Writer guy Bob Westal was literally born in Hollywood and has commented on the worlds of movies, popular culture, politics, and food ever since. His interest in cocktails is more recent, but he made up for lost time with hundreds of “Drink of the Week” blog posts for Bullz-Eye. In addition to writing and editing, Bob also talks a lot.
I suppose that technically rock videos aren’t really movies in the sense of being a theatrical motion picture, but “Thriller” sure feels like a mini-movie, and it’s homages to classic horror — complete with a rap of sorts by Vincent Price — are still scary, even mixed with Michael Peter’s and Michael Jackson funky choreography. Undoubtedly a still strong piece of movie making by John Landis, and one of the late Mr. Jackson’s most important efforts,
I’ll be back with the box office numbers later today, and I’ll be wrapping up my coverage of the Los Angeles Film Festival, which ends tonight, over the next couple of days.
I usually like my horror best when it’s well mixed with comedy. Moreover, this LAFF selection has gotten some good responses elsewhere, but I’m sorry to say that “I Sell the Dead” was my first real disappointment of the festival. It’s a fairly classic example of the kind of film where the cinematic “frosting” is sickly delightful, but where the actual movie “cake” beneath it is mostly a dud. Written, directed, and edited by Glen McQuaid on his first feature, the film is largely told in flashback as career grave robber/ghoul and alleged killer Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan, “Lost” and LOTR) is encouraged to recount his lengthy career by a fearsome but jovial cleric (geekfilm stalwart Ron Perlman).
Young Arthur (Daniel Manche) begins his profession under the tutelage of experienced corpse dealer Willie Grimes (cult/indie horror regular Larry Fessenden). Willie’s a rough sort and ready to do young Arthur in to curry favor with his fearsome main customer, an evil scientist who pays mostly in blackmail (the memorable Angus Scrimm, a.k.a., the terrifying “Tall Man” from the “Phantasm” series). But at heart he’s no murderer and the two become close friends as they eventually branch out from simple grave robbing to the commercial possibilities of dealing with the bodies of vampires, zombies, and assorted other deceased creatures, both undead and unusual. Eventually, Arthur’s ghoulishly sexy Lady MacBeth of a girlfriend (the terrific Brenda Cooney) complicates matters just a bit.
Writer/director/editor McQuaid is a designer and effects artist with a keen classic film and EC comics-inspired visual sense and a gift for horror-based humor, but the story he comes up with here is episodic at best and lacks anything resembling a spine. Moreover, while there are some wonderful gags and genuinely creepy moments starting about half-way through the film, it’s a long slog getting there and a fairly long feeling slog after.
I share McQuaid’s affection for the modestly budgeted horror/comedy/camp classics of old and “I Sell the Dead” is a nicely designed homage. However, without any clear emotional spine to the story, the director’s strong visuals and obvious enthusiasm for the genre, strong acting from the entire cast, and terrific score by composer Jeff Grace, sadly doesn’t add up to very much entertainment. Still, I know that fans of the endangered art of comic horror will want to seek this one out anyway. I hope they get more fun out of it than I did.
If documentaries necessarily involve a potential for abuse, simply because the perceived reality of film is so open to manipulation through editing and other tricks of the movie trade, documentary/fiction hybrids offer the opportunity for extreme confusion and manipulation. And, boy, is that the case here.
While the actual write-ups for “Paper Heart” were vague about the premise, a fellow LAFF-goer casually told me that it involved some kind of recreation of the romance between comedian/performance artist Charlyne Yi (“Knocked Up“) and the future of comic understatement, Michael Cera. Thus, watching the film, I became convinced I was seeing some kind of fictionalized retelling of a real-life romance. I am informed, however, in David Poland’s interview and from the post film Q&A that the relationship in the film is utterly and entirely fictional, so I assumed I was wrong again and the pair don’t date and never have. But after a bit more research I have information that indicates that Yi and Cera do have a relationship, just not in the one the movie. Except that the movie deals with what are Yi’s supposedly real feelings about love and how could that not affect her real or imagined romance with Cera? Of course, that’s none of my business and that’s probably a big part of the point.
The whole layers of fiction and reality thing got even more complicated when, at the post-screening Q&A, cowriter-director Nicholas Jasenovec stated categorically that story portions of the film were fictional while the documentary portions were not. Fine, but then a pre-teen boy who appears in the film opining on romance joins the discussion and, asked about he was found for “Paper Heart,” he and Jasenovic state that he was found through a casting process to join what appears to be a conversation with more or less random school children, and he is an actor.
When Jean Luc Godard uttered his most quoted line, that cinema was truth, 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie, I think this is kind of what he was talking about. But, so what?
One screening I’ll be attending tomorrow for sure at LAFF is “The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia,” about a rather intense West Virginia family into various forms of criminality, dysfunction and tap-dancing. I’m looking forward to it (you can see the trailer here), but below is something I won’t be expecting to see.
One side benefit of the busy, slightly weird and somewhat fouled-up time I’ve been having at the Los Angeles Film Festival is that I’ve only had time to watch films I’ve especially wanted to see. That’s prevented the joy (so far) of making an unexpected discovery, which is definitely part of the fun of film festivals. On the other hand, I’ve liked all the films I’ve seen (so far). “Black Dynamite,” a spoof of the seventies blaxsploitation genre, is one I’ve been wanting to see since the filmmakers’ commendably aggressive PR people sent me a trailer — and a very cool (but inexpensively seventies-esque) t-shirt — a couple of years back via my personal blog.
Fortunately, the wait, the slog through Hollywood traffic on the somewhat spooky evening of Michael Jackson’s death (not as bad as it could have been, actually), and even some technical problems on the first attempt to run through the film all proved to be very much worth it. Directed by Scott Sanders and co-written with actor and martial artist Michael Jai White (“Spawn,” “The Dark Knight“), this is just your basic story of a superhuman ex-CIA agent, able to take out a roomful of bad guys and satisfy a roomful of women, who sets out to avenge the death of his brother, stop the scourge of hard drugs at orphanages, and also deal with a brand of malt liquor that turns out to have a truly disturbing side effect.
The brilliance of Sanders and White’s approach here is the faithfulness they maintain to their source material while sending it up shamelessly. It happily exaggerates the cinematic flaws of actual blaxsploitation and its often unbelievable plots and absurd dialogue, taking several increasingly silly turns as the film unspools, but always with a completely straight face and an apparent complete lack of irony. The approach propels the comedy far further than less disciplined spoofs.
In a video interview conducted with writer David Poland after its debut at Sundance, Scott Sanders said he and White approached it not so much as a movie starring Michael Jai White as Black Dynamite and directed by Sanders, but a movie featuring Michael Jai White playing seventies-era ex-football player Ferante Jones playing Black Dynamite, and directed by Sanders “playing” a seventies director.
