He’s been deceiving the public and his fellow filmmakers for years. All of his work is just a ruse for what his real aim is, and I am going to expose it right here and right now. And that is… WOODY ALLEN IS TRYING TO KILL HOLLYWOOD! You think I’m joking? Let’s take a look at Allen’s career as a writer/director. The first movie he truly wrote and directed was Take The Money And Run, released by Cinerama. Several years later, Cinerama closed its tents and went out of business forever. Then he moved to United Artists and made several movies there. What happened to United Artists? They declared bankruptcy several years later, and were absorbed by another studio. Allen then moved to Orion Pictures and made several movies there. I’ll tell you what happened several years after he arrived: Orion declared bankruptcy. Allen then moved to Tri-Star and made a couple of movies. Not long afterwards, Tri-Star was finished as a studio and was turned into a brand that Sony uses to release movies they don’t have confidence in. And look at the studios writer/director Allen has worked with (and given his curse) since. There’s Miramax (the founders left the company and Disney has severely scaled back its releases), Touchstone (Disney has scaled it back severely as well), Fine Line (is now as dead as its parent company New Line), and Dreamworks (almost declared bankruptcy twice, and its remains and debts have been sold off). It’s just a matter of time before we hear bad news about Fox Searchlight and the Weinstein Company, the distributors he has worked with recently. It’s time to DECLARE WAR AND STOP HIS EVIL PLANS!
What does this have to do with the movie The Inglorious Bastards? Read the review and find out.
Mil Mascaras: Resurrection comes to us some thirty years after Mil Mascaras last appeared onscreen in a narrative feature. For those of you who missed out the first time around, Mil, along with Santo and Blue Demon, is one of the “Big Three” stars of lucha libre cinema, as well as one of the biggest stars in the history of lucha libre itself. While Mil’s cinematic efforts never had the same stateside impact as some of Santo’s, thanks to them never being dubbed in English, they are nonetheless every bit as entertaining — and, in some cases, much more so — than many of El Enmascarado de Plata’s contributions to the genre. Mil Mascaras: Resurrection — which was initially titled Mil Mascaras vs. The Aztec Mummy — doesn’t come to us by way of the normal channels one might expect a Mil Mascaras movie to come through. In fact, it may very well be the only Mexican wrestling film whose writer-producer holds a Ph.D. in robotic engineering from Oxford. Jeffrey Uhlmann brought the idea for the film with him when he took an associate professorship in the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Computer Science Department, and proposed it as an ideal project for exploring the potential for an entertainment technology-related IT program within the University’s Engineering School. Being that Uhlmann is obviously a serious fan of lucha cinema, I imagine that he also decided it would just be really cool to make a Mil Mascaras movie using some of Mizzou’s resources — but in the long run, it’s really all about the kids, isn’t it?
I had pretty high expectations going into this film — not that it would be good, but that it would hilariously, confoundingly weird. And I was not disappointed. But I discovered that it was also actually pretty good. Sure, it’s crude. Yes, the special effects are more surreal than they are real. Certainly it’s schizophrenic. But realism seems to be the least of this film’s concerns. What it is, instead, is an incredibly energetic, offbeat, thriller that has one foot in The Evil Dead, the second foot in Hong Kong horror/action films, and a third foot in films like Alejandro Jodorowski’s Holy Mountain. Although it’s fun to watch it alongside previously mentioned piece of crap horror films, it’s nowhere near that level of incompetence. It makes sense, in it’s own batty way. But that’s the same way that vampires, demons, animated little skull bats, and demon tree rape make sense. Without a doubt, the best Indian horror/supernatural film I’ve seen so far. You may not go into this movie thinking marmosets are scary, but you’ll sure as hell be creeped out by them afterward. Just imagine. You’re lying in bed, minding your own business, then you casually glance across the room, and there one is, just sitting there…staring at you…staring at you…staring at you…
Lloyd Kaufman of Troma is going to be in Salt Lake City next week for Tromadance (one of the Sundance hanger-on mini-festivals), and thanks to connections at the comic shop where he’s doing a news conference, I’ll be able to swing a short interview with him (five minutes, maybe).
By accounts, Kaptan Swing was a scrupulously faithful adaptation of the original comic, as can clearly be seen in how closely the costumes and the look of the actors match the appearances of the drawn characters. This is most likely a testament to just how popular the book was in Turkey at the time. And while such efforts are both admirable and surprising — especially given that they’re coming from a film industry that usually played pretty fast and loose with its source material, not to mention the copyrights protecting same — that holding sacred of the text here has the unfortunate consequence of insuring the presence of Sad Owl, Mr. Bluff and Puik in all of their pratfalling, compulsively mugging glory (and in the case of Sad Owl, in the person of a disconcerting Sid Ceasar ringer by the name of Suleyman Turan). As a result, Kaptan Swing comes off less like a comic book movie than a live action cartoon. Making matters worse is the fact that the filmmakers seem to regard the mere presence of these familiar characters as comedy in itself, freeing them from the onus of having to give them anything to do that could actually be considered funny. Having one of them greedily gnaw on a turkey leg while making a funny face or being bitten on the ass by the dog seems to have been considered suitably hilarious to comprise a generous portion of the movie’s running time, and if you have a problem with that, you’re probably going to find Kaptan Swing pretty tough going.