#wrong for assuming the actors have little of value to offer me re: the show’s perspective I mean

[ardentpoop]

jensen (paraphrased): I think “I’m proud of us” is a [defining] quote of the show, just the brothers looking back at everything they’ve accomplished and saying that to each other.

me: PFFFFFFNFNGNGNCNC whatever u say handsome

jared: I think it’s also - even more so - I feel it’s something that sam strived to be able to say, which is one of the reasons they work so hard, so diligently, they sacrifice so much; they want to be able to say “I’m proud of us” [clears throat] I’m choking up - the honesty and the vulnerability of admitting: hey, if this is it man, [voice wavers] I’m proud of us.

me: I retract my condescension that was some real shit you just said.

[mst3kproject]

Trained to Kill USA

Looking at my catalogue of Episodes that Never Were, I realize I have been rather biased in my choice of genres.  It’s not something I did intentionally, I just happen to like monster and mad science movies, and such films are often my favourite episodes of MST3K, so naturally they’re the first thing I go to.  But the show never limited itself by genre, and though I’ve managed to dig up a couple of Eurospy and 50’s Rebellious Teens movies, there are several things notably lacking.  I have not yet tackled a proper western, for example, nor a biker crime spree picture.  Time to pick up the slack.

I therefore present Trained to Kill USA, which I ran across quite by accident while searching for a copy of She-Gods of Shark Reef that didn’t make me want to claw my own eyes out (I never found one).  It’s got Sid Haig from Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II in it and Richard Slattery from San Francisco International, and it’s a nihilistic revenge movie as depressing as The Sidehackers and featuring an incongruously cheerful opening theme song that makes me think of Girl in Gold Boots for some reason. I’m not sure why, but Trained to Kill USA particularly reminds me of the latter movie, maybe just in its general late-60’s-early-70’s aesthetic and Ted-V-Mikels-like incompetence.

We begin with a couple of thugs under the leadership of a man called Prophet, robbing a liquor store and then fleeing from the sheriff, to the accompaniment of a terrible song and some egregious pan-n-scan. They stop at a farm where they assault the owner, elderly Mark, break his stuff, and try to rape his daughter Mary, but then flee when the man’s son Ollie arrives.  Mark wants Ollie to come with him and chase the two down, but Ollie refuses.  Later, however, the gang decides to steal Mark’s gun collection so that they can rob a bank in town, and during this heist Mark shoots Prophet’s buddy Parrish.  Believing Ollie to have been the killer, Prophet vows revenge.

That’s quite a truncated summary – a great deal actually happens in between the first and second attacks on the ranch, and almost all of it feels irrelevant.  Prophet and his men commit crimes, and Ollie sits around and drinks and has flashbacks. I know these scenes are supposed to be establishing character and so forth, but they just come across as filling time before the final showdown.  A family in a camper van get killed.  Ollie’s army buddies beat up Prophet’s men at a gas station.  Prophet fights with his girlfriend.  None of it’s presented in a way that makes the audience want to care.

Like a number of other movies I’ve reviewed, Trained to Kill USA is not this film’s original title.  It was released as The No Mercy Man.  Multiple titles are a common feature of terrible movies, but what’s interesting here is how the change re-focuses the audiences attention.  The No Mercy Man referred to Prophet – his friend Parrish uses that descriptor for him, and it suggests that this is his story we’re watching.  Trained to Kill USA, on the other hand, is obviously a description of Ollie, which leads us to expect rather more of him than the movie initially offers.

The film is actually equally about both men and their inability to fit into society.  Ollie is too damaged by his experiences in war to ever lead a normal life, while Prophet exists in a world where black men are automatically assumed to be criminals and there is simply no other role he can fill.  I think we’re supposed to see them as a pair of tragic figures driven inevitably to a confrontation that destroys them both.  It’s a little hard to say, because the movie is really bad at driven inevitably.  When it tries to set up fate and forces beyond these characters’ control, all it manages are a set of coincidences.  If there’s supposed to be a feeling that this all means anything, the movie misses it by miles.

Even more damaging to what I assume are the film’s ambitions (I’m really not at all sure what this movie is actually trying to do) is the fact that neither of these guys are characters we can root for. Prophet complains that his intellect could have taken him places were it not for his appearance: he is a tall, intimidating black man, and so people treat him as a thug.  Yet Prophet is the very stereotype of that thug, gleefully and gratuitously violent and a rapist of white women.  In both the RV theft and the bank robbery his original plan is to commit a crime in which ‘nobody gets hurt’, but in both incidents he drops this idea the moment something starts to go wrong.  The movie tries to bring some depth to him in his apparently sincere affection for his girlfriend Sally (the moment when he leads her in a circle around the fairground is the only thing in the movie that feels like real emotion), but he turns on her in the end, too, blaming her for the loss of his job.

Then there’s Ollie – he is a steaming mess of PTSD and we feel sorry for him, but we do not like him.  Actor Steve Sandor behaves like a robot and rather creepily looks like one, too. There’s something about his skin that makes him look like plastic.  If he is to be a tragic figure we should really have some idea of who he was before the war hollowed him out, but we see him only as the damaged hero, surrounded by people who are making his trauma worse.  His father is an old grouch living vicariously through his son, and his friends brag about his accomplishments in a way that triggers him repeatedly while they don’t seem to give a shit.  The movie seems to want us to root for him to give in to the violence in order to protect his family, but that is exactly what Ollie himself does not want and, indeed, is the worst possible thing that could happen to his already fragile mental health.  We do not want Ollie to be a hero.  We want him to get away from all this and into an environment where he can heal.

I honestly think the writers were trying to do something with this movie.  They believed they were going to make an important statement about war and racism and how both are damaging to the psyche.  They were trying to give us a tragedy about two gifted individuals who could have been so much more than what the world forced them to be. All they managed, however, was Trained to Kill USA, and the movie sucks.

The photography was bad to begin with and the pan-n-scan did it no favours at all – many shots look bizarrely off-centre, as is evident in the screencaps.  The characters are as flat as a creationist’s earth.  Fight scenes are awful: I don’t remember a single punch that I believed hit anything.  People go leaping over fences ahead of explosions that are obviously nowhere near them.  The ‘Vietnam’ flashbacks are shot in front of some trees in someone’s back yard.  The dialogue is terrible: characters say things like ‘Ollie, you’re the most decorated man in the state!’ and that’s supposed to be subtle exposition.  The Oblivious Camping Family have ‘victims!’ written all over them, to the point where they seem to belong in the opening scene of some slasher movie more than they do in this.  And at the time the film was made it didn’t matter that everything in it was outrageously, garishly seventies, but in the hindsight of a more fashion-conscious age, It just makes it that much harder to take any of this seriously.

The harder this movie tries to build tension, the worse it fails.  There’s a scene in which the criminals confront the Sheriff outside the bank, and while we should be on the edges of our seats, waiting for the bullets to start flying, all we’re seeing is a bunch of guys standing around awkwardly, exchanging terrible dialogue that aims for ‘badass’ and falls on its face.  The bank robbery itself is a free for all of guns and bombs.  It’s hard to tell who’s on which side because we’ve never met half these guys before, and both the criminals and Ollie’s army buddies seem to take such joy in violence that it’s hard to care about what they’re fighting for. The most memorable bit in the scene is the stunt guy who does a perfect flip as he falls from a roof.

At the end, the criminals attack Ollie’s family and he is forced to relive all the things he most wishes to forget as he finally takes them on.  This fight scene almost becomes effective in its brutality and crudeness.  There’s no choreography or sense of justice, just Ollie and Prophet beating the shit out of each other for reasons that have almost nothing to do with either of them.  When Ollie wins, it’s not in any way a victory.  Under constant pressure to give in to the violence, Ollie has lost, and it’s impossible to tell what the movie wants us to feel about this.  The ridiculously cheesy final song, with lyrics like no-one understands you ‘cause you can’t be understood, seems to agree with my gut instinct that this is a disaster, but didn’t we just spend the whole movie waiting for Ollie to kick some ass?  Haven’t we been told over and over that he is the only one up to the challenge Prophet presents?

As the credits roll, we’re left in a similar place to where we were at the end of The Sidehackers – nobody won.  Ollie will continued to be a shattered man held together by alcohol.  Prophet, who was supposed to look redeemable, is now beyond redemption because he’s dead.  What happened to the girlfriend Prophet blamed for getting him into all this trouble, we’ll never know.  How Ollie’s family feel about what he’s now done we’ll also never know, which is particularly annoying because their opinion of him was so important earlier.  Shouldn’t they come to understand why they’ve been treating him badly?  If you try to take their stories at face value, Ollie and Prophet both deserved far better than this shitty fucking movie.

[him-e]

your points about how sometimes people put the blinders on when they're in a toxic relationship are fine. but i'm not exactly sure that D&D thinking that deeply. the show cares most about the shock value of endgames and big moments more than anything else. and i can't help but think that they're dragging out the j/c relationship so its more shocking when jaime kills her in season 8. the reddit spoiler guy also said that cersei can't follow through with her threat of killing jaime when he breaks

up with her. because she still has some feelings for him. and then right after that she has a miscarriage. to me this is D&D setting up the valonqar for season 8. when cersei realizes that jaime is her valonqar will surely be a heartbreaking moment in the books. the show cut out valonqar and cersei’s paranoia so this is their way of doing it i think. that cersei will be heartbroken when jaime kills her because she couldn’t bring herself to kill him and also because she’s just miscarried his babynot that long ago. so my frustration isn’t with jaime being “weak” and not leaving cersei already. its about how D&D continously dumb down his character and keep adding cheap sex scenes to make the endgame more dramatic. also i don’t blame NCW trying to rationalize D&D’s writing in interviews, but i don’t think that’s what D&D are actually going for lol. as far as for the veracity of these leaks, its supposedly from awayfromthelads 2nd account. lots of people dont believe him but i do.

whether or not the D’s are thinking that deeply, it’s how the thing comes across to me, so I’ll run with it because it offers a more interesting discussion than “no it’s just bad writing”, which is something I can’t do much about. It’s a bit like shipping; canon gives you lemons so you make lemonade. In this case, lemonade is backed up by the actor’s interpretation, which is not irrelevant. Nikolaj has already filmed these scenes, so whether he’s just /rationalizing/ or he shares his view with the authors, I must believe that whatever happens in s7 supports, not contradicts, this reading.

re: “shock value”, see this post by @justthetippihedren, especially the part where it quotes Cogman. GoT discourse views shock value in a very negative way, and I don’t necessarily disagree, but the truth is in a serialized visual medium you have to worry about pacing things in a way that doesn’t put too much space between a certain seed and its payoff: “you have to pick and choose…where information’s going to be most effective”. So maybe yes, they want to maximize the impact of whatever Jaime ends up doing with or /to/ Cersei, but it’s not… wrong? To do so? Like you said, maybe this is their way of replacing the valonqar part of the prophecy—they’re doing a different build up, not /no build up at all/. Or maybe it paves the way for something else, but it’s still nothing positive for JC. 

I mean, it’s not like the JC relationship is going WELL. I dislike the sex scenes because they completely erase Jaime’s trying to stick to his KG vows, but sex in itself isn’t an indicator of a healthy relationship (come on, it’s just there because they need someone to fulfill the sex quota until the planets are aligned for Jon/Dany’s celestial hook up, as unfortunately this is still HBO). The miscarriage seems pretty symbolic, and Cersei’s threat to kill Jaime is… probably a point of no return.

And Jaime, on his part, already started to have doubts. They had him tell Brienne something to the extent of “you can’t seriously expect me to switch sides and turn my back on my family” which means that, on a subconscious level, he IS considering it (also, that’s foreshadowing). They had him give THAT look to Cersei while she sat on the iron throne, only a few episodes after we were shown a flashback of Aerys’ murder. They had him be visibly tempted by Brienne and watch her longingly as she sailed away from Riverrun, as if he wanted to follow her. It is excruciatingly slow and admittedly boring to watch and certainly not as good as his development in the books, but they planted SOME seeds.

My advice is to keep your expectations low ANYWAY (I haven’t been particularly impressed with Jaime since season 3, and I definitely agree they dumbed down his character and fucked up his /honor vs legacy/ internal conflict to a point where little can be done to fix it), but at the same time don’t assume that it will be another season of treading waters for Jaime. These “spoilers” tend to sound much worse than they are, because people either can’t explain properly what they saw/know or they always miss some fundamental nuance.