The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: Memories (1995), directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Koji Morimoto and Tensai Okamura

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: 'Memories.' by Chromonicci

       Anime is big business these days, and a big part of that big success is in what experts call the ‘anime movie’. Call it cringey or kiddy if you want, but there’s no denying that some of the most successful films in recent times have been animated films from Japan. Didn’t that movie based on Demon Slayer make like a billion dollars at the box office? And those two Dragonball Z movies hit number 1 in the U.S., right? Wild.

       If you were to ask the average person on the street about the directors of these Japanese animated movies however, the only name you’re likely to hear is Hayao Miyazaki. Which is unfortunate, because even though Miyazaki’s reputation is well earned, reducing any segment of art down to a single creator does a disservice to art itself. So how about we use our anthology movie pick of the Marathon to put a spotlight on some new guys, and a guy that loyal blog readers have seen before.

       Released in 1995, Memories was directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Koji Morimoto and Tensai Okamura, written by Otomo and Satoshi Kon, and produced by Atsushi Sugita, Fumio Sameshima, Yoshimasa Mizuo, Hiroaki Inoue, Eiko Tanaka and Masao Maruyama through Studio 4°C and Madhouse, based on manga by Katsuhiro Otomo. In ‘Magnetic Rose’ (directed by Morimoto) a down-on-their-luck team of salvagers in 2092 respond to a distress signal on an enormous abandoned spacecraft once owned by a famous opera singer, although it seems to be home to something else now. In ‘Stink Bomb’ (directed by Okamura), bumbling scientist Nobuo Tanaka takes an experimental drug to cure his cold only to accidentally become a weapon of mass destruction in the process. Finally Otomo himself takes the lead in ‘Cannon Fodder’, a slice of life story centered around a family in a city so dedicated to warfare that the whole of society is centered around firing cannons, although who exactly they’re firing these cannons at is something of a mystery. Topics such as obsession, the persistence of memory, fascism and how other people at the comic convention feel when you refuse to shower or use deodorant will be addressed.

       When it comes to anthology films, especially those based on the works of one person, it can sometimes be difficult for each story to stand out. Animation helps to alleviate that problem; While all three stories feature a kind of violent morbidity that feel right inside the wheelhouse of the man behind Akira, the fact that each story features a radically different art style really helps to distinguish one from the other. Magnetic Rose uses a more realist style that modern anime fans would find reminiscent of films like Perfect Blue and Paprika, Stink Bomb is brings to mind the work of Naoki Urasawa (‘20th Century Boys’, ‘Billy Bat’), while Cannon Fodder brings to mind Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Monty Python. Of the three Cannon Fodder looks the most unlike what you’d expect from an anime film, with its heavily shaded, heavily stylized people stuck in a fascistic hell of steam and heavy industry, and it’s the one I like the most. Although at the end of the day all three look good, and they’re all animated with the degree of quality you’d expect from Madhouse, which has gone on to become Japan’s premier anime studio.

       Of course in all anthology films there’s always a centerpiece story, whether intentional or otherwise. For the Twilight Zone movie it was NIghtmare at 20,000 feet, and for Memories it’s certainly Magnetic Rose. It’s the longest of the three segments, and certainly the most ambitious in both what it’s trying to say and what it’s trying to show on a visual level. Those coming into this film from Akira will likely find the greatest level of familiarity with Rose as well, high-concept science fiction involving the nature of reality featuring highly fluid animation, and of the three it’s the only one that feels like it could have been expanded into its own feature-length film without much issue. I don’t know if I would have done that though personally, as I think the contrast between Rose and the more comedic, stranger stories really elevates the entire film.

       Diverse art styles pair well with diverse music. Anime fans will be pleased to see the name Yoko Kanno as the composer for Magnetic Rose, who would later go on to score the legendary Cowboy Bebop. Jun Miyake provides a little bit of ska for Stink Bomb, and Fumitoshi Ishino of techno group Denki Groove bookends the film with some hard dance beats. It’s a soundtrack made for vinyl, that’s the thing that comes to mind now.

       Memories gets the recommendation. It’s not a film on the level of Akira, but then most movies aren’t, but it is a showcase of incredible talent and a love letter to the art of animation. Probably not something you’ll want to watch with the kids, a bit too dark for that, but grab a friend or two this Halloween and you’ll have a good time. Although if you’re trying to watch anime on Halloween having any friends at all might be too much to ask.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: Lord of Illusions (1995), directed by Clive Barker

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: 'The Immaculate Conception' by Jedi Mind Tricks

       Once more into the breach with Mr. Clive Barker. You know it’s a bit surprising that netflix or some other streaming service hasn’t called ol’ Clive up and got some adaptations going. There was that remake of Candyman, sure, but I imagine a lot of people don’t even realize it was an adaptation, much less one written by Barker. If Amazon can drop a billion dollars on a Lord of the Rings show that no one asked for, surely we could get some scratch to see more Clive on the silver screen, especially at a time when the FX for TV shows can finally keep up with the material. I’m sure he’d appreciate it too, if only to give him something to do that isn’t Hellraiser.

       Anyway released in 1995, Lord of Illusions was written and directed by Clive Barker and produced by Barker, Joanne Sellar, Steve Golin and Sigurjon Sighvatsson through Seraphim Productions, based on the Clive Barker story “The Last Illusion”. Scott Bakula stars as Harry D’Amour, a private investigator with one foot firmly planted in the supernatural, whether he wants to or not. While in L.A. investigating an insurance  fraud case, Harry stumbles upon a fortune teller being murdered by two men, a weirdo with heterochromia and no eyebrows and a skinhead with pointed teeth who manages to not die even after getting punched out of a second story window. This leads him to Dorothea Swann (Famke Janssen), wife of famous magician Philip Swann, who fears for her husband’s life. It seems that this fortune teller and Swann go way back, 13 years in fact, back when they and a couple others frequented a cult lead by a man named Nix, who was a magician as well. When Nix decided to go from sacrificing animals to people Swann and his merry band killed him, sealed his powers and buried him in a hole, but with people turning up dead one is left to wonder if being dead is all it’s cracked up to be these days. Harry takes the case, but little does he know that when you’re walking this fine path between heaven and hell, you’re bound to spot a couple demons.

       A detective story with a supernatural twist. Not exactly an uncommon combo, in fact we’ve covered several such films in the Marathon over the years (In the Mouth of Madness, Wolfen, The Believers), but it is surprising to see it coming from Clive Barker. This is the man who brought us Hellraiser and Nightbreed after all, even Rawhead Rex had some psychosexual themes under all the crap, that he would put out a spooky film noir when given the director’s chair seems out of character for him. Yes there’s plenty of blood and gore you’ve come to expect from a Barker story, but I mean, the story takes place in Los Angeles, the protagonist is a private investigator, there’s a beautiful yet mysterious woman who is immediately attracted to the P.I., the antagonist with a sidekick, and on and on. You’d think this would be setting up for some kind of subversion of those tropes as in Mouth of Madness, but no it’s played completely straight. Aside from the supernatural elements and the gore you could play this alongside any Hammett or Chandler adaptation. So I would have called it the safe move from Barker, but really how many people were trying the pulp noir throwback at this point in time? Besides Warren Beatty, and we know how that turned out.

        Of course it wouldn’t be a Clive Barker movie without the gorey special effects, and while Lord of Illusions is comparably tamer than Hellraiser or Candyman it still manages to scratch that itch, particularly during the climax. I especially like the moments where characters see with ‘true sight’, I'm not sure whether that was accomplished by camera tricks on a practical effect or if it was done through CGI, but it looks very bizarre in a good way. I assume it’s CG because there’s another scene where that uses it, and this would be around the time that practical effects and CGI would be at equilibrium. Obviously the practical stuff looks better on screen, but Barer manages to use it in a visually interesting way, and in any case I’ve gained a fondness for old janky CG.

       The decision to cast Scott Bakula as the lead was…questionable. Now I like Bakula well enough -- Quantum Leap is a fun show and I didn’t even hate him all that much in Star Trek: Enterprise, despite his character being the writing equivalent of a paper cut on your scrotum, but both of those roles play to his strengths; characters that are morally upright if kind of dorky guys. Seeming him trying to pull off a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe type character, I just can’t take him seriously, and that’s entirely down to my perception rather than his performance. Conversely I think David von Bargen was perfect casting as Nix, exactly as you’d picture a cult leader out in the Mojave desert to look. Famke Janssen makes for a believable femme fatale, and we even get an appearance by Vincent Schiavelli, which is always a treat.

       Add on to the fact that, while the noir throwback is novel it doesn’t really move beyond those trappings. Yeah it’s got that creepiness and gore that Clive Barker is known for, but it does a lot of setup between Harry’s backstory and the nature of magic and reality in this world and just leaves a lot on the table. Going back to Hellraiser yet again, the core of that film was familiar, deals with the devil, demons and what not, but the way that Barker reinterpreted those concepts felt unique. Lord of Illusions by contrast tries to marry this by the book noir tropes, you'd think Barker had The Big Sleep by his nightstand while writing the screenplay, to some early 90s Vertigo edginess, and the whole thing ends up feeling dissonant. Not horrible, not unwatchable, just…off.

       Lord of Illusions gets the mild recommendation then. Of all the Clive Barker adaptations that I’ve covered, it's by far the tamest and the easiest to watch in polite company, which might be the most damning praise I could possibly give to a horror movie. If you liked In the Mouth of Madness then you’ll probably enjoy this well enough, but it’s definitely not as engaging as that film. If you liked Cool World though this film is way better, so be sure to set your expectations appropriately this holiday season.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Tales from the Hood (1995), directed by Rusty Cundieff

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "The World is a Ghetto", by Geto Boys

       Collecting separate pieces of literature into one work has been a thing since books started being more than something monks did in between making wine and cheese, but for whatever reason I’ve always associated it with horror fiction above all else. Perhaps it comes from that classic image of a group of people telling ghost stories around a fire, doing their best to scare their friends while being scared themselves that does it, or that the nature of horror lends itself to short, explosive bursts of suspense, making them easily digestible and so taking several in one go sounds practical. I dunno, but that’s how it seems to go for books and, occasionally, films, as we’ve seen in previous Marathons with Tales from the Crypt and Spirits of the Dead. So why not do it again this year?

One dark night, three young men travel to a mysterious, almost anachronistic mortuary, on the basis of picking up a lucrative amount of drugs that the mortician had discovered (by force). When the three arrive however, the macabre mortician (played to eerie effect by Clarence Williams III) isn’t in the mood for drug deals. He’s interested in the dead, and the events that up to their demise. Tales of killer dolls and monsters lurking behind your door at night, of killing and being killed, or hatred and death. Tales from the hood, as the title says, and tales which for these three young men might be closer to reality than they’d hope…

       From the title you might assume Tales from the Hood is taking cues from Tales from the Crypt, and in some cases that comparison is accurate. Both feature a framing device with an eerie narrator relates stories in a location associated with death, both like to dig into a bit of the old comic aesthetic (especially the final story in this case), both like a little gallows humor here and there. However, where Crypt was all about the darkly ironic twists, especially the television series, Tales from the Hood is geared towards social commentary. All four stories, although featuring supernatural elements, center around issues that directly impact African-American communities: Police brutality, domestic violence, gang violence and so on. Subjects which they tackle unflinchingly, and honestly hit harder than the things in the film that we would label ‘horror’. In that way Tales from the Hood is the most effective film we’ve covered so far, even if its presentation is a tad tongue in cheek. That gallows humor coming into play, perhaps.

       I’m also reminded a bit of Rod Serling’s second show Night Gallery, in that the segments tend to be faster paced and narratively direct. There are four stories in total in Tales from the Hood not including the framing device: “Rogue Cop Revelation” (featuring Wings Hauser), “Boys Do Get Bruised” (featuring David Alan Grier), “KKK Comeuppance” and “Hard Core Convert”, all of which are clear in what they mean and what they’re trying to say. Of the four I’d say I was most partial to the final story, “Hard Core Convert”, which at first seems to be heading in A Clockwork Orange territory before suddenly veering into something reminiscent of Ambrose Bierce's “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, which I honestly didn’t see coming. It’s also the segment which I think maybe moves a bit too quick for its own good, probably could have been expanded on a bit more if they wanted, but that’s the way she goes when it comes to anthology movies. 

       Consistency, I guess the name of the game here is today. The stories work, the performances work, the direction and the special effects work, it all works. Which may be a matter of course in regular film, but I’ve covered two other anthology movies before this and there’s always been at least one segment there that could’ve been cut. Not so with Tales from the Hood which, countering Tales from the Crypt and Spirits of the Dead, has a sense of uniformity that feels and functions like a complete film rather than a couple of stories tied together by nothing more than someone’s personal preference. It may not have anything have flashy as ‘Nightmare at 20,000 ft.”, but then who remembers anything about The Twilight Zone Movie beyond that segment? Who even remembers there was a Twilight Zone movie? Besides the guy who’s probably going to blog about it at some point, I mean.

        I feel like I might be talking in circles here, or that I’m not being as descriptive as I should be, but I can’t think of much else to say. Tales from the Hood is good. I enjoyed watching it, I think other people would enjoy watching it, so I’m recommending it. If you do decide to throw this on your Halloween film queue this year however, you might want to avoid the sequel, Tales from the Hood 2. Similar in structure, yet lack much of the charm and soul of the original. The choice, however, is yours to make.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019:Tank Girl (1995), directed by Rachel Talalay

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Boys Wanna Be Her", by Peaches

       I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The 1990’s and early 2000’s were the best time for comic book movies. Sure, you didn’t have Marvel churning out some new crap every couple of months, in fact Marvel was practically dead in the water around this time, but it was also a time where you could actually see a movie based on a comic book that wasn’t just from Marvel or DC. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Crow, American Splendor, Men in Black... Some of them might not have been quite up to snuff, although who doesn’t love John Leguizamo as a fat demon clown, but at the same time it’s nice to see some degree of separation from the superhero status quo that we’ve been subjected to for about a decade, because it gave comic books fans some hope that comic books were finally being recognized as a storytelling medium worthy of adaptation like novels and plays. The possibilities were endless; Love & Rockets: The Movie, an Elfquest trilogy, Sam and Max Do America. What a time to be alive, if you only focused on that and not all that other horrible shit that going on in the world at the time. 

Released in 1995 under United Artists and directed by Rachel Talalay, whose previous directing credits include Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and Ghost in the Machine, which probably doesn’t feature Sting at all, Tank Girl was based on the British comic series/character of the same name created by Alan and Jamie Hewlett, the same Jamie Hewlett who would later go on to international acclaim with his co-creating of Gorillaz with Damon Albarn. The film takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth (destroyed by a comet passing over us turns out, and not any of the several other ways we’ll all be dead by 2033), where the control of water means power, so much so that even the local fascistic empire decided to name themselves after the idea. Lori Petty stars as ‘Rebecca’ (she is never referred to once as Tank Girl, always a great sign of things to come), an often drunk and very disorderly woman who’s just trying to eke out a living hanging out with her friends, scrounging for supplies, and avoiding both the forces of Water & Power and the Rippers, a mysterious band of killer mutants that have no love for the remnants of the human race. However that meager existence is forever altered when Water & Power raid their little hideout, killing Rebecca’s friends and enslaving her to do vaguely defined slave labor. Which, unbeknownst to Water & Power and its devious leader Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell), might have been the wrong move, as Rebecca is completely uninterested in the slavish lifestyle, like violently so. Plus there’s a tank right there so...yeah she’s just gonna leave.

Featuring Ice-T as a talking kangaroo man.

Alright, let’s start with what I liked about the film. I think they made a good choice with casting Lori Petty, as she’s got the look of Tank Girl down pat, and I don’t know if there’s anyone around at the time who could have done it better. I like the soundtrack, consisting of some of the best alternative butt rock of the time, including Bush, L7 and Veruca Salt. The two animated sequences in the film were also a real treat, as well as the abundance of art from the comics the film used as well. Honestly makes me wish we had gotten a Tank Girl animated series, in the vein of MTV’s The Maxx or HBO’s Spawn.

       As for what I didn’t like about the movie...well that was pretty much everything else. Now I wouldn’t call myself a Tank Girl superfan or anything, but I have read a few issues, and to me the world of Tank Girl was a combination of Mad Max, Tex Avery and an Ed Roth painting. Dirty, anarchic, rife with social commentary, all wrapped up in classic Sex Pistol chic, and Tank Girl was the poster child of that world. The OG riot grrl, an amoral, hedonistic punk who got her daily dose of id satisfaction through wanton acts of  extreme violence and debauchery (intended or otherwise). The kind of woman you’d think you’d want having your back in a bar fight, because she takes no one’s shit and dishes it out twice as hard, but chances are she’d kick your ass too after she ran out of whiskey. Maybe not the most nuanced character ever written, but a perfect fit for the leather and chains, chaotic neutral comic book scene of the late 80s through the mid 90s. 

       Tank Girl the movie is not that, although it tries to be. It tries to craft this gritty dieselpunk world by showing a lot of sand and industrial equipment, but there’s no grit! In this fucked-to-death scrap of dust where the most common career path is ‘dessicated corpse’ and water is such a limited resource that the bad guys literally invented a killing machine that sucks it out of people, everything feels so clean and plasticine, like ten feet away they're filming an episode of Star Trek. It’s the same with Lori Petty, who despite some slight glimpses of TG generally comes across as goofy child than a badass rebel icon. In many ways it reminds me of The Mask, which began life as a gritty, ultra-violent comic book that was then transformed into cartoony, PG-13 fare for the silver screen, including the now dated cultural references and shoehorned in musical number. Except that movie worked thanks to them getting Jim Carrey, and Tank Girl doesn’t thanks to them getting Ice-T dressed up as a kangaroo man.

       The pacing is also rather bad. The movie is about an hour and forty-three minutes long, and it feels like 15 hours before Tank Girl actually actually touches a fucking tank, so they’ve got to shove the rest of the movie into what’s left. Then when she actually becomes Tank Girl the movie poops its pants in confusion at how to fill the rest of the time. We get an ‘infiltrate the club to get the MacGuffin’ scene, a dress-up montage, a huge song and dance number, and then the MacGuffin is immediately retaken, rendering the whole sequence completely pointless. Then suddenly TG and Jet (haven’t mentioned her yet, basically she’s the live-action version of the shy girl in every anime you’ve ever seen and I guess the deuteragonist but she’s barely relevant) are looking for the Rippers to build an army, then a cut, and then the next scene they find them. The whole thing really needed another go round on the cutting room floor, although I’m not sure it got the first pass, considering the fact that during the climactic fight scene at the end they couldn’t even edit out those wires actors use to leap higher.

       Also, this might be a personal thing, but I fucking hate the Rippers. They’re supposed to be kangaroos but they look like the Who’s from the live action Grinch movie fucked a Gremlin, they’re played as an existential threat to the big bad despite there being only about ten of them, and every second their annoying, bucktoothed asses are on screen feels like some new kind of torture that ought to have been banned by the Geneva Convention. The fact that they got Ice-T, a man who at one point was cool as hell, to dress up like a bargain bin Klingon and growl at people is almost as bad as being forced to imagine Lori Petty banging one of these butt-ugly monstrosities. Why is their skin so blotchy, if I may ask? Pretty sure I’ve never seen a kangaroo with rosacea, or is it the human DNA that causes skin conditions. Give me the Ewoks any day, seeing moldy Care Bears using sticks and rocks to kill space Nazis is far less insulting to my intelligence than this.

       So this is going to be a firm ‘No’ on the Tank Girl recommendation from me. I’m sure that there are folks who can find a diamond in the rough with this one, but to me it was tedious, and that’s the one sin I can’t forgive in a movie. Malcolm McDowell couldn’t save it. An appearance by James Hong couldn’t save it. Art by Peter Milligan couldn’t save it. If you want a comic book movie from the period watch The Crow or the first TMNT movie, if you want Tank Girl just read the comics, both options are a better use of your time than this movie. Or just skip the movies entirely this Halloween and buy yourself a tank. Never know when it might come handy.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: Village of the Damned (1995), directed by John Carpenter

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Cradle to the Grave", by Dave Davies

       I’ve probably started several entries off this way, but there’s not much more than can be said about John Carpenter. He’s amongst the most lauded directors on this blog for a while now, rubbing elbows with Gilliam and Cronenberg, getting those precious name drops, in spite of the fact that he’s actually missed out on several Marathons. It’s an unfortunate side effect of the capricious nature of these lists that movies come and go at a whim, and what could have been a Carpenter film is replaced by Darkman, and then Darkman is replaced by Night of the Creeps, and so on and on (occasionally up until the very last minute). As with Hitchcock in a previous entry, putting off John then just meant we still have plenty of him to enjoy later. And in the language of my people, ‘later’ means right fucking now. It’s Carpenter time.

       Much like Carpenter’s landmark 1982 film The Thing, Village of the Damned is a remake of a earlier film, Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned released in 1960, which itself was based on the novel “The Midwich Cuckoos” by John Wyndham (who also wrote “The Day of the Triffids”). On a day like any other, every living resident in the town of Midwich, men, women and animals, experience a complete and total blackout, no matter what they were doing. After about 4 hours everyone awakes, perfectly fine (the one who weren’t operating heavy machinery at least) except for one particular issue: Several women are now pregnant. As most of us know, pregnancy can lead to babies, and so it is here as well. Only thing is, these babies are as mysterious as their origins. Not only are they intelligent, but as they grow up they gain extraordinary abilities, which they then turn on the townsfolk of Midwich with a grim regularity. With people dropping of left and right, it seems like town doctor Alan Chaffee (Christopher Reeve) might be Midwich’s only hope. What are these children? What do they want? And perhaps the most pressing question of all, is there anything that can stop them?

       Like with Terry Gilliam and the other directors in Thunderbird Hall of Fame, I think the main reason I always like to return to John Carpenter is that his films have this air about them that definitively identifies them as Carpenter. I’m not sure if I can identify it accurately, but the films of his that I’ve seen take the visual approach of Hitchcock and through the use of innovative special effects brings it to a surreal, often grotesque conclusion, all done with the cynical eye birthed from the dirty, dirty 1970’s. Sometimes it’s subtle, as in Halloween, and occasionally it’s right in your face, but it’s always there to push his films onto their own little pedestals. There are slasher movies and then there’s Halloween, there are sci-fi movies and then there’s They Live, and so on. The calling card of the Carpenter is unmistakable. 

       So it is with Village of the Damned, a work which seems to return the uncomplicated suspense of Halloween and Christine. There’s no head-spiders or mystical Chinese warriors here, just some emotionless white-haired children with glowing eyes walking in pairs. As iconic an image as anything else from Carpenter’s filmography, and effective precisely because it’s so simple. They look at you, and you end up doing something you don’t want to do. No need for big expensive effects, the fear comes from seeing the victims having control over themselves and their actions ripped away with gruesome results. Something which no one wants to experience, but can certainly imagine.

       Unfortunately, this ties into my biggest problem with the film, which is that I strongly dislike stories in which agency is completely removed from the characters. Once it is established that the children are practically gods and that there’s nothing the adults can do to stop them, it immediately becomes less of a thriller to me and more torture porn, torturous for me because I still have to wait an hour before the film drags itself to a conclusion. Same with the character deaths, which have that Carpenter gruesomeness, but don’t have much of an emotional impact because the characters barely enter the scene before they’re immediately killed off. It’s the same kind of problem I had with Rosemary’s Baby, a film which I slagged off despite it having such critical and commercial acclaim. Rosemary accomplishes absolutely nothing in that film, nor does she ever come close to it, so what’s the point in watching? Which doesn’t mean I don’t like downer endings in my stories, all of my favorite directors have done it, I  just don’t like being bored out of my skull when it happens. To it’s credit we do get a bit of action towards the end, and Carpenter does set the stage for the climax earlier in the film, but by the time the film got there I was just ready for it to be over. Also the ending of Scanners did something similar but did it better.

Acting-wise, there’s not much to say. Christopher Reeve is pretty good, showing some dramatic range that you never really got to see in the Superman. Kirstie Alley is ok but kind of onenote by the nature of her character. Always nice to see Mark Hamill on screen even if he wasn’t all that important to the plot, and everyone else I didn’t recognize and probably came across as far more interesting in the original story.

Music-wise, apparently Carpenter shared soundtrack duties with Dave Davies, one of the members of the insanely good and insanely underrated English band of The Kinks. While a connection could be made to Carpenter’s previous musical contributions to his films, I didn’t really make the Davies connection until I looked more into the film’s production. While it’s not horrible by any means, I think both men have done better work.

John Carpenter tends to get a lot of flak from people for the later part of his career, and the films he directed during that period have never gotten the kind of love that his work in the early 80’s. Some of them, like inevitable Marathon entry Ghosts of Mars, is downright despised if Rotten Tomatoes is anything to go by. However, although I have my issues with Village of the Damned, I wouldn’t say it’s a film devoid of merit or unworthy of attention, and for that reason I’m giving it a tentative recommendation. Carpenter’s made better movies, but there are plenty of people out there that have made worse. If you’re a fan of the original Outer Limits or that one episode of The Twilight Zone where Bill Mumy is sending folks to the cornfield, then try out this little number this Halloween and see how you like it. And if you’re ever in the town of Midwich, avoid the barbecue. You’ll never know what you’re gonna get.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2017 - The City of Lost Children (1995), directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Who Will Take My Dreams Away", by Angelo Badalamenti and Marianne Faithfull

     Last year around this same time, the Marathon dipped into the Franc bank to give you two films from the magical land of France: animated bird boob movie Gandahar and one third of the Poe tribute Spirits of the Dead. Pretty okay films all things considered, but the most important thing they did was to get me interested in covering more French films, as long as they were in the appropriates genres. I’d already seen the horror classic Eyes Without A Face, so that was out. La Jetee was also a possibility, having been the inspiration for the amazing 12 Monkeys, but that was another one I’d seen before (plus it’s only 28 minutes long). The work of Luc Besson was probably the strongest contender for the majority of the time, with Nikita, Leon the Professional and The Fifth Element all being on my watch queue at some point or another, however the poor reception to Valerian ended up souring my mood on Besson. Maybe next year.

     Which leads us to The City of Lost Children, directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunut. OG Hellboy Ron Perlman stars as One, a simple-minded yet strong-hearted carnival strongman living in an incredibly 19th century French port city. Live is shit, as you’d expect in a time before labor laws, but it is tolerable as long as he has his ‘little brother’ Denree by his side. Of course Denree is almost immediately kidnapped by bizarre thugs with steampunk technology strapped to their faces, an issue faced by French port cities to this very day. Completely lost as to how to begin his search, One is suddenly joined by Miette, a young street smart orphan girl forced into a life of crime. Together, the odd due go off on a fantastical adventure to rescue Denree, a journey of steampunk cults, evil circus performers, a gaggle of clones and a mad scientist and his devilish dream machine. Not to mention lots and lots of Santa Claus cosplay.

     It makes more sense in context.

     According to the general info, City of Lost Children, along with Delicatessen (which I actually saw years ago) and Amelie (which I constantly see around but never watch) was intended by Caro & Jeunet as a tribute to the works of Thunderbird favorite Terry Gilliam. If you’ve ever seen one of Gilliam’s film, in particular Time Bandits or Brazil, then the comparisons start to flow. Grungy yet colorful and almost expressionistic settings contrasted with fairy tale stylings and magic realism with copious amounts of black and visual humor, occasionally with a Monty Python actor thrown in somewhere. That’s Gilliam, and that’s what Caro & Jeunet manage to accomplish damn well here. The comedy kinda falls flat on occasion, which I’ll chalk up to cultural differences, but it nails that sense of dark fantasy that few directors are able to perfect. Gilliam, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, and now Caro and Jeunet.

     More than anything else though, what really sells the movie is the friendship between One and Miette (played by Judith Villett). The gentle giant and child isn’t a new concept in storytelling (bringing it back to fairy tales), but the two have such a great chemistry that you don’t really mind. Villett as the stoic, wiseass but ultimately vulnerable girl, Perlman saying everything with just an expression, it’s endearing to see them bond over the course of the movie. Way more than any scene with Denree, if we’re being honest. Kid’s a MacGuffin with an eating disorder.

     By the way, the music here is done by Angelo Badalamenti, who you might know from all your favorite David Lynch movies. I actually didn’t know this going into the movie and it ended up being a real treat.

     The hour and 52 minute runtime does drag a bit unfortunately, but overall The City of Lost Children was a lot sillier and lot more enjoyable than I was expecting. More than little bit disturbed, plenty depressing, but at its heart it’s simple moral: If you give love, then you’ll receive love, and no matter how hopeless things seem, love always wins. You don’t often find movies on Halloween that have a happy ending, but this is one that I can heartily recommend. You might even want to throw this on and watch with the kids if the repeats of Nightmare Before Christmas and Monster House has gotten a bit stale. Just remember: Cultural. Differences.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016 -- The Usual Suspects (1995), directed by Bryan Singer

Hard to believe that another year has passed, but it is indeed time for another Long Dark Marathon of the Soul. Going into it this year, I decided to do things a little bit differently. Instead of a 'must-watch' kind of list, which doesn't really work with blind watches anyway, I've decided to be as candid with these films as I am with my other write-ups. Which may mean you see more than a couple of entries that's mainly me calling a movie shit, but that's the gamble you take when it comes to art, I guess. And no matter what I think of the movie post-watch, I've taken a lot of time to try and root out the stuff that looks the most interesting or that deserves the most attention. That way, even if you don't agree with my opinion (and you wouldn't be the first), at least you'll be turned on to something you might end up enjoying. Which has been the point of this list since the beginning, and will remain the point until I stop.

Anyway, let's get things started...

The Trailer

and
The Appropriate Tune: "Main Theme", by John Ottman

     Any action, if done well enough, can be considered an art. Painting, composing music, cooking, the arrangement of flowers in a vase or furniture in a room, and even crime. Indeed, there have been a countless number of films, books, television shows etc. dedicated to the ‘art’ of crime; Tales of men and women who live life on the edge, navigating webs of intrigue and danger, flipping the bird to society’s rules, all the while shooting big guns and collecting piles of sweet, sweet dosh in the process (and occasionally getting shot in a poignant moment near the end of the story). While the reality is much more mundane and terrible than the romanticized picture of it we get in pop culture, the thrill that comes with the idea of ‘getting away’ with something and the removal of normal life’s restrictions make for some powerful escapism. We may not actually want to be a Cuban drug lord but all of us want to be Tony Montana, if you catch my drift.

     So arrives 1995’s The Usual Suspects, directed by Bryan Singer, which attempts to take it’s place amongst the annals of good crime thriller movies. A flaming boat and 27 dead Hungarian gangsters in an high-stakes drug deal gone bad have the L.A.P.D very interested, and crippled small-time conman Verbal Kint is the only one with any knowledge of what really happened on that night. Through a series of flashbacks, he tells us a story of Fenster (Benicio del Toro), Hockney (Kevin Pollack), McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Kint (Kevin Spacey) and Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), a collection of criminals who are arrested and harassed by the NYPD over the theft of a truck full of gun parts. Feeling vengeful, the Suspects decide to team up and pull one over on the NYPD, which ends up being wildly successful. However, a move to L.A raises the stakes, and soon the crew discover the horrible truth: Each of them has done something to cross Kaiser Sozey, the mysterious and ruthless criminal mastermind who is as much fantasy as flesh in America’s underbelly. Reconciliation is unlikely, retaliation impossible. Their only choice is to pull off one last job, and hope they don’t end up dead in the process…

     The Usual Suspects seems to owe much of its success to two things: it’s choice of cast and it’s Shyamalan style twist, which was actually three years before M. Night got into the game with The Sixth Sense. While cultural osmosis has pretty much taken care of the twist at this point (you could also probably figure it out if you just thought about it for a bit), I will give it credit for the casting. The characters tend to fall into common archetypes, McManus is the douchey alpha male, Pollack is the wiseass who just wants get paid and so on, but they make the character their own and they all play off each other well. All except Gabriel Byrne, who plays the world-weary ex-cop Dean Keaton, and along with Kevin Spacey is the major focus of the story. You’d think that with that amount of screentime along with the narrative drive of protecting his girlfriend and pulling the fabled ‘one last job’ that’d he come across as a more interesting character, but he honestly doesn’t. It’s like his charisma is inversely proportional to his importance in the film.

     The problem is, the vast majority of that character interaction that really makes this movie is frontloaded into the beginning of the film, and then you start seeing the holes in the armor. Like the soundtrack, which should be tense and exciting and instead comes off as goofy and melodramatic (more comic booky than any of Singer’s later comic book movies). Or the fact that that a story that revolves around plans within plans and all that are incredibly hard to do right without coming across as hokey and circumstantial. Once you understand the nature of the story, you have to wonder why a supposed mastermind like Sozey would leave so much up to chance and why he would bother using these guys, and it goes ‘clever story writing’ to ‘that’s the way I wanted to tell the story so that’s what’s happening’. That’s the problem with writing thrillers and mysteries, you can’t just go ‘because I say so’. Coincidence might be a cornerstone of fiction but you have dress it up a little, you have to properly build up to it or else any sense of tension is lost. Which is what happens to The Usual Suspects by the end; it appears to be present an intriguing howdunit type mystery, but the further we work back from the solution the less coherent the narrative becomes, and the less valuable the mystery becomes in the face random circumstance. Use coincidence in moderation is the lesson the day.

     See also: the first half of Death Note with L as compared to the second half with Near.

     Of course I might be a bit overly critical, and cultural osmosis may not have affected everyone as I assume it has, so check it out yourself if you’re interested. It may not rank amongst the greatest crime movies I’ve ever seen, but it’s an enjoyable enough time that it pairs well with popcorn and friends. As long as your friends aren’t the type to over-analyze movies that is, which explains a lot about my life.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2015: Se7en (1995), directed by David Fincher

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Sin", by Nine Inch Nails

     Ok, I’ll come right out and admit it: I haven’t seen Gone Girl. 

     I know, I know, I’m a horrible person, no respect for quality cinema, etc., etc., etc. Apparently it’s a really good movie, according to the folks whose opinions I care about, but I haven’t got around it. I’m incredibly busy for a man with no prospects and no future you see: Reading, writing, playing video games, exercising, lamenting the loss of my childhood, my schedule is absolutely packed. When I do find time to watch a movie, it usually ends up being some weird movie from the past (my preferred genre of cinema) that I can write about, not the current Oscar bait or unremarkable summer blockbuster. I think the most recent film I watched was actually Birdman, quite good by my estimates, but I only ended up watching that because I heard enough about it beforehand. I love movies, I’d love to make movies, but I just don’t have the time or the interest to constantly stay on top of the ever-growing movie pile. I’ll probably watch it at some point, along with Mad Max: Fury Road and about a dozen other movies, but who knows when I’ll get to it?

     I will admit that I am interested in exploring the work of David Fincher however, except for Alien 3, and since our esteemed director’s work seems primarily focused on the thriller genre, it seemed well-suited for our Marathon of the Soul. While there were several films that I could have chosen, Zodiac, Gone Girl, The Social Network for you technophobes out there, I decided to go with a film that I not only had eyes on for a while, but one I felt was creepy and bizarre enough for a proper Halloween treat. Ladies and gentlemen: Se7en.

     In an unnamed city, which is probably New York City or Chicago but is never identified as such, officer William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) meets officer David Mills (Brad Pitt) at a gruesome murder scene. Somerset is the jaded veteran officer, a man worn down to nothing by years of wading through the grime and muck that is this urban hell, who just so happens to be one week away retirement. His replacement, a recent transfer, is literally the polar opposite: young, headstrong, quick to anger and slow when it comes to the more subtle aspects of police investigation. So no real game-changer in that department, it’s an archetype that’s been replicated in countless stories throughout fiction, mystery fiction or not. Rush Hour, 48 Hrs., Lethal Weapon, etc., etc., etc. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme, you get the idea.

     The next day, Somerset and Mills come across an even more gruesome and bizarre murder scene: A man who was apparently forced to eat until his stomach literally burst. Strange, but not necessarily a big deal, until another body turns up, this time with the word ‘greed’ written in blood at the scene. It seems that there is a serial killer loose in the city, one who murders people in ways that visually represent the 7 deadly sins, and does it quite effectively to boot. Diametrically opposed though they may be, it’s up to Somerset and Mills to investigate, and put a stop to these grisly killings once and for all, before the Sin Killer manages to elevate himself to the ranks of the most infamous murderers in history. 5 more sins to go…

     If I were to compare Se7en to another film, and what is film criticism without comparison to other things, the first thing to come to mind was Manhunter. Although some of the camera work and the artistic design of the crimes gives the impression of the Hannibal TV series (recently canceled, resquiat in pace), but for whatever reason my mind immediately went to that film. Aside from the similar nature of the films, there’s a sense of tension that weighs upon the investigation as you’re watching. Even in Se7en’s quieter moments, you find yourself drawn into the case, wondering when Somerset and Mills will finally hit upon the right track. I’ve only seen one of his films, but I have to give Fincher the nod for his ability to pull off a suspenseful atmosphere.

     I also wouldn’t feel too wrong in throwing out a comparison to True Detective as well, particularly season 1 True Detective (because I haven’t been keeping up with season 2). Two detectives, one a nihilistic loner and the other kind of a douchebag without the greatest homelife, tracking down a serial killer Pretty basic, but it’s a matter of tone as much as it is structure. In both stories, and even in Manhunter, an almost supernatural slant to the crimes. There’s nothing actually magical in True Detective, same as in Se7en and Manhunter, but the way the murders are framed coupled with the oppressive atmosphere gives the impression of a quasi-mystical serial killer. It gives the story greater freedom of movement than the average detective story, and really only the weird ones even garner my interest nowadays. Except for Columbo of course. Columbo is always great.

     On the other hand, it definitely seems like Se7en is focused more on artistry than crafting a solid mystery. Somerset and Mills aren’t so much catching a serial killer as they are crafting a shelf from IKEA: Every step/clue is set up for them, and they are lead to each murder in a nice and orderly manner. It makes them a reactive force rather than an active one, and while it’s not uncommon in detective fiction, Se7en missteps when it comes to giving the audience a sense of progression. Especially when it finally gets to revealing the serial killer, which really disembowels the idea of a proper mystery. Maybe you could away with it if you labeled it strictly as a thriller rather a mystery film, or maybe Fincher was making a statement on how everything is shit and all your hard work is meaningless, which falls in line with Somerset’s character. One is a lazy answer, one is the artistic answer, but it still feels like a kick in the balls either way.

     So some definite story issues, but the atmosphere and tone are really good, cast is good aside from being saddled with some hokey dialogue and the music is okay if you love Nine Inch Nails. Overall a decent movie, and considering some of the shit that makes up typical Halloween fare you could easily do a lot worse. Like Alien 3 worse, and no one wants that.

The Basketball Diaries (1995), directed by Scott Kalvert

Sorry this a bit late. Sometimes I'm afraid that my excessive computer use is ruining my already shit vision, so I tried taking some time away from the internet. I think the damage is already done at this point.

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Dizzy", by Green Apple Quick Step

     I didn’t know who Jim Carroll was until his death, way back in 2009. Which sucks I suppose, as his work is now something I have to experience in hindsight, just like with so many other things I’ve grown to enjoy. Music, literature, video games and especially movies, they’re all part of some foundation of experience and culture I had no hand in building. Maybe they combine in some unique way to form my personality, my sense of self. Nature vs. nurture, right? My environment is an equal or greater influence on who I am than my genetics, correct? Do I form a greater attachment to things I seek out, or things that I experience as they occur? I assume there must be some difference, I’m just not sure exactly what.

    Metaphysics: My go-to way to start an entry.

     Jim Carroll’s most famous work was his autobiograhical novel The Basketball Diaries, released in 1977. Compiled from his childhood writings, Carroll describes in vivid and often poetic detail a life of basketball and a descent into a life of theft, prostitution, and drug addiction. It’s certainly a powerful read, as a 15 year old boy writing about his shooting heroin and selling his body to gay men in the heart of New York City would be, and one that I felt drawn to. Maybe because I find myself drawn to the underbelly that formed the basis for punk music and the post-60s counterculture, or possibly because I saw in that book a much more interesting and worthwhile youth than I considered mine to be. Not to say that I wanted to be a junkie, of course, but when the people you read or listen to all have some sort of drug habit, the social taboo of drugs means less and less to you. Especially in the case of people like Jim Carroll, where his use of drugs was in part why he become as vaunted as he is. But I feel that going on in that direction would go further into metaphysical questions, so let’s just talk about the movie.

     The Basketball Diaries focuses on the life of 16 year old Jim Carroll (Leonardo Dicaprio), one of the star players in a Catholic boy’s basketball team. Jim’s days are spent playing ball, writing in his notebook, and getting high with his friends Mickey (Mark Wahlberg), Pedro and Neutron. Such a life of rampant hedonism has a way of catching up with you however, and Jim and his friends find themselves falling away from school, sports and responsibilities and further into the degrading lives of junkies and thieves. We know Jim Carroll makes it out in one piece, we just watch to see how far he falls when he hits rock bottom. And spoilers, it’s pretty damn far.

     For a film adaptation, I think The Basketball Diaries does a decent job of capturing the snowballing feeling that was in the book, albeit in an abbreviated manner. It makes sense, although you see a lot more of Carroll and his friends on the streets than you do at home or school, so you don’t really get the feeling that what they’re leaving is really that much better than where they end up (there are pedos on either side of the societal fence it seems), although that might have been the intent from the start. Dicaprio puts in a good performance, though I can’t say I’ve seen a bad Dicaprio film so far, and Mark Wahlberg seems to have barely aged since 1995. The time shift from the 60s to the 90s seems to be nothing more than an excuse to make Terminator references and pad the soundtrack with Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, but it doesn’t detract from the movie.

     Not as entertaining as the book, but I say still worth a watch.

     Oh, and Ernie Hudson is totally in the movie too. So fucking awesome.

Result: Recommended

Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995), directed by Takao Okawara

you ever feel like you have no real skills or talent, and that you were better off dead?

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Metal Meltdown", by Judas Priest

     It occurred to me recently that, despite all my love for giant monsters, I don’t think I ever actually grew up watching that many kaiju movies at all. Aside from America’s overall poor 1998 adaptation of Godzilla and I guess the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers movie, the strongest memory I have of giant monsters is of a film called Godzilla vs. Megalon. The story is a blur to me now, involving a subterranean race of people who worship a gigantic ugly stag beetle known as Megalon, which eventually teams up with Gigan to fight Godzilla and the Ultraman ripoff known as Jet Jaguar for some reason I don’t care to remember. The movie is pretty damn bad, so much so that it even received its own episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (you can also see the iconic scene of Godzilla somehow sliding on his tail in the opening credits as well). I’m not sure how I didn’t completely lose my kaiju fascination after watching that film so many times, but over a decade later the announcement for a new Godzilla movie next year has me over the damn moon. OVER. THE. MOON.

     And what better way is there to follow a movie about giant robots than with a movie about giant monsters?

     First appearing in the 1954 Japanese film Gojira (known to Americans as the re-edited Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, according to ye olde wikipedia), Godzilla was originally created to be a symbol representing the dangers of nuclear power. The film was a success, and Godzilla went on to star in over a dozen subsequent films, totally winning over that punk ass turtle Gamera in the process. Sometimes he destroyed Tokyo, other times he destroyed Tokyo while fighting another giant monster that was trying to destroy Tokyo, and there were several occasions where he teamed up with giant monsters to keep other giant monsters from destroying Tokyo. He’s had a son, he’s had a son, and he once beat up King Kong. With so many storylines and character changes, ol’ Gojira here more closely resembles a pro wrestler than he ever did an actual lizard.

     Godzilla vs. Destoroyah brings the King of the Monsters back to his roots as a unstoppable force of destruction by making him about 100 times more dangerous than he ever was before. When the movie begins we are told that Godzilla has survived a ‘pure uranium fission’ type explosion, which I’m going to assume happened in the previous film, regenerating his body using the massive amounts of radiation as fuel. Unfortunately Godzilla absorbed too much radiation in the explosion, to the point that his body has become a dangerously unstable nuclear reactor. Every second that Godzilla is still alive is counting down towards his inevitable meltdown (which will annihilate the planet), and any attempt by Japanese forces to assault the monster risks causing a massive nuclear explosion (which won’t destroy the planet at least, but still a big fucking problem to all life on it). A pickle if I’ve ever seen one.

     Mankind’s last hope lies in figuring out a way to somehow kill Godzilla in a way that doesn’t set off a nuclear, and lo and behold someone actually does in the form of ‘micro-oxygen’. Used offensively, the results mirror that of the awesomely named ‘oxygen destroyer’ created by Dr. Cerizawa to kill the original 1954 film (they actually show the scenes from Gojira in the movie itself, which I think is a nice touch). It seems like a dream come true, but what happens when some leftover oxygen destroyer residue from the 1954 incident mixes with some prehistoric shrimp somehow?

     Hint: Destoroyah happens.

     The Notorious G.O.D. has had several different designs over the course of his storied career, but hip 90’s Godzilla is easily the best looking version of the monster I’ve seen so far. The design team really succeed in making Godzilla look and feel like an actual monster again, as opposed to the tail-sliding dumbass from Godzilla vs. Megalon. The suit seems sleeker in this era as well, which would allow for better freedom of movement and more realistic movement, but when you have massive kaiju thunder-thighs no movement is all that free. Oh, and on top of everything, Godzilla is fucking GLOWING WITH NUCLEAR ENERGY HOT ENOUGH TO MELT THROUGH THE GODDAMN EARTH. That’s so badass it makes Schwarzenegger look like some Eurotrash nerd by comparison.

     Not to be outdone, Destoroyah has rocks the mic with two powerful forms, conveniently named Destoroyah I and II. Version II looks exactly as Godzilla enemies should: A gigantic hellspawn with spikes jutting every which way but loose, that’s as big or bigger than Godzilla, and who could fuck up the world way worse if he won the final battle. Version I is a smaller, insectoid form, which seems to take several visual cues from the Alien franchise (small mouth hidden within larger mouth, anyone?). I prefer Destoroyah I, not only in terms of design, but because his smaller size allows him to terrorize human beings. Sure Godzilla and the kaiju destroy cities and the military all the time, but because you only ever see buildings and vehicles blowing up, it allows audiences to emotionally disconnect from the devastation. Here you have Destoroyah stalking and killing soldiers and citizenry directly, making us invested in the film’s non-huge characters. Also he moves about on wiggly puppet legs, which is just adorable.

     The hardest part of any Godzilla movie, kaiju movies in general, is the ‘movie’ part of the movie (movie movie movie). In a good kaiju movie, the ‘human’ portion of the film engages the viewer and either builds up or else doesn’t hinder the monster combat portion that people paid money to see, a good example being Godzilla vs. Monster Zero as compared to Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster. Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, with it’s callbacks to Gojira and visual evidence of human peril, got me interested more interested in the characters and their fate much more than normally would, earning itself a ‘good kaiju story’ ribbon in my book. The book is a book of monsters, by the way.

     If you have a friend who hates Godzilla for some reason, and you need to blow his socks off (with or without atomic fire), this would be a good place to turn. There’s some action, some horror, even a bit of tragedy mixed in for good measure. Not only does it touch upon Godzilla’s humble origins, it’s also a touching tribute to his then 40+ years on the big screen. Hail to the King, baby.

Result: Recommended if you like kaijus, sick flames, or scared Japanese people

              Not Recommended if you hate rubber suits, monster fights, or happiness in general