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12/27/2022 0 Comments Clerks iii Even if you don’t believe a third Clerks movie was entirely necessary, it’s hard not to feel an emotional tug. The original, which launched Kevin Smith as the reigning Jersey slacker-auteur of 90s cinema, remains one of the quintessential Gen X indies; a scabrously funny yet surprisingly sweet-natured comedy that found a way to transcend its obvious amateur limitations. For those who’ve been with the “View Askewniverse” from the very beginning, the Clerks films have become like cinematic inflection points; we haven’t just hung out with Dante and Randal over these past 28 years… we’ve literally grown up alongside them.
In a startlingly grim turn-of-events (grimmer, perhaps, than the film is ultimately equipped to deal with), we learn that Dante’s happily-ever-after at the end of Clerks II was scuppered after his pregnant girlfriend Becky (Rosario Dawson) was killed by a drunk driver… leaving him to persist with his Sartre-like existence at the Quick Stop (he co-owns the business, but - on the other hand - he’s still scraping gum out of the shutter locks, even though he’s pushing 50). Not much has changed over the years - he brews the coffee every morning and hosts the occasional game of street hockey on the store roof, while Jay and Silent Bob have transformed the now-defunct video store next door into an amateur weed dispensary (but still spend most of their time hanging curbside). But when Randal suffers a near-fatal heart attack (a nod to Smith’s own real-life brush with death), Dante encourages him to make a movie… and before you can nod and whisper the word “meta” with a knowing smirk, Randal’s cranked out an autobiographical script, directly based on his own misadventures as a convenience store clerk over the years. The most remarkable thing about Smith as a filmmaker these days is that he’s all but lost his comedic fastball (his once potent punchlines now rarely top 85 MPH)… yet he remains more keenly attuned to the emotional nuances of his projects than ever. Clerks III is a much better effort than the largely unwatchable Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (in the early days, the charm of Silent Bob was that he only spoke when he actually had something worth expressing; now he’s basically a spastic mime) - yet even that movie found a credible way to justify its own existence. For a director who was primarily known as a poet laureate of the profane (who can forget the explanation of the term “snowballing” in the first Clerks?), Smith has noticeably mellowed. He now feels most at ease when ruminating - with unironic sincerity - on Generation X’s surly (yet not-entirely-unwelcome) transition into middle age. There are some decent meta gags. Dante frets over Randal’s callous decision to have his character shot and killed by a robber - the original ending of Clerks (“What if there’s a sequel?” Dante asks. “What am I - a hack?” Randal scoffs). Silent Bob, signing on as the project’s unlikely DP, notes that contriving to keep the front shutters closed will allow them to shoot at night, but pretend that it’s still daytime (the same trick Smith used when filming the first movie). An amusing audition sequence features cameos from the likes of Ben Affleck, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Danny Trejo as would-be actors for Randal to cast. Pop culture references still mostly land (Randal taunts the Jesus-loving Elias by claiming he only answers to Conan the Barbarian’s God Crom). But the savage wit that once galvanized Smith’s writing (and made his spotty grasp of cinematic craft tolerable) has waned; most of the jokes have a jocular yet slightly desperate strain about them… as if Smith’s a 50-something dad of diminishing cool trying to show his daughter and her less-than-impressed friends that he hasn’t lost his once risible edge. “That’s how we did things in the 90s, son!” Jay barks early on, in one of quite a few lines that are just a tad too self-aware (on the plus side - depending on your perspective - Smith’s penchant for puerile shock humor appears to have largely run its course… in other words, no stink palms or donkey shows this time). But - as was the case with Clerks II - Smith is not operating out of cynical self-indulgence; he’s pulled off the genuinely impressive feat of ensuring that Dante and Randal’s register jockeying journey is worthy of its own cinematic trilogy. Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson were never really talented enough to break out beyond the View Askew oeuvre (and O’Halloran in particular is asked to punch slightly above his dramatic weight here), but the roles fit them like comfortable old clothes. “I’m not even supposed to be here today,” was always Dante’s signature lament, yet here he remains - an ever-present fixture at the Quick Stop, all these years later. There’s a certain comfort in that. The more things change, the more they stay the same… at least in New Jersey.
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12/14/2022 0 Comments The ultimate thrill Another guest review from Joe Frankel, whose piece on The Fabelmans was so well-received that he's already back - with a look at an obscure 70s thriller you probably haven't heard of but soon won't be able to live without having seen. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Yeah, I gotta check this out)
If you’re looking for a lean, efficient, retro programmer so obscure that the mere mention of it will impress your cinephile friends… this nasty little ski thriller could be just the ticket. I only recently learned of its existence while reading Quentin Tarantino’s newly-published book of film criticism, “Cinema Speculation.” In his chapter on Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller, he takes a minute to reflect upon the talent of actor Barry Brown, who died too young and was one of the stars of The Ultimate Thrill. The movie also features the beautiful Britt Ekland (most famous for her starring role opposite Roger Moore in The Man With The Golden Gun), but while she and Brown hold the screen the real standout is Eric Braeden (best-known for his decades-old role as Victor Newman on The Young and the Restless). Here, channeling a mustachioed, macho physicality that feels reminiscent of a young Tom Selleck, Braeden clearly has fun playing Roland Parlay, a wealthy industrialist with a passion for Russian Roulette and a penchant for humiliating his fellow man. Roland belongs to that special breed of ultra-wealthy, consequence-free, b-movie villains who are privileged to live beyond the rules of civilized society. He is both charmingly seductive and the living embodiment of man’s basest impulses and Braeden brings an A-level commitment to the giddily b-level material. The ultimate thrill of the title is actually a riff on “the most dangerous game” — a game that Roland discovers he loves playing when he returns home from a business trip and finds his wife, Michelle (Ekland), with another man. In truth nothing untoward has actually happened between them (we even see Michelle reject the advances of their predatory houseguest in the previous scene), but none of this matters to Roland. He gives the man precisely two minutes to escape on his skis before hopping into the cockpit of his private helicopter and pursuing him down the edge of a mountain in the most dishonorable possible fashion. What happens next is too deliciously twisted to spoil, but if you’re willing to suspend disbelief and ignore the cheesy elevator music that occasionally works against the movie’s edge-of-the-seat set-pieces, you may be as glad as I was to discover this forgotten gem. The ski scenes are inventively photographed (especially considering the shoestring budget) and the whole movie is loads of fun with better than average acting and a wild plot that will have you shaking your head in pleasing disbelief. There’s nothing highbrow about it, as I’m sure you can tell from the description, but there’s an undeniable kick to watching b-movies like these that have been produced away from the tidy rules and pandering expectations of mainstream Hollywood. Movies like “The Ultimate Thrill” may seem like they’re a dime a dozen, but not knowing what will happen next is a thrill that has grown increasingly rare in the context of today’s genre hits. If you find it difficult to locate, you may wish to search for “the ultimate thrill 1974 full movie” on Google. I found it on a third-party website with uncomfortable nudie ads and it was possibly the worst VHS transfer I have ever seen, but still well worth it. 12/7/2022 0 Comments the fabelmans This is a guest review by Joe Frankel, who is a filmmaker, teacher and founder of Imaginary Courtyard content agency in Toronto. He is also one half of the writing team that co-created the animated comedy series STEVE GUTTENBERG: FRENCHMAN (currently in development at SSS Entertainment). The other half is Bill. (EDITOR'S NOTE: That's me!)
The Fabelmans: A Spielberg movie about Spielberg… and movies Steven Spielberg was the youngest director to ever be offered a contract at a major studio, but unlike the other 1970s movie brats he’s typically lumped in with (Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese, Lucas) he was an autodidact. Not only did he not go to film school, he was rejected from film school despite his peerless and preternatural ability to tell stories with a movie camera. Since this is my first guest blog on Pop (very excited) I will confess, for anyone who doesn’t already know, that I think Spielberg is the single greatest director of all time. When I was 13, I cut school to see the first showing of Jurassic Park at my local multiplex. That same year my dad took me to see Schindler’s List and something exploded in my brain -- an ah-ha moment that I couldn’t fully make sense of. I knew I wanted to make movies. I had already known that prior to seeing those two films, but what I couldn’t figure out was how two such entirely different movies could have been directed by the same person – and released in the same year to boot. As I followed the rabbit hole deeper, I realized there was more to the story. It turned out that Spielberg had in fact directed (or in the case of Back To The Future, The Goonies, Harry and the Hendersons and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, produced) most of the defining movies of my childhood including: Jaws, the Indiana Jones trilogy and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial – and when I lined up our respective biographies I further discovered that we had a lot in common – but a lot of people will feel that way watching Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical movie, The Fabelmans. One of the most pleasurable aspects of watching the movie is seeing yourself in it as you get immersed in the family story of Sammy (Spielberg’s alter-ego played mostly by brilliant newcomer Gabriel LaBelle), his mother Mitzi (a gifted and artistically frustrated pianist played to the nines by Michelle Williams), his father Burt (a sweet but emotionally stunted computer programmer played by Paul Dano) and his uncle Benny (the man his mother ultimately left his father for, played winningly by Seth Rogen changing gears). The supporting players who round out the family could be ripped from your own home movies, but what’s especially thrilling about The Fabelmans is knowing where it’s going – because this isn’t just an ordinary family story. This is the story of how the most successful filmmaker in movie history became the most successful filmmaker in movie history… and knowing that makes watching it uniquely fascinating. On one level, because it has been billed as “semi-autobiographical,” it plays like a beguiling mystery that challenges anyone with even a passing interest in Spielberg to guess which of the (sometimes mundane, often remarkable) episodes in the loosely-structured script (co-written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner) are actually real. The movie is loaded with throwaway anecdotal moments that feel strange but true. Like the moment when Mitzi takes Sammy and his sisters out in a storm to chase (rather than flee) an active tornado, while dodging electrical explosions and a row of shopping carts rolling innocuously down the street. Or the scene where Mitzi performs an impromptu piano solo for the whole family that is undermined by the sound of her long, manicured nails tapping on the keys. Or the time when Burt comes home and learns that Mitzi has purchased a pet monkey to inject some welcome chaos into their lives. These are the kinds of indelible details that stick in the memory and have come to define a Spielberg movie – only this time we know they are his actual memories. In contrast to such familiarly succinct visual shorthand, Mitzi is that elusive rarity in a Spielberg film: a vital, nuanced female character. The fact that she’s inspired by Spielberg’s own mother goes a long way towards connecting the dots regarding why he’s struggled in the past to make sense of his female characters. If the movie is to be believed, his young life was dominated by a mother who was a confidante and kindred spirit, but also a destabilizing presence – and according to Spielberg and Kushner all of the major events in the film are true. The Fabelmans is therefore one of the most nakedly confessional projects ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker. One that takes a surprisingly tart and unvarnished view of the single most traumatic event in young Steven Spielberg’s life: the divorce of his parents. Spielberg has flirted with telling versions of this story before. Broken families have been a staple of even his most lightweight films for most of his 50+ year career and here he lays out several of his most painful and personal experiences directly for mass-consumption. But what’s even more remarkable about The Fabelmans than its confessional aspects is how palpably it evokes the wonder of cinema during this moment -- a cultural moment when movies and the shared experience of watching them in a darkened theatre risk becoming obsolete. It marks what is arguably the first time in Spielberg’s entire career when he’s actively working against the zeitgeist… and yet the movie is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. The audience that I first saw it with at TIFF in September voted to give it the People’s Choice award and you don’t have to be a filmmaker or cinephile to relate to Spielberg’s story or how it felt to be him as a young, budding director because he brings the experience to life with all of the brilliance and emotional clarity of… well… a Steven Spielberg film. The movie transcends the kind of clichéd reverence that typically informs these kinds of stories. There is an infectious, boyish exuberance to Sammy’s movie love as he co-opts his friends in the boy scouts to help him make his own homegrown westerns and unlike the protagonists of other more straight-faced love letters to the cinema like Truffaut’s Day For Night, Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso or Scorsese’s Hugo, Sammy/Spielberg doesn’t fall in love with movies overnight. The first movie he sees in a theatre (specifically the train crash in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth) traumatizes him and he proceeds to smash up his toy trains and film them in order to recreate what he saw and conquer his fears. The movie makes further use of the specifics of Spielberg’s life to show us with a surprising lack of sentiment how filmmaking became not just a vocation but also a means of escaping and gaining control over the pervasive tensions in his life. In this sense, Sammy’s relationship to cinema is sometimes surprisingly ambivalent. Filmmaking provides him with an outlet, but it also often backfires in his face. It’s while he’s stitching together the home movie footage from a family camping trip (in a stunning sequence that plays like Blow Out meets The Ice Storm), that Sammy discovers his mother and his uncle Benny are having an affair – the footage reveals this to him. In another bravura sequence at Sammy’s high school prom, Sammy screens a mythical “ditch day video” that wins a standing ovation from his graduating class and transforms the antisemitic bully who has made his life miserable into a bona fide Hollywood-esque sports hero. Sammy doesn’t always understand what drives him, but Spielberg and Kushner do and there’s real depth in how they unpack his psyche. You can’t help but admire the power of movies through his eyes and by the time the final scene rolls around (which is the stuff of dreams and yet all allegedly true save for a few minor embellishments) you will be delighted to witness the lecture young Sammy receives at the hands of a legendary filmmaker regarding how to frame an “interesting” shot. (The crusty old-school filmmaker in question is portrayed by yet another legendary and unlikely filmmaker who is arguably the finest choice of any living person who could have been cast in the role.) Feeding off of this, the final shot of the movie is the rare instance in all of Spielberg’s films where he consciously tips his hand to direct your attention to him, as the director. It will send you out of the theatre smiling and wanting to curl up in bed with a movie camera the way Sammy does in deference to all of those legendary baseball players who slept with gloves under their pillows. At least, that’s how I felt. 12/4/2022 0 Comments The menu
The culinary world - like porn and pro wrestling - represents relatively low-hanging fruit when it comes to satire. So much of it serves as an easy target… vacuous foodies armed with smart phones taking obsessive plating snapshots for their Instagram accounts… the Spartan-like regimentation of professional kitchens, where God-like head chefs command total loyalty and subservience… fussy molecular gastronomy techniques such as foaming and gelling, flash freezing and spherification… serving a plate with segregated piles of lettuce, parmesan and croutons, and calling it a deconstructed caesar salad.
All of this lands squarely in the crosshairs of The Menu, a midnight-black comedy with a healthy strain of horror movie DNA. The story revolves around Hawthorne, the flagship restaurant of celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), which is located on a private island accessible only by ferry, and serves a meticulously conceived and executed menu each night to no more than a dozen guests. Enter Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who’s somewhat half-heartedly accompanying her simping foodie boyfriend Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) for what promises to be a “once in a lifetime meal.” As the evening begins, the comedy is obvious, but spot-on - a pretentious food critic (Janet McTeer) nitpicks a broken emulsion as her obsequious editor (Paul Adelstein) nods feverishly; a trio of tech bros comment “At least we can say we ate here” as they scroll indifferently on their phones. But as the meal takes an ominous turn, it becomes clear that Slowik has carefully selected a cross-section of guests that have all contributed to the joy being leeched from his artisan craft. Some of them - such as Reed Birney and Judith Light as a wealthy couple who make a point of frequenting Hawthorne several times a year, but share little connection to the actual food - are perfectly conceived. The logic behind others - such as John Leguizamo as a washed-up movie star - feel more like a farcical stretch. The wildcard ingredient is Margot. Anya Taylor-Joy, with her beguiling, goldfish-like visage, and Ralph Fiennes, with his serpentine sinisterness, are well-matched as cinematic foils (in my review of Don’t Worry Darling, I noted that Florence Pugh is probably “the most compulsively watchable actress under the age of 30.” ATJ would be a firm #2). But - not to belabor the culinary metaphors here - a screenplay is not unlike an eight-course meal… a delicate and strenuous alchemy in which perfection is rarely achieved. And unfortunately, Seth Reiss and Will Tracy’s script, after a strong start, begins serving its own broken emulsions. The ingredients don’t coalesce with the ideal balance or acidity (anyone who’s seen The Great knows what a skilled comedic actor Hoult can be… but his character makes less and less sense as the movie goes on). The story’s increasingly warped plot turns feel less the product of a scrupulously planned master vision unfolding with a display of consummate control… and more just like one randomly fucked-up evening (as is often the tricky problem with satire, the behavior of certain characters - specifically Slowik’s fanatically devoted kitchen staff - only make sense within the heightened construct of the film’s own artificial reality. In other words - these aren't real people). Part of the issue is that, at heart, The Menu is a simple class skewering, more than anything. But the good news is that there’s still pleasure to be had in a meal that offers comfortable calories, rather than a rapturous engagement of the palate. As a comedic thriller, the film is nimbly paced and darkly bemusing in tone (“I wrote a negative recommendation letter to Sony,” Leguizamo confesses to his personal assistant at one point. “I know,” she responds. “You cc’d me on it”). It achieves a consistent tension. It also gives Fiennes his sharpest starring role in years - even if the character offers only fleeting glimpses beyond the tortured perfectionist persona. The Menu is solid enough cuisine, but, to paraphrase Joel Robuchon… [couldn’t find appropriate Joel Robuchon quote, insert witty amuse-bouche themed closing remark instead]. |
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