least has the thin veneer of satire, the important difference is the sympathy factor. Even if you’re writing an ‘everything sucks’ story, especially if you’re writing one, you’ve got to give your protagonist something to make us care about them, to make us want to follow them down that road for good or ill . Rabbit, Bear and Fox might now have been the strongest written characters in the world (I believe Bear was the only one with an arc), but you liked them, you wanted to see them eventually pull one over on their enemies and seize the day. Heavy Traffic on the other hand has Michael, a guy who starts dropping racial slurs by his second scene and later reveals himself to be a perennial loser ripped straight from the pages of Catcher in the Rye who smacks women around when he’s angry. Why the fuck should I care about him? Why the fuck should I care about any of the characters besides Carole and Ida, the only characters that come close to feeling like real people? The fact that this movie even attempts a happy ending is almost insulting, considering how tone deaf it is to the rest of the film. What a way to spend almost two hours, am I right?

       I appreciate the work Ralph Bakshi put into pushing animation as a storytelling medium and for showing folks a world beyond Disney fare, but the fact of the matter is that so far his track record hasn’t lived up to the hype. I don’t think I’ll be recommending Heavy Traffic, as much as I liked some of surreal imagery the film felt tedious and juvenile and any buzz I might have felt was thoroughly killed. Watch if you so desire, of course, but the options for mature animated films isn’t as barren as it was in the 70’s, so feel free to explore. Or just take a bunch of mushrooms this Halloween and watch Akira, you know, whatever floats your boat.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2015: The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Tubular Bells", by Mike Oldfield

     I’ve already spoken about how horror and science fiction could be considered ‘easy’ genres of film to do, because the standards for what constitute a good film in that case usually end up being how many buckets of blood can be thrown at a screaming woman. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘easy’ films in a sense, it’s a good way for up-and-coming directors (Peter Jackson, David Cronenberg) to cut their teeth in the industry, but that convenience seems to come at the cost of quality control. Generally it seems that the cream of the crop is afforded the respect they deserve, your Alien/Aliens, your Blade Runners, etc. but other films that might be considered classics of horror are seemingly far from classics in the eyes of the cinema intelligentsia. Would the psychologically disturbing themes and iconography of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Halloween be more accepted in film circles if the deluge of bargain-bin crap that spawned from it didn’t exist? Maybe, maybe not.

     One of the most successful exceptions to this rule is 1973’s The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin (Sorcerer, The French Connection), Much like Richard Donner’s infamous The Omen, Friedkin took an obscure, goofy bit of Catholicism, in this case the incredibly shady practice of exorcism, and expand it into a movie. At the time it was incredibly unique, and definitely not a film that could have been shown before the 1970s, when directorial freedom and special effects started to become prevalent. . Showing a child in this grotesque position, bloody, pockmarked face, spouting obscenities, and making the protagonist a priest who in the beginning of the movie has lost,The Exorcist touches not only upon us the cynical realist attitude born of Vietnam/race riot/political assassination era America but also of an overall maturation of cinema and the mainstream audiences. We could explore themes and show stories that we were unable to in the past, whether by technology or social morays, and not only that but really lay the groundwork for what was to be arguably more than any other time in film history. Much as Jaws and Star Wars established the foundations of the blockbuster, The Exorcist showed what this new decade meant for the horror genre, and the new avenues for where that genre could push itself in the future, whether it was through special effects or cinematography or what have you. It’s a good movie as well as an influential one, and that’s often not the case.

     Much like The Omen, Exorcist is a slow burn. The movie is about 2 hours long, and Friedkin really uses that time to build us up to that moment. A little less ambiguous than The Omen, where the events could be chalked up to Damien’s satanic influence or freak accidents, which Richard Donner (and I) consider one of the strengths of that film. When the girl starts looking like a Garbage Pail Kid and punching out grown men it does strain suspension of disbelief a bit, especially when they seem to go through every single medical exam they can think of, because a brain lesion can totally give a 12 year old girl a man’s voice. However the characters are very strong, very ‘real’ in my opinion, and I think that the feeling of tension and helplessness that arises from seeing a loved one lose control of themselves, whether through demonic possession or not, is a universal one and comes through very well. Great drama, horror classic, if you haven’t seen it already, make it a priority this Halloween.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2015: Westworld (1973), directed by Michael Crichton

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "Wild Wild West", by Kool Moe Dee

     If there’s one things we’ve learned in the hundreds of years since the invention of speculative fiction it is this: People will always find a way to fuck themselves over, no matter what. Human have been around for quite a while, and in the dozens, some might say hundreds, of years, we have packed the entirety of the human literary canon about how arrogant, spiteful dicks people are, and how they ruin their and other people’s lives through their arrogant, spiteful ways. We can’t get enough of the stuff. Of course, since we’re so busy talking about how bad other people, how stupid they are, how their way of doing things isn’t like ours, we tend to be very slow at actually trying to make the world a better place. It seems like humanity loves to revel in the idea of of our own helplessness when it comes to our media, that our lives have to be bad, that we have no agency, in some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy/egotistic masturbatory session. Or maybe that’s just how I see things, being a severe depressive and all. Can’t say for sure.

     If there’s any man who knows the folly of man’s arrogance, it’s Michael Crichton. From his first novel back in 1966 until his death in 2008, Crichton loved to explore the ways in which we humans could fuck ourselves over through our own stupidity, generally through some horribly mismanaged sci-fi concept. The most famous of these explorations was of course Jurassic Park (adapted to film in 1993), recently given a franchise update in Jurassic World (which seems to simultaneously one of the most hated and most successful movies of the year if anonymous people on the internet is anything to go by), but it has also been seen in other Crichton adaptations like Congo, The Terminal Man and The Andromeda Strain. So when it came time to hand the directorial reins over to Crichton, it makes sense that his debut film, the film that I’m featuring on this list, would deal with the same themes that he would later use with cloned dinosaurs and hyper-intelligent gorillas in novels/movies. We’re talking Westworld

     In the far-flung American future of hovercrafts and things that aren’t hovercrafts, the most popular amusement park in the world isn’t Disneyland or Six Flags or Dear Leader’s Happy Funtime Child Pit & Salt Mine (#1 in North Korea),it’s Delos. For a paltry 1000 dollars a day, you can vacation in Medievalworld, Romanworld or Westworld, perfect recreations of those historical periods populated entirely by androids. You can talk with them, fuck them, kill them,beat them up, all under the watchful eye of trained Delos technicians and engineers. Ever wanted to rob a bank on horseback? How about swordfighting a knight while feasting on mutton and mead? Does a drunken outdoor orgy with men & women of indiscriminate ages strike your fancy. The heights of debauchery and wish-fulfillment in a safe, controlled environment can be yours when you try Delos, so why not take a trip to Westworld today? Heck, even our animals are artificial!

     Of course, this being a movie, the day that our protagonists John Blane (James Brolin) and Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) decide to take a trip to the most magical place on Earth is the day that everything goes to shit. It seems that the rate of malfunctions in the robots has dramatically since the park opened, mostly tied to a breakdown in their logic processors it seems, and in true Jaws fashion the higher-ups are too interested in their profits to notice when something is about to go tits-up. Blane and Martin might find shootouts, bar fights and sex with robo-hookers fun now, but what happens when the machines don’t want to listen anymore? What happens when the sensors that keep the (very real) guns from firing on real people stop working? Worst of all, what happens when you have a bloodthirsty Yul Brynner gunning for your ass? You get three guesses.

     Crichton was already a fairly accomplished novelist before his work on Westworld, so it’s not surprising at all that this movie probably reads far better than it plays. Particularly in the case of the protagonists, Blane and Martin. I can’t writing and erasing things down trying to accurately describe my feelings about it, but the heart of the issue was that they were completely totally uninteresting characters. Barely characters really, you never really learn much about them, never really get to identify with them (unless you too are a scrawny douchebag with a pornstache) and thus, inevitably, don’t care about whether they live or die. Compare it to Jurassic Park, which is pretty much this move but with dinosaurs: You cared about Hammond, you cared Malcolm, because you learn about them through the course of the film by the way they act and interact with others. Crichton manages to impart a bit of personality to other characters, most of which have even less screen time and dialogue, but Peter Martin (who is technically the protagonist I suppose, with Blane being the deuteragonist) is a nonentity. Sit through the entire movie and the most you’ll figure out about him is that he doesn’t like to get shot by robots. The last half of the movie is filled with corpses, and this fucker is still gives the most lifeless performance in the room.

     Westworld isn’t what I would call a bad movie though (otherwise it wouldn’t be this list presumably), and for a debut film by someone who presumably didn’t study filmmaking it’s quite well made, all things considered. I mean the ‘Amusement Park run amok’ setting concept was good enough that Crichton managed to successfully recycle, it managed to at least touch upon how the removal of consequence affects man’s behaviour and sense of morality, and Yul Brynner as a cowboy Terminator years before Arnie played a killer robot is pretty cool. If you keep in mind that this movie is from the early 70s, when science fiction was at this weird crossroads between new wave philosophy and commercial genre fiction, the concept is enough to warrant a watch. If you liked Soylent Green and Logan’s Run, then you might like to take a trip to Westworld this Halloween.

Double Feature: Play It Again, Sam (1972) & Sleeper (1973), directed by Woody Allen

Originally written for the Tricycle Offense

This here is a little thing I’m calling the Thunderbird on Cinema Double Feature, as you might be able to tell from the title, which may show up now from time to time. The premise is, essentially, that I take two film which are connected in some way and write about both of them, in an unprecedented bit of film criticism the likes of which has never been seen before. Rather than try to dig deep and really delve into the core of the film, as real film critics you see, I’ll just be throwing together two small articles I managed to crap out and charging double the price. That’s called economics kids, read a book once in a while.

This first edition of this subfeature concerns a couple films I’ve already seen and written down notes for months ago, which means my impressions will be fresh and perfectly valid. It also deals with a director I haven’t really talked about yet, which I’m sure no one actually wanted to hear. Enjoy.

Play It Again, Sam (1972)

Actor. Writer. Comedian. Director. Playwright. Clarinetist. Although his star has certainly dimmed, it'd be pretty hard for it not to considering, when it comes to American filmmakers there aren’t many that have done so well for so long as one Mr. Woody Allen. Going back all the way to his debut film (What’s New Pussycat?, released in 1965), Woody Allen has been able to sit down at his typewriter and crank out a new movie almost every year since, a grand total of 40+ plus movies under his belt. Although starting off in straight, full-fledged comedies, Allen is likely most well-regarded for his string of films in the 1970s (in particular Annie Hall, which won 4 Academy Awards), which helped to redefine and reestablish the romantic comedy genre, not to mention helping to bolster the careers of both Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow. Whether or not that’s a bad thing is up for you to decide, and whether you think the world needs so many rom coms about a neurotic Jewish man having sex with a woman out of his league is another issue, but you can’t deny the man’s work ethic. He’s worked with science-fiction, film-noir, animation, 19th century Russian prose, murder mysteries, mockumentaries...even if he does repeat himself at least he mixes it up a little sometimes, you know?

Based on the play of the same name, which was also written by Woody Allen, Play It Again, Sam stars Woody Allen as the standard Woody Allen character: A neurotic east-coast Jewish writer who somehow has tremendous luck with women despite looking like a broom with male pattern baldness. In this particular case he plays the role of Allen Felix, a critic obsessed with the 1942 film classic Casablanca to the point that Humphrey Bogart’s character appears to him to give him some hard boiled advice from time to time, like Ben Kenobi from the Bronx. Felix is recently divorced, his wife citing a lack of excitement in their relationship as reason enough for the split, and he’s understandably a little bummed out. His friends, Dick and Linda (played by Allen regular Diane Keaton) decide it would be for the best if Felix got back on the saddle and set him up with a couple of new women and test the waters, to use dissimilar turns of phrase.

However, Dick and Linda’s relationship is far from perfect itself, and as Felix and Linda spend more and more time together, a spark of attraction threatens to grow into the flames of passion. Could Felix, would Felix betray the trust of his friend and step into the world of adultery? Is he even ready for such a commitment, or is his mind still in rebound mode from the departure of his wife Nancy? And where exactly does Casablanca fit into all of this? That’s for you to find out, in case you decide to watch it for yourself.

Woody Allen is a man who loves his romantic comedies, or at least he’s been cursed by a witch to write so many, and going by critical opinion he’s pretty good at it. Since the very idea of romance fills me with deep-seated feelings of shame and regret, I tend not to go much for the rom-coms, but I found myself enjoying Play It Again, Sam. Not so much for the general setup, which has been done in many films before (even the ‘main character obsessed with Casablanca which which eventually helps to show his evolution as character’ thing has been done), but because the romance element feels more or less like a natural buildup. Not so much for Allen’s bizarre rape comments (you’ll know it when you come to it), more so it’s that when Felix and Diane talking with each other it feels like two real people having a conversation. Much like how actual human beings form relationships, or so I’m told. Allen and Keaton have great chemistry together, and if it didn’t seem like Allen was the type of writer that planned out scenes point by point, I’d think that he just improv-ed the whole thing. Which is something I tend to enjoy in films actually, the dissolution of the barrier separating real and directed action. It’d explain my love of Spinal Tap at least.

Aside from some cartoonish Jerry Lewis-style antics which I don’t much care for (don’t ask how I know what a Jerry Lewis-style antic is when I haven’t seen a Jerry Lewis film), and the aforementioned weird ‘women like rape’ line, I found myself enjoying Play It Again, Sam. I haven’t seen enough of his filmography to determine whether this is one of his best movies, but I do think this could make for a great introduction to his other work, either to his early comedic works or his later more dramatic projects. Of course my introduction to Woody Allen was Antz, which might explain why it took me so long to watch another one.

RESULT: RECOMMENDED

Sleeper (1973)

Love him or hate him, the one thing you have to concede about Woody Allen is that the man is one of those tirelessly prolific kinds of writer that always pisses me off. Coming one year after Play It Again, Sam (and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* (But Were Afraid to Ask), by the by), Allen wrote, acted in and directed Sleeper, his one and only foray in the genre of science fiction. This film was yet another to feature the Woody Allen/Diane Keaton billing by the way, which seems to have been the partnership connected to his better films. Is Sleeper indeed one of those gems of the 70s, as were the likes of Annie Hall and Manhattan, or is it a dud? Does even bringing up the question cast perceptions of doubt on its potential quality or lack thereof? Read on and find out.

In the sci-fi romcom Sleeper, Woody Allen stars as Miles Munroe, a 35 year old clarinet player and former health food restaurateur who is definitely not Allen playing himself as he does in all his films (dude writes what he knows). After being cryogenically frozen back in 1973, Miles is revived 200 years later by renegade scientists in a dystopic utopian future that looks a lot like someone’s backyard in Southern California. It seems that in the subsequent 2 centuries the United States of America has given way to the despotic and dictatorial American Federation, and society has entered into a Huxley-esque state of hedonistic yet sterile complacency. Androids now act as manservants, tobacco and junk food is actually better for you than fruits and vegetables, and people have sex by machines. Not the worst place to end up in, but the brutal tyranny does put a little damper on things.

Miles Munroe is a neurotic, cowardly schlemiel of a man,who happens to be a fugitive now that he’s been unfrozen, so of course he gets roped into the underground resistance movement to discover and stop the Federation’s secretive Aries Project. During his escape he decides to disguise himself as the android servant of Luna (Keaton), the yuppie poet laureate of the future. After abducting Luna (more or less), the two wacky weirdos decide to go on a journey to discover just what that whole Aries Project thing is all about. Which will probably lead to the dissolution of aforementioned despotic and dictatorial American Federation, because this is a light-hearted romantic comedy and not Brazil. Not saying that Sleeper ending with a lobotomized Miles glorifying the Federation ala George Orwell’s 1984 wouldn’t have had its own charms in a lot of ways, but I don’t think twist endings like that are really Allen’s style.

Sleeper is far more a work of comedy than of science-fiction, a Spaceballs or Galaxy Quest rather than a Planet of the Apes or Soylent Green, and any radical ideas about the future and technology takes a back seat to the comedy. Like a bus in Montgomery Alabama in the 1960s, that’s how far back that seat is in this analogy. I imagine the budget for this couldn’t have been too large, but I’ve seen episodes of Star Trek and Doctor Who from this era that had better sense of setting and special effects than what one sees in Sleeper, and if your Hollywood movie has worse special effects than Doctor Who then that’s just fucking embarrassing. You could perhaps explain away by reiterating the point about it being a comedy and that it isn’t necessary, but it still doesn’t keep the film from looking like an Ed Wood original. Dude may have been pumping a movie a year, but if what he is putting out feels half-assed it doesn’t really mean much, does it?

So if sci-fi wasn’t the primary objective, then that means the focus is on the comedy and the romance, but I don’t think Sleeper really excels in those cases either. The goofball comedy is in full-force when compared to PIAS, and it just falls flat for me just as it did then. It’s not that I don’t think Allen is funny, because I do, it’s more that I find him at his funniest when he’s talking and telling jokes and when he tries to be wacky it comes across as someone trying to do Blake Edwards or Mel Brooks (both Allen and Brooks wrote for Your Show of Shows, so there’s that connection). The romance might be even worse, as it seems thrown in because the story needed to have a romance and not because a romance added to the story, which wouldn’t really be much at all if the romantic elements were removed. I didn’t really like Luna or Miles as characters (especially Keaton’s character), and that chemistry that worked out so well in PIAS almost seems nonexistent here. Or rather the actor chemistry is there, but the character chemistry isn’t there. By the end of the movie and you get the heartfelt ending I couldn't bring myself to care whether Luna and Miles reconciled their love or not, because I couldn't bring myself to care about the characters at all. The tagline for the poster does indeed say ‘A Love Story About Two People Who Hate Each Other’, but there’s a long-ass distance between that and 10 Things I Hate About You, if you catch my drift.

Obviously I didn't care for Sleeper all that much, but I wouldn't say I hated it either. It was average I could you say, a C to C+, enjoyable enough to watch at the time. It’s just doesn’t have anything that would make me want to go back, and it’s not a film I would’ve regretted not seeing. If you’re way too into romantic comedies or you’re working your way through Woody Allen then yeah, sure, but if you’re not? Eh, I’d say you’re better off elsewhere.

RESULT: NOT RECOMMENDED