Kennelco Film Diary

(1983) dir. Irvin Kershner
viewed: 08/12/07

Part two of my little television broadcast James Bond/Sean Connery double feature, care of Mexican television.  These movies were broadcast en Ingles con subtitles.  This was an interesting film to show in contrast with Dr. No (1962) being Connery´s reprisal and final portrayal of James bond versus Dr. No `s first appearance.

Directed by Irvin Kershner, who delivered the best of the Star Wars series with Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and noted to be the only director to do both Bond and Star Wars, this film is entertaining and campy, but no great shakes.  The film is steeped in what became the cliches and requisites of all Bond films.  Like so many Hollywood franchises, the movies feel somewhat rote in their features of “Bond girls”, cheesy theme songs, and exotic locales.  Paint by numbers stuff.

Actually, the film is very interesting in contrast with Dr. No because it is also about Bond´s virility.  Connery, now in his 50`s is still a very sturdy, handsome fellow, but the first thought in looking at him is that he´s an older gentleman.  He is no longer the pulse-charging thrill of a hunk that he was.  The film is an interesting play on his masculinity and aging.  At first, Bond´s new “M” instructs him that he is over the hill and needs to stop eating red meat, drinking vodka, and to take care of his “free radicals” and sends him to a health spa.  Many gags revolve around colonics and his manhood.  Connery plays it up quite admirably, getting at least five babes into the sack and saving the world in a number of less-fashionable clothing items than his previous years.  Those sweatsuits are vile.

The worst of the clothing disasters are worn by Barbara Carrera, who plays Fatima Blush, the villainess, who also manages to bed Bond.  Those outfits really give the 1970`s a run for their money with out-and-out badness.  At least her hair looks okay. 

I´ve read that this film is a re-make of Thunderball (1965), which was really due to a rights issue regarding the character that allowed for two duelling Bond films to appear in 1983, Connery´s Never Say Never Again against Roger Moore´s Octopussy.  Who knows?

Again, virility.  I am sure that it´s been written about to the Nth degree so I won´t go into it deeply, but it is an interesting middle-aged, semi-mid-life-crisis Bond.  Of course, the crisis is for the perception of the man and his abilities.  Bond never doubts himself, which is all part of his masculinity and machismo, and as he says to the villain, “I never lose”.  Of course not!  The hero never loses!  Especially the most macho, sexy, virile hero in American cinema.  Especially not the 1962 version of Connery, and to his credit, he still looks great in 1983.  But the thought that every young thing with a funny name just sees him and wants to make love to him…it gets a little hard to swallow.

(1962) dir. Terence Young
viewed: 08/12/07

Kicking back on holiday in Mexico for me isn´t always about seeking out the beach or trying to cull the amount of culture that I can lay my hands on.  Vacation is also about relaxing and chilling out.  And when I stumbled on the showings of two James Bond flicks yesterday, the initial one, the initial Sean Connery film, Dr. No, and titilated by the fine opening sequence of colorful silhouettes dancing, I was drawn in.  I often note here that I rarely watch broadcast television versions of films, but here is the latest exception.  Shown on a channel called Golden, they only broke once for commercials and besides not being letterboxed, was probably pretty good as far as these things go.

As I have also noted here briefly, I am not a dyed in the wool Bonds fan.  But this movie is pretty much the stuff.  Iconic moments, such as the initial introduction of the amazing Sean Connery, cigarrette dangling laconically from his lips, utters the initial quotable quote: “Bond. James Bond.”  and Connery himself, pure masculinity and suavity circa 1962 (and still) just exudes sexuality, machismo, and coolness.  Is there anyone more suave and alluring?  Doubtful.

The film has several peak moments as this and plays along pretty doggone fun throughout, though occasionally slower than one might be used to.  Another key peak is the iconic guitar riff, James Barry’s “James Bond Theme”.  That riff still just kicks ass and the musical score is fresh and fun.  Still the film is all about Connery, all about masculinity, all about sexual roles and ideals, and the narrative is really the background to this lustful portrayal.  Women are all just willing sex objects.  Well, more than objects…they function physically as well.  They are also interestingly intended to read as multicultural, too. 

Connery though carries this film with his charisma.  He is virility embodied in man, handsomely good-looking, aesthetically built, and clever and strong.  He is Superman. 

The sexual mores played out here are for the original Playboy generation.  And while there is much to critique in it, one also continues to react to it with the same allure and awe that made these images enduring.  I want to go back in time and swill vodka martinis with the guy and go for a roll in the hay with these sex toy dames (okay, I´m exagerrating for impact here, but you get my point.)  This film is pure.  Pure ideology.  Pure snapshot of the period.  And Connery…he is truly the man´s man, the ubermensch, el rey de cine.

(1966) dir. Howard Hawks
viewed: 08/27/06

I, as I often have stated here, hate watching movies on broadcast television and almost utterly refuse to do so.  So, why I decided to watch Howard Hawks’ El Dorado, I can only say that I happened to catch it coming on and decided to stick with it.  AMC used to be a good film network, but now they have an horrendous number of ads running frequently throughout a film.  I understand that TCM still runs films in their full duration.  AMC also plays a lot of modern crap that can hardly be considered “American Movie Classics”.

That said, El Dorado, is perhaps a classic American movie.  It’s directed by one of Hollywood’s true auteurs, Howard Hawks, and stars some big name talent like John Wayne and Robert Mitchum and features some other solid performances from Ed Asner, Arthur Hunnicutt, and a very young James Caan. 

It’s cut from a classic form cloth, in fact, many speculate that this film is essentially a remake of Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) rather than an adaptation of a novel as the film claims.  It’s interesting since this film is created out of the studio system by the heavyweights of the system but is in close time proximity to significant twists on the genre in such films as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) &  Little Big Man (1970), El Dorado is a more traditional Western in more ways than one.

It clearly depicts the last flares of a dying system and approach to genre, but does so with much of the traditional system’s qualities and charms.  Wayne and Mitchum are very strong, pulling the others along with them in numerous moments, and I am sure that the film continues to be rife with characteristics of Hawks’s films and is probably quite interesting from that perspective.  This was his second to last completed film.

Utlimately, I found it a mixed bag, myself.  When the classic pieces were working and when the story was clicking, there were many moments and sequences of good, classic Western material.  But really, the film does feel like a retread.  The story is not particularly compelling, sort of straight Oater fare.  One evil cattle baron tries to tough out another cattleman for the water rights to his land.  Hired guns are hired.  It all ends in a shoot-out.  There is not a great sense of period or significance.  As in Hawks’s films, it’s about the relationships between men and men and men and women, and therein lies the interest and pleasures.

I think it would be interesting to chart the significant developments in the Western, as it moved from certain codification and characteristics to the points in which those codes became subverted or replayed.  Where this film falls on that chart or timeline could be particularly interesting, especially for such a major director of classic Hollywood and major stars such as “The Duke”.   That said, that’s probably been done and all I need to do is Google it.

(2002) dir. George Lucas
viewed: 05/22/05

Ah,…Star Wars.

As a general rule, I won’t watch anything in an “edited-for-television” mode. But with Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) just released and my impending trip to the theater to see it, I was thinking that it would be good to revisit the 2nd …or is it 5th chapter of this saga, because the last and only time I had seen it was in the theater on its initial release and disappointment.

When Fox broadcast this, I realized the opportunity to save myself the trouble of renting the DVD and could watch it in its most plebian format. Then I would feel prepared to head out to the cinema to catch the final installment.

I grew up with this stuff, like many a person of the era. I saw the first film in the theater in 1977, a mere 28 years ago. I was agog over it from the age of 8-14 or so. And I still have a soft spot for it. But significantly, I am not part of this modern zealot phenomenon whose fanatacism is far more proliferated and often even more insane than the cult of Star Trek. Is it all about Science Fiction culture?

Anyways, my first viewing of Attack of the Clones was in the theater and was disappointing. While I thought it was an improvement on Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999), it was still a huge letdown. Was Lucas really so bad at so many aspects of making a film?

The love story is awful, painfully awful. The cringe-inducing dialogue and the amazingly over-the-top cliche’s of soft-lit romantic backdrops to the lovers’ conversations are truly things for the ages. Interestingly, it seemed as if they cut some of it for the telecast.

Still, the film is more fun than the first, and I am not just talking about when Natalie Portman’s shirt gets ripped to reveal her midriff. Though that still does crack me up like nobody’s business.

It’s amazing how many plot points that I had forgotten in the years since I had seen it. Who was making the clones, why they were making the clones, all about the death of Anakin’s mother, etc., etc. So re-viewing it helped for going to see the new film. And for some reason, I felt less harshly critical of it. Maybe I’m just softening up after all these years.

(1985) dir. Martin Scorsese
viewed: 07/06/02

After Hours was made to be a cult film, one would think.

I certainly adopted it as such as a teenager when I first saw it. I remember going to watch it in the theater and, liking it so much, I coerced some friends to watch it again. Even back in my teenage years, repeat viewing in a theater was a pretty rare thing for a film.

For me, it was an oddly pivotal film, as it initiated my very first interests in contemporary directors and got me thinking about films from an auteurial perspective, I guess you could say.

It is perhaps a little ironic that this film, which got me interested in Scorsese, in many ways is somewhat a-typical of Scorsese’s main body of work. It’s not altogether a-typical, in that Scorsese has been continually interested in genre film and has tried his hand at a number of genres: musicals (New York, New York (1977)), biblical epics (Last Temptation of Christ, The (1988)), period literary adaptations (The Age of Innocence (1993)), and his bread and butter, the modern “gangster” films, (Goodfellas (1990)).

So, somehow, this contemporary (it was contemporary in its day) comedy seems another stab at playing the genre fields as many of the more “classic” American auteurs were known to do, like Howard Hawks or Frank Capra.

Another of Scorsese’s trademarks is his employment of 20th Century music as ambient commentary, and the film does contain some great use of music, including Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” and Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”

After Hours is a film about anxiety, a particularly urban anxiety, a fear of the nighttime denizen of New York City — circa 1985 — (Please see Whodini’s 1984 track “The Freaks Come Out at Night” — a more obvious version of this film would have certainly included this song as a constant refrain), which nowadays looks like a very dated vision of underground life. Griffin Dunne is Paul Hackett, a lonely “word processor” who finds himself lost in SoHo with not enough money to make it home again (an interestingly pre-ATM era predicament), confronted with a bizarre assortment of New York’s “after hours” crowd. It’s a paranoid and hysterical universe full of obsessive characters who would be outsiders in Hackett’s daily world of the office, but among whom, in their element, Dunne is the outsider.

The fears and paranoias are often sexualized. Hackett embodies a very straight heterosexual male perspective, a fear of anything that is other. Sexual images are portrayed almost as archetypes, and though the film does find its sympathies in his character, Hackett also reads as very unhip and middle-class. In a world that he perceives as filled with as cartoonish sexual “deviance”, his deviance is his own dullness.

His trip throught the city’s “after hours” subculture an absurdist nightmare, with a distinct nod to Kafka. It’s still a very funny film, if now also an artifact of the 80’s, informed very much by its then-contemporary period.

I watched this on cable in a pan-and-scan format, which I think detracted from it somewhat. As a result, it lost some of its cinematic style, which maybe even letterboxing would have brought back somewhat. It actually made me yearn to see it on the big screen again, the way that I originally encountered it and was intrigued by it.

(1981) dir. John CarpenterThe thing about cable is the randomness of what is being shown. It’s always a crapshoot, usually offering up, just plain crap. This was a rare exception, a film that I liked that was coming on at a time that I could watch it. At 99 minutes, it’s a pretty tight little thrill ride.

The late-Seventies and early Eighties were a good time for low-budget science fiction/horror films, and at some point, John Carpenter had a pretty good grasp on how to make them. It seems like he’s been trying to regain his hand at it ever since he tried going “mainstream” with 1984’s Starman.

A midnight movie classic from its initial release, this film seems to have disappeared a bit in recent years. Carpenter made several films with Kurt Russell, the best of which is probably his gory remake of the classic Howard Hawks’ sci-fi flick, The Thing (1982). He also re-teemed up with Russell in 1996 to make a truly awful sequel, Escape From L.A., which missed the mark so incredibly. Luckily, the original still shines with its low-budget coolness.

Now, this is a film that I have seen several times, and actually, after re-discovering The Thing a couple years ago, I wound up renting Escape From New York at the time. So, in reality, it hadn’t been all that long since I had seen it…maybe a couple of years. So, this time around, the thing that stuck out the most was the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

A lot of movies feature the NY skyline and almost any that feature the WTC in any significance are now documents of the structures that no longer exist, as much as they are films…or at least for a while, that is perhaps how they will be seen. For this film, Russell’s Snake Plisskin lands his glider on top of one of the towers in order to infiltrate the world of Manhattan, a penal colony that reeks of anarchy, and what was, no doubt, in 1981, a humorous commentary on life in the city.

I suppose another irony would perhaps be the new “kinder, gentler, Giulianni-ier” New York that has taken place of this rather bleak, though comical view of “The Big Apple.”

Ernest Borgnine and Harry Dean Stanton show up in notable supporting roles.