[201]0 // 005 Pootie Tang [2002] dir. Louis C.K.

Wow.

I’m not even really sure what I just watched. I mean, it all made sense. There was a plot, and there were characters. They deliver lines, and there’s sort of a theme here. I can totally understand why this is almost universally regarded as one of the worst movies of all time. I don’t agree with that sentiment, though. It’s not a bad movie. It’s an off-its-rocker-balls-insane-ridiculous movie. It’s aimed at  only a certain taste, and those who don’t dig the entirely absurd won’t dig this.

There’s no point in trying to sum up the plot. Its just something that needs to be seen. But let me break down what you’re in for. This is not a blaxploitation spoof. It’s not even a 70’s spoof. It is the story of a man named Pootie Tang who is so cool, he doesn’t even need to speak real words. So, when you hear the words “Sine your pitty on the runny kine,” you know that you’re either gonna get your ass whipped by his magic belt (“You can whip anyone’s ass in the world using just this belt,” says his dad), or you’re in the running for some Pootie loving.

The movie is notable for making Wanda Sykes tolerable, even though she really only just dances the entire time, shooting off half-yelled dialogue. That sounds a little worse than it actually is. Her character is almost more of a narrative tool. She, along with the actual, real narrator, co-tells the story that we’re watching. It’s not a supremely effective way of getting the point across, and it seems like the whole thing was invented just so we could get a not-so-good narrator narrating his own conversation joke later in the film.

And I guess that’s sort of the problem I have with Pootie Tang. There are so many completely wild, unexpected sources of humor that its actually a little sad that some of the jokes are so painfully obvious and unfunny. But, as often as there are groaners (“Pootie was rejuvenated. Rejuvenated! He was juvenated, lost it, and got juvenated again. Rejuvenated!” Ugh.), there are sublime physical jokes and David Cross in blackface.

I’d like to thank Louis CK for that last one. The man’s been a huge force in stand-up for years, despite people’s complete ignorance of him, and his efforts bring a lot of nice comedy cred to this film — almost all completely miscast for effect. David Cross as a black man? Dave Attell as a corporate stooge? I’d also like to thank CK for giving Kristen Bell her first screen role. You’ll have to wait till after the credits though. The man has devised a completely whacked out premise that would confound and anger most normal viewers. I can’t believe it took his wife this long to divorce him.

Honestly, just like the car jumping scene in Transporter 2, this movie has tons of “you’re with it or you’re not” moments. I can’t fault anyone for switching off when one of Chris Rock’s three characters gets killed in a freak gorilla mauling accident. I just don’t want to be friends with that person. This movie holds so much brilliance, that is worth sitting through some of the garbage it throws at you. Chris Rock is a highlight throughout. So is Jennifer Coolidge. It’s also slightly offputting to see two future The Wire actors cheesing it up in a movie like this. Especially when one of them is Reg. E. Cathy. Lance Crouthers has no career after playing Pootie. He doesn’t even have a wikipedia page. Seriously. That’s how deep this man went after whipping 100 men with a pimp belt.

This movie features some of the oddest structuring ever committed to film (You are not watching a movie called Pootie Tang. You are actually watching an 85 minute clip of a movie called Pootie Tang in Sine Your Pitty on the Runny Kine.), some of the smartest bits of stupid dialogue ever written (“Pootie Tang whip your ass so bad, you can write it off on your taxes!”), and the single best send up of the “drawing guns at noon” archetype I think I have ever seen.

There is no way that everyone would sort of love Pootie Tang the way I do. It’s got some shameful writing in it, but it is balanced out by a consumptive love for the insane and the unexplainable. It is a singular film, not tied to anything before it. Plus, it has a cow and a stalk of corn giving life advice. There is nothing else out there like Pootie Tang, and that is a mixed blessing.

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[201]0 004 // Daybreakers [2010] dir. The Speirig Brothers

Dammit. This movie was so close to being GOOD.

Daybreakers introduces us into a world run by vampires. And by run, I mean run. There are vampire governments, with elected officials. There are vampire companies, who cater to vampire needs. There are vampire agencies, that provide underground walkways so vampires can get to work in the daytime. Hell, even Chrysler is catering to the undead set. It’s this part of the movie that is genuinely good. The filmmakers have really, really created world with history. One that makes sense, and is actually interesting. Unfortunately, where all of this falls apart is in the details.

Ethan Hawke plays a hemotologist vampire. The company he works for harvests human blood for distribution to the vampires of America (the world?), and underpopulation and overhunting have caused a massive human blood shortage. Hawke is charged by deliciously evil Sam Neill to create a human blood substitute. You see, the vamps only have about one month of blood supply until it’s all out. And it turns out that a lack of human blood causes a rapid and violent de-evolution in vampires. The turn into mindless batlike creatures that will attack and eat anything, even corpses and other vampires. The vamps in charge have to deal with both the blood shortage and the ever-increasing population of these “underdwellers.”

Needless to say, humans aren’t an endangered species. They are food. Plain and simple. Humans caught out in the open will be harvested. There are some, like Ethan Hawke, who won’t drink human blood out of principle (for him, it was because he was born a human – most other vamps don’t have this ethical concern), and others who are out to help keep some fragments of humanity alive. But, after meeting a man who claims that he has found a way to reverse the vampire “disease” (Willem Dafoe), Ethan Hawke attempts to turn his blood substitute into a cure.

I said something about the details being the breaking point in Daybreakers. It’s half true. There are some brilliant touches put on this world of bloodsuckers. For one, virtually every vampire smokes. Constantly. Even better, not a single one mentions anything about the whole “can’t get cancer, can’t die, so fuck it” situation. It’s a smart addition to a pretty smart concept.

But all of this world building  comes to a retarded head in the third act, where blatantly obvious reveals are treated as if they were truly capable of pulling the rug out from under even the most remedial audience. Combined with a series of ridiculous action pieces (which generally revolve around a whole bunch of vampires killing lots of other things in waves), and the set up of a real world with real issues kind of gets ignored. It’s nice to bring up underdwellers, surround them with a sense of dread, and then use them effectively. Although that last part was apparently not apparent to the filmmakers.

There’s a lot to like here, and one of those things is not Willem Dafoe. His character, named Elvis, seems to be a redneck at heart but Willem Dafoe has no idea how to play that character. He plays him as an oddly spiritual gruff guy, with a really annoying speech-giving habit. His introduction is so mind numbingly stupid in context, that the character never fully recovers. He summons Ethan Hawke to meet about a cure to vampirism, and greets him with a completely ridiculous speech about how vampires are like trees. He does the same thing later in a badly presented third act reveal.

What follows next is a complete and utter ruination of the end of Daybreakers. If you care, please read on. If not, here’s a nice little sum-up: Daybreakers is an uncommonly smart straight up horror film that sort of sullies its well thought out and presented premise with a slightly silly third act, and characters that never quite seem to work. It’s certainly a lot better than a lot of movies in the same genre, but it just doesn’t quite summon the strength to be actually interesting or good.

SPOILERS: THIS WILL RUIN THE END OF DAYBREAKERS.

There is a cure. Actually, two. One is to expose the vampire to the sunlight for just the right amount of time. Apparently, right before it kills them it strips away the virus. It’s a little silly, but I chose to believe in it. The second cure is the blood of the “cured” vampires. Drinking it causes the virus to be fought off by the “cleansed” blood, and those vampires go back to being human. Ethan Hawke is cured the with the first method. The biggest problem in the movie is that the main conceit – there is a blood shortage, and a possible cure – comes to a perfectly tied-up conclusion in the third act. AND THE MOVIE COMPLETELY IGNORES IT.

You see, one of Ethan Hawkes hemotologist vamp friends creates a viable substitute. Evil Sam Neill shows Hawke the vial containing the liquid. And then tells him that this vial is going into mass production the following week. You see where this would go? A newly cured Ethan Hawke with a body full of vampire-cure, could simply fill that vial with his blood and get it shipped off. Thereby curing most, if not all of the vampires in the world – which is what he has been trying to do the entire movie. Instead, he kills Sam Neill by allowing himself to be bitten. This turns Neill human, and Neill is then attacked by a vampire army. Turning them all human. And then they are attacked by more soldiers. Turning them all human. And then everyone gets gunned down (except the main characters, who go on a cross country trip to cure vampires).

Not only would that have totally tied up the story were there to be no sequel, it would have set up a second film where the remaining vampires are holding out against the previously persecuted humans. But, making a logical film within the rules established with the promise of a good second film (currently they’re planning a prequel which is rubbish) was not something on the Speirig Brothers to-do list.

There have been reviewers that have compared the vampires to Americans – people who have been on top for so long, that they don’t see the oncoming fall – and this isn’t an unfair comparison. Plus, the Speirigs have certainly created an interesting vampire mythology and universe. But I sure wish the whole movie would have explored that theme instead of ignoring good plotting in favor of a good ole U.S. of A machinegun bloodbath.

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[201]0 // 003 Moon [2009] dir. Duncan Jones

Wow.

The worst part about Moon is how impossible it is to explain it without spoilers. I’m leaving the comments open for discussion about the movie for those who have seen it. So, if you want to see Moon unspoiled, DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS. Onward.

It is the future. Helium-3 pockets have been discovered on the moon, and a large company is mining these resources to provide cheap energy to 70% of the planet. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a mining supervisor of sorts who is ending his three-year contract on Moon Base Sarang. He’s been watching over the base and the mining robots for all that time all by himself. His only companion is a robot named GERTY who is pretty much there to run the higher functions of the base while providing Sam with anything he needs to get the job done. Despite this, Sam is a lonely guy. Direct communication with the Earth has been disabled by some solar flares, so all he has is a pseudo letter correspondence with his wife and young child via recorded video. But, it’s only two weeks until his contract ends and its nearing time that he leave the moon to rejoin his planet. But the effects of a thee year tour with nobody else around are starting to take their toll, and Sam starts seeing some weird shit.

And that’s all you get. To say any more would be to deprive you of all the impact of one of the best films of last year. There aren’t any twists, per se. It’s just that to dissect this film thematically would require me to talk about the plot past the setup, and the thrill of seeing that plot unfold is much more interesting than me talking about it.

It’s a wonderful, small movie. Sam Rockwell gives what is almost assuredly the best performance of his career as Sam. We get to see him play the man ready to begin his three year isolation on a foreign body, and play the tenured man who has dealt with that isolation for the past almost 1,000 days. It’s a remarkable performance, and its one that will be outright ignored at awards time because of both the size and performance of the film at the box office (small, and mediocre) and the fact that the role of Sam Bell has no “actorly” moments that remind you “this is a great performance, dear Academy.” What I’m trying to say is that Sam Rockwell doesn’t Sean Penn this performance.

What he does do is capture the spirit of humanity, both thematically and emotionally, while stranded alone on an orbiting rock. There is nuance to spare here, and the movie demands multiple viewings to sort out the subtleties after the story has been experienced once. Just as nuanced is first time director Duncan Jones’ view of the future. Besides an artificially intelligent robot and a fully formed lunar base, there’s not a lot of tech innovation here – just a world that works. Jones and his production design crew fill the Sarang interiors with tons of detail, none of which are flashy, and all of which make sense in context. The movie is beautiful in a hollowed out sort of way, and Clint Mansell proves without question that he is the best small movie composer working. His score is as sparse as the landscape, but exponentially more beautiful.

There is so much to love about Moon. It’s a wonderfully conceived, acted, designed, directed, and scored movie. And, just like the comparable District 9, the effects work is nigh upon seamless for such a tiny budget. I hope Duncan Jones and Neill Blomkamp (and Primer auteur Shane Carruth, for that matter) continue to work in sci-fi for a long time. They’re single-handedly restoring the faith that George Lucas, McG, and James Cameron have so delicately pissed away this decade. Leave it to the Spawn of Ziggy Stardust and a stupefyingly young South African to tell two of the best tales the genre has seen in years.

I would be exceeding my place to declare Moon a masterpiece. I’ve seen the movie one time, less than six hours ago. But it’s a film that I think I will find myself watching more than twice in this calendar year, and maybe at that time I will be able to give it the title that it may end up deserving. Regardless of that fact, Moon is a near perfect film, an assured debut of a hopefully prolific filmmaker, and one of the best films I have seen in the last 365 days.

Science Fiction is nothing more than the use of the fantastic to tell us about the things that are ultimately very personal and human, and Moon is one of the few movies that manages to transport us to another time and place to remind us why being a human is so unique and important. We are lucky to have Duncan Jones and Sam Rockwell. We are better for having movies like Moon.

UPDATE: According to this article at CHUD, Sony Pictures Classics is not even sending screener copies of the film to awards affiliated folks. I can’t say I’m shocked, but their attempt to pass off the dropping of the ball on internet piracy rather than “we just don’t wanna,” is a little dumb. Either way, this virtually guarantees that Sam Rockwell will be getting zero nominations outside of the useless Saturn awards.

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[201]0 // 002 Blood Car [2007] dir. Alex Orr

“Let me set this up for you… You know the phrase ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen?’ Well, people still say that. But they don’t drive cars.”

Those words, spoken by a potato chip chomping narrator, begin our journey into the futuristic world of Blood Car. Somehow these people made a movie about a car that runs on murdered human beings’ blood and didn’t make it into a horror movie. They filled it with ridiculous humor and on-the-nose satire. Given the immeasurably small budget (Reported be be less than $25,000) Alex Orr has made one hell of a flick. It manages to be an amalgamation of several films while being its own thing at the same time.

Archie is a vegan kindergarten teacher who is developing an engine that works on wheat grass. Maybe, in a normal world, this would be some damn hippie bullshit. But in the world presented in the film (a world that is “maybe two weeks from now,” according to the same narrator), gas has risen to $40 a gallon, and there are no more cars on the road. Only the obscenely wealthy drive – the rest of the cars on the planet have been abandoned in automobile graveyards, where horny teenagers still have sex in them. But, back to Archie.

He’s hit a dead end in the engine experiment when in a fit of drunkenness, he cuts his hand on a broken vodka bottle (complete with the hammer and sickle logo – the film, if nothing else, has class) and the engine roars to life with the bloodfuel. Tasked with finding new fuel supplies to maintain the ungodly amount of pussy he gets from being the only guy in town with a car, Archie begins by using his own emaciated frame for the gas. Then he moves on to squirrels, chained up dogs, dead neighbors before getting his hands dirty with actual manslaughter via lawnmower blades he has placed in the trunk.

But, beyond all of this, there is almost no horror involved in this film. Sure, people get hacked apart by axes, little kids get bullets in the brain, and shady government agents get shredded by the ultimate Honda Civic mod. But this is all part of the spot-on absurdist humor of the film. It does right what most fresh-out-of-college filmmakers do wrong. There are homages to other films, the end of the film is essentially the end of The Godfather, and there are kills directly out of Goodfellas and The Shining. But Blood Car is smart enough to use these references inside a framework all its own. They’re nice moments for the people in the audience who will recognize them, not blatant rip-offs for throwback value.

Add in Anna Chlumsky as a all-organic kiosk owner who sells Archie his wheat grass and Katie Howlett as the sexpot who owns the rival stand, simply called MEAT, and you’ve got a decent cast that understands the ridiculousness of the plot without overselling it. The script is tight, and above all, actually funny. This actually may be the funniest movie I have ever seen that includes gags about puppies and five-year-olds getting murdered.

Blood Car will never go down in history as anything other than a deceptively smart piece of absurd, violent filmmaking, but Alex Orr creates a world that is worth revisiting. While the government satire may be a little heavy-handed (and it’s understandable but off-putting that there is no one over thirty in this film), the final speech given by the government agent about the Blood Car in question is an exercise in brilliance. Not only does the logic not work, the phrasing and the delivery of these absurd declarations elevates the material to far above its no-budget DIY roots. I’d also be remiss to neglect the brilliant way the CIA spooks clean up after a clean hit.

I am glad that there are smart, resourceful, and talented people like Alex Orr and his crew that get to make movies that appeal to insane people. There is so much unmitigated garbage floating around in the independent scene, that it is a welcome bit of refreshment to see a film as well put together and executed as Blood Car. Its premise and delivery maximize the retardedness of every moment. And that’s what makes it so smart.

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[201]0 // 001: The Bank Job [2008] dir. Roger Donaldson

The first quarter of any given year brings a heavily mixed bag of film to us. Normally, January, February and March are the could-have-been-a-contender Oscar crowd’s consolation prize and the dumping ground for any assortment of terrible horror and sci-fi flicks that are meant to capitalize on people being sick of schmaltzy best picture flicks all month prior. But, often, that first quarter finds a few films that serve as the film industry’s misfit toys. They tend to be small films with a simple story that can tread the waters between action and drama. They tend to hav workingman directors and an ensemble cast of mostly nobodies. They also, if we’re fortunate, tend to be very well done flicks that simply aren’t heavy enough in scope to appeal to the fanboys of summer.

This is exactly where The Bank Job fits. It’s the kind of movie that people claim we don’t make anymore. It’s a tiny little heist flick set in the year 1970, that finds a small group of friends thrust into a theft that is way over their heads, both technically and politically. You see, they have to break into a bank’s vault to steal incriminating photos of a royal family member taken by a black power luminariy from a safe deposit box. Not that they know this – they just assume they’re there to grab as much cash and valuables as possible.

Roger Donaldson has made a ton of these kinds of movies, and he is indispensable at managing the three disparate arcs (the robbers, the politicians, and the black power camp) and combining them into is a well-paced, well-told simple story. Jason Statham gives what is possibly his best, and undoubtedly his most subdued performance as Terry, a husband and father in a working class home who is talked into the biggest score of his life by a seductive old flame (Saffron Burrows) who is working hand-in-hand with MI-5 to bring down Michael X, the black power magnate.

The other bit of genius in this movie is the casting and the set-slash-costume design. The flick is shot in very subdued tones, and all of the gang of friends look definitely like they walked out of the 70s. The supporting cast is not deep, but they are all performed with detail and precision by their actors. This flick is very much a working class picture. There is little fanfare or flair in the proceedings, but everyone from the focus puller to the Porn King of London are all paying their roles like honest to god human beings.

The Bank Job is a film that will certainly never gain a huge audience. It is a good story told well, but without any adornments or flashy actor and director moments. It is simply a movie about working class men told by working class filmmakers, and the synergy is completely wonderful. Watching Jason Statham play a dad is worth it. Watching a murderous old man with kidney stones get kicked in the guts often is worth it. Seeing Colin Salmon in a beard is worth it.

It’s an obvious Hollywood film, but the focus is entirely on the plot and the characters. And hey, it’s actually watchable and compelling throughout. There is no reason for the average person to go rush out to see this film, but if it’s on the television or you just need a nice little flick to pass the time one night, there’s no harm in checking out The Bank Job. I am happy that men like Roger Donaldson exist, and can make films like this with the support of the studios.

I really hope that this is the kind of film that we never stop making.

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