Brotherhood of Death

Yesterday I had the chance to see a rare 35mm print of the ultra-low-budget Blaxploitation flick BROTHERHOOD OF DEATH thanks to Dan Halstead and the Hollywood Theatre, so naturally I took it. After all, check out this premise: three African-American Vietnam vets return home from war and use guerrilla war tactics to rid their town of the Klan. Pretty irresistible.

BROTHERHOOD OF DEATH stars real-life Washington Redskin Roy Jefferson along with Le Tari and Haskell Anderson as the Vietnam vets in question. Shortly after they return from war to their North Carolina town, a local girl (Kandy Hooker) is raped by three rednecks. Although the sympathetic sheriff (Bryan Clark) is pretty sure he knows who was behind it, a connected Klansman, he lacks the evidence to make an arrest.

So our heroes spring into action and... get the local preacher (Ed Heath) to implore the African-American community to register to vote. That's right. Instead of immediately embarking on a kill-crazy, revenge-fueled bloody rampage, we have a "get out the vote!" sequence in the middle of an exploitation movie. It's charming. And timely.

Anyway, this just enrages the Klan even more, until it eventually does become out and out war with the sheriff turning up dead and replaced by a vile racist (Brian Donohue) hell bent on keeping the local African-American community in check.

Finally as the movie nears a close, our three heroes don their military uniforms and spring into action to enact a creative plan and exact bloody revenge on the Klan.

The film's incredibly low budget is most evident during the Vietnam scenes, not only because they're clearly not shot in a jungle of any kind but also because the military uniforms are completely unrealistic. I don't know anything about the military and even I could tell they were fake. It made me wonder why they bothered including Vietnam scenes, anyway. In other Vietnam revenge flicks like FIRST BLOOD and ROLLING THUNDER, we just start with the soldiers' homecoming and skip the stuff in country.

But, that's just a nitpick. It doesn't really matter. This movie has it where it counts. The mostly amateur actors are pretty good, the rednecks are suitably awful, and the narrative takes a few turns that are more interesting that you'd normally expect from an exploitation movie. For instance, it's funny that the sheriff is basically a good guy, rather than the ringleader of the Klan, and it's cool that the first plan of action is to get the community to register to vote, before resorting to violence. Another added bonus is the music is pretty groovy.

Although this flick was made in the 70s, its bold and decidedly un-Hollywood take on the ugly fact of racism in America is just as relevant today as it ever was. Amazingly, a billboard featured in the film advertising the Klan in broad daylight on the side of a main road was an actual billboard standing in the actual North Carolina location at the time the movie was shot. The dodgy production values and violent revenge story aren't for everyone, but it's worth a watch for any fan of grindhouse cinema.

By the way, there were a couple vintage blaxploitation trailers before the feature, including one I'd never heard of before but would like to see: GORDON'S WAR. This is another Vietnam revenge flick, but this time it stars Paul Winfield. I've only ever seen him as a supporting actor in movies like THE TERMINATOR, STAR TREK II and WHITE DOG, so to see him as an action star would be amazing. Maybe some day!

The Founder

Michael Keaton has been an important actor in my life. My earliest memory of him is the scene where he battles the blanky-eating vacuum cleaner in MR. MOM. Later, when I was 8, he'd go on to star as the caped crusader in BATMAN, and just a couple of years ago he had a major comeback and a shot at Oscar gold as a washed up actor in BIRDMAN.

So, that's why I went to see THE FOUNDER, starring Keaton as Ray Kroc, the guy who ripped off the guys who founded the biggest fast food chain ever, McDonalds. THE FOUNDER was written by Robert Siegel, the genius behind THE WRESTLER, and directed by John Lee Hancock the... director who directed THE BLIND SIDE.

As the movie opens, Kroc is pounding the pavement as a milkshake machine salesman, striking out at shitty burger joint after shitty burger joint before receiving an order for eight (eight!) milkshake machines from place called McDonald's in San Bernardino. Kroc's gotta see what kind of shitty burger stand needs eight milkshake machines, so he hits the road and finds McDonald's is anything but shitty. It's clean, family-friendly, and perhaps best of all, fast.

The brothers who own the place (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) give Kroc a tour of the custom-designed kitchen, a model of assembly-line efficiency, and the wheels start turning in Kroc's brain. What if he could franchise these places? He'd make a fortune! At first the brothers are hard sells -- how do you keep up quality control when you've got restaurants all over the country? But eventually they give in and Kroc's off to the races.

Of course, you probably know where this is going. Slimy salesman Kroc dreams big and is persistent, and the down home McDonald brothers are naive and eventually get taken advantage of. It isn't long before Kroc is willing to cut corners to maximize profits, and why shouldn't he? He's a business man. Still, the McDonald brothers aren't really in it for the money and wonder why anyone would bother having lots of shitty restaurants when they could have one good one.

These three central characters, Kroc and the McDonald brothers, carry the movie. Keaton is fascinating as Kroc, simultaneously sympathetic and disgusting, and Offerman and Lynch also pull double duty as convincingly idealistic while also being frustratingly stubborn. The production design is also nice, setting the movie convincingly in the 50s and 60s and using a lot of the famous McDonalds iconography to great effect, like the arches, to great effect. You're going to want a quarter pounder and some fries after seeing this movie.

All that said, the story is predictable and too much of it is told rather than shown. Still, the pros mostly outweigh the cons and while THE FOUNDER won't blow your mind, it's worth a watch for the performances.

Although the casting of Keaton is the single best thing about this movie, it is also the most distracting thing. At 65, Keaton is over 10 years older than Kroc was at the time the movie begins, and one of his best assets -- his face -- betrays this inconsistency in closeup after closeup. This is just a minor gripe, though. If I was making a movie about a 52-year-old and Michael Keaton wanted to be in it, I'd be like, "Yes, please."

Hidden Figures

HIDDEN FIGURES was an appropriate movie to see on the eve of attending the Women's March. Jessica and I both wanted to check it out after seeing the trailers and we were not disappointed. I'm a sucker for anything space program related, especially Mercury and Apollo stuff, but this flick had a bonus because it used that stuff as a background for a more compelling story about African-American women breaking into the world of mathematics and science. Talk about a heretofore unexplored angle on a familiar story.

To the movie's credit, HIDDEN FIGURES puts its three African-American leads front and center. Taraji P. Henson stars as a "human computer" or, as they used to call them before desktop computers were a thing -- computers. She's assigned to a team tasked with getting the Mercury astronauts first safely into space and back, and then into orbit. There's a sense of urgency as the Soviet Union already has Sputnik in orbit and is about to send a man up, too.

Henson's fellow co-workers and car-poolers, as played by Octavia Spenser and Janelle Monae, attempt to climb in their NASA careers via other avenues. Spenser wants to be promoted to supervisor of her team, since she's already doing the work of a supervisor anyway, but can't get by her boss (Kirsten Dunst) who goes strictly by the minority unfriendly rules. Monae wants to be an engineer some day, but finds it impossible to continue her schooling in Virginia, where the only schools that offer the programs she needs refuse to integrate. All three actresses are great in their roles. I already knew Henson and Spenser have what it takes to carry this material, but Monae still manages to steal some scenes.

I went into this movie knowing it was based on a true story but unaware of exactly how fictionalized or true-to-life it would be. Throughout the film I thought it was possible that the three leads were composite characters, standing in as symbolic characters representing hundreds of other women. While that might be partially true, I was pleased to find out at the end of the movie that each of the three main characters were based on specific individuals: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.

If this movie had been made even 20 years ago it probably would have starred a white actor or actress as the main character whose eyes we see the African-American struggle through. The movie wouldn't have been about the struggles primarily, but about how the white main character is changed through becoming aware of these struggles. You might think that sounds pessimistic but just look at films like THE LONG WALK HOME and GLORY.

Kevin Costner is on hand as the supervisor of Henson's team, and he gets his moment to make the white folks in the crowd feel better about themselves. But that's not what most of the rest of the movie is about, and is also not to say that Costner's character or performance is the stuff of easy cliches. The movie may look like a feel good, Hollywood whitewashing of a difficult time in our history, but it's not. It's understated, realistic and pays full service to the personal experiences of these three African-American women, without bothering with seeing through the lenses of privilege.

One of the most memorable examples in the movie involves Henson's repeated races to the colored restroom. The wing of NASA she now works in doesn't have a colored restroom, so she has to run almost a mile across campus just to take a bathroom break, and then run back. All of this while her supervisor, Costner, is wondering why his new computer is always missing when he needs her. At first this serves as an example to the audience of how seemingly petty and minor Jim Crow rules can cause huge problems, but later grows to show just how absurd and fundamentally flawed racism is when it comes to more important things, whether it's big things like the progress of humankind or small things like getting a job done. These repeated runs to the restroom eventually add up to Henson's big scene, and I'm sure you'll see the clip on Oscar night.

Earlier I said this movie wasn't feel good Hollywood whitewashing, and it's not. But it is feel-good. The film is about inspiring women who have the ambition and smarts to accomplish what they want in life, even if it requires them to break ground that hasn't even been heard of before. Spenser's character learns how to program an IBM, and teaches her team the same, not just to keep her job, but to keep herself from becoming obsolete when others might be content to give up. And if you're wondering if Monae gets a judge to integrate a school for her, I'll give you one guess.

Paterson

Finally, a movie named after a man I love. That alien movie PAUL from a few years ago doesn't count. PATERSON stars Adam Driver as the titular character, a bus driver in Paterson, NJ who writes poetry in his spare time and counts poet William Carlos Williams (author of the book... "Paterson") among his favorites.

Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, PATERSON unfolds at a very Jarmusch-y pace. That is to say, it's kinda slow, takes time to linger on shots that make normal stuff seem beautiful and has lots of self contained scenes that begin and end with fade ins and fade outs.

That's not to try to make it sound boring, though. The pace isn't for everyone, but PATERSON is a very funny and touching movie about a week in one man's life as he copes with a monotonous routine. As played by Driver, Paterson is usually poker-faced so it's hard to say whether he resents this routine, is indifferent to it, or embraces it. I guess he does all three at different points of the movie, like most of the rest of us in real life.

He lives with his wife (Golshifteh Farahani) who is very supportive of his poetry (and his routines) and has ambitions to learn guitar (in a nice touch, she's inspired by guitar virtuoso Esteban of infomercial fame) as well as strike it rich at the local market with her cupcakes. She spends her days at home decorating the house in her signature black and white style. When Paterson gets home from a day of listening to his passengers' conversations on his bus and writing poetry in between, he takes Marvin the dog out for a walk and then has a beer at a local bar where he touches base with the old bartender, Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley) and the two observe the love lives of the other patrons.

This all sounds very mundane on the surface and I suppose that's what's so attractive about it. You can tell Jarmusch, as the observant filmmaker, is viewing things with sympathy and a sense of humor, and that is projected through Paterson's eyes so that you're not just watching the dry daily movements of regular people, but instead getting a peek into the little things that add up to make life special and important for very specific individuals.

I went into this movie suspecting I'd like it, since I've enjoyed several of Jarmusch's earlier films (BROKEN FLOWERS, GHOST DOG, etc.) and since Driver is always an interesting actor to watch. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit there's also a part of me that's specifically sympathetic to a guy who wants to be a writer but is driving a bus instead.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

I saw THE 36th CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN tonight, which marks my first visit to Kung Fu Theater at the Hollywood. You'd think someone who goes to the Hollywood as much as me would have been to Kung Fu Theater by now but you'd be wrong. Normally I'm just the guy annoyed that the line for Kung Fu Theater is interfering with the other movies I've showed up to check out. Tonight it snowed, though, so I didn't want to drive anywhere and the only movie the Hollywood was showing that I haven't seen before was Kung Fu, so there you have it.

Hollywood programmer Dan Halstead introduced the movie, which didn't surprise me, because his 35mm Kung Fu film collection is the stuff of legend. What did surprise me, though, is the fact that he told the tale, complete with visual illustrations projected on the screen, of how he came across his 35mm treasure trove. I won't recount it here except to say he used detective work and moxie to track a mother's lode of prints buried beneath the stage of long-closed Vancouver BC movie theater. I love you, Dan Halstead, but I'd love you even more if you'd show "Ed Wood."

The movie itself stars Gordon Liu, known to me as the guy Quentin Tarantino cast in KILL BILL vols. 1 and 2. Any film buff worth their salt has probably seen Liu's entire catalogue but I haven't so there. Liu stars as a student of a radical teacher in ancient China who is involved in a local rebellion against the occupying Manchu government. Liu and his buddies sign up to help out with the rebellion but it isn't long before the rebellion is exposed, Liu's schoolmates are captured, and Liu's father and the family business are destroyed.

Liu knows the monks from the Shaolin Temple know Kung Fu and wishes he knew it, too, so he could fight back. So, he goes there to learn it and learn it he does. There's a legendary one-hour-long training sequence, taking up about half the movie, showing Liu's progression through the 35 chambers of Shaolin -- each teaching him a valuable Kung Fu skill until he eventually graduates.

After mastering the art of Kung Fu, Liu challenges his masters by saying he'd like to set up a 36th chamber of the Shaolin by teaching outsiders Kung Fu so that they might fight back against their oppressors. With a wink and a nod, Liu's masters send him back into the world to recruit some students and kick some Manchu ass.

So, it goes without saying that this flick is considered among the best of the Kung Fu genre but one could argue the majority of the genre sucks so how good could the best possibly be? In this case, pretty good. It both created and suffers from some of the trappings of the genre, mostly stemming from the overly aggressive use of the zoom lens and the unrelenting assault of over-exaggerated sound effects.

But it only suffers if you let it. If you take the flick on its own terms, it's a pretty great crowd pleaser. If you're annoyed by entertainment and fun then you probably won't like it. But if that's the case, stop going to movies.

Silence

It's times like this I miss Roger Ebert. He was always at his best when he was writing about Scorsese and I'd like to know what he thought of SILENCE, the latest Scorsese flick I just saw tonight.

He'd probably say Scorsese is no stranger to the movie's major themes: catholicism, faith, guilt. And he'd be right. Whether Scorsese is dealing with gangsters or taxi drivers, he's always struggling with the same themes. What's right, what's wrong and how do you deal with the feelings you get from doing one or the other.

Scorsese has never dealt with these themes quite as literally as he does here with SILENCE, since it's about a couple of Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who travel to Japan to find out what has happened to their mentor and fellow priest (Liam Neeson). It's the 1600s and Christianity is frowned upon in Japan to the point that missionaries and converts are tortured and executed. Rumor has it Neeson committed apostasy and turned his back on Christ. Garfield and Driver want to find out if that's true and, if they can, spread their religion in the mean time.

After all, as the film starts, the Catholic church is about ready to give up on converting the Japanese, so this makes Garfield and Driver the last two priests sent into the foreign land. They meet up with a drunken and disheveled Japanese Christian-convert (Yōsuke Kubozuka) who serves as their guide and leads them to a faithfully converted village whose citizens live in fear of being discovered by the torturous and murderous inquisitor (Issei Ogata).

This is where things get complicated. The priests are putting the village in danger by being there. The village wants them there because they need religious guidance and leadership in their persecution. If they're caught, they'll be tortured and punished unless they renounce their religion. They can renounce their religion and still believe in it, but what's the point, in that case. If they turn their backs on Christ to avoid discomfort, do they really believe?

Now, this is where I might be shallow. Faced with similar problems I'd probably say to myself, "Look, Jesus will understand if you pretend not to believe in him just so you can avoid torture." So I'd renounce Christ, avoid torture, and then later be like, "Hey, Jesus, you know I was just saying that to avoid torture, right?" Because, to me, it seems like Jesus wouldn't want you to be tortured and would totally understand if you sold him out briefly to avoid it.

But this is what sets me apart from the characters in the movie. In the movie, of course, it's blasphemous to even pretend to give up on Christ and so everyone's trapped. The philosophical question, then, becomes, is it cool for the priests to refuse to give in if their people are going to be tortured? Or would it be more Christian of them to renounce Christ just to save their people from suffering?

I guess what makes this interesting is that we're not viewing it from an outside point of view, but firmly from the point of view of the totally 100% devout Jesuit priests. Throughout, Garfield struggles with his faith, and the title of the film refers to the silence of God and Jesus in the face of all of this suffering, and also refers to the apparent breaking of that silence during a crucial sequence near the end of the film.

Watching the flick I kept remembering that I'd just seen Garfield as a similarly suffering and devout Christian in HACKSAW RIDGE just a month or two ago. How interesting that he'd show up on screen in two similar roles. Of course, HACKSAW deals with the physical and emotional ways in which Garfield's character puts his faith into action and SILENCE deals with the opposite -- the way action must be resisted to preserve faith.

All this religious and philosophical stuff aside, the movie is beautiful to behold. All of the locations, almost exclusively outdoors and in nature, are breathtaking and all of the performances go for broke. Ogata is particularly good as the inquisitor, but there's also Tadanobu Asano as an interpreter who starts as almost impartial but bends every translated line into a contemptuous argument against faith. I mentioned the guide to the Jesuits before, Kubozuka, who is the most outwardly flawed character but who might hold the most keys to redemption -- at least he knows he's flawed.

This film is one of Scorsese's best in a career of masterpieces. Apparently it's a passion project he's been trying to get off the ground for years. Well, I'm glad it's finally here. It's fitting, I think, that America's greatest living gangster poet is also America's greatest living theological filmmaker, because it takes a guy who understands where those two worlds intersect to be able to say anything worthwhile about either of them. The only thing this movie leaves me wishing for is the words to describe what I thought about it, because I'm not doing it justice.

Divorce Italian Style

I went to see the 1961 Italian comedy DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE at the Hollywood Theatre this evening. It was presented by the guy who used to write movie reviews for the Oregonian, Shawn Levy. His most recent book, DOLCE VITA CONFIDENTIAL, covers 1950s Rome, including Italian cinema, and he's clearly an expert on the subject. He got on my bad side when I was 17 and he gave SAVING PRIVATE RYAN 5 out of 4 stars in the Oregonian because, after all, that's impossible. But now I'm an old man and I don't care anymore. It's amazing what you'll forgive in your twilight years.

DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE was directed by Pietro Germi, who is not a huge name in Italian neo-realism, and stars Marcello Mastroianni, who is. Apparently Mastroianni was a dramatic star on stage, then relegated to goofy roles on screen, and with his lead turn in LA DOLCE VITA became an unexpected Latin Lover. Uncomfortable with that role, he sought to undo it with flicks like this one.

Mastroianni stars as a Sicilian from a noble family on the decline. They're running out of money fast and Mastroianni's down to living in half of a run-down palace, with his extended family living in the other half. He's sick of his clingy wife (Daniela Rocca) and yearns for his teenaged cousin (Stefania Sandrelli) who is visiting for the summer.

Inspired by a recent case in the tabloids, Mastroianni hits on the idea of tricking his wife into cheating on him so he can catch her in the act and kill her in the heat of the moment. He figures he'll get a light sentence, due to her act of dishonoring him and his family, and then he'll be able to be with his cousin. After all, at this time and place, divorce would be impossible.

Mastroianni is all pencil mustache, cigarette holder and slicked back hair, except of course in his more manic moments, when his slicked back hair puffs up into unruly, sweaty curls. He's delightfully slimy but thanks to the miracles of cinema we're always on his side, watching in anticipation as he sets up his wife and one obstacle after another gets in the way of his attempts to trap her. Rocca, as the wife, could have had a thankless role, with an exaggerated unibrow and faint mustache meant to make her less attractive and provide excuses for Mastroianni's philandering, but the comedy allows her to rise above it as she takes the character to at first annoying and oblivious and then to cunning new heights as she turns the tables on her husband.

Even though I'm supposed to be a film buff I've never been able to sit through the entirety of either LA DOLCE VITA or 8 1/2, but a melodramatic comedy like this one is easy to love, especially with Mastroianni's alternatively twitchy and smooth performance as the transparent wannabe jilted lover. In this flick, when overblown moonlight trysts occur, they're played for laughs, and that somehow makes the heightened romance both more realistic and more fun to watch. I'm not sure what the trick is -- maybe if you're laughing, you can swallow over-the-top stuff a little more easily? Whatever it is, the fact that you're supposed to be laughing at these soap opera characters makes them easier to relate to than... well, soap opera characters.

This flick amazingly won best screenplay at the Oscars even though it's in Italian, and it's easy to see why. Something as simple as the breathless narration by Mastroianni is rendered unique by the way he starts and stops it depending on what's going on on-screen -- in one moment, he's narrating and his wife looks at home so he pauses a moment before going on more discreetly.

I saw Mastroianni once before in YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW, another Italian romantic comedy, this one with Sofia Loren, in which the two stars played three sets of couples in three short stories. Levy observed a shortened version of this flick would have fit right in with those stories, and he's right.