Comedy Challenge 2019 Wrap-Up!

At the start of the year, I claimed comedy films aren't really my thing, that I laugh far more readily at humor divorced from narrative structure or typical stage-bound set-up/punchline stuff, being the kind of dweeb who gets a big kick out've Vinesauce compilations.  Perhaps in an example of sticking true to form, or perhaps because I didn't make the best selections for this year's programming, my first round at this comedy challenge turnt out fairly in line with the expectation set by that sentiment.  Of everything I kept active tabs on, the comedy challenge scored lowest on average, and led to the most groans and complaints about films simply not being very funny.  I wouldn't make TOO much of this, for I'm still plowing ahead on next year's challenge with high hopes, but a year largely dominated by "mn, alright" is a year dominated largely by "mn, alright."

Still, this more muted reaction to the selected films means the ones I DO hold and cherish as my favorites are the ones I truly, earnestly love, and count a few instant favorites amongst their ranks.  But since I ran the Cult wrap-up post with the favorites first and the worst second, why don't we flip the script a little here, plow through the negativity right from the breach, savor the positivity for last?  Sounds good to me, should sound good to you, let's sally forth:

I Did Not Find These Films Particularly Funny

Coneheads
(SNL Alumni Week)

10: One third weird immigrant origin story, one third new twist on the old SNL sketches, one third budget space adventure, tied together by way too many celebrity cameos, attempts at serious drama, and talk about Conehead sex.  Sound atonal and messy?  Well, it is.  Dan Aykroyd probably should've cashed it in after Coneheads (or preferably beforehand), and stopped before he could further embarrass himself over the last 30 years.

Diplomaniacs
(Wheeler and Woolsey Week)

9: You've not heard of Wheeler and Woolsey?  No big surprise, considering Robert Woolsey died in 1938, and Bert Wheeler in 1968, right before the major boom of old comedians reviving their careers on the talk-show circuit.  They were a pretty big box office draw in the 30s compared to many acts we now think of as the classics, although Diplomaniacs isn't quite the best showcase of their talent.  It's full-up on hokey jokes without strong enough personalities to back them, and the racism... well, there's a lot of it. A whole lotta it.  The climax is one big blackface joke lot of it.  Eesh.

(Over the last year, nobody has been able to adequately explain why there's a swastika casually sitting in the RKO copyright byline.)

Yankee Doodle in Berlin
(Silent Comedies, Sans Giants Week)

8: Yankee Doodle in Berlin's a touch uncomfortable nowadays.  A big, unearned all-American victory dance all over the German's stupid faces fully written, shot, and distributed after the Great War was over, its generally low-energy presentation and slapshod sense of humor is exacerbated by how it reminds one of the way pretty much every Western power convinced themselves punitive, humiliating retribution against the Germanic people could have no possible long-term consequences.You get to see Bothwell Browne's female impersonation act, though, the only time he was filmed performing too, so that's neat.

Ka-Boom
(Queer Comedy Week)

7: Confession: I let Ka-Boom's not being Mysterious Skin get to me more than was probably reasonable.  Gregg Araki is not trying for the same effect here as in his earlier devastating masterwork, but while I don't think it fair to damn Ka-Boom on the grounds of not featuring similar themes and performances as a different movie with different goals, I do think it fair to put the film on blast for not featuring much in the way of proper effort at all.  The film stinks of a filmmaker diddling round in circles with more a mind for shock and purposeful quirkiness than any coherent point to make, and ends on a note that marks the whole production as pointless in the eyes of those who created it.  Fine to not be Mysterious Skin, not so fine to fail at being anything worthwhile yourself.

The Iron Petticoat
(Bob Hope Week)

6: I'm sure there's a Bob Hope film out there for me, one with him putting on an agreeable persona and delivering some jokes I can get behind.  When he's in his whole "Boy, fellas, these broads sure are a real pain in the keester, right?  Good thing I can set 'em straight!" mode, though, I'm gagging like there's no tomorrow.  The laziness extends to the plotting, which dawdles around to such an extent that it loops back round and keeps the jokes from evolving beyond a repetition of one already sour note again and again.  Doesn't help in the slightest for the shrew Hope's trying to tame taking the form of one way-too-good-for-this Katharine Hepburn, losing all her usual vocal charm to a really bad Russian accent and the need to act second banana to Hope's buffoon.  Maybe the Jerry Lewis collaborations are more my speed...

What's New, Pussycat?
(60s Sex Comedy Week)

5: A comedy of errors largely free from errors, what with its contentment to explore characters who're on the same page far more than any whose various hang-ups and quirks clash to produce comedy when forced into close contact.  You can feel the spirit of Warren Beatty forcing Woody Allen out've the lead any time Allen's supporting player has a scene to himself and does something funnier than anyone around him.  By the time What's New, Pussycat? feels like waking up and actually doing something amusing, it has spent so much time on blah material, I just don't feel like going along with it, which is a poisonous attitude for a comedy to install in an audience member during its zaniest moments.

Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number!
(Female Comedian Week)

4: God, why did I schedule myself for two Bob Hope films in a row?  Why'd I have to make one of them Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number!, a sex comedy free from any sex that treats its most risque player like an agency-free prop for Hope to toss about like a sack of potatoes?  Why'd it have to be so square and bland, sandwiched right between the wilder excesses of true 60s counterculture and the more fully-fleshed beats of 70s television programs in the same style?  Why, when presented with any notable female comedian as the subject for this theme, did I go with a Phyllis Diller production where she's barely in it, and not able to take advantage of her greatest strengths besides?

More like Boy, Did I Pick the Wrong Film.  You may shoot me now.

Mother Riley Meets the Vampire
(Long-Running Series Week)

3: I listened to some've Arthur Lucan's Old Mother Riley comedy records from the 40s before watching this, the ones he made while his wife and long time comedic partner Kitty McShane played foil to his doddering-whipcrack old woman character.  Although the act WAS stronger in its intended form than with Lucan trying to carry on solo, I doubt McShane's presence would've saved a film produced at the tail-end of 16 years' constant production with a completely dry well for creativity and budget alike.  Lugosi's about the only fun element in Mother Riley Meets the Vampire, and he's simply not around long enough for you to do much more than smirk at his usual over-the-top silliness inherent to his poverty-era performances.

Billy Madison
(Comedian You Hate Week)

2: Oh, like there was any hope for Billy Madison with this theme.  I won't skewer Adam Sandler quite so deeply as I might otherwise, given Uncut Gems is doing the round and inspiring a whole slew've career reappraisals, but I see no reason to claim his early mainstream successes point to anything other than a man who knows and appreciates anything beyond the lowest level of filth.  This is a vile, hateful, miserable little film, not even well-made by the standards of a 90s gross-out slobs vs snobs comedy, and it makes me want to puke thinking about it again.  That phone call scene with Steve Buscemi is one I've seen multiple times in tumblr gifs and videos, and I thought it genuinely hilarious, so learning it has just a tiny little bit extra at the end where it turns into a borderline transphobic gag just makes me all the angrier at Billy Madison for ruining something I actually liked.

The Pick-Up Artist
(80s Teen Comedy Week)

1: Would The Pick-Up Artist be a better movie if Robert Downey Jr weren't playing the worst person in the whole wide world as the film tries to pretend he's secretly a really nice guy who should be seen as everyone's friend?  Yes, but then it wouldn't be The Pick-Up Artist.  Fun fact: director James Toback is apparently this sort've harassing, abusive scumbag in real life, so there's absolutely no reason to look on his work as anything other than a celebration of how degradation, misplaced charm, and engineering hostile or dangerous situations are the ideal ways to catch a mate!  Also I don't think it's very funny, and Molly Ringwald doesn't have anything she brought to The Breakfast Club here.

The Dishonorable Mention

Pineapple Express
(Stoner Comedy Week)

I very purposefully did not grant Pineapple Express a rating, because I acknowledge my inherent, extreme distaste for stoner culture put me in a position to hate it before I ever gave it a chance, and kept me from enjoying what I do believe is a fairly well-structured movie with some good jokes in  its pocket.  However, this lack of rating does not prevent me from putting it on record that I still kinda just hate its stupid guts, nor from posting the "IT'S NOT FUCKING WEED YOU PIECE OF SHIT STONER" image again in lieu of thinking about it further.

Enough negativity, let's talk funny!

I Laughed At These :D

Burn After Reading

(Dramatic Actors Going Funny Week)

10: I don't remember which actor I singled out as the one making a notable rare comedic turn when I picked this, considering they've all done comedy and drama with fair frequency, but I'm glad I chose Burn After Reading for a watch anyways.  John Malkovich's rage against everyone asshole, George Clooney's Smoothest Man in the World slowly degrading into total paranoia, Brad Pitt's stunning turn as a man with as few brains as he has audience-grabbing charm (I seriously don't understand why my dad hates this guy, he's great in everything I watch), Frances McDormand's cottonmouthed flailing for competency, they're all wonderful pieces of a story that gets bloody and senseless before anyone figures out what the hell is going on anyhow.  Special props to the dildo chair and everything with JK Simmons.

The Lavender Hill Mob

(Ealing Studios Week)

9: As I mention in my review, I didn't think The Lavender Hill Mob an especially special film immediately after its last frame, not compared to the same year's The Man in the White Suit.  Further consideration found me appreciating the way it exploits the camaraderie between its characters and a new ridiculous situation every scene to set off a series of firecrackers that SHOULD cause the whole thing to explode with manic energy, yet remains hilariously tamped down because we mustn't let ourselves get TOO ruffled, you know.  Great acting and clever filmmaking combine for a solid tale of comedic woe.  I'm still of the opinion this is one of the few times American censorship standards of the day forced the ending to be even better to release across the pond.

Bringing Up Baby

(Katharine Hepburn Week)

8: Love me some Howard Hawks.  Love the euphoric madness he brought to every picture, the unique, undeniable sense of a man happy to run rabbit rampant across the silver screen in the name of a laugh, in whatever form he liked.  Bringing Up Baby contains the single funniest moment from this entire challenge, for while I'm still a tad iffy about how Katharine Hepburn's character was written, it all becomes worth it when she storms back into the picture with a wild leopard in tow, completely oblivious to the danger she's in, as a final match in an already flaming powder keg.  Plus, y'know, she's tag-teaming with Cary Grant in one hell of an upper performance, and making ol' Bob Hope look hopelessly flacid about 20 years before he had the chance to do the same himself.

(The general consensus is right: "Because I just went GAY all of a sudden!" really is a hilarious line in an already funny scene.)

The Crazy Family

(Japanese Comedy Week)

7: Things fall apart in The Crazy Family.  Each member of the Kobayashi household has their little quirks, same as any family, which grow ever-more pronounced as the stress and isolation of the suburbs coupled with the absurd standards of Japanese family life push them deeper into their eccentricities.  When Gakuryuu Ishii touches a live wire to their wavering sense of sanity, the whole film erupts into a crazy battle between outrageous personalities, with our central father figure growing nihilistically homicidal.  Nobody's stable, everyone thinks they're the only sane person left despite all appearances, and they're all out for blood as they literally tear their house to shreds.  It's hilarious, and I'm gonna bluntly tell you that you should watch it, considering you've probably not heard of it compared to all the other top 10 selections.

Smokey and the Bandit

(Any Comedy You Like Week)

6: A pleasant last-second surprise from the very last comedy film choice of the year!  I've rambled about how Hitchcockian Smokey and the Bandit is in my review, so allow me to simply say its high-speed yet easy-going spirit, with Sally Field settling into Burt Reynolds' rhythm of life just as easily as Jackie Gleason lets it outrage and fluster and ruin his day, a murderer's row of colorful CB-usin' truck drivers on tap, and the musical styling of Jerry Reed permeating the whole film makes a wonderfully engaging time.  You've gotta love any film that treats expensive top-of-the-line vehicles like big kid toys to be thrown tumbling all throughout the American South.

Some Like It Hot

(AFI Top 100 Comedies Week)

5: To reuse an analogy from the review: Two men playing poker and blatantly cheating on every hand, only to lose to a woman who sat down and played the game straight despite being a little hazy on the rules.  With those men being Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon, the woman being Marilyn Monroe, and the whole thing being orchestrated by Billy Wilder with a focus on executing such a dynamic again and again and again with new ideas and smartly-written dialogue on every reset, it's no wonder Some Like It Hot ranked so highly amongst the American Film Institute's voters, and there's no trouble understanding why it's still widely beloved today.  Way, WAY better at crossdressing gags than pretty much anything I've ever seen.  Also, Joe E. Brown as Osgood is just plain perfect.

A Night at the Opera

(Marx Brothers Week)

4: The first film I found actually, no qualifications hilarious this challenge, and one I continue to have trouble articulating why.  Even accounting for how the Marxes lost their long-time producers after a studio change and dropped Zeppo for A Night at the Opera, the hell raised by Groucho, Chico, and Harpo on their journey across the Atlantic is so howlingly funny yet honestly sweet and wholesome that I can't imagine the kind of person who wouldn't find them funny.  We all remember the contract scene, the stateroom, Harpo's piano playing, etc, but I'm personally more inclined to name the Marxes gradually emptying a bedroom of its beds in a circular chase with a delightfully pompous police officer.  Funny's funny, the Marxes were funny, and this movie's a hoot.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

(Steve Martin Week)

3: Expecting Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to be indiscriminately meanspirited and cold-hearted towards the world entire, and finding it actually a wryly self-aware, even-handed, ultimately positively sentimental work is downright one of the best surprises I experienced this year.  After years of keeping John Candy off my radar for no real reason other than general ignorance, I now regret not giving him a chance sooner, as he's a total delight to watch, and stunningly easy to care for without losing his loudmouthed, annoying traits.  Steve Martin, for all his badgering and rudeness and self-satisfaction, gets it way more often than he's capable of giving, and learns to love and accept this boorish man he thought he could only hate in a sequence that had me begging him to do the right thing through my TV screen.  Probably the perfect holiday travel comedy?  Yeah, I can get down with that descriptor.

Ball of Fire

(Screwball Week)

2: The film that clarified Howard Hawks for me.  Prior to this, I couldn't put my finger on what made his work so damned special in my eyes, what common element united the man noted for experimenting in every genre available.  The above-described sense of mad euphoria is plain as day in Ball of Fire, a rip-roarer of a comedy if there ever was one, with too many endearing bits and bobs to mention.  The best strategy I can think of is reminding everyone of how Hawks often cited an approach centered around "Three good scenes, no bad ones," and suggesting that if the matchstick rendition of Drum Boogie, the conga lesson scene, and Gary Cooper confessing his love to Barbara Stanwyck in a darkened bungalow are merely good, then the concept of "great" has been rocketed far beyond any mortal's reach.  Not only my second favorite of the year, my absolute favorite of the six Hawks productions I've seen, and likely to remain so for a long time.

It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

(Massive Ensemble Week)

1: Are there words?  A large portion of my review for It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World consists of me alternately listing out my favorite parts in a massive block paragraph and exploring how it flows structurally for a few more, but are they words enough?  Can anything explain the sheer joy of watching Stanley Kramer exercise every comedy star under the sun in a madcap race to the prize for nearly three hours, short of watching for yourself and seeing with your own eyes?  I'd like to think one can do so, for one should be able to communicate just about anything with the right words and sufficient length... but hell if I know what those words are or could be.  It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World moves with a fleetness a film its size reasonably shouldn't, contains more funny moments by proportion and volume than anything else I watched this year, and has a killer structure to beat all with Spencer Tracey as the unexpected MVP.  It's a screamer to end all screamers, the kind of project that could only happen once and then never again, and they pulled it off beautifully.  The lone five-star film of the bunch, and it deserves it like no other.

Honorable salutes to the special effects wizardly and theme music of Killer Klowns From Outer Space, Cantinflas' Spanish wordplay that I couldn't understand thanks to shitty subtitling in Romeo y Julieta, the Birmingham Jail sequence from Stir Crazy, and Sean Penn's little smile from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, proudly pictured above.

See y'all in 2020 for even more comedy stylings, hopefully ones better on average than this year's!

Cult Movie Challenge 2019 Wrap-Up!

YEAR TWO OF CULT IS DEAD, LONG LIVE CULT.

Myself, Jackie, and John have watched weird, obsessively detailed Something Weird catalog videos disguised as a documentary on old pornos.  We've learned why you don't muck about with Black Magic Fuckery.  We've entered and questioned the strange world of Andy Sidaris, he of the Bullets, Bombs, and Boobs.  We've pondered the philosophical question of "why isn't Elijah Wood punting any of these zombie kids"?  We've been 20,000 leagues under the sea, to a strange, happenin' New York version of Oz, and whatever the hell you call the ending of Big Man Japan.  But through it all, which films were great, and which were not?  That's what we're here to look at today!  Hope y'all enjoy this way-too-high-effort end of year Content!

IF SOMEONE GAVE YOU THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE

A Pistol For Ringo
(Spaghetti Western Week)

10: More in the spirit of the classic American westerns with the indulgences spaghetti westerns allowed pumping through its veins than something truly in the style of a Leone or Corbucci, A Pistol For Ringo nevertheless delivers an excellent time at the movies thanks to its balled-up contradiction of its main character, the savagery of its villains, and how cleverly the two flit in and out've advantages and disadvantages between them.  It's the kind of tense battle of wills where bodies can still drop with great frequency, and both parties need to bullshit some quickie explanation for why it happened and why it's justified before there's a bullet 'tween their eyes.  Plus, as I mention in the linked review, it has a weaponized Christmas tree in the finale, so it outranks Die Hard for best non-conventional Christmas movie.

Tremors
(USA Up All Night Week)

9: I say again, the most American monster movie to ever grace the silver screen.  Tremors fully commits to the classic "buncha stock characters trapped by weird monsters in a hostile setting" set-up of 50s monster movies, and runs hog wild with the possibilities offered by that setting being a run-down middle-of-nowhere desert town with plenty buildings to destroy and its own resident survivalist loaded on guns galore.  The monsters act intelligently enough to create an active push-pull dynamic that keeps the movie from resting for too long, the characters all acquit themselves nicely, and it features a contender for my favorite scene of the challenge when Burt and Heather empty an entire wall of firearms into a single Graboid.  Yee-haw, y'all! 

The Killer
(John Woo Week)

8: Without seeing Hard Boiled, I can't declare The Killer the definitive John Woo package - I CAN, however, declare it promises his brand of kinetic gunplay at a peak, relationship/rivalry between Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee that can't be beat (those parts where they spend an entire scene with guns to one another's temples while pretending to be on good terms for Sally Yeh's sake are great), the kind of effortless, butter-smooth pacing you think one only dreams about, and a genuinely tragic, gut-wrenching ending to cap it all.  Really glad our decision to go with more unconventional John Woo films for this theme didn't pan out.  I'm sure Red Cliff is great in its uncut two-film form, but then we wouldn't've time for this action classic.

Porco Rosso
(Anime Week)

7: The first Miyazaki film I've seen to dip below a perfect 5 star rating, and still considerably better than the vast majority of films we watched this year.  Where Porco Rosso doesn't quite touch the highs of Castle in the Sky or My Neighbor Totoro, it still soars on the strengths of its beautiful flying animation, memorable character designs and personalities (big, big shout-out to the Mama Aiuto Gang), and contemplations on mortality and forgiveness.  Porco's vision of fighter pilot heaven ranks up there with the most arresting images Miyazaki ever committed to film, and the extended fisticuffs brawl against a rival pilot towards the end has some real weight behind its comedic rhythms.

An American Werewolf in London

(Werewolf Week)

6: John Landis sure did get some innocent people killed with his recklessness, but damn if he wasn't a great filmmaker in his prime.  Even knowing its place as a horror-comedy, I found An American Werewolf in London an unexpectedly uproarious time, a black as hell's pits joke about life slamming David Naughton's face straight into a brick wall over and over again, and him being too oblivious about anything to pick up on the hint until he's lost half his blood and all his teeth.  The werewolf and Griffin Dunne's decaying ghost corpse still look great nearly forty years on, and the film's rocking a strong sense of place whether we're on the wild wet moors of Northern England or playing out a fifty car pile-up in Piccadilly Circus.  Romance is a bit weak, but that conversation about suicide with a bunch've recent werewolf victims in a porno theater is killer.

Eight Diagram Pole Fighter
(Shaw Brothers Week)

5: Gordon Liu's thickheaded, eager-to-fight Fifth Brother is my favorite character from any of the films this challenge.  His skullbrained attempts to achieve enlightenment through peaceful meditation by threatening to beat and break everyone and everything around him would make Eight Diagram Pole Fighter a top-ranked film on their own, and yet the movie also offers gorgeous sets, ridiculous plot convolutions, and easily the best hand-to-hand action I saw all year.  That fucking rotating coffin pile, man.  The monks using their poles to rip out full sets of teeth from the enemy mooks' mouths?  The whole opening massacre scene?  The splinter-bomb bamboo staffs?  Or...

Head
(Psychotronic Encyclopedia Week)

4: "Hey hey, we are the Monkees, you know we love to please/A manufactured image with no philosophies."  Need I say anything more than my original opening line describing Head as the perfect cinematic equivalent to a suicide note written in magazine clippings?  The Monkees, Bob Rafelson, and Jack Nicholson went right the hell off in this attempt to detonate not only the band's popular public image, but any possible alternate interpretation, leaving naught but ash behind.  They chose to do this in a wildly inventive, literally acid-fueled charge across the entire pop culture landscape of their day, with some of the band's catchiest psychdelic tunes as backing, and highlights like the alternating black-to-white Ton Basil dance to a casual conversation about suicide amongst dozens of others.  It came for the head of everything Monkees related, and walked away with about twenty more representing the whole 60s counterculture movement on its belt.  And somehow, it's still a prime example thereof.

Danger: Diabolik
(Mario Bava Week)

3: I often claim films attempting appeal to spectacle, high-octane action, or simple hipness are often let down by a perceived need to still tell some kind of coherent story or impart a message, which often leads to the stuff you're supposed to find appealing getting lost beneath the greater volume of less expensive subpar character work, or else overwhelming interesting ideas in the event some arose in the screenwriting.  Danger: Diabolik needn't worry about this problem, because it is the Pure film I have chased after all these years.  It wants to be cool, it strives to be cool in every single scene, and it IS cool in every single scene, because Diabolik lives a life of fabulous, enviable crime, pulls off some incredible new stunt, heist, or escape every time we see him, and lives a life scored to Deep, Deep Down.  When we are not with Diabolik, we are still in a world shot and acted to revolve around the idea of his personality, and make his next action seem all the cooler whenever he next appears.  It's the kind of movie where a bad guy who operates at the peak of James Bond villainy by dropping people out've planes through a hidden trapdoor in his on-board office is no match for an anti-hero willing to pump him full of emerald bullets, and then retrieve them from his ashes in the crematorium, which plays even better than I describe it.  Forget Endgame or Joker, THIS is the best comic book movie I've seen all year.

Manos: The Hands of Fate
(Mystery Science Theater 300 Week)
(Bwang!)

2: It is all broken, and it is all glorious.  Manos: The Hands of Fate is the proverbial movie that's so bad it crashed straight through the floor and came out the ceiling again good.  Nothing works as intended, not the acting, not the screenplay, not the camerawork, not the music, not the sets, nor the props, nor the lightning, or the basic scenario.  It is still the single funniest thing I've seen in my entire life when Torgo, poor ol' John Reynolds in those malformed satyr legs, starts hobbling along to his discordant, repetitive theme tune, which stops abruptly for some shaky dialogue, only to strike up again after a sudden jump cut to Torgo struggling back inside.  The total lack of ability here loops round in circles until it crashes in on itself like a particle in the Large Hadron Collider, sparking an alchemical process whereby a movie of total ineptitude becomes one of the few I'll ever describe as So Bad It's Good.  Anyone who claims you absolutely NEED Joel and the Bots to make this one watchable is Wrong, for it is a cult classic all on its own merit.

Inferno

(Dario Argento Week)

1: MATER SUSPIRIORUM!  LACHRYMARUM!  TENEBRARUM!  DOMINAE, DOMINAE, DOMINARUM!

Beautifully horrifying, oblique to an extreme, rocking a Keith Emmerson synth-heavy soundtrack - this is the real deal.  Dario Argento tosses conventional narrative structure right out the window in favor of imparting the impression of a curse senselessly tearing through anyone and everyone you know with no possibility of understanding, only the raw horror of watching something you cannot explain strike again and again in weirder and weirder forms.  Each image more exquisite and haunting than the last, Inferno builds to a peak from which it can build no more, and then tops itself with the ultimate in indulgence: a spooky lady smashing through a mirror as she shouts "THE MORTALS CALL US DEATH!" and turns into a scary skeleton while the building burns down around her.  Of everything here, Inferno jams itself right into my list of favorite films ever made, no questions asked, except maybe "Can we stop acting like Suspiria and its family are meant to be understood like one of your shitty Star Wars lore books?"

Gahbahge Movies, Throw Them In the Trash, Please.

 

Ghost Shark
(SyFy Week)

10: Is it at all fair to hold Ghost Shark's quality against it, given its status as a low-effort film of the week from the SyFy Channel?  Yes, because I dedicated most of my review to proposing rewrite ideas, and in total they create a more enjoyable trashy movie than the wasteful film on offer.  I come to you expecting a movie to equal the slip-n-slide death everyone giffed on tumblr a few years back, and you give me this?  For shame.

Dune
(David Lynch Week)

9: You read the order correctly, I am putting Actual Theatrical Movie Dune From Highly Respected Director David Lynch a slot before Junk Bin Movie Of the Week Ghost Shark.  Even acknowledging Lynch was the wrong man for the job of adapting Frank Herbert's Dune (a job I'm still not sure anyone is suited to), and even knowing the film suffered heavy post-production meddling courtesy of Dino De Laurentiis, there's just no reason Dune should've come out bad as it is.  Initially a crushingly-dense attempt to communicate a small sliver of Herbert's complicated network of characters and interplanetary politics with an ill-fitting aesthetic and way too many hoarsely whispered voice-overs, the film manages the rare feat of reversing the polarity on its badness, and speeds through an entire half of the book inside half an hour with such ruthless efficiency it becomes impossible to tell what's going on if you've not read the book in the last ten years.

Sandworms looked cool, tho.

The Swarm
(70s Disaster Movie Week)

8: Hoof, The Swarm.  How does one succinctly describe The Swarm?  Well... picture a movie with far too many characters it invests way too much time into that still kills them off by the trainfull whenever it gets bored, asks you to take the sight of little black dots bip-boppin' across the screen as a legitimate threat, manages to make a bee swarm detonating a nuclear power plant and setting an entire city on fire seem boring, starts out incoherent and loses any ability to speak clearly as it goes along, and is two hours forty minutes in its uncut form on top've all that.  Should give you something to work with.

(Jackie never got me my gif of the children hiding in the garbage cans, and I am still miffed over never receiving meandthelads.gif.)

Microwave Massacre
(Bleeding Skull Week)

7: Jackie Vernon has nobody to play off in Microwave Massacre, and everyone else in the cast is convinced they can match his deadpan schtick, so the whole film is a toneless dead joke.  Focusing all the humor on "I hate my wife!" one-liners and gags about black prostitute meat doesn't help matters any.  It lacks even the conviction necessary to pay off the obvious "here's a little dog, here's a big microwave, dog, microwave, dog microwave" set-up it hammers on so much in the early goings, so it can't function as something legitimately disgusting either.  At the least, the disappointment of not getting anything enjoyably depraved convinced us to pop on The Boogens the next night, which introduced us to just... the most wonderful, beautiful boy I've ever laid eyes upon.

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace
(Bad Movie Week)

6: The reputation is deserved - Superman IV: The Quest For Peace hails from impossibly restricting origins, and falls below even the lofty standards of a piece abandoned by its original creators and picked up by Cannon with a last-second major budget slash and a cast who visibly want to leave.  Surprisingly, it shares some issues with Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, in that if it chose to focus on one or two of its ideas, some of the misguided aesthetic and acting elements could be forgiven by mining some interesting territory, yet instead it plows ahead on every last notion, and makes them all worse for the overcrowding.  It's just BVS is swinging for the fences with big philosophical ideas, and Superman IV has Nuclear Man and a Superman double date.  Christopher Reeve deserved far, far better than this, but so does every Superman actor in the end.

Surf Nazis Must Die
(Troma Week)

5: Let's not besmirch Troma's good* name by associating them with this.  They only distributed Surf Nazis Must Die, and if Lloyd Kaufman had actually overseen production, it might've turned out a worthwhile artifact of trash cinema.  As is, there's precious little in the way of surfing or Nazism, and the Surf Nazis mostly stand around talking a big game without actually doing anything.  A promised revenge rampage from a black mother whose son gets killed about halfway through takes too long to get going, and by the time it finally starts up, the movie's pissed away whatever goodwill and engagement I was willing to offer.  There's nothing but an alluring title and poster here.

(*Good here meaning "slimy, grody, and proud of it.")

The Food of the Gods
(American International Pictures Week)

4: Meanwhile, LET'S besmirch Samuel Z Arkoff's good name by associating him with this.  Much as Arkoff made his fortune by selling on that empty promise of a title and poster and little else, he still found ways to deliver satisfactory product to ensure he wouldn't lose ticket sales TOO fast - I Was A Teenage Frankenstein is a drive-in classic, and nobody will convince me otherwise.  He went completely off the rails and became negligent in his duty when he permitted Bert I. Gordon to direct The Food of the Gods, which plays like Frogs without the joys of watching little amphibians command an army of swamp creatures.  It's a go-nowhere, do-nothing, show-off-the-worst-effects-of-Mister-BIG's-already-shaky-effects-driven-career film, and more than likely committed animal abuse to get some of its effects besides.  Only good thing to come from this was an imprompteau Village of the Giants rewatch, which convinced me Gordon wasn't ALWAYS the absolute worst.

Night Feeder
(Shot on Video Horror Week)

3: Y'see the killer baby on the poster?  It's not in Night Feeder until literally the very final minute, and it looks like it's made from burlap.  Meanwhile, there's an EXCELLENT brain dissection scene round the middle of the movie, which I cannot for the life of me believe was shot without a real cadaver.  Something this low-budget and low-effort could only boast so good a special effect if it were not a special effect at all, and just a fresh corpse someone's buddy dragged over from the morgue.  I got The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes flashbacks during that scene.

Anyways the movie's not good and I don't feel like saying anything else about this one.

Monster a-Go Go
(Bill Rebane Week)

2: I ask of you, which is the greater tragedy?  The way Monster a-Go Go, already a doomed venture from the start, languished on the shelf half-finished for years before HG Lewis took it up and slapped together a non-movie to fill out the runtime in a weekend?  Or the way I exerted so much effort in proposing a means of taking Monster a-Go Go of all things and making a satisfactory movie from its crumpled, broken body during my review?  I ask this as a legitimate question, for I truly do not know.

Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold
(Fred Olen Ray Week bonus)

1: Because Wizards of the Demon Sword was not satisfactorily bad enough, apparently, I, in my infinite wisdom, decided we should also watch John's pick for the week that didn't make the final list, on the grounds of my having looked at clips of Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold on YouTube when I was a teenager.  I apparently thought it would be funny for us to waste an afternoon watching a stupid softcore porno from Fred Olen Ray, a man with no talent and no interest in developing any.  It wasn't supposed to be here, it wasn't funny, I hold the film in active contempt, and wish to only repeat that its sole saving grace is making a giant lipstick joke instead of a giant vibrator joke at one point.  Just kinda fuck this movie.

As to what my watching companions thought this year?  Jackie says her favorites were Inferno and Porco Rosso, with her least favorites being Surf Nazis Must Die and Sgt Deadhead; while John says his favorites were The Killer and Pump Up the Volume, with The Swarm and Surf Nazis Must Die as his least.  Everyone hates Surf Nazis, that's the big takeaway this year.

CULT ROUND THREE.  CULT LIVES FOREVER.

Mixed Nutcrackers Wrap-Up!

Heads up: sometime in the next few days, I intend to write some wrap-up posts for the Cult, Comedy, and Queer challenges I run on letterboxd, as a means of introducing such content to the site and prepping for the next year of featuring them more heavily on this space.  For these, I'll probably provide a top ten best and top ten worst from each challenge (perhaps less for the Queer challenge, just because there's fewer films than in the other two, and they never got quite so bad as the others), alongside any stray observations about other notable films or ideas we encountered in the last year's watching.  This post... will not be like that!  While I could easily handle it like I did the wrap-up for the Loft Film Fest and rank all the films in contention, there's not much fun there - I've already given the full extent of my thoughts on everything here, and the rankings seem fairly obvious.  Here, I can burn through em right now:

1: Fantasia (5/5)
2: The Nutcracker 1973 (4/5)
3: Nutcracker Fantasy (3.5/5)
4: Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (3.5/5)
5: The Nutcracker at the Bolshoi Ballet (No rating)
6: Barbie in the Nutcracker (3/5)
7: The Nutcracker 1990 (3/5)
8: The Nutcracker Prince (2.5/5)
9: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2/5)
10: The Nutcracker in 3D (2/5)
11: Tom and Jerry: A Nutcracker Tail (2/5)

Fun-ish.  But I believe we can have yet more fun than this!  I believe there are elements to these Nutcracker tales deserving their own ranking, separate from that of the pictures as a whole.  As such, we are going to rank...

The Nutcrackers!

(With respect to both their animate Nutcracker forms, their real human forms, their inanimate forms where applicable, and overall personality!  Obviously Fantasia won't partake in these events, but it has won enough by being wonderful as it is already.)

Mixed Nutcrackers: Fantasia (1940)

Call this a belated Christmas present. After a solid month of delaying season challenge stuff so we could wade through ten different Nutcracker adaptations of varying quality, we come to Fantasia, a film wholly divorced from the rest of the marathon save its use of Tchaikovsky's music in one segment, and to pull a quote from Deems Taylor, this is all to the good. Strip away the decades of filmic evolution that led Disney so far astray as to make something so uninspired and wretched as The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, roll back the years of artistic waxing and waning, settle on down for an older form of animated experimentation, and you find Fantasia, the single most diamond perfect film Walt Disney ever produced. I am tired from spending so much time plowing through Mixed Nutcrackers this last month, and from spending so much time over this last year watching and writing about so many movies, so I am going to simply extend the Christmas gift of watching Fantasia to gushing about its varied virtues in a series of bullet points. There will, as per usual, likely turn into more full-blown paragraphs, only justified as bullet points by the lack of structural linkage between each. It's my present to me, though, so we do things how I like.

• The flow of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor hypnotizes me anew with each watch. Credit some of the effect to Deems Taylor's introductory statements, which put one in the proper frame of mind for interpreting the abstract imagery on display, but the actual lulling spell of the images on their own tell quite the story as well. From simply playing with angled colored lights on Leopold Stokowski as he conducts facing away from the audience, to filling the screen with massive fragmenting shadows of the orchestra's sections, to the abstract interpretation of musical notes floating in space as your mind drifts away from the physical and into the purely artistic. The little blue plunking ripple dots playing through the hair to represent fingers covering holes on a woodwind are always a favorite, as are the slightly jagged wavering yellow lines dancing in a stutterstep one after the other across the sky for the strings. When the piece moves beyond awareness of even the instruments and gets into simple phantasmagorical landscapes conjured by sound alone, those rolling pink-and-black-striped hills alongside the constant return to a rolling river of red akin to volcanic flows always leave one floored by how smooth and utterly natural they look for something done entirely by hand. Ending the segment on a return to Stokowski, at first a small figure conducting a brilliant sunrise before we zoom in to find him commanding little more than a glaring, solid block of red, makes the perfect scene-setter for the rest of Fantasia. We're here to watch a dance between sound and vision, overseen by a massive crew so powerful and firm a guiding hand that it looks as if a single figure instructs its complexities by magic, and it is beautiful.

• Of all the pieces in Fantasia, the Nutcracker Suite sounds most different from its traditional interpretation - most other pieces undergo some form of rearrangement to suit the story flow, but where the Rite of Spring and the Pastoral Symphony mostly resemble the conventional choices in modern, standardized orchestration, and Night on Bald Mountain practically set the piece's standard sound, the Nutcracker Suite was a solid decade and change out from its reinvention and revitalization in the New York ballet. As such, the instrumentation on many of its movements isn't quite what you've come to expect from their use as Christmas staples in prior decades. The Russian Dance, for instance, features reedier sounding strings and a heavier emphasis on percussion than the newer variations, while the Sugarplum Fairy Dance has a gentler, slightly eerier vibe than the more familiar crystalline, ringing interpretation. With how omnipresent many of these pieces are in the broader popular culture (and even how familiar pieces like the Arabic Dance are to the ballet community), the deviating musical choices here help make Fantasia's version of Tchaikovsky's music fall upon fresh ears every time, exactly as radical visual reinterpretations like this should.

• Disney's animation department was really well truly at the top of their game in 1940, right? The sparkling play of dewdrops across multiplane background elements and spider's silk as fairies prepare a garden for the dawn, the elegant, flowing gossamer on the fish fins as they whirl in an underwater dance, the beautiful skipping dance of flower petals and leaves on the wind in time with the music without feeling like they're doing anything other than following a natural current upon the air, the way palpably chilly patterns of ice appears at the fairies' feet when they skate across the water as individually designed snowflakes drift down from the sky? Not to mention working multiple approaches to humanizing the non-human, from the elongated lithe torsos on the fairies, to the fish with little more than solid heads attached to practically strips of fabric, to the two wholly different modes of making anthropomorphized flowers dance between the Russian Dance and Waltz of Reed Flutes that are equally suited to the flying leaps and spinning grace of both pieces, to the unfortunate but still adorable mushrooms pitter-pattering about during the Chinese Dance? I love looking at this segment so much, and have to wonder what if Walt's ambitions came to fruition, what if we really did see animation take a turn towards Fantasia's ambitions in the following decades, without the war and the strike and the public disinterest? It's a massive shame more works at this level never came to be, even if it does leave Fantasia feeling wholly unique.

• If Mickey Mouse is gonna hang about the movie, he might as well hang about in the best-looking Mickey Mouse short ever drawn, yeah? The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a little bit unusual for Fantasia, considering it's the only segment to function like a morality play, what with Mickey skiving off his master's discipline-building task to take the easy route of enchanting a broom to carry the water for him, and finding his efforts arrested by an inability to stop what he's started. It still works well as part of the whole, though, entirely because it ALSO functions as a chance for the animation team to show off how good they'd gotten at character animation on their flagship face, how the water effects in Pinnochio weren't merely a one-off fluke, how they could take something so simple and silly as a broom with arms and transform it into a series of arresting images by multiplying the thing and sending it on a shadow-heavy unstoppable march. The additional minor fun of playing with smoke to form bats and butterflies, the shooting stars in Mickey's dream, and Bill Tytla showing off by animating the only realistically-proportioned human in the film with some of its most subtly expressive movements enhances the fun all the more. This isn't really Mickey's movie, but he advances the project's ambitions so much by showing how a simple Mickey Mouse cartoon, once the realm of light entertainment for the real show, can stand as a legitimately artistic, lovingly-crafted work alongside the more immediately art-like pieces before and after.

• I'm legitimately joke angry about the galaxy that starts The Rite of Spring. Just... look the thing up sometime, find a copy of Fantasia and LOOK at it. The thing's an equal to any galaxy you see animated by computers for bottom-of-the-barrel programs on the Science Channel nowadays, and they did it by HAND. S'enough to make a full-grown person cry at its beauty and the skill necessary to get it twinkling and rotating like that. Makes the sorta wonky sun we see a few seconds later all the funnier lookin', tho.

• While the creature design in The Rite of Spring is hopelessly outdated by modern palentological standards, it holds infinite charm for me all the same. Contrast between the natural elegance of lava bubbling and flowing and tearing the earth asunder, and the pencil sketch-like early single cell organisms in the Cambrian seas make the slow march towards complex life highly satisfying to watch, particularly once we make the leap to the dinosaurs and see the sheer diversity on offer. They're quite unlike anything in the Disney style without deviating so much as to be unrecognizable as something from their house, and whether we're considering the swooping pteranodons, the massively bulky stegosauri, or the monstrous early vision of a T-rex, each offers some insight into how the late 1930s' understanding of fossil records mingled in conversation with an artist's impulse for what's most striking and memorable. I'd love to see someone, anyone, Bogleech, run a retrospective on all the designs on display here, and how they stack up to what we know now. Even if many of the ideas are a little bit silly (there's a jellyfish using its tentacles to snare a fish and chew with its membrane), an article to this effect would delight me to an equal extent as the segment itself.

• I don't know why, but I've always liked the effect of rendering one of the brontosaurs in a panning shot as primarily painted background element for the main body, with an animated neck and head stretching out into the distance. Gets across depth in the shot quite well, and I notice it in particular every single time I watch Fantasia.

• Leave it to Disney's Golden Age animator stable to construct a memorable, charming character from nothing but pleasing abstract shapes and pitch-perfect timing. The part where Taylor interviews the soundtrack and coaxes the simple vertical line to demonstrate its potential by vibrating in time to different instruments is an easy highlight. The fat, jiggly slabs meant to represent a bassoon's lowest notes are the absolute best, though the cheeky little triangle ting at the end of the percussion section and the wild flare they put into animating the brass make solid contenders for the title. Its little jig to the right before sliding off-screen also pleases one to no end.

• Confession time: While Fantasia is very much the perfect movie, and while I will fight anyone who says otherwise verbally and physically, the Pastoral Symphony is always where I start to fidget in my seat just a little bit, and check the time remaining where the previous segments kept me wholly engaged and enraptured. This, I think, comes more down to my own issues with sitting still and focusing for extended periods of time than any fault of Fantasia's, for the Pastoral Symphony's vision of Grecian mythology is still a wondrous thing to look at, all gentle pastels and soft character designs and gentleness right up until Zeus shows up for a little bit of what Zeus does second best. The pegasi look majestic, their children adorable, the centaur's appropriately suave and dopey, that little romance between the blue centaurs gets me right there in the chest, the 40s Disney vision of Dionysus is about as perfect as you can get, and I am once again made angry by how lovely Iris' rainbow and the starry Athena shooting a flaming arrow cross the sky look for how much effort it must've taken to get them looking just right. It's mostly just... I don't have much to say regarding overall effect or place in the program here; it's gorgeous and gorgeosity made manifest through paint and paper and celluloid, and I've little more to contribute to the larger conversation than "purdy." Which is fine, cause sometimes a piece of art appeals to you aesthetically for no real deeper reason, and you can love it for what it is on a surface level just as is.

• If there's one spot where the modern, widely available version of Fantasia legitimately clunks, it's when they have to awkwardly repeat some shots of a centaur strutting and posing for the camera in order to realign the visuals to the music after chopping out a solo shot of Sunflower the Racist Caricature. I'm not at all sure how you could make up for the time difference with any elegance short of biting the bullet and reinstating her for historical purposes, but even without knowing why the repetition happens, one can still tell it's not a natural choice by the original team. 

• Every time I watch Fantasia, without exception, without fail, The Dance of the Hours starts up, and I expect it to be the place where my opinion lessens and I go, "Well this one part isn't quite so good as the rest." The whole thing's more directly comedic than any of the other segments, basing itself around the joke of performing a ballet with awkwardly shaped animals not at all suited for executing pirouettes or pliés or grand jetés. We're effectively watching a more conventional funny animal cartoon in the midst of a film about to thunder into one of the best animated finales ever put to screen, so the expectation for it to suck the joy out've the room comes wandering in uninvited without fail. And yet, I always enjoy The Dance of the Hours. As a technical achievement it's not quite the equal to those it follows, but it's a damned impressive funny animal cartoon with a wide display of body shapes and weights and impossibilities made feasible thanks to expressive characters, personable sight gags, and a sympathetic environment shifting through times of day across lovely looking color shifts. As a part of Fantasia, it works well for the same reason Mickey's appearance earlier in the film does: Disney built its bones on these funny animal cartoons, so even though they're reaching for higher and higher artistic ambitions with ideals towards the mainstream recognizing animation as a serious technique, they're not gonna forget where they came from. They're gonna elevate the funny animal cartoon by putting all their skills to use for the BEST, most graceful funny animal cartoon they can possibly manage, and I'll be smacked if they didn't produce something with admirable pacing, imaginative twists and turns, and a killer ending with the whole anarchic jumble the finale became capping with a pull back to the palace doors slamming so hard they fall off their hinges. Fantasia leaps my worries about this segment every year, solidifies itself as a favorite by assuring me it displays mastery of every technique it tries, and leaves the air clear for ideal enjoyment of its final part.

• That Fantasia positions The Dance of the Hours' funny animal cartoon right next to its exploration of the profane and the sacred in Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria speaks to Walt Disney's confidence in animation's potential as a high-minded, cultured artform to equal painting or opera. You can explore the medium's most pedestrian, every-day, mass-appeal application to its fullest extent with no shame about laughing at the absurdity of hippos and elephants serving as ballerinas, turn around for a trip into the deepest bowels of hell rising up to manifest themselves upon this sinful earth in a gorgeous and frightening danse macabre, and then depict a pilgrim's journey of the long winding path to find beauty and divinity in the simple act of watching a sunrise, and have it all WORK because you're good at your job and have a vision in your mind, a spark in your eyes, and an army of hands and machines capable of bringing it all to life. Fantasia's last and best segment is so much better for working in conversation with something so simple and pleasing as "the animals they are too ungainly to dance," and illustrates Fantasia's main point better than any other individual part. It's all art, it's all beautiful, it's all worthy of love and care and admiration and immortality and all the other fine descriptive words for something so insightful and perfect. Even that which we might consider lesser deserves appreciation at the same level as the holy.

• And yeah, even leaving aside how they interact with the movie at large, Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria are technical accomplishments beyond compare, in the Disney oeuvre and in the larger animation industry. I've never understood or found sources explaining just what they did to make the ghostly spirits rising from their graves and flying to the mountain peak look the way they do, but it communicates the dead rising to roam the earth better than anything else I've ever seen. Tytla's work on Chernabog is nothing short of masterful, be it his powerful flexing as he unfolds his wings, his sweeping gestures as he summons the damned to his domain, the way his face twists and contorts itself into new expressions in close-up, or the way he becomes a pillar of evil's eternal power in the sequence's final shot before cowering back to inert rock. The maelstrom of hellfire which consumes his followers and sweeps demonic figures across the camera is beautiful as it is terrible. I am all about the way they render Chernabog's exposure to the ringing light of church bells by transitioning his figure from the solid inky blacks to what look like heavy pencil sketch fills and back on each chime. And as to the pilgrims' progress through several Disney's most complex ever multiplane camera shots, well... they inspire one. Inspire one to contemplate the purpose of a disciplined walk, lit candle in hand, face obscured, following a winding path through the damp, dense woods, knowing evil lurks out there somewhere, following the hard trail laid down by ancestors long past, for the purpose of appreciating the effort behind each step, the beauty of the world scantly illuminated by your tiny light as dawn builds all around. The revelation of just how profound the simple sight of clouds drifting through the sky on a sunny morning can be with thoughts of grace in your skull. How all this, how the wild torment of wicked madness and the slow, methodical approach to showing the beauty and specialness in something that happens every day when seen with the right eyes, is directly reflective of the work necessary to make something like Fantasia possible.

God, I love this movie. Can we not talk about any other movies from now on? Can I just keep watching Fantasia once every few weeks, jotting down some new thoughts about something I noticed fresh this time, and forget about all the other bad films out there? I know we can't, for Fantasia wouldn't appear half so special if it didn't have the whole cinematic landscape to tower over as a magnificent, impeccable work of filmmaking, but... I don't wanna come down, man. The whole world seems beautiful as Fantasia from up here. I'll press on as always, cause I won't find new towers to survey the land from and find peace atop, but you won't catch me at all liking it. And we can always return here whenever we like, for the simple pleasure of being and seeing.

5/5

Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas (2014) - A Celebration of Avarice

(The following content is reran from the 2018 Christmas marathon on Letterboxd, as originally seen here.)

Against every better instinct I have, I'm starting this review by playing nice. The basic theory underlining Kirk Cameron's arguments in Saving Christmas is not inherently flawed or condemnable. Across multiple narrated vignettes, Kirk argues against worries about the commercialization and secularization of Christmas by finding avenues to link activities and iconography commonly associated with the holiday back to Jesus. He's effectively saying one shouldn't lose heart in the validity of their faith when they see trappings of Santa Claus and mistletoe everywhere, as a good Christian will find ways of reaffirming their connection to God and Jesus in the everyday. If you place sufficient value on your spiritual life, the idea holds merit. Make your practice a personal matter, maintain a mindful attitude surrounding its tenants, and find strength through reflection on what you believe and why.

Thing about theories, though: they can only remain pure, untainted notions in perfect isolation. When Kirk Cameron puts this theory of argument into practice in Saving Christmas, he uses it to spin baffling nonsense about how Adam needed to put the forbidden fruit back on the Tree of Knowledge to get right with God, so Jesus going up on a wooden cross was a symbolic token to the same effect, thus turning all Christmas trees into unused crosses representing the salvation of mankind. He rambles on about how the historical Saint Nicholas punching a heretic at some ancient holy conference proves the current incarnation of Santa Claus is a crusader for the faith and some kind of badass warrior preacher. Christmas presents become the New Jerusalem, a somewhat interesting theological discussion about the relationship between Jesus' swaddling cloth and the Shroud of Turin becomes reason to not bemoan the lack of a nativity scene, and nutcrackers become Herod's baby-killing soldiers, now transformed into defenders of the holy way. To Kirk Cameron, finding the sacred in the secular seemingly means pulling up little bits and bobs of trivia from hagiography and apocryphal doctrine to justify not changing one's ways or attitudes in the slightest. The application falls just a tiny bit short of the theory.

Now, this is all VERY badly presented. Saving Christmas boats a bland visual style and an incredibly boring camera. We have to listen to Kirk Cameron put on his best William Shatner impression, stretching out every single monologue to three or four times its necessary length. He and his costars act by scrunching up their faces and wiggling from one weird expression to the next in a pantomime of what they think sudden enlightenment looks like. There are completely unnecessary digressions to Not Chris Rock doing his standup routine, a conspiracy theorist rambling on about Area 52 and poison in the hot cocoa, and a protracted breakdancing sequence towards the end set to the most repetitive sounding electronic dance hip-hop cover you could squeeze out of Angels We Have Heard on High. When the movie DOES deign to focus on its main conflict of Kirk talking to his brother in the car, the visual flairs it offers to keep the monologues interesting alternate between lazily floating through caves and Christmas tree lots, and scruffy-dirty-bearded-tavern-scripture-quoting-triphop-scored-Santa-beatdowns. It is two scenes from a real movie stretched out to forty minutes, with the remaining half-hour filled by inhuman attempts at comedy.

Still... it is not inherently loathsome. Horrendously executed, amateurishly argued, insulting on multiple levels, but not hateful like God's Not Dead. I INTENDED to go the tiniest bit easy on Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas and give it one single, solitary star, as the smallest offer of mercy. "You're completely bugnuts, Kirk Cameron, and I don't agree with a single thing you've to say. Power to you to waste your money saying it in a movie, tho," sort of thing.

Then Kirk Cameron got to justifying conspicuous consumption and holiday avarice. Jesus IS the reason for the season, after all, and because Jesus took a material form when God sent him to earth, we should all celebrate his birth by spending and hoarding and glutting ourselves to excess. MORE materialism means MORE material stuff, and the MORE material stuff you have in your life, the MORE Jesus you have in your heart, or... something.

The rest of Kirk's arguments at least have either sufficient theological merit to get a pass in isolation, or are harmless enough to pass with a bewildered, "believe what you wanna believe, man..." This, though? This is straight up "the very things people claim run against the spirit of the holiday and Christ's fundamental teachings are actually virtues we should indulge in without restraint, because I did a little bit of wordplay." It is mindbogglingly misguided at best, willfully hard-hearted and selfish at worst. The whole idea retroactively strips the rest of the film's arguments of their scarce value, as it reveals the total lack of thought and introspection behind their conception. All we have here is a mouth set into a slab flesh, blathering away with the sole aim of vindicating its own capacity to speak and eat without shame.

Having seen all seven films, the question still remains: Why WERE there so many Christian films released in 2014? We know Kirk Cameron put out his film because Kirk Cameron is a crazy person who honestly thought telling non-believers their secular trappings are actually religious out one side of his mouth while telling the faithful they should abandon their morals and mindlessly feast would somehow earn him critical acclaim or substantial profit. But why did the world see the production and distribution of not only this many films, but the wide-release and heavier-than-average media coverage of the same? Is there any linking factor between the impetus to create Son of God, God's Not Dead, Noah, Heaven Is For Real, Left Behind, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas?

After many hours of consideration, internal debate, and fine-tuned analysis, I come to the conclusion 2014 saw the release of so many Christian films because multiple unrelated entities saw an opportunity to service/exploit a monied crowd whose opinions on the larger culture included a belief that they experience undue suppression in the media, and all happened to complete and circulate their products at around the same time. Some did this out of genuine belief, some did this to fulfill an artistic impulse, some wanted to turn a profit and nothing else, and some are Kirk Cameron. Either way, an abnormally wide-spread response to a potentially profitable business venture handily explains the whole phenomenon. Shocking revelations, I know. Kirk Cameron's the one who stopped talking in code and waffled on about how the liberals want Christmas to be more PC and keep Christians from practicing in public. Blame him for the blunt, cynical verdict here.

0.5/5

Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) - A Reinterpretation of Scripture

(The following content is reran from the 2018 Christmas marathon on Letterboxd, as originally seen here.)

Why were there so many Christian films in 2014? In part, because Ridley Scott's adaptation of Moses' story hit theaters in early December. If we're to believe Scott's comments regarding the film's casting, had he bothered scouting for actors whose background remotely reflected those of characters and historical persons of Middle Eastern descent roughly 2000 BCE, we'd have gone down a film that year. Apparently, hiring actors whose skin is too dark or whose names are too foreign-sounding when making a film about the Exodus narrative means no studio will fork over a budget big enough to depict the Plagues or Parting the Red Sea properly. Whether the film was worth dousing Joel Edgerton, John Turturro, Aaron Paul, and others in varying degrees of brownface is a little bit up in the air, as the final product is a fairly mixed.

Giving a tiny bit of credence to Scott's financial justification for whitewashing and brownfacing his cast, the special effects during the big, spectacular Acts of God sequences are appropriately grandiose, and have an interesting bent to their execution. The film tries to find some natural means of explaining fantastical events, and so the plagues have initially sound justification for the Nile turning to blood, frequent swarms of destructive insects, and boils upon every Egyptian. Moses parting the Red Sea is treated as a potentially coincidental happening with only circumstantial ties to his own actions, which he must take advantage of as means of proving his connection to God to the doubting tribes. When it comes time for God's hand to become visible and explicit in its actions, the visuals gain a properly cinematic sheen, with a creeping shadow claiming each firstborn and the sea slowly collapsing back in on itself in a rushing tidal wave.

Exodus' new interpretation of Moses has some merit as well. It ditches the traditional role of shepherd and vessel of God in favor of a military man whose connection to the Lord may well be resultant from a traumatic head injury. There's a potentially neat dynamic around the midpoint, when Moses has returned to Egypt and determined to free his people through guerrilla warfare, intending to break Ramasses' will through attrition. As a concept, it makes some sense for a man brought up to lead armies to approach freedom from a fighting standpoint, and the film expands on this notion by contrasting it against God's proof that He can manage the same strategy far more effectively. I can see the intent, slowly nudging Moses out of his comfort zone and into the part of spiritual leader, and it might've worked!

But then we get into a major problem with Exodus: Gods and Kings: the storytelling and acting. Say what you will about Cecil B deMille as a director of crowds rather than actors; The Ten Commandments handily demonstrates how, with a lengthy enough running time and some talented players on hand, he could hammer a fully fleshed, comprehensive version of the material. Ridley Scott, working with still considerable two-and-a-half hours of screentime and actors of far greater standing than Charlton Heston, somehow cannot wrangle an ounce of humanity or relatability out of one of the quintessential religious stories about the power of faith and striving for freedom. He changes the script up far too frequently, giving Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton very little time to establish their characters as much beyond the same basic personalities in a slightly different situation before they overextend themselves or fade into the background. It's weird to think of a movie this long as feeling rushed, but it tries to cram in several additional scenarios for the rival brothers to work their way through in addition to the already shifting narrative of scripture, which makes odd moments like Edgerton's over-reliance on bellowing his lines to convey emotion, or the absolute stone-cold-stunner of, "From an economic standpoint alone, what you ask is problematic at best," stand out all the more.

Moses suffers the most here, as Scott's conception of a more secular prophet of the Jewish peoples comes off half-formed at best. The notion of moving him from commander of armies to rough-hewn freedom fighter to the Moses of Biblical understanding DOES have merit, but the film's eagerness to move from scenario to scenario means it never really slows down to examine Moses' psychology, or the deeper implications of his transformed state. A large portion of the middle stretch is taken up with Moses arguing with God in little circles about the morality of his actions without moving forwards. While his hollowed, resigned warning to Ramasses on the eve of the tenth plague and full confirmation of God's might has promise, it becomes a weirdly-shaped wrinkle when Moses' next big action involves triggering the parting of the seas with an act of doubt at God's presence. He awkwardly jolts from state to state depending on what the film deems necessary, and for all the hats he wears throughout the narrative, we ultimately see something less than the textual Moses.

When considering Biblical stories and characters, one needs to remember they rarely follow modern conventions of narrative structure or dynamic characters. The presentation on page frequently involves little more than "and then this happened, and so it was, and then this happened, and so it was, and then..." while the characters we're meant to learn from achieve their status as teachers by way of embodying an infallible moral righteousness. Introducing fallibility and uncertainty, then, is an easy way to make the old patriarchs and prophets more relatable, and examine their ideologies in greater detail. Taking Moses for an example, you have a man who knows exactly what he means to do the second God comes into his life, and hammers against the Pharaoh with unflinching certainty until he succeeds, only to turn the wrath of the Lord upon his own people when they fall short. Following the need to transform the character into something understandable and readable as an actual person in the moment, deMille kept the strong authority figure image, and whilst heavily emphasizing Moses' role as a lawmaker and Jesus-like figure, a good fit for mid-50s American culture.

Ridley Scott and Christian Bale's Moses does not only suffer from the story refusing to slow down long enough to examine him as a person - he sinks further because the film is naked about its intent to change him for profit. This Moses is not a man brought up to lead armies who later uses his experience to engage in a dragout war with his brother because it contrasts with any particular weightiness against his eventual turn to pure belief and subservience to God. He is a general-king because it enables to filmmakers to actionize the material, cram a few extra battle sequences in amidst the scenes of Biblical devastation, leverage the allure of a recently-departed Batman hanging around the studio. Action is not an inherent evil, and can be readily employed to underscore some greater point within the story, but Exodus' action scenes exist only to wow. Without proper interrogation of what this new strategically-minded, ready-to-doubt characterization means for Moses, the lurching nature of his character arc becomes more pronounced, and we end where we should have started.

They go and sideline the Golden Calf portion of the story, too, which is pretty much the most important part of Exodus if you're trying to give Moses a story about coming into conflict with God's divine wrath and learning to trust in His will instead of the strength in your own hands. There's fertile ground in a changed Moses suddenly turning against the very people he won over, the challenge of leading them to as pure a faith as his over forty years in the desert, and it's relegated to a single, far-away shot. That's how unwilling Gods and Kings is to engage with the implications of its alterations.

Initially, I felt three made for a fair rating. Ridley Scott at least provided some rather impressive vistas and battle sequences and visions of destruction on a mass scale. As I thought through the film more, though, I realized most of those visual effects-dependent scenes were either unnecessary attempts at actionization, or an inkling less impressive than equivalents in the deMille epic thanks to the (relative) ease of creating such shots in a computer compared against wranglings tens of thousands of cast and crew for similar effect. Though I do still find the Plagues and the Red Sea sequence both visually compelling and well-executed storytelling, I don't think the press of so many other visuals souring the more I contemplate them deserves too high a praise. Loop the brownface back into the discussion, and I'm more than happy to give Exodus: Gods and Kings my patented "there's some good things here, but man, the bad will weigh on your mind" rating.

Next time: The final installment of this impulsive Christmas series! Who all's ready for Kirk Cameron to celebrate the virtues of greed, gluttony, and conspicuous consumerism!

I'm not.

2.5/5

Left Behind (2014) - A Fanfic of the Apocalypse

(The following content is reran from the 2018 Christmas marathon on Letterboxd, as originally seen here.)

Why were there so many Christian movies in 2014? In part, because writer/producer Paul LaLonde finally raised sufficient funds to get a new adaptation of Tim LaHaye's sixteen-volume Left Behind series off the ground. A previous trilogy of films about the exploits of RAYFORD STEELE and BUCK WILLIAMS in the wake of the faithful's physical Rapturing to Heaven saw increasingly weak critical and financial success, and Kirk Cameron's continued slide into Evangelical nutjob-ery made his return impossible, so LaLonde instead snagged up a paycheck-desperate Nic Cage, a few vaguely recognizable character actors, and set about with his readaptation. Unlike his fellow Christian filmmakers, he didn't finish his movie in time for the lucrative Easter season, and evidently didn't feel like holding back for a month until Christmas, so the final product wound up dumped in early October and quickly forgotten.

Side note: In spite of a crowdfunding campaign for a sequel failing miserably, LaLonde has announced plans to adapt all sixteen books of the Left Behind series. Maybe he'll actually get around to filming something interesting on one of these future outings.

I'm incredibly disappointed in Left Behind. You hear the plot summary of the books and think to yourself, "Well, it might not sound GOOD, but they at least commit to spouting some absolute lunacy." Millions upon millions of good Christians bodily vanish in an instant, and the whole world instantly falls into rioting and chaos. A select number of survivors form the Tribulation Force to defend and convert the remaining unfaithful during seven years of hardship. There's conspiracies and redrawn national borders and armies of millions and a ceaseless war against the Antichrist against a backdrop of flame as the sun ejects half its matter onto the planet's ever-quaking surface. The whole thing's predicated on the notion all non-Christians need to hurry the hell up and get with the program lest they experience untold suffering for their staunch refusal to believe, but it's sort the sort of thriller where Russia can form a union with multiple European nations to simultaneously nuke Israel, only for God to vanish the nukes and plant them in the capital cities of the aggressors seconds before detonation. If the piled up nonsense still isn't tantalizing enough, I remind you this new adaptation has Nic Cage as a man whose faith is tested in the first hours after the Rapture. We have open invitation to completely lose our shit here.

Instead, it seems LaLonde and director Vic Armstrong decided the "try to act like we're normal people who believe normal things so the conversion message sells better" part of the job was more important than the "Lean into a full sixteen books of increasing fantasy insanity" aspect. A film starring a paycheck-cashing Cage and supporting actors in starring roles from a stuntman director never had much chance of achieving a great deal of depth, but relegating the action to Captain Steele's attempts to land his plane and nothing else smothers the film. With such a limited scope, all the movie has space for is characters with one-note personalities getting into arbitrary conversations/arguments in a confined space, while those whose book-counterparts are presumably more developed suffer through having to solve a conflict totally unrelated to their later apocalypse ministry. There are exactly three people who matter in this movie if my interpretation of the Wikipedia summaries for the books is correct, and their movement throughout the film can be easily boiled down to "is not a Christian" for 95% of the runtime, and "is a Christian" for the final 5%. That's not a heck of a lot to hang a "land the airplane" thriller on.

They could offer up SOMETHING here, but even if I set aside my disappointment at not seeing Nic Cage wage psychological warfare against the UN-leader Antichrist, there's nothing. The other passengers on their airplane occasionally set-up possibly interesting conflicts, like the pissing match between the Muslim and the little person, or the guy convinced everything is happening because aliens, or the woman who resorts to threatening everyone with a firearm after she becomes convinced they're all in on an act to steal her child. These situations are universally defused within two minutes of their introduction, and wrap back around to the same ol' "where did the other people go?" question without fail. Buck Williams is a total wash of a character, despite the half-hour prior to the Rapture taking its time to give him some connection to almost everyone onscrreen. Cage barely emotes as Steele, not even bothering with his trademark swaggering awkwardness, and favoring a bland, generically frustrated "ordinary man in a crisis" persona. Steele's daughter gets a lot of screentime wandering the post-Rapture world looking for her brother, which accomplishes nothing other than introducing a short cameo from another book character, and underscoring just how awful God is in this fictional world.

God seriously needs a better publicity guy. Throughout this review series, I keep mentioning how the Bible contains plenty of good messages and guidance for living one's life, so long as you read it critically and understand the cultural gaps between when it was written and the present day. However, across five films - four of which so far have served as not-so-covert attempts at converting nonbelievers - we've seen nothing but idle interventions, echoing silences, and a penchant for cruel torture, with this film representing the height of the final tendency. Were it not for Captain Steele's conversion in the last few minutes, I'd consider it a decidedly anti-religious film, what with all the focus on chaos and confusion and suffering as a result of his great gift to the world. I know and you know it's all MEANT as a time of hardship to sort out the worthy from the unworthy and grant the nonfaithful a final, true test of character before the End Times proper, but the movie never once mentions any of this. We're apparently supposed to watch all this destruction, see the devastation of parents who lost their children and good people deemed wicked sinners for a simple human failing, and think this a good and right part of God's plan because... well, because Nic Cage tells his passengers to pray before landing, I think.

It is, if nothing else, a spectacular self-own: You realize your source material has a little too much crazy religious fundamentalism to effectively work as propaganda, so you expunge everything but the inciting incident and "thrills" of trying to land a plane in a panic, only to also leave out all clarification for why the audience should take these developments as beatific, thus making the deity you worship look even crueler than his book-counterpart's relentless hammering upon the earth. Nothing works in Left Behind, unless you want to count the unintended comedic value in scenes like the bait-and-switch electric toothbrush, Nic Cage's last second attempts to avoid collision with a wholly-Raptured plane, or the sheer speed with which polite society descends into petty thieving and murder once there aren't any TRUE Christians left. I'm only giving it 1.5 stars because it does such a thorough job of scrubbing out the truly hateful parts of its ideology as to work against its own purposes, and argue the virtues of agnosticism. Nic Cage's performance barely rises above sleepwalking, so why bother?

Next time, Ridley Scott does some whitewashing, but still makes a real movie.

1.5/5