Come for the Movie, Stay for the Guy Behind You Talking About Peter Boyle's 1970's Hair

I'll tell you this: If John Huston asks if you're getting laid, you damn well answer him.

Winter Kills is an odd one. The cast alone is what sold me. Jeff Bridges, Toshiro Mifune, John Huston, and, oh yeah, Anthony Perkins. And Elizabeth Taylor. And Eli Wallach. And Sterling Hayden. And it was shot by Vilmos Zsigmond. With music by Maurice Jarre. I had to see this movie. The fact that I had never heard of it made me even more interested. I refused to look anything up. Was it a western? Was it a war story? Was it a musical? Early Dogme 95? Porno? I had to know! So I drove my ass out to the New Beverly tonight and I saw it.

And, let me tell you, Winter Kills is one hell of a mess.  A hilarious mess, a mess with some fine performances, but a mess nonetheless. The kind of mess you need to clean up with a hose.

Depending on what stage of your chemical exporation you are on, Winter Kills is a take off on the labyrinthine world of JFK assassination theories, and it's either a comedy with aspirations to thrill its audience or it's a thriller that thinks it can do comedy. I mean, I don't know, man. I'm not sure it's director knew either. I'm not sure I care. The mystery of the film is almost more interesting than the film itself.

The whole movie plays out like The Parallax View by way of Joseph Heller. But not Catch 22 Heller. Closing Time Heller. While it doesn't match the heights of other conspiracy thrillers of the time like Three Days of the Condor, it certainly is as brown, if not more so. So brown.


John Huston seems to be the only person having any fun in the film, which is just as well. He is one of the main reasons I saw it. I have to imagine he was thinking about his paycheck the whole time. Good for him. The real revelation in all of this is Anthony Perkins, who seems to have seen John Huston's dailies and went "I can beat that." Because his performance is bananas. It's ecstastically bonkers in a way that only the best of Jimmy Stewart of Nick Cage seem capable of delivering. He actually got applause for his big speech towards the end of the film. Somebody get that guy more work.

Then you have Toshiro Mifune, who is on screen for maybe three minutes before he is buried behind the wall of the film's insane plot. It's just as well. In hindsight the film benefits from layering on the confusion like this. There's a lot more fun to be had looking back and going "What the hell was that about?" than to eyeball the actual plot of the film.

Before I go off about the actual quality of the film stock, I'll give you a few highlights of the film to mull over:

• There's a wig warehouse owner that is a full blown Williamsburg Beardo. Powerful stuff.
• During a sex scene Jeff Bridges has to smother his girlfriend to keep her from screaming. He fucks that good.
• John Huston (spoiler) dies after clinging to a massive American flag.
• Sterling Hayden drives a tank. Because he's a man, damnit.
• Jeff Bridges has the vapors at one point.
• Belinda Bauer looks really, really good dressed like a man.

I'm sure I'm breaching some well-worn code about complaining about the quality of an old print, but I can only tell you what I saw: The reel looked like it had been dragged through hell and back. The color was shot to hell. There was a lot of dust on the frames and, what are those? Like, track lines? You know. The things that run up and down over a bunch of frames? I'm so far removed from actual film lingo I have no idea what to call these. I feel like a spoiled aristocrat trying to come up with the right words to describe the weekend.

Artist's concept of writer

"Well, you know, it's the day where you don't work. I mean, not that I would. But, others don't work. Except for our staff. Which is the entire town. And farmers. But, well, hmmm. . . "


Then again, there's a certain charm in being reminded what worn out, old film looks like. I can see why Quentin Tarantino insisted that the theater only show film. . . Wait. No I don't.

The second problem I had with the presentation was that there was, what I can only guess, is fifteen minutes missing from the beginning. The entire beginning of the film is missing. At first I was wondering if the film was just that daring, then it slowly dawned on me that, no, this wasn't how the film was supposed to be shown. After it ended, I asked the man behind me (who, before the film began was pontificating on his friend about the pluses and negatives of the film Hardcore), if the first reel was missing and he didn't seem sure. It's that kind of a movie.

And, again, maybe it makes me a snob. Maybe I'm missing the point. As charming as the physical medium of film is and as much of a rollercoaster thrill ride as wondering "Will this movie's color be completely blown out? Will the reels be in order this time?" I would much rather just straight up watch the damn movie.

That isn't to say that I won't be back. As flawed as this outting might have been, the New Beverly Cinema is delivering a service. It's showing films that nobody would show if it wasn't for this place. It's a place that still believes in the communal experience of the theater, of the actual physical medium of film, of the kind of artistic divinity that you get sitting with a group of strangers in a dark room watching a movie, especially some strange movie that you would have never heard of or never seen without the aid of the New Bev. Netflix is great, but it can't replicate that experience. And Hulu certainly can't because I think that site is run by apes. Stupid apes.

I just probably won't be back to watch Winter Kills.

James Kislingbury writes, draws, and does a few other things. You can listen to his podcast, A Quality Interruption. You can donate to fund that program here. Keep your eyes peeled. He's going to weird crap coming down the pipeline.

The Only Other True Detective Theory That You Have to See

I was skeptical, but I'll tell you, now, after seeing this, my eyes are wide open.



There's no coming back from this, people. It's all out there now.

Let's Mutate Comic Books!

As much as it's nice to commercialize comic books (as, let's face the facts, they normally aren't),there is something obnoxious about some studio exec looking down a list and saying "Let's go adapt that" or, more and more likely as time goes on "Let's reboot that."

If you heard that Battleship was being turned into a movie ten years ago would you have done anything but laugh? At least it flopped, proving that while America is stupid enough to keep watching Pirates movies, at least they aren't going to fall for a movie adapted from a boring board game.

There's a line and I don't know who said it (so sorry, dude), which is that movies are no longer allowed to be good, they have to be awesome. Adapting comic books has a lot to do with this idea because most comic books are awesome. They're basically budget free blockbusters. They're stories where you can burn down Europe, go to space, have the devil fight an alien, and enlist a cast of thousands without any larger of a budget than a kitchen sink film. In a way they're basically free screenplay idea and, while I don't want to get into the pitfalls of that whole end of movies, it's something to consider. I don't want to be accused of just hyping comic books to be turned into movies because, as artifacts on their own, they do not have to be anything else than good stories. Comic books are great as comic books. They are not always good as films.

But, who the hell wants to fantasize about things that should not be? Let's leave that to the religious fanatics, shall we?

So, what should be made before we get our unwanted Defenders movie, here is what I would like to see if I have to see it--

100 Bullets

It's hard to think of a crime book that's as byzantine or involved as 100 Bullets and while cramming it all down into a two hour (or God-forbid three hour) film would almost certainly be a disaster there is something to be said about seeing the b-movie schlock premise of the book, which is that a man in a suit named Graves shows up with a gun with one-hundred untracable bullets and tells you that you to go wild, turned into an adventure on the big screen. The world is full of great characters and dialogue as well and while film is full of noir crime stories it would be fun to see old man Graves encouraging a righteous killing spree or two.

It's a smart enough B-movie premise to get people in the doors and with the right actors and behind-the-camera talent it could be a pretty successful film (then again, you could say that about most movies, couldn't you?). Just throw Bruce Willis at it. He's great at this sort of thing. He doesn't even need to try any more, either.

Ideal Directors: David Fincher, Nicholas Wending Refn, Michael Mann.

Elevator Pitch: It's the ultimate crime caper mixed with the ulimate vengeance tale. It's smart, it's funny, it's got sharp dialogue, and, better yet, none of that matters because all of the bad people die in terrible ways. It's everything a crime movie should be and what's that? Oh, yeah, sequels. Franchise.

(Apparently David Goyer might have beat me to the punch on this one. Or not, you know how these things work.) 

The Damned

The Damned is one of the most refreshing books I've read in a long time.What sounds like a terrible idea in the abstract (in an alternate or after-life version of the 1920's the cities crime syndicates are all run by demons and curses are as deadly and as real as tommy gun bullets), but the idea comes to life because of the sharp dialogue and twisting plotting of Cullen Bunn and the sharp and expressive artwork of Brian Hurtt. It's everything a hard-boiled comic book should be with that little bit extra that should keep it from blending in with the rest of the uninspired genre dreck that plagues our shelves (though comic book noir, I feel, doesn't really fit on that list, does it?).

It's a wonderful comic book. It's funny, it's gory, it's creepy, and it's an original idea that executes as well as you could ever hope.

There's also a second volume of The Damned, but my shop is always sold out of it. I guess I could have them order it in for me. . . Hmmm.


Ideal Directors: Guillermo Del Toro, Rupert Wyatt, Tim Burton.

Elevator Pitch: Monster meet mobsters.

Desolation Jones



Desolation Jones is what happens when you film a remake of The Long Goodbye if the cast of characters consisted entirely of citizens of the Island of Misfit Superspies. . . which is literally what the book is. In Warren Ellis and JH Williams III's arc we're introduced to insomniac ex-spy Jones (the sole survivor of the mad science project) who is exiled to Los Angeles, which acts as an Elba Island for unusual spooks such as himself. From there Jones is hired by a retired (and probably insane) army officer to recover his private stash of porn staring Adolf Hitler. From there it gets weird.

It was a great book when I read it the first time and it was great when I read it again recently. Besides the wonderful art and layouts of Williams, Ellis has managed to create a world of spies and intrigue that doesn't feel at all rehashed or cornball. The world has a ton of potential and, unfortunately, this one trade is all we're ever going to have.The second arc was never completed, so, if there is any chance at a continuation it'd be on film. While most of the titles here I would rather see instead of Avengers 3 or Superman: King of All Monsters, in this case I'd like to see it simply to keep this weird little fucker of a story alive.

Read it if you can, because apparently no one else did (Hey, I detect another theme in this article!)

Ideal Directors: Joe Carnahan, Steven Soderburgh, Ken Loach.

Elevator Pitch: It's the Maltese Falcon if it cut open and wore the skin of In Like Flynn. It's the kind of movie Red grew up watching and decided to become a spy because of. Also: Stolen Hitler porn. Let's pull this trigger, shall we?

Hellblazer



As much as I loath relaunches and the very idea of a reboot Hellblazer is a book that deserves proper treatment in the eyes of the public.Whether you know it or not Hellblazer is one of the longest running books on the market which is incredible when you consider that it's about a Cockney wizard in modern times. He's one of the great icons of comic book history and considering that even Swamp Thing got a movie it does feel a bit odd that old Johnny Boy has been left out in the cold (then again so has most of DC's TV and film projects).

Of course Hellblazer was already adapted in what amounts to a not very good movie.What movie was that? Constantine, which, while not terrible didn't set the world on fire.

First of all they can't even pronounce the character's name right (even though how "Constantine" is supposed to be pronounced is stupid. . . ).

Secondly making John Constantine an American is incredibly bizarre. It isn't as though Americans won't watch a piece of media if it has English accents. Stupid people think that. Studio executives think that. As a result we're expected to believe that, but it simply isn't true. Guy Ritchie made his career selling accented shlock to the American people and Harry Potter is the highest grossing franchise of all time. People are ready for white folk with accents. To remove that is absurd at best and immensely and impenetrably retarded at worst.

He's Cockney. He speaks in that language and he's a part of that world. As bad as mid 2000's Guy Richie is he would have been much more at home than the guy they got. Toss in Eddie Marsan and Ray Winstone and you might have yourself an actual picture. Or at least the color of one. Making Constantine American is like making Sherlock Holmes into an American. Or Colonel Blimp for that matter. It might not be a terrible idea, though the odds are: It is probably a terrible idea. The reboot would need John Constantine to be American. Like he is fuckin' supposed to be.

Lastly Neil Gaiman was right: The movie would have been better if he had a tan trench coat. Nobody knows why, it just would have been better.

And, let me play the Internet's Advocate briefly and air out the idea that Benedict Cumberbatch play the titular detective. Hey, it worked before!

Ideal Directors: Matthew Vaughn, David Yates, Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Elevator Pitch: If Humphrey Bogart went to Hell and had an accent, he'd be the Hellblazer. Now give him all your money, would you? There's no better property in the DC canon to reboot than this bad boy.

Sgt. Rock

For whatever reason DC relaunched this book during its "New 52" and decided that there was a market for garbage.

It also added superhero elements to the book, which isn't inherently a terrible idea (Punisher used to and still does fight superhumans and that seems to work just fine), but my thought is: If you're going to relaunch a character and have him fight supervillains why would you choose Sgt. Rock? A character famous for fighting in WWII exclusively? And don't we have Stormwatch for that? Also the book was called Men of War. I mean, did they even try?

After the failure of Men of War (just hire Garth Ennis, will you? Or Greg Rucka? Or Chuck Dixon? What's wrong with you idiots?) they started up GI Combat, which is the most comic booky of comic book ideas: soldiers fighting dinosaurs. Only Darwyn Cooke has ever made a worth a damn story about dinosaurs fighting GIs and that only lasted about a dozen pages. It's a terrible idea. There's nothing wrong with straight WWII stories. There's never been anything wrong with that. If you have to change the premise of something good either you have a brilliant concept or you're an idiot who doesn't know a good thing when he sees it. You can only round the wheel so much and that's Sgt. Rock if there ever was an idea.

It's simple, clean, Nazi killing fun. While that's not a great pitch to anyone outside of myself-- fuck you, this is my blog, damnit!

Ideal Directors: John Woo. No other names. Just John Woo.

Elevator Pitch: Quentin Tarantino proved that people still love a good WWII yarn and there's a million different ways to tell them. In short: Sgt. Rock kills Nazis. Let's let him. Also, fuck all of the DC 52 military relaunches. The fuck are they doing over there?

The Winter Men

The Winter Men is one of my favorite comic books of all time. Every aspect (but its tragic release schedule, which I'll get to in a bit here) is nailed perfectly by the writing and by the art.

The Winter Men takes place in a world where super heroes and super science once ran rampant, but has since fallen to the wayside, forgotten and abandoned like so many once mighty creations of the Soviet world. The main story isn't so much about those great colossi as they exist to set up the background of the world. They were then, the corruption and intrigue of post-Soviet Russia is now. From the accents to the background artwork The Winter Men feels like an incredibly well thought out and fleshed out world that we're only getting to see a sliver of one panel at a time.

Then there's John Paul Leon's artwork-- which I realize would not make it to the big screen-- which works excellently with the writing. He gives it just enough detail to flesh out this world and to feed back into teh realism of it and yet he can also draw robotic supermen and atomic children without it feeling silly. It's not so much of a strange book, it's a unique one. It's exactly the kind of weird jewel that I follow comic books for.

Maybe, at least it'll get people to buy more of these books. And if the creators get a nice piece of the pie, well, that'd be dandy. Overall, though-- and this is the fan in me speaking-- is that a movie could conceivably deliver a final and finished ending to a story that truly deserves it.

Ideal Directors: Duncan Jones, Martin Campbell,Werner Herzog.

Elevator Pitch: Fuck you, this book is a wonder. Give me the money I need to make glory. Fuck all the bodies who will not wish this so!

Honorable Mentions:
Bone
The One Trick Rip-Off
Onwards Towards Our Glorious Deaths
The Other Side
Queen and Country
Scalped
The Sixth Gun

Alright. That's enough of that. I'm going to go watch Prometheus now and then wonder later unironically why nobody seems to do anything original any more.

"Not in My Cinema"

For the second time in my life I have finished watching The X-Files film and I gotta say twenty-four year-old James enjoyed this film far less than his ten year-old counterpart, which is a damn shame because I just recently rediscovered the original show.



I remember having very fond memories of that film. In fact, I remember the theater where I saw it and that I saw it with my uncle and one of my cousins. Considering one the theater got torn down and one of those people died there is literally no way I can recreate that occasion, so I guess it's only appropriate that Fight the Future is depressingly messy.

It's not that's it's awful or anything, it's just that the critics at the time were right. Fight the Future doesn't seem to be anything more than a two hour long episode. If you love The X-Files, then you'll be happy at having a two hour episode to watch. If you don't, TS, better luck with X-Files 2: Black Oil Harder*. Now, I do love the show beyond recognizing character actors from Deadwood and stuff, I really truly love The X-Files to death. Even as a kind of creaky, sometimes incredibly boring show, it still amazes me just how radical it still is. A lot of movies fail to do this and it's even rarer that a TV show can pull this off.



The problem isn't my lack of love for the source material, my problem is that I love movies far more than I do every other Fox TV show (the notable exception being The Simpsons seasons three to eleven). There is no amount of fanaticism that can get me to ignore that Fight the Future is almost entirely uncinematic. Not only are its actors and subject televisual, but the whole damn thing is, from writing to cinematography, soup to nuts. It's all things we've seen before on the small screen and in that case, it's often slightly better than what is on the big screen. Fight the Future is a movie without an argument for being a movie.

Other than the occasional flourish of visual effects (like the federal building bombing and the core of the alien space craft), there's nothing to tell you that this isn't a very long episode of the Fox TV show (in fact, if you cobbled together one of the longer story arcs-- "Nisei" arc, for example-- you'd end up with something roughly as long as this movie).

And those handful of scenes aren't enough as the visual effects have lost a certain amount of their impact over the past ten to fifteen years. The Black Oil, as cool of a concept as it is, looks like something that might have gotten lost from a bad episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Federal building explosion not only looks like a touched up matte painting (with a few practical effects sprinkled over the whole of the thing), but even as an off-screen presence or a plot point it feels small and underwhelming.

I know it's a rarity to compare something favorably to 9/11. While watching the movie though, I couldn't help but think, "Jeese. September 11th was way more impressive than this thing." Watching this building get blown up I didn't feel anything-- maybe because I've been desensitized by the acts or real world mad men-- due to the fact that I knew that the bomb only killed Locke from Lost (I mean, maybe if it was Bishop from Aliens I might have cared a little bit more). Where's the weight? Where's the consequences? I guess the writers and the director assumed that the emotions would be filled in by the audience who were likely still worked up about the Oklahoma City Bombing. How lazy is that, though? That makes sense, but it isn't good film making. This is all speculation, though. I guess what I wanted was to feel the appropriate reaction to an act of terrorist, which would be something fleeing disinterest and running towards, you know, actual terror.

If you're going to invoke the Oklahoma City Bombings you have to have the teeth to exploit what people think and feel. Half-assing it isn't enough. To do otherwise-- have an explosion that only costs people taxes and a guy with a mustache-- is a many things, dull being the most obvious.

In the movie's defense, how the fuck is something this piddly supposed to compare with 9/11? Back when this movie was made Osama bin Laden was just some jerk with a van packed with fireworks. Wouldn't it be nice to go back to those days for just a little bit?



There's a tick in my brain that I discovered. It's probably true in general, but when it comes to watching and enjoying movies, it's especially true. What I know is that whenever I'm watching a film (or a TV show, even) and I think "I could do better than that," it is universally a bad sign for the movie. There's plenty of reasons why I might think this. One reason is that the movie is so sparse or so uninteresting that my brain defends itself against the film by coming up with a more interesting scenario. It's basically my version of people paying attention to the set dressing, because if you're paying attention to the background, it means that whatever is in the foreground just isn't doing it for you.

The second reason is that it might actually be true that I can write or director (or sometimes even act) better than whatever is on the screen. This isn't an attempt for me to brag about my talents, it's just that something very bad might be on screen and it might not take much to make it slightly better than it is. In a way that's even more frustrating than just being bored. Knowing that even you in your limited time with this film can come up with something better has to make you wonder why no one who was getting paid could accomplish this.

If there's a third reason for this it's that my expectations have not been met. In the case of Fight the Future, it is probably more guilty of this than it is of the other two reasons. There are a million reasons why an X-Files movie should be the biggest sci-fi film of the era, after all it was the biggest sci-fi TV show of the era, TV, movies, books, and comics are still trying to copy its success almost twenty years after it first premiered.

It's funny that it doesn't wind up as good as some of the other movies of the era (there's a swipe at Independence Day after Mulder gets good and drunk) and it's funny that it probably isn't even as good as some of the great episodes that Fight the Future is based off of.

Despite all of this, I still love the X-Files. In fact, if I could, I would buy one of those gimlets (but I can't. Fuck this earth). Like the show, the movie is basically better than the sum of it's flaws. There's some great stuff in there and the whole of the piece shines through. It's worth it. Plus, the concept of a sentient alien virus being the villain-- despite being supremely underwhelming of a presence-- is a pretty crazy and frightening concept. I mean, a virus? How the fuck do you kill that?

All in all, I'd like to see a third X-Files movie (if the rumors are true, this desire might change when I watch I Want to Believe), this time with a one-hundred million dollar budget and somebody like JJ Abrams or Guillermo del Toro** helming the picture. And with Doggett returning and maybe a villain that's worth a damn instead of "Old White Guy #447." Oh, and somebody with a cellphone that actually fucking works. Now there's be a movie I'd pay to see***.


(That's not The X-Files, damnit!)

SIDE NOTE: I think one of the reasons no one has ever been able to emulate what The X-Files did in the early 90's is because cellphones and the internet have basically ruined everything mysterious for us. Think about this, how could the government keep aliens a secret when celebrities can't even keep their genitals a secret? In 2011 the grand extraterrestrial conspiracy would last about five seconds because once Mulder runs into a database of DNA punch cards or a pile of alien mummies in Navajo country, it'd be twittered and flickred and Facebooked all the way around the world twice. Then again, if the show came out today, I'm sure those geniuses in Hollywood would find a great way to knock Mulder's iPhone into a puddle or a toilet every episode****.

SIDE SIDE NOTE: And, another thing, how many times can Scully be out of the room or unconscious every single time something supernatural happens? Or when something supernatural happens, she just casts it off as. . . what? A trick of the brain? How many times over six years can this happen before she's just an idiot? And, again, a camera-phone might help the case along.

THIRD SIDE NOTE: Hey, that's the Arboretum. Rad.

FINAL NOTE: I took the title from a sentiment that Dr. Mark Kermode expresses whenever he encounters something in the movies that isn't very cinematic. I also borrowed the word "televisual" from him.

*I'm not happy with myself about that joke. And the saddest thing is, this was the one I chose over X-Files 2: The Filening.

**Could I have chosen more obvious nerd directors for a nerd picture? No. No, I could not have.

***That or a Harsh Realm reboot. Somebody call the Battlestar Galactica guys.

****Jesus Christ, as I'm writing this Mulder literally dropped his fucking gun down a hole. I can't believe someone isn't paying me for this.