#what is it with german silent films that make their main characters just so poor little meow meow

[sages-of-hell]

watched metropolis (1927) last night and i’m genuinely disappointed nobody ever cared to tell me that it has freder fredersen in it who is possibly the first case of babygirl in film history

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael After Midnight: Yoga Hosers

“So bad, it’s good.”

This is a phrase that is near and dear to me. It is a phrase that indicates quality where others would find none, it indicates that a movie is saved unintentionally, it just tells me I’m in for something fun. I love “so bad, it’s good” cinema. My love for it is is pretty much the entire reason I made Michael After Midnight, so I could showcase these weird, quirky, awkward films I love so much and spread them to a new audience, and maybe even convince you that some of these films actually do have genuine qualities underneath it all.

I also love the View Askewniverse, as this old review of the franchise can attest to. Kevin Smith really was onto something with this series, combining snarky dialogue, pop culture references, and stoner humor together into something that I feel so many movies tried to replicate but that very few ever came close to. Like most movies that use “lol weed” humor fall flat on their face, but not Smith’s movies. Any other movie where a couple argues over the girl having given 37 different dudes blowjobs prior to this relationship would just feel tacky and forced, but Smith made it work. Kevin Smith could take weird concepts like “A woman who works at an abortion clinic is tasked by the voice of God (played by Alan Rickman) to stop Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (who are fallen angels) from accidentally rewriting reality so they can get to heaven; she is aided by Jay & Silent Bob, a black apostle, a muse, and a skeevy priest played by George Carlin. Also there’s a shit demon and Alanis Morisette is God” and make them work. But outside the View Askiewniverse his success has dwindled, with his films ending up forgettable at best; you’ll never find anyone citing Zack & Mirri Make a Porno as their favorite comedy, you know?

So you’d think his “True North” trilogy, a series of B-movies with “So bad, it’s good” aesthetics set in good ol’ Canada, would just be a home run. Combine Smith’s with with the kind of fun campiness of B-movies, what could go wrong?

A lot.

“So bad, it’s good” is not an exact science. It’s not an exact art. The expert creators of this style of film – people like Tommy Wiseau, Neil Breen, or the SyFy Channel – they always have an air of sincerity to them even when they wink at the audience and really lay it on you. The Sharknado movies showcase a perfect balance of telling the joke and being in on the joke, to use one example. But it is so incredibly easy to go too far and end up ruining your own joke by just constantly rubbing in the audience face that yes, it is a joke. Willing suspension of disbelief applies to enjoying films ironically, interestingly enough, and if you keep slapping your audience in the face and telling them “Hey dipshit, this is supposed to be fucking stupid,” they’re not gonna like it. Tusk had this pretty bad, with its interesting premise being ruined by too much self-awareness and too much Johnny Depp. But Yoga Hosers?

This movie is even worse.

This movie is an absolute trainwreck of premises. Two clerks at a Canadian convenience store have to fight Nazi bratwursts created by an evil German mad scientist sculptor who helped form a Canadian Nazi party during WWII. Also there are Satanists who want to cut up the clerks and sacrifice them. There’s also yoga tossed into the mix for good measure. The thing is, all of these ideas could have been used separately for some fantastically stupid films, the “Bratzis” in particular being the idea only someone who is high half the time could come up with. The concept for them alone is what made me want to watch this film, and yet, the execution is just so utterly terrible it makes me regret ever finding the idea charming at all.

A big problem with the Bratzis is just how poor the effects are. They are painfully greenscreened in, an effect that makes the Fierys from Labyrinth look like something out of Avatar in comparison. They speak in gibberish German phrases and when they are killed they splatter in a confetti effect that looks like it comes prepackaged with Baby’s First Video Editing Suite. I get Smith doesn’t work on big budgets or anything, but this is just absolutely embarrassing. This man made a movie with a shit demon as a practical effect and this is what he does when he gets his hands on cutting edge technology?

And it’s not like anything else about this movie is pleasant enough to make up for the awful effects. The two main characters are played by Johnny Depp’s daughter and Kevin Smith’s daughter, and while they undeniably have good chemistry as friends and can sing very well, their characters are just unpleasant, obnoxious millennial stereotypes: they’re catty, they’re snotty, they’re glued to their phones, and they’re pretty dim. Johnny Depp’s character from Tusk is back, and I’m happy to say he’s just as terrible here, mumbling his way through his scenes and just in general sucking what little life there is out of this film. And as if the characters aren’t annoying enough, every fucking character is introduced with some social media title card. It’s absolutely as stupid as it sounds.

And see, some would point to this and say “Oh, come on, it’s so bad it’s good, Smith is clearly just taking the piss here, it’s supposed to be bad!” Well guess what? That’s no excuse to make your movie shit. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is also an intentional “so bad, It’s good” movie, one that spoofs the gloriously cheesy sci-fi B-movies of the 50s. But that movie felt like a loving, affectionate parody, one that didn’t insult its audience. They knew you were in on the joke, and they just let you enjoy it while they tell it.

Smith, on the other hand, won’t let you enjoy his joke. He constantly needs to cram in cameos from his celebrity pals, with Stan Lee, Jason Mewes, and Kevin Conroy all popping in for some pointless appearances. The terrible effects are just too terrible, with none of it feeling like a charming throwback to rubber suit monster movies and all of it feeling more like budgetary constraints, laziness, and lack of creativity. But worst of all, this film is clearly trying to be funny. The best part of any “So bad, it’s good” movie is that it’s funny accidentally. Humor is derived from the awkwardness of lines delivered earnestly; again, going back to Lost Skeleton, it works because as goofy and awkward as the lines are, they really aren’t too inauthentic to old school sci-fi cheese. Yoga Hosers, though? It is so desperately trying to make you laugh at it unironically while simultaneously trying to get you to laugh at it ironically. It feels manipulative and tasteless, and in the end, it’s what kills the movie.

I have no idea who this would appeal to. It has none of the quality of Smith’s better work, it’s not going to appeal to monster movie fans because its plot is so scattershot and the effects are too poor for even ironic enjoyment, and the jokes are not going to appeal to anyone who isn’t too stoned to realize what they’re watching. All of it feels phony, insincere, and crappy in a genuine way, and there’s just no humor to be derived from something this creatively bankrupt. Shame n Kevin Smith for taking an unironically fascinating and stupid concept and running it into the ground with schtick. I came for Nazi bratwursts assaulting convenience store employees, but instead I get mumbling Johnny Depp and a guy dressed as a Nazi doing celebrity impressions. Fuck you, Smith. Fuck you and your insincere attempts at schlock.

[impressivepress]

The Political Life and Cinema of Comrade Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin’s sympathy for the working class defines all his most famous silent films.

In September 1952, Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) looked back at New York on board the Queen Elizabeth. He was bound for Europe, to introduce the continent to his latest film Mousieur Verdoux. On the ship, Chaplin learned that the US government would only let him return to the US – where he had lived for the past three decades – if he subjected himself to an immigration and naturalisation inquiry into his moral and political character. “Goodbye,” Chaplin said from the deck of the ship. He refused to submit to the inquiry. He would not return to the US until 1972, when the Academy of Motion Pictures gave him an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement.

Why did the US government exile Chaplin? The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) – the country’s political police – investigated Chaplin from 1922 onwards for his alleged ties to the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Chaplin’s file – 1,900 pages long – is filled with innuendo and slander, as agents exhausted themselves talking to his co-workers and adversaries to find any hint of communist association. They found none. In December 1949, for instance, the agent in Los Angeles wrote, “No witnesses available to testify affirmatively that Chaplin has been member CP in past, that he is now a member or that he has contributed funds to CP.”

Beside the charge that he was a communist, Chaplin faced the accusation that he was ‘an unsavoury character’ who violated the Mann Act – the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910. Chaplin had paid for the travel of Joan Barry – his girlfriend – across state lines. Chaplin was found not guilt of these charges in 1944. It has subsequently been shown in a number of memoirs and studies that Chaplin was cruel to his many wives (many of them teenagers) and ruthless in his relations with women (Peter Ackroyd’s 2014 book has the details). In 1943, Chaplin married the playwright Eugene O’Neill’s daughter – Oona. She was 18. Chaplin was 54. They would have eight children. Oona Chaplin left the US with her husband and was with him when he died in 1977. There was much about Chaplin’s life that was creepy – particularly the way he preyed on young girls (his second wife – Lita Grey – was 15 when they had an affair and then married; he was then 35). FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had considerable evidence to sift through here, but none of it was found to be sufficient to deport Chaplin.

What was the smoke that got into Hoover’s nose from the fire of Chaplin’s politics? From 1920 onwards, it was clear that Chaplin had sympathies for the Left. That year, Chaplin sat with Buster Keaton – the famous silent film actor – to drink a beer in Keaton’s kitchen in Los Angeles. Chaplin was at the height of his success. With Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, Chaplin created United Artists, a company that broke with the studio system to give these four actors and directors control over their work. Chaplin was then working on The Kid (1921), one of his finest films and based almost certainly on his childhood. Keaton recounted that Chaplin talked “about something called communism which he just heard about”. “Communism,” Chaplin told him, according to Keaton, “was going to change everything, abolish poverty.” Chaplin banged on the table and said, “What I want is that every child should have enough to eat, shoes on his feet and a roof over his head”. Keaton’s response is casually insincere, “But Charlie, do you know anyone who doesn’t want that?”

Chaplin came to the US just after the Russian Revolution. He saw the growing lines of unemployment and distress in the US – an unemployed population that grew from 950,000 (1919) to five million (1921). This was a time of great class struggle – the Palmer Raids conducted by the government against the communists, on the one side, and the general strike in Seattle as well as the Battle of Blair Mountain by the mineworkers of Logan County, West Virginia, on the other side.

Chaplin’s silent films were anchored by the figure of the Tramp, the iconic poor man in a modern capitalist society. “I am like a man who is ever haunted by a spirit, the spirit of poverty, the spirit of privation,” Chaplin said. That is precisely what one sees in his films – from The Tramp (1915) to Modern Times (1936). “The whole point of the Little Fellow,” Chaplin said in 1925 of the tramp figure, “is that no matter how down on his ass he is, no matter how well the jackals succeed in tearing him apart, he’s still a man of dignity.” The working class, the working poor, are people of great resourcefulness and dignity – not beaten down, not to be mocked. Chaplin’s sympathy for the working class defines all his most famous silent films.

It was Chaplin’s popularity and his message that disturbed the FBI. “There are men and women in far corners of the world who never have heard of Jesus Christ; yet they know and love Charlie Chaplin,” noted an article that an FBI agent clipped and highlighted in Chaplin’s file. Chaplin’s plainly-depicted criticism of capitalism did not fail to impress the world’s peoples nor disturb the FBI. “I don’t want the old rugged individualism,” Chaplin said in November 1942, “rugged for the few and ragged for the many.”

The great limitation in his films is the depiction of women. They are always damsels in distress or rich women who are desired by poor men. There are few ‘women of dignity’, women who – at that time – were in pitched battles for their own rights. In fact, many silent films in both the UK and the US disparaged the Suffragette movement of their time – from A Day in the Life of a Suffragette (1908) to A Busy Day (1914, which was originally titled A Militant Suffragette). In this latter film, only six minutes long, Chaplin plays a suffragette who is boorish and then dies by drowning.

The film was released the same year as Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes to unite suffragette politics with socialism. Pankhurst, unlike Chaplin, would join the Communist Party and – in 1920 – would author A Constitution for British Soviets. She would leave the Communist Party, but remained a devoted communist and anti-fascist for the rest of her life. If only Chaplin’s sexism had not blocked him from celebrating his contemporaries such as Pankhurst, Joan Beauchamp (another Suffragette and founder of the British Communist Party) as well as her sister Kay Beauchamp (co-founder of The Daily Worker, now Morning Star) and Fanny Deakin.

What drew Chaplin directly into the orbit of institutional left-wing politics was the rise of fascism. He was greatly troubled by the Nazi sweep across Europe. Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator (1940) was his satire of fascism – a film that should be watched by all in our times.

Two years after that film was out, Chaplin flew to New York City to be the main speaker at a Communist-backed Artists Front to Win the War event. Chaplin took the stage at Carnegie Hall on 16 October 1942, addressed the crowd as ‘comrades’ and said that Communists are “ordinary people like ourselves who love beauty, who love life”. Then, Chaplin offered his clearest statement on communism – “They say communism may spread out all over the world. And I say – so what?” (Daily Worker, October 19, 1942). In December 1942, Chaplin said, “I am not a Communist, but I am proud to say that I feel pretty pro-Communist”.

Chaplin was impressed by the principled and unyielding stand taken by the communists against fascism – whether during the Spanish Civil War or in the Eastern Front against the Nazi invasion of the USSR. In 1943, Chaplin called the USSR “a brave new world” that gave “hope and aspiration to the common man”. He hoped that the USSR would “grow more glorious year by year. Now that the agony of birth is at an end, may the beauty of its growth endure forever”. When asked a decade later why he was so vocal about his support for the USSR – including with appearances at the communist fronts such as the National Council for American-Soviet Friendship and the Russian War Relief – Chaplin said, “during the war I sympathised much with Russia because I believe that she was holding the front”. This sympathy remained through the remainder of his life.

Chaplin had not calculated the toxicity of the Cold War era in the US. In 1947, he told reporters, “These days if you step off the curb with your left foot, they accuse you being a communist”. Chaplin did not back off from his beliefs or betrayed his friends. At that same press conference he was asked if he knew the Austrian musician Hanns Eisler, who was a communist and who wrote the music for many of Bertolt Brecht’s plays. He had fled Nazi Germany for the US to work in Hollywood. Eisler had composed songs for the Communist Party (he would write music for the anthem of the German Democratic Republic – Auferstanden Aus Ruinen). Chaplin came to his defence. When asked about his association with Eisler at that 1947 press conference, Chaplin said that Eisler “is a personal friend and I am proud of the fact…I don’t know whether he is a communist or not. I know he is a fine artist and a great musician and a very sympathetic friend”. When asked directly if it would make any difference to Chaplin if Eisler was a communist, he said, “No it wouldn’t”. It took a lot of courage to defend Eisler, who would be deported from the US a few months later.

When Chaplin died in Switzerland in December 1977, he was mourned far and wide. In Calcutta, where a Left Front government had only just come to power in a landslide in June, artists and political activists gathered the next day to mourn him. The main speaker at the memorial service was the Bengali film director Mrinal Sen. In 1953, Sen had written a book on Chaplin – illustrated by Satyajit Ray.

Neither Sen nor Ray had made any of their iconic films as yet (both released their first films in 1955, Ray’s Pather Panchali and Sen’s Raat Bhore). “Without a moral justification,” Sen said at the memorial meeting, “cinema is ridiculous, is atrocious, is an outrage. It is a social activity. It is man’s creation.” The gap between art and politics should not be too wide, Sen warned. He was thinking of Chaplin’s films, but also of his own. At that time, Sen was working on Ek Din Pratidin (One Day, Everyday), a superb film that chronicles the possibilities of women’s emancipation. Here Sen went far beyond Chaplin. His communism included women.

~

Vijay Prashad · 29. Jul 2017.

Vijay Prashad is the author of The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution from LeftWord Books.

[majingojira]

120 Years, 120 Monsters, Days 27, 28, and 29

This one is going to be a doozy! 

101) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) - Orcs/Uruk-Hai

One of J.R.R. Tolkien's original creations for his Mythopoeia were the Orcs, and their spawn the Uruk-Hai.  They’re the template example of the ‘evil minion’ that can be slaughtered in droves yet still poses a danger if only from their numbers.  

Crude, vile, filthy, disgusting, rough, and cannibalistic, the Orcs were made to be as repulsive as possible, and that made them memorable.

102) The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) - Nazgul/Ringwraiths

Eh, might as well complete the trilogy.  With only one monster left to claim as its own, but still so many to choose from, it was a hard choice to make.  I decided to go with the one that has their own memorable musical motif.  

The Nazgul are an inspiration for every kind of “Undead” in gaming fiction.  Men who were granted immortality thanks to their magic rings, but their bodies did not last with them.  So now they are wraiths that animate armor and clothes in order to affect the world of the living.  Capable of dark sorcery, a shriek that drives men to madness, weapons capable of making more like themselves, and being unkillable save a few specific methods.  Drawing from old folklore and myth, it became a standard for generations to come.

And with their horses gone, they upgrade their mounts to Fell Beasts for the movie -- winged horrors that allow them to take down armies almost by themselves.  Since they are the inspiration for so many RPG horrors, I think the best way to describe how terrifyingly powerful and dangerous the Ringwraiths are is with an RPG term.

“HAX!  I CALL HAX!”

103) Freddy vs. Jason (2003)     - Jason Voorhees

Jason had to be on the list, but let’s be honest with ourselves: they were pretty crap for the most part. Often incoherent, relying more on spectacle than story, they’re good schlock at best, but some are also quite painful.  And he didn’t become a true monster until later in the series.  Before that, he was a human killer, and before that the killer was his mom and the best scare of the movie came from a damn dream sequence.  

Which is probably why, in the end, I went with the one where he fights the incarnation of nightmares for the film to include him in.  This was a labor of love, and that love shows through the film.  As you might have guessed, I’m not a fan of the Friday the 13th movie series. The love this movie shows that series makes me want to give them another chance (or a chance in some cases).  

As to Jason himself, he is in pretty good form. Archetypal “Slasher” or “Relentless Undead”. Driven to kill in part for revenge, in part mad obsession against perceived impropriety, and in part because his mommy told him.  It makes him more . . . sympathetic.  He’s still a remorseless killer, and nearly unstoppable juggernaut, but he’s the lesser of two evils here.

But that bar is REALLY low.

104) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) - Dementors

Harry Potter had a lot of creatures in it, some from folklore, others were unique.  But only one really, truly resonated.  Those were the Dementors.  According to the writer, they were her expression of depression.  What it did to her is what the dementors do to others.  It’s quite succinct, but that’s what they are.  It’s a YA series, they can be deep, but sometimes the meaning is spelled out clearly.  

Their design, faceless, shadowy wraiths, works well to support them as incarnations of depression.  Plus the mouth the movie’s give them is just damn creepy.

105) Call of Cthulhu (2005) - Cthulhu

H.P. Lovecraft’s works have had a long and powerful influence on monsters, but his work has rarely been translated to film, and even rarer has it been done well.  One of those exceptions goes to a group of dedicated fans of Lovecraft: The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society who made an adaptation of one of his most famous works . . . as a silent film.  They made it as though it were adapted around the time it was printed.  

This choice allows for low budget and simple effects to carry the day.  It turns R’lyeh into full expressionist germanic horror. Including some practical effects taking advantage of visual illusions (creating a concave structure that looks convex, etc).  

Lovecraft’s stories are generally about the buildup, and the film works well in that regard.  It convinces the audience of the insignificance of man in the setting, and the reach and power of the sleeping god-monster.  Once Cthulhu shows up, there’s no real dialogue for that sequence. The actions are all primal and universal, with R’lyeh as much a danger as Cthulhu himself at times.  

There is one change: Cthulhu doesn’t ignore the poor humans.  It considers them.  Little more than pests, but it still considers them.  

And he’s a GREAT stop-motion effect, and even once shown, he is kept in shadow and shown only in part, adding to the menace he emanates.

106) The Host (2006) - Gwoemul

The Host is an odd film.  One part comedy, one part tragedy, one part absurdity, one part social commentary.  In the end, it works, but it’s an odd journey to get there.  

The creature itself is a mutation, and one of the best looking mutations I’ve seen.  It’s so mutated that it’s hard to identify exactly what it is, or what it was to start with.  Most mutants in fiction are just organism A + Extra stuff.  This thing is . . . well, aside from being horrendously ugly and amphibious it’s hard to say what it is, exactly.  And that works well in its favor.

The creature also moves around and acts as though it were in constant pain, which is another nice touch.  It is still a villainous beast at the end of the day, but the constant pain it feels and its need to feed make its actions understandable.  

107) The Mist (2007) - The Leviathan

The Mist has a great, simple premise.  “A fog rolls into town and a person with blood on their shirt comes running out, screaming ‘There’s something in the mist!’”

It’s so simple, it’s brilliant.  What is in the mist?  An entire alien ecosystem, foreign enough to be hard to kill, but close enough to eat us without suffering.  Of these, one monster stands above all the others (literally).  A creature as massive as a whale that has other horrors following in its wake.  After all the monsters and killer creatures (and madness driven humans), it shows up and easily demonstrates how insignificant humans are in this strange world order that peaked into our world.  It doesn’t interact with the survivors, it just passes by as the things which they thought were the deadliest things in the mist fly around it to pick up its scraps.  No more than oxpeckers to the horror.

It says so much with so little screentime.

Also, the ending of this movie messed me up in all the best ways.  

108) Cloverfield (2008) - Clover

This was America’s giant monster answer to 9-11 as Godzilla was to Japan after Hiroshima.  It didn’t quite work out as well, but it was still a good monster and good film.

I think part of the reason why Godzilla worked, and Clover did not has to do with symbolic resonance.  He manages to capture the fear, confusion, and similar fears brought up by the incident, but doesn’t go to the same lengths and depths of understanding of the situation (because, frankly, almost no one understood them yet at the time, at least not fully, as it was the result of almost 100 years of turmoil that can date itself back to the FIRST World War).  

The creature is just as confused as everyone else in the movie, which is a stark contrast to all that possible allegorical connection.  Still, it set one thing up: Large American monsters would have a bent-legged stance from here on out.  

109) Trollhunter (2010) - Trolls

A variety of perspectives and stories is always helpful.  It’s as true in life, as it is in film.  This is partly why I tried to include a few of the foreign film monsters that I have seen (that are worth it, I’ve seen some that were derivative as hell without adding much worthwhile).  So I was quite pleased to include Trollhunter on this list.

It walks a fine line between horror and comedy, which I always appreciate. It also treats the Trolls as sources of horror as well as treating them as big, dumb, dangerous animals.  All the strangeness of them is explained decently (they’re so dumb because of what they eat for the most part -- a mix of meat and rock, they turn to “Stone” because of a runaway chain reaction of calcium buildup due to an inability to process vitamin E or some such technobabble), save one detail from the folklore.

They can still smell the blood of a Christian man.  

The Found Footage style makes sense here and works well with it, and leads to some interesting humor beyond the usual “Camera Damage’.  We get humor ranging from surprise reveals to the mundanity of what really should be an awesome sounding job (To meme: Paperwork? For my troll hunter? It’s more likely than you might expect!).  The FX are convincing but what really sells it is the title character and his interactions with the creatures.  They’re just animals, big and dumb, and he has to clean up after them.  And his job is as terrible as you might expect.  It’s one part character study, one part journey into a hidden world.  And I’m a sucker for that sort of mix.  

110) How to Train your Dragon (2010) - Dragons

The Dragon in folklore, myth, and religion is one of the most diverse creatures within those fields.  Beyond even the vampire, which at times usually means “Usually nocturnal thing that attacks people in a debilitating/draining way rather than outright killing them”.  Very few movies go into the sheer variety the dragon can encompass.  They usually focus on one individual dragon or one species of dragon.  Before this series of books was turned into a movie and TV franchise of epic proportions, the only thing that even came close to doing that was the Rankin-Bass animated feature Flight of Dragons.  Which showed two main varieties of Dragon (Eastern and Western).  

The advent of cheaper CG allowed for a whole slew of dragon shapes and sizes to be used and while they didn’t go as nuts as some of the folklore went, they made a really good effort.  And one that I think should be rewarded.  

While the ones in the film have a similar general behavior (in the way that big cats have similar behavior), the visual variety made them a treat to all see on the screen at once.