Some Words About That New Jackie Chan Picture

A REVIEW ON THE FOREIGNER (2017)

This year has been a real whirlwind when it comes to delivering on trailers. On the one hand, there were pleasant surprises like Logan and It, as well as Blade Runner 2049, a movie that had no right being as excellent as it was considering the expectations behind it. On the other end of the spectrum, there were movies like Atomic Blonde and Alien: Covenant, both of which failed to deliver on my ever-so-finnicky expectations. Unfortunately The Foreigner falls into the latter half. It had a great trailer, a great director (Martin Campbell), and a solid cast. Despite that, the end result is a middling, dull in parts, and, most frustratingly, it does not deliver on the magic of its premise. 

I mean, how do you make a movie about Old Man Jackie Chan beating the fuck out of the Irish Republican Army? In what world does that fail to be the best movie ever made? Hell, if they handed the script off to another director and called for a do-over, I'd pay to see it all over again. 

The Foreigner is most interesting when it hints at the world of politics and the world of terrorism and law enforcement being a constant struggle of compromises. It presents the murky world of British governance and old Irish grudges as being two worlds, intertwined. With the IRA it presents a world where difficult ideals are easily undercut by radical purists and where even the finest of beliefs can be undone by expediency. On the other hand, you have the "Brits," who only care about results. And then you have Jackie Chan, who can build bombs. Which is nice. I kind of wish they made the movie about him.

That, ultimately, politics is a business of relationships, and without an underlying trust and affection, it does not matter what your end goals are. Nor do your tactics. In the world of The Foreigner, character is destiny. In all of this, Jackie Chan’s mourning father is the only man of pure purpose and of pure drive and, as such, he’s the only one who seems to walk out of the movie unscathed (of course, not literally, mind you). Of course, that’s the movie’s problem. That Jackie Chan beating up dumb paddies with a step ladder isn’t the main draw of the film. It's Irish internecine politics. The fact that I, James Kislingbury, do not care about a movie where in the complexities of modern Irish radical nationalism is on display is a problem.

And, frankly, it beggars belief to take the IRA seriously in any way, shape, or form in the year of our Lord 2017. Maybe it plays better in the UK and in Ireland, where these stories hit much closer to home. Maybe they even play better in China or in Asia where the IRA is just a series of letters. But who knows? 

The IRA always felt like a safe stand-in for more deadly international terror groups (and more controversial ones). Don't want to piss off the Palestinians or the Saudis? Throw the IRA in there. The Red Army Faction doesn't exist any more? Throw in the IRA. De Gaulle is out of office? Throw in the IRA. Get Sean Bean on the phone or some poor dead toe-rag from Game of Thrones and call it a casting session. I mean, whose feelings are we going to hurt? Plus, everybody knows who they are. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.

Plus, how bad can the IRA be? They tried to blow up Margaret Thatcher. That's a noble endeavor. It’s arguably Alzheimer’s one saving grace.

Ultimately, The Foreigner seems to be caught between several different movies, each of which succeeds where this one fails. You have the staid, idealist Boy Scoutery of Patriot Games and its IRA villains. You have Campbell’s own Casino Royale, which is a perfect film on every level. Lastly, you have Old Jackie’s chef character reflected in Clint Eastwood’s Best Picture winner, Unforgiven. Then, lastly, there’s Edge of Darkness, a movie so close to Martin Campbell’s heart, that he made it twice, once as a mini-series in England and another as a feature in America (staring Ray Winstone and slightly pre-freak-out Mel Gibson). But the problem isn’t necessarily that this movie isn’t as good as those. The problem is that each of those movies is great because they succeeded in being unique and being good in a unique way.

The Foreigner isn’t bad enough to be depressing. If it looks like anything, it looks like itself. Its broken, grey shape is best reflected in its titular character, brilliantly played by Jackie Chan, as a broken down, hobbled old man who had one good thing hidden inside of him. The one difference is that Jackie Chan and his character actually came through.

James Kislingbury is a writer, a host, and, unfortunately, a protestant. You can listen to his news podcast. You can listen to his cult movie podcast. You can donate to both podcasts. But, seriously, don't try to blow up Margaret Thatcher, guys.

A Trailer, a Thought, and More Defensiveness About Movies I Love

This looks like it might be a winner, right?



After watching the trailer for Automata (which is way too close to the warmed up left overs that is the Penny Arcade crew's Automata), I wondered something: Are we quietly living in the best era of science fiction since the late 70's/early 80's?  While that decade had Silent Running, Alien, and Star Wars and in the early 80's you have Blade Runner, Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, Terminator, and Outland.

Now, we have Looper, Moon, District 9, Inception, Primer, Her, Attack the Block, Snowpiercer, and the new Planet of the Apes series. . . I mean, these movies aren't perfect, but we're in pretty good shape here, right? They're either great pieces of cinema or they're interesting pieces of cinema.

And with that said, look at how good our big, dumb blockbusters are! Did anyone expect Guardians of the Galaxy to be that hardy of a picture? And while Edge of Tomorrow might be a lark, it's a smarter film than a lot of other sci-fi films that I do not care to name. Then there's Pacific Rim, which is a movie that I could go on about forever (and have).

And what did the 90's have? Total Recall (a great, great movie) followed by a bunch of Will Smith movies (you could argue for Terminator 2 (but that's more action than it is science fiction and that seems to be an outlier). Then you've got the 2000's which are stained with the legacy of the Prequels That Shall Not Be Named and, what? Avatar?

Oh yeah, Minority Report was awesome. Good call on that one, reader.

Maybe I just have a selective memory or a kind of blind confirmation bias. Who knows? Whatever the case is, we're lucky to be in an era where special effects have finally caught up with screen writing.

I don't know. Movie are cool. I guess that's what I'm getting at. We should be exicted about them. Which brings me to the next item on the agenda:

The script of Blade Runner 2 is complete.

There's been a lot of boring, Internet skepticism about this and as much as we all love a good skeptic now and again, it's important to remember you can shut the fuck up we have a goddamn Blade Runner sequel here. Thirty fucking years in the making do not take this away from me!

There's every reason in the world to trust Sir Ridley Scott on this one, too. I mean, he did make Blade Runner.

And Alien. And Gladiator. And Kingdom of Heaven. And Black Hawk Down. And Prometheus and fuck you, Prometheus is awesome. And sure, he's done quite a number of highly questionable films-- some of them as recent as the past year-- but, hey, when you're one of the greatest film makers of all time, you're entitled to a slump here and there. HE MADE BLADE RUNNER, YOU CURS.

In the meantime everybody go read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as a warm up for Automata. And toss Neuromancer and Akira in there while you're at it, because, you know, they're great.



James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and an enemy of mankind. You can follow him on twitter.

FOOTNOTES
*Notably I've left out Kathryn Bigelow, who would be perfect to take the mantle from Scott, except that she's already at work on Alien V, which is a fact that I am 100% is true.

The Vampire Hit the Street Junksick

The Vampire Hit the Street Junksick:

Some thoughts on Only Lovers Left Alive

For some reason the need to watch a movie about people blowing up aliens has gone right out of me.
Instead, I want to see a movie about people. I want to see a movie that somebody actually wanted to make. What I don't want to see is something that was made to pad out a conglomerate's figures on the tertiary market. Over the past few years I have made great strides to avoid being a snob. I have no problem with popular cinema. I'm just tired of it. I want to see movies about emotions and things that I haven't felt or seen before.

So I went and saw a vampire movie.

As far as genres go, it'd be hard to think of a more dessicated one than the vampire movie.

Jim Jarmusch, as you might recall, is a great filmmaker and side steps all of the typical pitfalls of the vampire legend by instead re-framing it within the context of music legend. Instead of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice, we get Link Wray and Iggy Pop. There is a club scene in the film, but it's about as far away from The Hunger or Blade as you could imagine. It looks like a real place inhabited by real people who have real emotions, but a few of them just happen to be vampires.

As much as the movie is a reflection of other works of art (it name checks Byron and Mary Shelly to name but a few), it stands on its own. It's a kind of film that, like Le Samourai, a movie he paid homage to in Ghost Dog, doesn't emulate any sort of scene. It is the invention of a scene. To say that it is a "cool" movie makes it slightly trite. It makes it sound as though it's the kind of movie that people in their early 20's enjoy and no one else. As it is more than a vampire movie, it is more than a cool movie. It's a literate movie about people trying to make sense of their lives. They just happen to be really cool. And vampires.


One of the other aspects that makes Only Lovers Left Alive stand apart from the other genres in its bloodline is that it is proper art. And not because it's good or because it's slow and has some subtitles or that a movie with a flaming crossbow can't be art. This movie is art because it's thoughtful in both an emotional and intellectual sense. It has something to say about human (or vampire) relationships and how they change over time. It has something to say about the state of the world and about the many things we fill our minds with to keep from thinking about death. It's about more than that, as well. It's the kind of movie that you talk to your friend at a party after you've had too much red wine.

Only Lovers Left Alive is, like The Limits of Control and Broken Flowers, a movie for the patient. It takes its sweet time and it doesn't particularly care whether or not you're following along. Like everything that is truly cool (and I think that we can all accept the premise that Jim Jarmusch is a cool man, I mean, just look at him), it doesn't feel the need to help you along. It doesn't need to rush anything. Instead it convinces you that you're right there with it, that you're hip enough to know what's going on at all times. It's a trick of cinema and a testament to Jarmusch's skill that you are convinced right up until the last frame.

More than skill, though, one of the admirable aspects on display in Only Lovers Left Alive is Jarmusch's love of making movies. Another line of his that I cary around with me is that he doesn't see himself as a professional, but as a amateur. He doesn't make movies to make money. He makes movies becuase he loves them. Even in his worst film you can see this drive at work. In Only Lovers Left Alive, you not only see it, you feel it. This movie comes from a place of love as much as it is about love.

Towards the end of the film John Hurt, playing the long-since-thought-dead Christopher Marlow, says to his adopted family that "Humility will get you nowhere." It's clearly posed as an ironic statement (and not a spoiler, incidentally). There's a smile at the edges of John Hurt's mouth in a way that only he can that tells you that there is something more to his words. It's a line that encapsulates the depths that the movie possesses. It's melancholy, yet slightly funny. It speaks to a larger world, yet is also about a few people having a moment. It also sums up the man who wrote it.


Unlike the Marlow of this film Jim Jarmusch is in no danger of suffering the same fate. While many other indie directors have changed course or become massive stars or simply faded away, Jarmusch is still there, quietly being the artist that we would all like to be. Humility, it seems, has gotten him somewhere.

This is the coolest vampire movie I've seen since Near Dark. It defines itself in a different manner. Near Dark is about violence and family. Only Lovers Left Alive is about guitars. And it's also about books. And all of the albums you talked about with your first girlfriend. It's about all of the emotions you invest in these things criss-crossing with one another. Most of all, though, it's about love and what that does to people over the long term. It's a movie that you're surprised that no one has made before. It seems to fully formed, so fully thought out, that it seems like it's always been there. It's the kind of movie that only Jim Jarmusch could make.

(Because, at a certain point in this movie, Adam and Eve have a full-blown junkie lean going on. You'll know it when you see it.)

James Kislingbury writes comics and podcasts. You can follow him on Twitter @kislingtwits.

The Limey: A Play in Three Rhyming Acts

I was going to write an entry on Ground Zeroes and then maybe Tomb Raider or, at least the Bioshock Infinite DLC. Instead I finally watched The Limey. Top notch relevant stuff on this blog and nothing but!

If you had to compare The Limey with a 1960's crime film-- and I think that we do-- It's much more Performance than it is Get Carter. Saying that now I realize that's exactly the kind of revenge movie the guy who made King of the Hill would make. It's soft and it's odd and it isn't quite what I was looking for. And that isn't a bad thing.

Instead of being this drama driven by anger and spite, it instead circles around the idea of a revenge film without ever actually becoming one. It takes this dreamy, scenic route through the margins of Hollywood and Los Angeles, and through the journey of an emotionally unstable man, and, yet, in the end, it ends up in the exact same place as a Death Wish or any other revenge movie (and, thankfully, without the cliche at the end about how violence never solved anything and "dig two graves" and blah blah blah).

There's a shoot out, there's catharsis, there's bloody resolution. In the end there's all the things you want, but they aren't the same because of the jounrey you took to get there.The Limey is a different kind of movie-- and I don't mean from a thriller, I mean from all movies. It's an odd duck, The Limey. It's probably why I'm so tepid on it. I can't be too enthusiastic about it because I'm still not sure what it is.

The one thing it does really well is shoot LA in a way that doesn't look like any other film I can think of. Well, maybe White Dog. There's a lot of LA mountains in both of these movies. Lots of scrub land.

It isn't glitzy and it isn't glamorous and it isn't the usual heap of B-roll of the western end of Melrose or Sunset. It isn't involved with Hollywood. There is nothing on parade for the tourists. Hollywood, though, touches on the fringes of this world. And like downtown LA in the background of Valentine's apartment, it's a hazy place many, many miles away.


You know what's a slightly better Terrance Stamp road/crime movie? The Hit. I don't remember too much about that one, but I do remember it being pretty good. I'd bet money that Steven Soderbergh feels the same way.

As for artsy genre movies and Steven Soderbergh movies go see Haywire. It's got a solid cast, a plot that doesn't get in the way of some serious ass kicking, and seems to embrace its genre far more than The Limey does.

I'm off to watch Le Duexieme Souffle next. It's a Jean-Pierre Melville movie, so it can only be so bad. I've also had Out of Sight sitting on top of my player for about a month, so maybe I'll finally get around to cracking that one. . . Plus I still have to watch Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, somebody make a Performance sequel. Set in in the present. Someone get James Fox and Mick Jagger on the phone. Let's hash this thing out while I still think this isn't a terrible fucking idea.

***

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Hanna: Or How To Do That Rogue Super-Assassin Movie Right

Before even finishing watching Hanna my first instinct was to compare it with Drive. There's a lot of similarities to be found-- They're both directed by Europeans who are aping American blockbusters, they both came out this year, they're both modern fairy tales, they're both ostensibly genre films with a deep well of artsty-what-have-you, both have excellent soundtracks, and both have a really stellar kill with a length of pipe. A younger version of myself that had to finish a paper would have gone along for the ride. He also might have tried to wedge something about, I don't know, realism into the mix. Also, at the time of writing the first draft of this I was pretty drunk and the whole mess got away from me. It's probably for the best, I'm sure.

Now, before I get into it, the more important argument than any of this is that you should really watch the hell out of both of them. So unless you want to indulge me in my prolonged. . . I don't know what, exactly, then leave now. Go. Go now. Gone? Good. Then it's just me and the dogs in my head that won't stop barking. The reality is that the only way I could square writing about Hanna-- or Drive-- was to couch it in film schoolic nonsense, when I should have taken a breath and realized that it should be enough that it is a very good movie.

What I like about Hanna is that it takes a pretty simple premise and manages to twist it and turn it enough so that it's a better product than the sum of its parts.

On the surface it's a rogue spy movie and underneath that it's just Red Riding Hood. Neither is a particularly complex concept, but there's a reason movies and TV and books and comics and stories told around the campfire keep on coming back to premises as simple as this is because there is something in the human brain that finds it compelling. There's a reason that operas about three thousand year old legends are still being performed and that a new edition of Beowulf comes out every couple of years and it isn't because Adolf Hitler is running an endowment for the fine arts.

On the one hand you can make a hackneyed version of that familiar story and on the other hand there is something immensely satisfying about seeing that old tale told in a new and clever way. The simplicity of Hanna is probably it's greatest flaw. Despite that it still manages to be smarter, more fun, funnier, and more touching than the majority of the high-budget action films it would share a shelf with. At the very least if you want to see a young super-assassin take out a bunch of Euro-trash, this is the movie to see.

One of the reasons this modern fairytale stands out is its European in their style and sensibilities. That probably sounds like an obnoxious thing to say and it probably is, but give me a second here, I'm going to be complimentary. That's a sort of amorphous thing to say and I also realize that calling something "European" or "American" is usually just a code word for some sort of national hostility, in this case I mean it in a positive way. Hanna just feels like a kind of an action movie that could have only been made by Europeans in Europe (though I'm willing to bet that this had no little amount of American money involved in it).

Obviously that might have something to do with the cast, the setting, and the amount of electronica in the soundtrack. Personally I'd like to think I'm a little more cultured than that.

Also, on a base level, it is fun to see a movie where the people with the European accents are the good guys and the person with the over-blown American accent is the bad guy. You don't need to go far to find the opposite is usually the case. There are worse gimmicks to be hooked by.


This is a poster. Stare at it.

Looking at the basic ingredients of Hanna you can see how a lesser director and a stupid cast and crew might have made Bourne Identity: Teenage Edition instead. The movie is allowed to be a little messy and quiet in a way that a bigger budget movie wouldn't allow and it also avoids being just a cheaper version of those films, as well. By applying some sort of weird art judo Hanna, like its titular character, manages to beat the hell out of its bigger competitors by never actually directly competing with them.

Most of the time you see a foreign production make a straight attempt on an American genre it winds up being a version that's made with less money and by someone who doesn't quite get why the genre works in the first place. It's like listening to the Japanese play rock music or the French play the blues. It's a grotesquerie and I'll have no part in it. And just to put it in perspective, do you really want to see an American studio make a Bollywood musical or a comedy of manners?

The best translations of American genres are the ones that take what's good about those films and put their own spin on it. In the case of Bande A Part, Jean-Luc Godard took the American hard boiled novel and the film noir and managed to make a fun and resisted the urge to do a cheap press-plate copy*. The best comparison I can think of is a good cover version of the song-- If I wanted to listen to somebody sound exactly like Bob Dylan, I'll just go and listen to him-- you have to do something different in order to make it worthwhile.

Hanna proves a lesson to which the studios are completely resilient to, which is that you don't have to make a fun popcorn film and make it dumb, as well. You'd think The Dark Knight and Inception especially would be good enough argument for that. As the parade of board game movies and sequels carry on shitting up our streets and making us collectively dumber as a species, it proves that these studios and executives not only aren't listening but that they hate you.

Hanna, and Drive, as well, cost a fraction of the price that the average crime or action or chase film. It also made back twice its budget, which is pretty much the most important factor in all of this. I'm not one to argue for making art for art's sake, so when you see good movies becoming profitable and yet the tide of nonsense seems to only accelerate, it starts to feel like a Kafka story. I mean, if being well made and well liked and profitable isn't enough of an argument, then what the fuck do you even want?

And another thing, if you're spending two-hundred fifty million dollars on a movie and it isn't as good as a movie that cost thirty, what is all of that money going towards? Cocaine and Red Bull can't cost that much.

I was looking at this article about Amazon dot com and there was a line I read which just kind of confirmed something I've been hearing for a while, which is "[w]hen you try to have a conversation with the new Hollywood, it quickly becomes clear that you’re talking about movies and they’re talking about refrigerators."

It makes me hope that at least at this point in history while most film studios are looking to make fridges, there might be some relict community in Europe that still want to make movies. That's probably not true, I realize. I just want to believe it is.

But none of this has to do with anything.


Arctic mountain girl assassin is a good look. I predict a trend.

Besides the genre-bending going on, there's scene in Hanna that I think all of us would recognize as a standard pillow-talk scene between two lovers. In fact, I'm positive I've seen this scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Except that instead of it being two lovers talking at point blank range under a sheet, it's two teenage girls.

The amazing thing is that even when one character kisses the other, it isn't creepy or weird or tinged by any sort of lechery. It's a legitimate sign of one person loving another. It's beautiful. Where this movie differs from the standard action-thriller can't be numbered, but this scene sticks out in my head the most, because while this is an ass-kicking, fuck-you-up, fugitive/chase/assassin movie, it's still about a little girl lost in the woods who found a friend.

I guess the fact that this scene is set-up in such a way and is not intended in any way to inflict boners gets me to believe that there is something greater at work. That this is so casually put in and then tossed away leads me also to believe that there's an alternative way of looking at things that doesn't involve dude boners or lady boners poking all over the place or being completely asexual.

I mean you've got people who have access to nude beaches making films, occasionally there's going to be some fissures between them and us in terms of what's normal. Or what is inappropriately titillating. One can only imagine what the Brett Ratner version of this movie would look like.

On second thought, don't.


Cate Blanchett points her weapon and ludicrous Southern accent at persons unknown.

Watching the special features, I also realize that the movie is better edited than most high budget affairs, in that, when people are fighting, I can actually tell that two people are fighting. What a concept.

Over the past ten or so years the art of editing an action sequence as gone from a coherent narrative to something akin to blurred objects fucking for a third of a second at a time. It's a shame and-- I, in no uncertain terms blame Sir Ridley Scott for all of this-- luckily Hanna manages to escape that trap. It's odd that we're at a point in our evolution where putting together a fight scene so that the human eye can comprehend it is an aesthetic choice.


Tom Hollander just straight up being a boss with his sexually ambiguous skinhead henchmen.

So what have we all learned here? I don't know, I kind of lost track of it here. I guess what I'm getting at is that if you're going to make an action movie make sure that you have a competent director who is maybe from Europe. They seem to know a thing or two about using a smaller budget and also maybe story telling. And if you're going to make a movie that could quite easily fall into the realm of cliche or camp make sure you at least pack it full of well done action and fine performances. Also, I am kind of angry with the status quo of the movie industry. Again, fifty years ago one of the biggest movies ever made starred an Egyptian and was about a Russian poet who cheats on his wife. Today it is about people who jerk off to close-up shots of cars for a third of a second at a time.

Oh, also, the soundtrack deserves a mention. Composed by the Chemical Brothers also known as "That one electronica band nobody really has a problem with" and "Not, that's the Dust Brothers you're thinking of, they also do electronica music," the original score is pretty darn delightful just on its own. When inserted into the film it gives the subject a kind of light-heartedness and a playfulness that works perfectly with what's on the screen. Hanna isn't a perfect film but there are few movies I can think of recently where the soundtrack works with the visuals as in this film.

The music comes into the frame, so to speak, at just the right moments and isn't so overbearing that it telegraphs to the audience "We're doing something, you should be impressed right now," which is maybe a voice only I hear in my head, though I'm sure it's an experience we've all seen and heard in films (I'm going to blame oh, I don't know, David Fincher for that one. Yeah. He can take it. He'll be alright). It's like a character on its own, but it's not about to upstage anyone.

Anyways--If you want a sleek European action movie you could do worse. Go and see Hanna. You deserve a fun movie and it deserves the audience. It's the kind of movie I can't wait until my niece and nephew are old enough to watch.

On that note, let's let the Drive soundtrack play us out--

Yeah. That hits the spot.

And this fun little scene--

Horse hockey, they cut out the best line in this scene!

SUB-NOTE: Seriously, the worst thing about Hanna is that the title isn't an anagram. Would it have hurt them s much to add an H on the end?

SECOND SUB-NOTE: I couldn't find a place in the essay for this, but I'd like to point out that both movies have a pretty stellar kills with a pipe. A good year for elaborate pipe kills.

THIRD SUB-NOTE: Oh shit that's the guy from In the Loop and The Thick of It! Holy shit! I thought he was just some German weirdo they picked up off the streets. I love this movie!

FOURTH SUB-NOTE: Another thing I cut out before this "went to print" (laugh to self, wipe tear away) is how because this movie was basically a version of Red Riding Hood, but with paramilitary and espionage what have you inserted into the story it therefore shared some DNA with the Japanese film Jin-Roh.

FINAL SUB-NOTE: I just recently finished Fantastic Mr. Fox. I didn't care for it at all. I'm fairly certain everyone who thinks it's brilliant is insane, but looking at the negative reviews, I can't say anything kinder about the people who didn't like it. There is a weird anti-American sentiment regarding the movie, as though this fairly inocuous movie was final straw in an Anglo-American culture war that we didn't even know existed (which I'm sure pisses these passive-agressive English people to no end). It's a crazy thing to read consider that Wes Anderson is hardly the most bombastic or American film maker I can think of. "Oh that Anderson fella, always being loud and making overweight films!" I mean, really? Wes Anderson? That's the strawman you're going to burn for bastardizing your culture? Blegh. Idiots.



*Actually, thinking about it, the film noir is one of the few American genres that foreigners seem to do just as well. Hmmm. I might have to recalibrate my thoughts on this. Westerns are another good example-- Sergio Leone took the cowboy movie and injected it with an operatic glee that his American counterparts never had. Then again how corny are the movies that are trying to copy Leone? You know what? In general: Don't go around copying people if you suck.

The Terrible Movie About the Matrix That Wasn't a Matrix Sequel

There's no doubt Johnny Mnemonic is a bad movie. History has proven this. There hasn't been any kind of redemption through a director's cut and there no cult following has ever materialized. The crowd of ironic cinema goers has moved on to much shoddier fare than this. The only people who ever wind up watching this. . . thing are people like me, movie nerds with too much time on their hands and who want to see sub-genre train wrecks complete with Dolph Lungren as a fanatic cyber-monk and a junky dolphin that Ice-T owns that can hack government super computers*.

I'd wager that it did more damage to science fiction and the cyberpunk sub-genre than we'll ever know. It's kind of amazing that it's this bad, considering that it's based off of a short story by one of the better science fiction writers of the past thirty years (William "I Created the Term Cyberspace" Gibson). Making a movie about this subject look this crappy and sound this goofy would presumably take far more effort than making a film that was actually good.

Johnny Mnemonic is one of those silly movies of the 1990's and reeks of being a work made on the fence between two eras. It came early enough to know about the internet and the revolution of technology that would ensue, but not late enough to know what the actual shape of things would be. On the one hand it knows that the internet would be a daily part of our lives-- something most movies about the future can barely even comprehend-- and on the other hand it didn't manage to predict cell phones or that a terabyte hard drive would be smaller than the book the original short story was included in. It's also one of these weird 1990's movies that thinks that people would actually want to go into the internet. While he isn't a speculative futurist, Dave Chappelle got one thing right: If you could actually travel to the internet, nobody would ever want to.

Chappelles Show
If the Internet Was a Real Place
www.comedycentral.com
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs Black Comedy True Hollywood Story

To quote Roger Ebert:

`Johnny Mnemonic" is one of the great goofy gestures of recent cinema, a movie that doesn't deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it. Based on a story by William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk fiction, it has the nerve to pose as a futuristic fable when in fact all of its parts were bought off the shelf at the Used Movie Store.

That's probably sums up what this movie is more than anything else. With that said, even though it doesn't deserve it, I really do want to seriously analyze this movie. Why? Because I'm almost positive nobody else on earth has ever felt the slightest desire to. Being first as something is a rarity nowadays, even if it's under as ignominious circumstances as critically analyzing Johnny Mnemonic.

The movie is dumb as dirt, Ebert is right about that, like most things that are stupid, Johnny Mnemonic doesn't know that it's stupid. Despite being Blade Runner's thalidomide baby, it has serious pretensions about being a well-thought out movie. I guess, maybe if there was some thalidomide baby born into really supportive (and borderline delusional) parents, that didn't want to tell junior that it had anything wrong with it, that kid's future would look something like this piece of crap.

It reminds me of much better films, so with that said, it isn't entirely without merit. It's kind of worthwhile, if only due to reflected glory.

From the first few minutes on it's clear that this flick is referencing the cyberpunk Holy Grail, Blade Runner. The entire aesthetic of the film is ripped off wholesale from the adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, with a few added plot points about the internet. Besides the seedy, rain-slicked streets packed with Asians and neon, there's at least two shots that are direct send-ups of its better (those being when Johnny first arrives in China, he stands on top of his car a la Deckard in his foot chase with Zhora and the second shot is just a simple panorama of the city).

Despite having all of the budget and technology that Blade Runner didn't have, Johnny Mnemonic looks like a bad film school knock-off. It's profound, that kind of incompetency. How hard could ripping Ridley Scott's last sci-fi movie be when you've got all of the blue prints at your finger tips? Someone already did it! All you have to do is follow the instructions. It must have taken them far more effort to make a crappy, knock-off version of the movie considering the newer, quicker resources they had at their finger tips. I mean, even Keanu Reeves' hair looks bad and that's probably the easiest thing in the world to fix.

Shameful shit.

There must be an over/under for making movies looks good. You've either got to go way high on the budget-- like Avatar, Terminator 2, or Superman Returns or something-- where you end up with a true, larger than life spectacle, made by the best in the business with as much time as they need. Or you've got to shoot low like with Monsters or District 9, where the effects become more impressive because of how little they cost. Now, while Mnemonic didn't have the technological resources as any of the above movies, I think it might be a victim of being neither a flawed, low-budget art house picture and it isn't a big-budget summer blockbuster. It's this lukewarm sci-fi nothing that is only really notable for its intense goofiness.

Or in the director's words:
"[The movie] started out as an arty 1½-million-dollar movie, and it became a 30-million-dollar movie because we couldn't get a million and a half."

Alright, enough of that. We know it's bad. As I said before, even though it has no real worthwhile qualities of its own, it reminds me of much better pictures. For whatever reason, one of those is Persona.

That's right, this fuckin' film--


Ingmar Bergman is one of the great artists of the 20th century and for whatever reason one of the dumbest movies of the 1990's reminds me of what is perhaps his greatest work.

There's a reason for this. So, let me show you the method to the madness, While the subject matter of either film diverges greatly, there is an interesting overlap between the time and I think if even Johnny Mnemonic can understand one of the things that makes Persona great, then there's no reason you shouldn't understand that, as well(do I need to mention the thalidomide thing again?).

There is no doubt that there's a stack of thesis papers and critical studies as thick as my fist just on that opening alone (Hell, I'm sure I've written at least one of them) and they're all probably better thought out and better sourced than this little blogging here, so don't take my word for it. It's just funny, to me, and I thought I'd share it with you, that two years after I saw this movie and studied it that the one thing that would get me to think about it the most is bad sci-fi.

The opening and closing of Persona is famous for it's collection of unrelated and unexplained images that reads more like a cinematic free-association riff than it does an Eisensteinian montage. As an audience we have to assume that it is a metaphor for something rather than any kind of narrative. Bergman's body of work often concerns itself with psychoanalysis' conflict with art and the opening seems to encapsulate that idea because, if anything, it's Bergman at his most artsy and his craziest.

I suppose it is the idea of the montage (which, as you probably know, isn't always something people did in the 80's before a big competition, but, rather, the combination of two images that, as a result of their juxtaposition, create an idea larger than the sum of their parts) taken to its most abstract limits. It all of the trappings of a montage without anything to contextualize it.

What got this whole ball rolling is that the key to unlocking Johnny's woefully small brain hard-drive isn't a pin number or an decryption key, but three images randomly chosen from whatever happened to be on TV at the time. I like that. I like that a lot. It might just be the most clever thing in the movie. Now, while that makes it something of the tallest dwarf in the mine, it's still a good idea because in a way this is what Bergman was going for in the opening of Persona. In both cases it is images-- not words or technology, but art-- that are used to peer into the protagonist's mind. While the reasoning and execution is different, I'd like to think that this shows even the most imperfect pieces of art are not without fleeting moments of perfection-- even if they're accidental.

Now, watch this opening before you start calling me an idiot.



I can wait.

It's clear there's potential within this movie. It's based off of a William Gibson short story that has the same name. What drives me the craziest with works of art that don't work aren't necessarily their flaws, but they're wasted potential. Messy movies are fine, a film can survive being a mess. Some of the greatest films of all time are messes-- The Thin Red Line and Magnolia pop to mind. Movies are such an amazing art form and it hurts to see people with so many things to work with squander what they have.

SIDE NOTE: I like that Johnny carries a briefcase full of equipment. In my best-of-all-world's part of the brain, I want to believe that Christopher Nolan and his brothers saw this movie and at least thought that the brain-hacking briefcase was a good idea. Even if it didn't-- there it is-- It might be in one of the most infamously bad movies of the 1990's, but it shares a huge link with Christopher Nolan's most recent masterpiece, Inception.

Think about that for a moment.

SIDE SIDE NOTE: Watching bad movies is a lot easier for me to do than to watch a good movie. Artful films, important ones, take a patience and the right kind of mood. A lot of the time I don't have this. Either I'm busy or drunk, or I don't want to watch it on a shitty TV or whatever. It isn't a process that comes as simply as sitting down and watching something I know doesn't really deserve my time (see: Reign of Fire).

Over the past couple of weeks I rented a few movies that I would consider to be "great." There was Seven Days in May (which I've neglected to write about here, but I should get around to it) and Serpico. Each of these took me about a week to watch each, because I knew they were worth the time. This isn't something I'd do with an Earnest movie. The latest movie I've got from Netflix is Citizen Kane. I've only had it for two days, though, considering that it's supposed to be the best movie of all time, it could take me a month before I actually sit down for it.

SIDE SIDE SIDE NOTE: Also, you know what is a much better, much more fun, much more compitent (but no less silly) movie about cyberspace is?

Hackers.


I love Hackers.

LAST SIDE NOTE: Now that I'm going over this again, there's another couple of stories that are about enlightenment or salvation through information and through art. Recently the post-apocalyptic action movie The Book of Eli was about just that (in this case a book, not a bunch of screencaps from the TV) and, less recently, but more significantly, Fahrenheit 451. What is is about dystopias and their inability to properly store needed information? You think they'd at least have knocked that one out by then.

*Oh man, I would totally pay good money to see a super-intelligent dolphin go head-to-head against Ken Jenning on Jeopardy. Are you listening, Hollywood?