No, really. I wouldn’t call myself a Jerry Lewis fan (his brand of humor had already gone out of fashion by the time I was born), but he did do an excellent job in The King of Comedy (which is, I can assure you, not the film you want to watch while you’re depressed). Anyway, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, even if you take his claim of banging Marilyn Monroe with a grain of salt. I was unaware he had written a highly-praised book on directing, or taught directing classes attended by Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas. He also seems to be a remarkably astute businessman, since he made the studios promise to give all the rights to his movies back after 30 years.
Anyway, it’s an interesting piece, even if you’re not particularly a Jerry Lewis fan.
Since trailers for two of the films Howard Waldrop and I will be reviewing for Locus Online have recently dropped, I thought a trailer roundup was in order:
In November we’ll be reviewing Hugo (AKA Hugo Cabaret, based on Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret), a steampunk children’s fantasy from Martin Scorsese:
Which begs the question: Will Hugo be up for a Hugo?
Next year comes John Carter, AKA John Carter of Mars, AKA A Princess of Mars) directed by Pixar’s Andrew Stanton from a script written by Michael Chabon:
Don Webb alerted me to the existence of Hotel Torgo, a documentary on Manos: The Hands of Fate. It features commentary by El Paso SF fan Richard Brandt (a regular Nova Express reader, back in the day), and memories by cast member Bernie Rosenblum.
Warning: You do have to put up with annoying, intrusive Microsoft ads.
Your normal moviegoer isn’t going to touch this with a ten-foot pole, so this review is aimed at fellow freak-cinema aficionados, the sort of people who see a trailer for a film about a murderous telekinetic tire, and go “Oh yeah! I have to see that!”
You might want to reconsider.
I am totally down with the idea of a film about a murderous telekinetic tire, but Rubber disappointed me. About half the film, the scenes of the tire itself, its slowly building murderous rampage (it starts out with small animals before going all Scannners on various humans unfortunate enough to cross its path), and it stalking a random hot French chick, work almost as well as I hoped they would. All it needed was some recycled Michael Bay music for the perfect over-dramatic touch.
Hot French chick included. Sadly, it doesn't really help.
Unfortunately, the other half of the film ruins the tire-rampage sections, by imposing an arty-farty, post-modern, metafictional framing device whereby a bunch of slow-witted redshirts are lured into the desert to watch the tire’s rampage through dispensed binoculars as part of some sort of…what? Performance art? These parts serve only to pad out the film (and it’s a bad sign when an 82 minute film feels badly padded), provide a few (far too few) laughs, and heighten the artificial nature of the whole endeavor.
This is the wrong narrative strategy.
The way to make a film like this work is never to wink at the audience. Minoru Kawasaki provides great example of how to do this in The Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala. The more absurd the actions, the more serious the actors played it. No one pointed out the combat boots sticking out of the giant squid, or the obvious zipper on the back of the koala’s head. Unlike Rubber, nobody comes out and gives a speech at the beginning about why things are done for “no reason.” Or, to pick a domestic example, no one walks on screen during Team America: World Police to point out how all the characters are marionettes.
Some things in the film work. The scene of the tire sitting in the hotel room watching NASCAR really captures the absurdest vibe the director seemed to be aiming for. The opening bit where the car knocks down every single artfully disarrayed breakaway chair almost works as a sort of white trash Jacques Tati cinematic tone poem. It’s got well-executed exploding heads. And you get to see Roxane Mesquida’s very shapely French ass for a few seconds while she takes a shower, which would be a big deal if it wasn’t for, you know, the Internet. (NSFW. You’re welcome.)
About the only way I can recommend seeing this is as part of a viewing party for weird films, especially if you give out a prize for whoever can come up with the most tire-related puns. But even in that context, it’s not remotely as inventive (or interesting) as the far-less-technically-competent Die, You Zombie Bastards!, which delivers steady doses of WTF throughout.
My advice? You shouldn’t see any films about murderous telekinetic tires until a better one rolls along.
Here’s the trailer, which includes most of the best scenes:
Here’s a Top 100 List broken out by sub-genre. Unfortunately, in addition to expanding the list to include things like Westerns, it also lets some dubious crap in. (Constantine and Rendition? Really?) And Ronin is a great car chase surrounded by a pretty mediocre thriller.
Today we come up on the 80th anniversary of an unsolved death that marked a major scandal for a prominent political figure. The badly bruised body of beautiful 25-year old girl washed up on the beach at Long Island, her liver showing traces of Veronal (the first commercially available barbiturate). The body turned out to be one Starr Faithfull, a “good time girl” well known on the Boston social scene.
That would be interesting enough. But it turned out that Starr Faithfull kept a diary, in which she described having an affair with a prominent political figure. The figure turned out to be Boston Mayor Andrew James Peters, who denied the affair, but who ended up paying $20,000 worth of hush money to Starr Faithfull’s father.
John O’Hara would later use elements of the story in his novel BUtterfield 8, though set in New York rather than Boston, which lead to Elizabeth Taylor’s Academy Award winning performance in the movie of the same name.
They’re going to be filming in El Paso, just like the original.
Wait, it gets better: The film stars Jackey Raye Jones, who played the little girl in the original Manos: The Hands of Fate. Plus a character played by Joe Warren, the son of original Manos director Harold Warren.
The kicker? Tom Neyman is back as The Master.
And yes, there’s a poster:
You could say that making a sequel to one of the worst films ever made is a bad idea, but frankly, the entire enterprise is beyond your puny mortal concepts of “good” and “bad”…
