The Warriors

Walter Hill says his cult classic "The Warriors" is about courage, but it certainly isn't about heroism. In retrospect, the Warriors themselves are hardly distinguishable from one another except that the one that's arrested is lewd and the one who proclaims himself leader is (almost parodistically) as plain as toast, the butter being his stagnant, pretty boy hairdo. They aren't really heroes in either the Greek sense or the comic book sense; they, like the rest of the gangs that they mingle with in the course of this unforgiving night, just want to survive and maintain a grip on their turf. Their blandness or fungibility may actually be key; the movie is not about them, it's about what happens to them--or, rather, how it happens to them.

Hill's not-too-distant future isn't a product of pessimism like Kubrick's ("A Clockwork Orange") or Ridley Scott's ("Blade Runner"); in fact it's the product of no foresight or pretense to such at all. It's more of a fantasy for kids who were becoming nauseated by disco and starting to turn to punk and I think the proto-punk nihilism is what continues to be appealing to young people today, twenty-eight years after the movie's release. It's not as affectless as it seems, because, as it is for so many teens, the nihilism here is just a cover for a small-minded, but universal, code of honor. The movie kind of ridicules the traditional notion of the hero wanting more out of life than his petty brushes with gangsters, but, in a quiet way, it doesn't. It knows that the kids in the audience wouldn't have admitted to enjoying that, so it gave the hormone-inflicted pre-emo audience what it consciously demanded: rock, sex and fighting. The flick is cut expertly to the jock-rock (provided mostly by Joe Walsh) and slummy late-seventies New York looks demonic in seedy, after-hours neon and fluorescent lighting that looks like "American Graffiti" growing up into "Pulp Fiction." It's the New York of "Taxi Driver," but chillier, emptier, more industrial and less fleshy. It's corrupt in a more juvenile way. Only the imaginatively-themed gangs and the coppers in pursuit are out at this late hour--which is, consciously, well past the teenie bopper audience's bedtime--and anybody else on the scene (like two yuppie couples coming home from a disco) is made to know that they do not belong.

To me, "The Warriors" is power-pop kitsch equal to other movies overly-evocative of their eras such as "Rebel Without a Cause," "Easy Rider," "Saturday Night Fever" and "Scarface." It's fun in a silly, absurd, goofball kind of way, but it's not altogether witless. When David Patrick Kelly famously jeers, "War-riors, come out and play-ay," you know that he knows the coke-headed absurdity of it all.

Robocop

"Robocop" is Paul Verhoeven's nice little satire of corporatization. It's witty and affably small for a movie of its type, but it's also very thin. The Detroit slum villains (who are, notably, forty-year-old white men) are lusciously sadistic like the comic book bad guys they are supposedly meant to reflect, but the heroes (when stripped of their metal chasis) aren't particularly interesting. Peter Weller is a good, straight-man satirist when his vocoder is in place, but his partner in the police force, played by Nancy Allen, has the faintness of a plot device. Some of the framework of the plot is likewise shoddy, but it's mostly swept underneath the carpet of clever direction and fluky action sequences. The vaguely overcast cyberpunk atmosphere is gloomy, but it's a tasty little action confection that's very easy to swallow.

Talk to Me / Inland Empire

Talk to Me – August 22, 2007

Even if, after a certain point, "Talk to Me" becomes utterly predictable, there are certain things that the movie gets very right. First of all, the center of this artist biopic is not a celebrity on the level of Johnny Cash or Ray Charles; Petey Green (Don Cheadle) is not in the pop mainstream and therefore most of us cannot bring our celebrity-worship of him into the theater and turn his life into an epic. Green was a local-level celebrity for the Washington D.C. listeners of his morning radio show which gave a voice to the concerns of Civil Rights era blacks. That's an easy storyline to turn messagey and drench with a syrup of lamentation for the good old days of protest and progress and optimism. But Kasi Lemmons, the director, never overplays the period or takes cheap shots at racists or reactionaries. Yes, Green's fashions may lead one to believe that this is an ill-conceived sequel to "The Ladies Man," but Don Cheadle plays him with such scrappy vitality that one can believe that he'd wear that clothing and one knows why. One could also believe that he'd peg WOL-AM executive and future manager Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) as an Uncle Tom or a Sidney Poitier-wannabe. But Ejiofor is convincing, too - he's wearing a conservative gray suit because he doesn't have Green's unrestricted mouth. He is not a coward or reactionary, though, and neither are his sententious white coworkers (Martin Sheen as the eldest and best-played among them). Ejiofor was in "Inside Man" and "Children of Men," but I hardly remember him in the latter and not at all in the former, which I watched recently. I do remember him, though, in "Kinky Boots" (yes, I saw "Kinky Boots") where he gave a sweetly flamboyant performance as a transvestite. It may not have been enough to have transcended that movie, which wasn't very good, but, considering his performance in "Talk to Me" it shows how wonderfully talented and diverse a performer he is and, I hope, continues profitably to be. Eventually, the plot clicks (at an accelerated pace) through every big and expected cliché - alcoholism, marital infidelity, not wanting to make it to the top despite his manager's pushiness, the fight between he and Hughes that ensues, Green's wife (Taraji P. Henson) facilitating a making-up between them and so on. But the movie is worth seeing if only for the sequence surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death, which is so evocative that it gives new meaning to its significance for someone like me who did not live through it. And there's no tabloid gush to it at all.

Inland Empire – August 22, 2007

What has happened to David Lynch? I'm loath to say that sometimes it may be best for an artist to be restricted by producers and executives because, in this self-distributed venture, Lynch has left the planet. "Inland Empire" makes "Eraserhead" or "Mulholland Drive" or even "Lost Highway" look like "Just My Luck" because it hasn't the slightest degree of cohesion. The one-day-at-a-time shooting technique is enjoyable to no one but those involved and probably wasn't too enjoyable for Laura Dern who spends three hours panting and pouting and spewing dialogue into dead ends. In the movie, she's a big-time Hollywood actress taking on a doomed role - the actress in the original version of the movie-within-the-movie (which is a paltry imitation of any studio film made since 1960) was murdered. After some semblance of a plot has been promisingly established, our Alice is irrevocably dropped off in Wonderland, but, the problem is, there wasn't even a hole. Themes like time and identity are alluded to, but Dern (and everyone else) has so many doppelgangers that one loses track of who the real Dern is--and so do her characters.

Exploration of schizophrenia is nothing new to movies and certainly not to Lynch, but who cares if a character is losing her personality if her personality is uninteresting to begin with. And with no anchor personality, the tension and thriller aspects of the film become nullified. Loss of identity and the fulfillment of prophecy are distilled into an interdimensional, inter-temporal chase sequence that lacks bite because there are too many close-ups and reaction shots and unrelated clues and dark hallways. And only a few scenes, like those of banal bunny rabbits in a drab sitcom and whores dancing to "The Loco-Motion" and creepy floating faces, remind you that this is even a David Lynch film. He seems to be the same affable, well-meaning and cheerfully wacky goofball that he's always been, but "Inland Empire" hardly reflects that. Part of what made his surrealism work was his humor - the world view that self-consciously mixes Boy Scout honor with an unfiltered macabre curiosity. That, balanced with a certain romanticism, dreaminess and the sensibilities of both an expert storyteller and an abstract painter, is what makes Lynch's best films great. It's a very precise mixture: too much of one element can result in good but lesser pictures ("Wild at Heart" and "Lost Highway"); too little of either result in this.

I admit that I admire the "experiment" - this was shot on digital video (which you get used to but seems terribly like an MTV reality show at first) and more-or-less improvised. To be able to do that is any filmmaker's dream and one as accomplished as Lynch's right, but it lacks an overriding idea, vision, premise or theme. Experimental movies may not need plots, but they need something stronger than an assortment of motifs; in the very least there should be stark images that invoke ideas and emotions beyond "how much longer until this is over?" I could be wrong; Lynch could have had some mystical epiphany in the editing room or while directing Laura Dern (who gives a strong and diverse performance but is the only one allowed enough screen time and transparency to do so) to be terrified by this or that. If there is one, though, it's denser a thought and less pleasant a trip than it has ever been before. I want the old David Lynch back and I hope he's back soon.