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

 

The Trailer

and

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 2020: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), directed by Nicholas Meyer

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Where No Man Has Gone Before", by Leonard Nimoy

      Talk about a legacy, huh? When I covered Star Trek: The Motion Picture all the way back in Marathon ‘15, that I would even do the other films was still a vague concept in my mind. You never really know what your situation is going to be in the future after all, and it’s certainly possible that in the intervening time between Octobers I could have lost interest in Star Trek, or found some other film to fill that spot on the card, or just covered them in a separate review altogether, or just fucking died and never got to watch them.  But no, every year the Marathon has come and gone, and every year for the past five years we have borne witness to the adventures of Captain Kirk and the USS Enterprise, for better or for worse (looking at you Star Trek V). Now, after three seasons, an animated series, a couple albums and a shipload of homoerotic fanfiction, we’ve reached the end of the road. This is the end, my beautiful friends, the end.

      Released in 1991, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country shows it’s not kidding right out of the gate by putting Nicholas Meyer in the director’s chair, who had previously brought great success to the franchise through Wrath of Kahn (Marathon buffs will also known him from Time After Time). With a tip of the hat to the then-recently departed Gene Roddenberry at the start, we join the USS Excelsior, where Captain Sulu is enjoying his ‘three days away from retirement’ status. Those good vibes are soon interrupted by the Excelsior being rocked by an energy wave, which as it turns out was the Klingon moon Praxis blowing the fuck up. Praxis was the main power source for the entire Klingon Empire as it turns out, their entire civilization is set to collapse in a couple decades with it gone, so with the sword of Damocles looming above their head they finally sit down to talk. The long conflict between the Klingons and the Federation seems to be coming to an end, but there are some among Starfleet that balk at the thought of diplomacy. Folk like Captain Kirk, who seems to be leaning towards the ‘genocide’ option, and thus the natural choice to break the ice with Chancellor Gorkon (played by David Warner is his second Trek role in a row) of the Klingon High Council before transporting him to a peace conference. When Gorkon is later assassinated and all the evidence points to the Enterprise being responsible, Kirk and McCoy (who was with him at the time) are arrested and put on trial for the crime. Yet if the Enterprise was not responsible for the attack, as the crew seem absolutely certain of, then that begs the question of who did? With the clock ticking ever closer to the start of the peace conference, it’s up to Spock and the rest of the crew to discover the true culprits behind Gorkon’s death, rescue Kirk and McCoy, and save both the Federation and the Klingons from falling back into war. All in a day’s work.

      With this film being released the year it was, it’s impossible not to draw parallels between the situation between the Federation and the Klingons with that of the United States and the Soviet Union, with the destruction of Praxis resembling the Chernobyl disaster and Gorkon being a stand-in for Gorbachev. What I appreciate about this story though, especially with the benefit of hindsight, is that Leonard Nimoy, Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal do not make the Federation pure-hearted heroes or the Klingons dastardly bad guys, and in fact give the Klingons many reasons not to trust the Federation. Kirk outright advocates for the extinction of the Klingon race near the beginning of the film (I guess a dead son you talked to twice is equal to a couple million dead infants), and most of the crew is casually racist towards Klingons even up to the end of the film. The Klingons bring up how the Federation is a ‘humans-only club’, mirroring that of the U.S. and certain European countries influencing world affairs, and indeed as we see from later Trek series about 90% of the people we see are humans. The Klingons bring up that collaborating with the Federation will destroy their culture, and while they’re still going strong later in the Trek verse, in real life the U.S.-backed Boris Yeltsin regime caused such economic chaos and widespread misery that Russia to this day has never fully recovered, to say nothing of the other former Soviet Republics. Really the worst thing you could say about the Klingons in this film are their penal colonies, a reference to the infamous Soviet gulags, but considering the Federation also has penal colonies it seems like something of a moot point, and we’ve talked on the blog before on the United States’ hypocritical views on prison. You could argue that this goes against Gene Roddenberry’s vision of utopian human society, but I do prefer a Federation that isn’t perfect but is willing to do the right thing and go for peace over the Federation in The Final Frontier, who half-ass a planet-sized vanity project and then leave its citizenry to basically live like animals in a blighted wasteland.

 

      Speaking of The Final Frontier, hoo boy, what a difference a change of directors makes. I’ve heard that William Shatner had requested and was denied an increase of budget for Star Trek V, which was why the special effects by the end weren’t that spectacular, but that doesn’t explain all the shitty attempts at comedy and the fact that a movie titled Star Trek spends most of its time in a desert. Not only does The Undiscovered Country look better all around (the Enterprise looks sleek and futuristic rather than a broken hunk of shit), not only does the story flow better, not only is there a bigger & better cast, not only do the crew actually get some dialogue, but Nicholas Meyer did it all for 6 million dollars less than Shatner. Hell, Wrath of Kahn, often regarded as the best Star Trek film, only cost 12 million! It worked, just as Star Trek VI works, because Meyer tells simple stories in extraordinary settings. Wrath of Kahn was a revenge story combat inspired by submarine combat, Star Trek VI is a mystery story and a political thriller. There are still the trappings of science fiction there, you’re still dealing with outer space and aliens and what have you, but the special effects are more enhancing the story than dominating it. Which has always been a major point of contention in the argument between Star Trek and Star Wars, but I think that sixth Star Star Trek movie has got me more invested in the political drama it was telling than the sixth Star Wars movie ever did, even if it had less pew pew lasers. 

      Hell, Nicholas Meyer even gets Kirk better than Shatner did during his time in the chair. Kirk in The Final Frontier was in full-on smarm mode for most of the film, and after a while he came across as a jackass. Kirk in The Undiscovered Country not only gets the denouement of his arc that’s been brewing since the second film, dealing with his son’s death and his feelings towards the Klingons, but in general he just feels more in line with the character we know as James T. Kirk. Stuff which doesn’t really play as well in 1991 than it did in 1969, like him beating 7 foot tall aliens and making out with sexy ladies, but since was to be the last ride for the OST crew you can forgive trotting out a bit of nostalgia.

      Of the rest of the main cast, Spock is the only other person to come out of this series a different person/Vulcan than when he went in, having mastered the ability to express his emotions without becoming a nutbar like other Vulcans (also Sherlock Holmes is real in the Trek universe and Spock is related to him). McCoy is just McCoy, and the rest of the crew, while more active this time around are just the crew, quirks and all. Again, if the intent is to play on OST nostalgia then it would be fine if we returned to the old characterization, but we never left it! In fact in some ways we’ve gone backwards, as that whole Uhura/Scotty romance thrown around in earlier movies has been completely dropped. It’s nice to see Sulu the captain of his own ship, even though it’s also a convenient excuse to write him out of most of the film, but one of the major things I wish these films had done was to utilize the opportunity to deepen those characters which might have been considered shallow in the original series rather than devote so much attention to Kirk and Spock. Trek has always been an ensemble-based show and I believe the writing should have reflected that in the transition to film, especially if they were planning on making half a dozen of them.

      I admit I also wasn’t all that impressed with our two major non-main cast characters in the picture, helmsman Valeris (played by Kim Cattrall) and the *SPOILER* antagonist General Chang. Apparently Kim’s direction on how to play a stoic alien zen buddhist was ‘regular person speaking at a formal function’, way too similar to Spock in temperament without having earned that development. As for Chang, visually he continues the theme of nostalgia by making him an OST-style Klingon, which means he basically looks like a dude dressed as a pirate in a room full of dudes dressed like aliens. His whole ‘quoting Shakespeare’ gimmick makes him more memorable than Christopher Lloyd’s character in Star Trek III, but he does it so often it gets tedious, and comes across as kind of a Kahn-lite. While the story itself has multiple layers to it, Star Trek VI opts instead to undercut that by making Chang into the tired ‘dastardly Klingon’ cliche. They could have easily used the mutual enmity between the Federation and the Klingons to make Chang a nuanced villain, a dark mirror of Kirk perhaps, but instead they have him twirling his metaphorical mustache (as opposed to his actual mustache) doing bad things for seemingly no other reason than that he’s an asshole. Rather bland when you consider that you could see more interesting Klingons just by staying at home and turning on TNG.

      It could be that extreme dislike of Star Trek V is causing my brain to overcompensate, but I’m going to give Star Trek VI the recommendation. Nicholas Meyer doesn’t blow the roof of the joint but he does manage to close this series out on a high note, and while I might have personally wanted more, it’s nice to see the crew of the old Enterprise ride off into the sunset one last time. Overall I’d say my experience with the OST Trek films hasn’t strayed too far from the popular consensus: I liked Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the only one on the planet seems like), liked Wrath of Kahn, can barely remember anything about Search for Spock, liked The Voyage Home, hated The Final Frontier, and now liked The Undiscovered Country. An above average experience! Does that mean then that next year’s Marathon will see us digging into the Next Generation Trek films? Maybe, but before that we’ve got one more book that needs closing…

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: Monkeybone (2001), directed by Henry Selick

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Monkey Gone To Heaven" by Pixies

      It’s unfortunate sometimes that when someone gets popular, they overshadow their peers so completely. Take for example the case of Tim Burton and Henry Selick. Both men had similar starts as animators in Disney pictures like Pete’s Dragon and The Black Cauldron, both men ended up digging on a weird neo-gothic expressionist aesthetic, but because Tim Burton was first past the filmmaking post, it is forever ‘his’ style. Every film that Selick has directed, it is Burton’s name that is the first on people’s lips. Nightmare Before Christmas? Burton. James and the Giant Peach? Burton. Coraline? Burton. It’s enough to drive a man crazy, if he actually cared about any of that, which I doubt he does. So to honor the name of Henry Selick, the man behind some of the most treasured films of my childhood, let’s talk a bit about the least beloved film he’s ever made. A little film called Monkeybone.

      Released back in 2001, a year full of surprises, Monkeybone was directed by Henry Selick and written by Sam Hamm, based on the indie comic Dark Town by Kaja Blackley (never knew that until I decided to do this review). Everyone’s favorite actor Brendan Fraser plays Stu Miley, a cartoonist whose creation Monkeybone is on the verge of full-on franchising; Shitty toys, shitty fast food deals, shitty cartoons, the works. Stu doesn’t care about any of that though, all he’s interested in proposing to his girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda) and enjoying their lives together. Which he totally would have done, if Stu didn’t immediately get into a car accident and get thrown into a coma. Rather than just, you know, being in a coma however, Stu is instead transported to Downtown, a sort of limbo where those stuck in dreamland hang out alongside figments of the imagination. Figments like Monkeybone, who turns out to be just as annoying in person as he is in cartoon form. Not an ideal situation for poor ol’ Stu, so Hypnos, god of sleep, proposes a little plan: Sneak into the land of Death and grab one of her golden exit passes that ensures a return to the land of the living. Stu accepts, but what he doesn’t know is that this whole situation is a lot more complicated than he realizes. Not to mention scarier.

      When discussing this film, Brendan Fraser described it as ‘the most expensive arthouse film he’d ever been in’, or something to that effect. That isn’t apparent at first, but as soon as the movie hits Downtown and the nightmare sequences you see that Selick pulled out all the stops. Costumes, puppets, animatronics, CGI, claymation, it’s everything about Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetlejuice cranked up to eleven. Which I love, having grown up on that Hot Topic shit, and it’s easily the highlight of the film. Probably why it feels like you barely get any of it too, because we’re not allowed to have nice things.

      Casting wise it’s also a pretty strong film. Of course there’s Brendan Fraser, who is always fun to see whenever he’s on screen, but you’ve also got Briget Fonda as Julie, John Tuturro as the titular Monkeybone, Dave Foley, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Kattan, and a couple of other names that would be familiar if you watched Comedy Central back in the day. A bit like a Christopher Guest movie; Not a lot of famous faces, but a lot of faces you’ll recognize. I was pleasantly surprised, I have to admit.

      It’s certainly not a perfect movie though. The best parts of the film take place near the end of the film, and it doesn’t really start moving until 30-45 minutes in. Not to mention the whole conceit of Downtown, that it’s this place that everyone in a coma goes to and yet no one in the real world has ever corroborated what must be thousands of reports at this point, and there’s never any indication that people lose their memory of it when they wake up either. The relationship between Monkeybone and Stu also feels like the writer taking pages out of the Roger Rabbit playbook, only not as good. Roger was annoying to some degree too but you could understand why he was popular in the context of the film. Monkeybone the character is annoying but never establishes himself as an interesting character beyond that, so he’s just a chore to sit through. Also if the idea is that he’s meant to be an annoying mascot character, a proto-Spongebob if you will, Selick and the writers don’t do that great a job of building the reason WHY he’s so popular. At the beginning of the film when they show the pilot for the potential Monkeybone cartoon, titled Monkeybone, Monkeybone isn’t even in the damn thing, it’s Stu, so where the hell does the monkey even come in? This movie is an hour and 45 minutes long and yet it feels like they left an hour or so on the cutting room floor.

      I’ve done a lot of defending of dark fantasy movies over the years on this blog. Return to Oz, Drop Dead Fred, City of Lost Children, and so on and on. Of that particular subgenre, Monkeybone seems the most ambitious but at the same time the most cautious. The ‘darkness’ that we get feels very superficial at times, and by the end we’ve landed into broad, slapstick territory in terms of comedy. I’ve brought up Beetlejuice and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but the most apt comparison is probably The Mask: Both starting life as indie comics before getting put through the Hollywood machine, retaining a piece of what made them great while smoothing things out for mass consumption (certainly the case for the originally hyper-violent Mask). If you had problems with that movie, chances are it’s not going to be all different when it comes to Monkeybone. So it gets the recommendation, but even with that sweet sweet Brendan Fraser action Monkeybone probably isn’t a film you’re going to keep coming back to every Halloween.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), directed by Peter Greenaway

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "If love's a sweet passion" by Henry Purcell

      Sometimes I think people have a way of dehumanizing the past. By that I mean we take a look at history and forget that those who made that history were human beings too, with the same kinds of wants and desires that we have today. Their outfits may have been a bit weirder and their pictures of naked women were more elaborate, but they were human beings. They love and hate and fight and fuck just like the rest of us, and sometimes they just fuck and fight. Which isn’t cool on a social level, but it does make good material for a movie, so here we are. Not the best intro paragraph, but it’s five in the morning right now and I’m spacing out.

      Released in 1982, The Draughtsman’s Contract was written and directed by Peter Greenaway, who had previously directed a number of short films before breaking into the feature-length game with The Falls two years previously. Anthony Higgins plays Mr. Neville, a draughtsman (as in architectural drawing) of some renown who is contracted by a Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) to compose a series of 12 drawings of her husband’s estate while he is on a two-week trip to Southampton. Initially reluctant, Neville is eventually convinced when he learns that part of the deal including enjoying Mrs. Herbert’s ‘company’. So he moves onto the estate and gets to work, crafting pictures of the world, throwing shade on the Herberts’ obnoxious son-in-law Mr. Talmann, enjoying some ‘company’, and it all seems to be working out (for Mr. Neville at least). However at a certain point things start to feel a bit... off. As Neville drafts these pictures, certain things here and there in the various locations begin to stand out. Objects which might otherwise not draw any attention, yet in the context of the drawing might lead a viewer to certain conclusions. Conclusions like perhaps the irascible Mr. Herbert never quite made it to Southampton, and that perhaps one of the residents was responsible. Which might not be the smartest thing to do when you’re stuck in a house miles away from anything or anybody else.

      It should come as no surprise that besides being a filmmaker, Peter Greenaway is an artist as well as an art fan, particularly of the Flemish period. The most obvious sign of that is in the set & costume design, where great care has been made to recreate the look and feel of the English aristocracy in the 1700s, warts and all. Yet in the grander sense the film is also about art; the depiction of things that at once seem simple yet give rise to deeper feelings. Even the dialogue feels that way, characters dancing around each other using simile, metaphor and innuendo as the crux, the context of their conversations bubbles under the surface. What matters isn’t reality, the intention of the artist, but rather what the observer decides the meaning is. Which definitely has no relevance in our modren society.

      The Draughtsman’s Contract certainly deals in concepts that we’re familiar with. Murder, revenge, machinations and maneuvering, all of which would fit right in with your average thriller but with a powdered wig thrown on it. Yet I think that wig weighs heavier on this film than it realizes, forming a barrier which insulates the film from its audience. There’s an overwhelming Englishness to the film, a choking miasma of Britishness that irritates the lungs of anyone not of Albion descent. Like if you’re from Surrey or something I’m sure you’ll hear them name drop William of Orange and nod your head in knowing satisfaction, but as someone born in the boorish, degenerate United States these overt cultural references go right over my head. I like Blackadder as much as the next guy, but I could also see this being a bit excessive.

      Excessive...I guess that’s why my mind tends to wander when writing about this movie. It looks nice certainly, the acting is fine, I understand the message it’s trying to convey (or at least the message I interpret from it), but it’s just tiring. It seems to take so long to really get anywhere, and all the while you’re untangling the gordian knot of syllables that they’re tossing at each other, that once things start moving forward it doesn’t hit as hard as it could have. Not to mention that Neville is kind of an ass, the Herberts are assholes, and I find that I don’t care who these pompous aristocrats fuck or kill. Wicker Man this is not. As long as the naked dude is fine, nothing else matters.

      There’s enjoyment to be had with The Draughtsman’s Contract, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to recommend it. Art is subjective though, so movies about art must be super subjective, and if you tend to be on the same wavelength as me when it comes to movies then an Edwardian period piece erotic thriller will probably appeal to you. Personally, I’m fine with modern day erotic thrillers.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), directed by Robert Aldrich

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Don't Worry Baby", by The Beach Boys

      The film industry is one that loves to play both sides against the middle. For every movie that plays up how fabulous Hollywood is and how show business is glamorous, there’s a movie that says that it is a lie, and that Hollywood is in fact bad and how show business is very much not glamorous. For every Singing In the Rain, there’s a Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, or Showgirls and so on and on. The natural  assumption would then be to go the middle route and assume that it’s just average, capable of experiences both good and bad, but I think that’s the sucker’s bet. Given the recent outings of several executives and talent as rapists and molesters, and given the nature of the country it inhabits, I think it’s more than fair to assume that the film industry really is an veritable charnel house for hopes and dreams and the fact that anything half-way decent ever gets made at all is something of a small miracle. The same can be said of all industries really, but seems more acute in the case of the arts, a field supposedly built on the ideas of self-expression and creativity. Aside from internet film blogging  that is, which prides itself on featuring neither of those things.

You might notice that those anti-show biz film examples I gave prominently star and feature women, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Aside from the aforementioned rapists and molesters, female actors also have to deal with the fact that their careers generally have a much shorter expiration date than their male counterpart. Doors that were wide open at 18 and 19 are increasingly closed when you’re pushing 40, which isn’t an easy pill to swallow if you have gotten a taste of the spotlight in the past. That stories of substance abuse, excessive cosmetic surgery, and eating disorders are so common should come as no surprise, because that is the type of environment that is supported, if not outright endorsed by the Hollywood establishment. Which sounds shitty, but only because it is in fact really shitty and unlikely to change without sweeping socioeconomic changes. Charnel house of hopes and dreams, remember?

Which brings us to today’s film, 1962’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, adapted from the novel by Henry Farrell, with a screenplay by Lukas Heller and directed by Robert Aldrich, who Thunderblog buffs might recall from Kiss Me Deadly. In the year 1917 there was no bigger name in entertainment than that of Baby Jane Hudson, the song & dance moppet supreme and the apple of her father’s eye, much to the chagrin of her sister Blanche. By 1935 the Baby Jane star had collapsed in favor of Blanche Hudson, the up and coming Hollywood starlet, at least until a violent incident with a car ended both their careers. These days however you don’t see much of the Hudson sisters; Jane (Bette Davis) has become a bitter, emotionally unstable alcoholic and the now-paraplegic Blanche (Joan Crawford) has become a shut-in (although not necessarily by choice). But that’s not Baby Jane’s bag, jack! She’s a star! She’s meant to be on a stage, basking in the adulation of her fans, not wasting away in some dusty old house! Which is exactly what she’s going to do, just as soon as she gets rid of some dead weight.

      Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is one of the earlier entries I’ve seen so far of a subgenre I’ve dubbed invalid thrillers, for lack of a better term. Basically films wherein the protagonist is incapacitated at the start of the story and subsequently tasked with surviving a dangerous situation, thus giving otherwise mundane tasks an increased sense of tension than they would otherwise have. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is perhaps the most famous example of what I’m talking about here, although much of that film is about unraveling the mystery and attempting to entrap the criminal. Baby Jane on the other hands settles firmly on the more ‘psychological’ side of things, emotional manipulations, acts of torture, and so on. If you’ve ever seen Misery, or the hundreds of Misery parodies and pastiches that followed, you’ve got some idea of what you’re in for with this film here.

      As was the case with Misery, Baby Jane is a film that is carried on the backs of its cast. Victor Buono makes his proper introduction in this film, who you might recall as King Tut from the Adam West Batman series or the face you picture in your mind’s eye when you imagine a fat Jason Siegel, but the ones you came to see are Crawford and Davis. Both veterans of the silver screen by the year 1962, winners and nominees of multiple Academy Awards, and both actors who were no doubt feeling Hollywood’s dagger pressing against their back at this stage in their career, putting in the work that proved that they hadn’t lost a step. Particularly in the case of Bette Davis; Crawford does great work as Blanche, the frazzled, frail victim, but there’s so much meat on that Baby Jane bone that Davis chews to bits. Her portrayal of Baby Jane Hudson is a Batman rogue before that really meant something, and considering the Batman: The Animated Series would eventually introduce a villain named ‘Baby Doll’, I don’t think I’m the only one who thought so. On the one hand she’s a spiteful, vindictive harridan, capable of acts of great malice with no sense of remorse. Yet flip the coin and she’s a child, or rather an adult desperately trying to recapture her childhood, the only time in her life when she was happy, the only time she felt loved and the world seemed to make sense. She’s loathsome but at the same so pathetic that you can’t help but pity her. A tragic villain played to perfection, it’s no wonder that she would eventually get a Best Actress nomination for the role. That she didn’t win and that it would prove to be her last ever Best Actress nomination is a shame, even though she was one of the most prolific players in the best acting nomination game at that point, because the more I stew on it the more fascinated I become with it. A bit of a slow burn but then really kicks your ass into gear.

      As wild as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? can get though, there’s something...personable about it that Misery lacks. Now I’ve only caught some of that film so I can’t make any in depth comparisons, but Misery has always had a bit of a pretentious air about it. A novelist writing a novel about how it’s so hard being a rich and successful novelist because some people like your work TOO much and get obsessive about it, and then they made it a movie. Not exactly relatable. The personal lives of Golden Age Hollywood actresses might seem at first to be the same here, but the Hollywood aspect isn’t really the focus of Baby Jane, it’s just a good set piece. Really the film is about these sisters who were set against each other from the very beginning, and how that resentment and bitterness rippled outwards and drastically altered the entire course of their lives, and that to this day they’ve trapped themselves in this quagmire of toxicity and familial obligation. Because if they didn’t have each other, they’d have no one. I think the film tends to present things a bit more one-sided than how I’ve described it, but there are definitely points throughout the film where it shows that neither woman is without sin. Which I like, it adds a layer of depth to the story beyond whatever morbid fascination there is in watching the early 60s equivalent of  torture porn. From a simple thriller to a Shakespearean tragedy.

      Just about the only thing I didn’t care for all that much is the score, composed by DeVol. Typical orchestral fare for the time, and I do love “I’ve Written A Letter to Daddy” as a leitmotif, but occasionally it feels like it has two gears for every case: Twilight Zone drama and My Mother The Car cheeze. Scenes that don’t seem all that dramatic are suddenly very dramatic, and the lighthearted moments feel like Lucille Ball is about to step in from off-screen, that sort of thing. It tap dances along the line between drama and melodrama, and not only on the side that I think it intended.

      Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is an easy recommendation from me. Loved the story, loved the acting, and it feels like a novelty to have a movie starring older women, about older women, that’s something besides Steel Magnolias or what have you. If you liked Kiss Me Deadly, if you liked Psycho and other Hitchcock works, then I think you’ll get a kick out of this movie. And while you’re leaving to go watch this fine film, don’t forget to stop at the lobby and pick up your very own life-sized King Thunderbird doll, only 3.95 each! Sure to bring a smile to your face and a financial burden on your family.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: Chan Is Missing (1982), directed by Wayne Wang

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Cantonese Boy", by Japan

      The relationship between Hollywood and Asian people over the years has been, unsurprisingly, about as rocky as it has been for every other ethnic minority that has resided in this country since the invention of film. Kowtowing servants speaking broken English, mysterious villains (epitomized by Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and parodied by John Carpenter’s Lo Pan) and ancient masters of the martial arts, with the added possibility of being the exotic love interest for our red-blooded American hero if you were an attractive enough woman, that was about the extent of what you could expect as an Asian actor back in those days. Hell, they weren’t even allowed to play characters where the whole gimmick was being of Asian descent! Charlie Chan? Played by longtime Swede Warner Oland, who also played the mystical Fu Manchu in three films for Paramount. Mr. Moto? Peter Lorre. Mr. Wong? Why that’s Mr. Frankenstein himself Boris Karloff, who also played Fu Manchu in 1932’s The Mask of Fu Manchu and General Wu Yen Fang in 1937’s West of Shanghai! I know that people of a certain ethnicity playing people of other ethnicities isn’t exactly uncommon in cinema history, in ways that range from the innocent to the blatantly offensive, but it’s still kind of strange to me that ‘white guy playing East Asian detective’ was its own subgenre for a hot minute there. It’s such a bizarrely specific thing for folks to have latched onto for a while, I can’t think of an equivalent.

      Which brings us right around to Chan Is Missing, directed by Wayne Wang and written by Terrel Seltzer, which I believe I found out about from an old Siskel & Ebert video. Wood Moy stars as Jo, a Chinese-American guy living in the heart of San Francisco’s famous Chinatown district. One day, in a bid for more cash and independence, Jo and his buddy Steve lend some money to their mutual friend Chan Hung so that he can get them a cab driver’s license. Several days later however, and Chan has gone missing. He had gotten into a car accident a few days prior, and ever since then he had completely vanished, seemingly without a trace. For varied reasons, not the least of which is getting back that money, but they soon discover that tracking Chan down is going to be a lot more difficult than they realized. It turns out that Chan Hung knew a lot of people, and he was a lot of different things to those different people. An eccentric, a struggling immigrant, a failure, a political agitator. Maybe even a murder suspect? A lot questions and not too many answers as Jo and Steve work their way through the briarpatch that is their friend’s life, about themselves and their own identity, as they try to figure out why Chan is missing.

      This probably goes without saying, but Chan Is Missing is not a Charlie Chan or a Mr. Wong movie, where the Asian protagonist spouts off some vaguely philosophical one-liners while someone rings a gong in the background. This is a film that takes place in Chinatown, made by and with Chinese-Americans, and it deals in issues that affected Chinese-Americans at the time, and still do today. Issues like racism, certainly, but also that of immigration, the difficulties of cultural assimilation, the tension between supporters of the PRC and Taiwan, and ultimately what it means to be a Chinese-American. Heavy stuff, and yet Chan never feels like a particularly heavy film. Even as we delve deeper into the mystery of Chan Hung’s disappearance and all the things that it dredges up it feels less like we’re falling into a pit and more that we’re walking through a foggy marsh, where detail and definition fades into the haze. What is the truth? What is the answer? They’re there, you can find them, but everything’s so hazy you might find yourself walking in circles.

      Stylistically then Chan Is Missing fits right in with film noir standards like The Third Man or what have you, with a couple of touches, a POV shot here and there, that pushes things more firmly the experimentation of the French New Wave directors like Godard. Whether or not it all works is probably an arguable point, I think the film is at its best when it blends this kind of grounded, proto-Clerks realism with touches of film noir, and the moments when Wayne Wang decides to change things up a bit can feel a bit forced. He doesn’t go to that well that often, which is why it’s a bit weird when they do show up, but I wouldn’t say it detracts from the viewing experience.

      Anything else I want to mention…? I liked the choice of songs here, especially the Chinese-language covers of rock songs. I thought the acting was good, the actors drew you into their world quite naturally. Both Wood Moy (who played Jo) and Marc Hayashi (who played Steve) didn’t really have a long career in film, appearing in only a handful of movies, but I think they do a good job as leading men here. I also like how they’re both dressed like they’re 60 year old male truckers, but that might have been the style of the time. Oh, and I 100 percent want that Samurai Night Fever T-shirt they show off too. That looked cool as hell.

      Ultimately, I’m giving Chan Is Missing the recommendation. It’s certainly rough around the edges, which should be expected with a lack of budget and a relatively inexperienced production (this was Wayne Wang’s second ever film, released seven years after his debut), but it is unique not only in its presentation but in its cultural perspective, so I’d say it deserves some time in the spotlight. While I’ve covered several Chinese films before, this is the first time I’ve seen a Chinese-American film, and it’s made me interested in more. After watching Chan Is Missing, maybe you’ll feel that way too.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: The Thief and the Cobbler (2013), directed by Richard Williams

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Scheherazade", by the Vienna Philharmonic

      With cinema, as with many things, we sometimes find ourselves occupied with thoughts of what could have been. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune is perhaps the most well known, but I’d venture to say that much of its popularity lies in it being supremely unfilmable. A 24 hour runtime? A cast that included Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali (before he went fascist)? Art direction by a young H.R. Giger? What a trip that would’ve been! What’s less fun, however, is those films that were being worked on, did show promise, but all of a sudden...stopped. Maybe it was money troubles, or troubles with the cast and crew, or studio interference, but whatever the reason the movie just does not see the light of day. Or if it does, because movie studios are as obsessed with money as they are with fucking up the things that make them money, it’s ultimately released as a shadow of its former self.

      We’ve covered one such case on the Marathon before in Lost Soul, the documentary of up-and-coming director Richard Stanley’s ambitious adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau which eventually limped into theaters as a John Frankenheimer directed trainwreck. Yet all the heartache and pain that surrounding that production almost seems like a drop in the bucket compared to that of The Thief and the Cobbler.   That whole thing took place over a year or two; Director, co-writer and animator Richard Williams (who you might recognize as the animation director for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) began work on the film in 1964, and then spent the next 30 years of his life trying to put it together, funding it out of his own pocket and through whatever investors he was able to find. In the early 90s, after a deal with Warner Bros. fell apart, Williams was forced off of the film by the new rights holder The Completion Bond Company, who hired Fred Calvert to put a bullet in its brain, which in industry terms meant filling in the cracks with cheap animation done by freelancers and Disney style musical numbers. The distribution rights of that new film, known as The Princess and the Cobbler, were then sold to Miramax, where noted rapist Harvey Weinstein had the film cut again into Arabian Knight, which in the theaters went over about as well as farting in your girlfriend’s face when she’s trying to tell you she’s pregnant. Although it doesn’t seem like he was the easiest guy to work with in the world, it is a shame that Richard Williams went to his grave in 2019 having never been able to see his life’s work come to fruition. Which got me curious to check it out for myself.

      As I said, The Thief and the Cobbler was never actually made into a movie.. A workprint was made around 1992, which is where the material for Princess and the Cobbler and Arabian Knight came from, but many scenes had yet to be animated and overall it was not in a state fit to be called a movie. Because of that, and because I had no interest in covering those other films, I decided instead to take a look at the ‘Recobbled Cut’, a project headed by Garrett Gilchrist which seeks to take as much of what was The Thief and the Cobbler as possible, the completed animation, animatics, still pictures and what have you, and fashion it into a workable narrative. It’s not a perfect solution obviously, a good portion of this animated movie isn’t even animated, but as far as I know it’s as close to Richard Williams’ original vision as we’re going to get. Recobbled Cut Mark 4 I believe is what it goes under, shouldn’t be all that hard to find. Now let’s get into it.

      In a world that is not unlike a dream, there is a golden land. In that land is a magnificent golden city, and in that city is a tall golden minaret, and at the very top of that minaret there are three golden balls. Legend goes that as long as those balls are on the minaret peace and prosperity will reign, but should they ever be removed, then death and destruction is sure to follow. However, legend also states that should this ever occur, then the simplest soul will save the day. One day, an encounter with a wily Thief ends up putting humble cobbler Tack on the shit-list of the crooked grand vizier Zigzag. Arrested and sent to the palace for punishment, Tack instead finds himself in the good graces of the beautiful Princess Yum-Yum, while the Thief catches a glimpse of the beautiful golden balls. While the two youngsters try their hand at courtship, Zigzag schemes a way to take control of the city, and the Thief plies his trade, none in the city realize the danger that looms on the horizon. One Eye, the insatiable warlord, has his sight set on ransacking the city, and he’s got about 2,000 men ready to help him do it. Disparate people with disparate aims, and yet as time goes on it seems inevitable that these paths will meet. How much stock can you put in legends? How drunk do you have to be to name your daughter Yum-Yum? And how many stories set in a fictional Middle Eastern kingdom that deals with a commoner falling in love with a princess and opposing an evil grand vizier with a bird companion whose plan involves marrying the princess against her will do we really need anyway?

      As you might expect from an animated film that was worked on for 3 decades, at its best The Thief and the Cobbler is stunning. Not only is the animation as smooth as anything you’d seen in a Disney film, incorporating an eclectic range of character designs from the simple to the grotesque, but the art, matte paintings and so on, are insane. Not only is it incredibly detailed (replicating classical Persian artwork), but how it’s used is unlike anything I’ve ever seen attempted in animation before, at least in the West. There’s a scene where Tack is chasing after the Thief in this black and white section of the castle and it might be the first time I ever felt dizzy while watching a movie, because it feels like a kaleidoscope in fast forward. The Thief and the Cobbler’s sense of scale is reminiscent of Sun Wukong on the Buddha’s palm, and I can’t think of many animated films outside of Akira and Ghibli’s best that went so far so well. It also does a great job of highlighting how it never got finished; With how much work it takes to make hand drawn animation in general much less shit this good, combined with what was supposedly a haphazard working environment, I doubt there’s many studios out there that would be willing to throw down the cash to keep the lights on. 

      The story I could also see being an issue with money hungry studio execs, because it’s not quite your standardized Hollywood fare. The characters our film are named after are almost totally silent, and while there is technically ‘action’ most of it, in fact most of the plot is driven by the extreme and often implausible whims of fate, much in the same way as a Wile E. Coyote or Pink Panther cartoon. Which can be entertaining, combined with the sense of scale you can get some truly amazing scenes of utter chaos, but it does feel at times that the movie is focused too strictly on Thief getting into slapstick situations at the expense of character development. Who cares about who Tack is as a person? Who cares about building that relationship between Tack and Yum-Yum? No matter what anybody does the world seems set on pushing towards a conclusion so I guess it doesn’t matter, basically. Makes sense for a dark comedy like Hitchhiker’s Guide, but not for a more upbeat story like it appears Thief and the Cobbler was meant to be.

      Also this is a personal thing, in this completely objective film review, but I do not agree with the choice of Sara Crowe as Princess Yum-Yum (listed as Hilary Pitchard in the credits. The rest of the cast ranges from okay to good, with the obvious highlight being Vincent Prince as Zigzag, but Yum-Yum’s voice reminds me less of a princess and more of Harley Quinn. Too high-pitched for my tastes, and since she doesn’t really get to do much in the movie she never really has time to ingratiate herself with the audience. If this were Dragon’s Lair or something where it’s full on farce it’d work, but I’m just not feeling it. I also don’t know if Bobbi Page or Jennifer Beals, the voices for the AFP and Miramax cuts respectively, were any better, I just know that this Yum-Yum wasn’t doing it for me.

      Richard Williams died having never finished his most ambitious project, and we will all die having never seen it. Still, even Williams himself acknowledged that it was fan edits like these that kept the spirit of the movie alive, so I think I can give the Recobbled Cut of The Thief and the Cobbler. If you consider yourself even a casual fan of animation I think you owe it to yourself to check it out this Halloween. If not for the story it tries to tell, then in recognition of the blood, sweat and tears that Richard Williams and dozens of others shed to try and make it happen, and to what might have been.