MOVIE DIARY 2023: I MEAN... HAVE YOU EVER!... DO YOU LIKE EVEN... DO YOU?? YOU TELL YOUR PEOPLE THAT!
Wow wow wow, we’ve got a HUGE post today! I’ve been waiting for this one, because I’m gonna try out something new: TWO SPECIAL GUEST WRITERS! Returning to the blog today, we’ve got a couple of heavy hitters. First up is Fran Hoepfner, who has graced us with a stealth Classical Music Hour (one of my favorite ever blogs) post on Rollerball (1975). Then we’ve got my longtime online (and recently IRL!) pal Christian Brown on changing tastes and a very wild Kung-Fu film that I feel like I absolutely must seek out.
Rollerball (1975) - dir. Norman Jewison
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: FRAN HOEPFNER
I laughed out loud about a third of the way into Rollerball when Jonathan (James Caan) and his Rollerball teammate Moonpie (I didn’t name him) (John Beck) visit a library. This is not funny because they are pro-athletes who read – though god bless them – but because the scene of them ascending an escalator inside a neo-neo-futuristic-whimsical-dystopian facility is set to the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty ballet. You know this song even if you think you don’t: it was aped (“adapted”) in the Disney animated version of the fairytale from 1959. “I know you,” Sleeping Beauty coos, dancing alongside an owl dressed as her beloved prince, “I walked with you once upon a dream.” It’s a great tune.
That director Norman Jewison scored his film not only with ample, if not obvious classical music cues but saves this one – one of the most romantic and Romantic pieces in classical music history – for Jonathan’s doomed library trip says it all. This ought to be a dream: these men are professional athletes, wanting for little and fighting for everything, and as we witness throughout the film, they are living in a waking nightmare. In brief fits of psychosis during the early days of the 2020 pandemic, I used to walk around Jersey City listening to this waltz on repeat, if it’s any indication of the grand purpose of the song.
As I wrote in the above, there is a lot of classical music in Rollerball. There is also a lot of Rollerball: a hyper-violent sport that’s a mix between roller-derby and football, with teams of men skating around in circles. (“There should be more sports that take place in… you know, a loop,” I told Phil. “Track sports?” he asked. I forgot there are already kind of a bunch of those.). Many of my takeaways from Rollerball are a bit incorrect (“They should play Rollerball in the Olympics!”) when the film is about a conspiracy to get the successful, beloved Jonathan to retire against his will (couldn’t be me). Jonathan’s refusal of his corporate overlords sends him and his teammates on a death march to the playoffs. It’s either James Caan’s most Jewish performance in the most goyishe movie of all time, or the opposite. I’ll keep you posted.
The biggest hat tip in the Rollerball score, however, is not the J.S. Bach “Toccata” that bookends the film, but rather the fact that is not one or two but THREE excerpts from Dmitri Shostakovich symphonies. Shostakovich, a 20th century Russian composer who briefly occupied this earth at the same time as James Caan, is perhaps most famous for being a “canceled” figure in Soviet Russia for his provocative operatic adaptation of Lady Macbeth (based on the Nikolai Leskov novella Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which also went onto inspire the Florence Pugh film from a few years back). Jewison plays a bit of Shostakovich’s infamous Fifth Symphony, the classical composition that marked his “comeback” in Russian artistic society after a year in hiding, fearing the death of him and his loved ones for bucking tradition. Depending on who you believe, Shostakovich’s Fifth is either the world’s most bombastic groveling or a satirical fanfare (the composer argued the latter, but it’s easy to say that once Stalin is dead). Complete with shrieking strings, thudding timpani, and sweeping brass, it’s hard not to be reminded of the Rollerball rink. The uncontrollable fans! The clanging of the scoreboard! The deadening slam of the metal ball into its skee-ball-esque hole. And, of course, one guy bucking the grain until he’s surrounded by carnage. It’s probably for the best Shostakovich didn’t live long enough to see Rollerball; I think it might have really upset him.
Fran Hoepfner is a writer with an MFA in fiction FOR SOME REASON. She lives in New York.
The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1984) - dir Lau Kar-leung
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: CHRISTIAN BROWN
In summer 2021, a spring in my brain snapped, and I could no longer tell whether something I enjoyed was "good" or "bad" or really "why I was doing anything." My media consumption took a hard right turn and I was watching old 90s tv shows on a spare monitor I put in my work-from-home-office, or rewatching the entirety of Battlestar Galactica, or just throwing on all sorts of mediocre anime, which I never really consumed before. I like to think that the thing that broke in my head was unimportant, a beneficial casualty of the pandemic, but who knows! It's gone now, and I've watched about 4 dozen Shaw Brothers kung fu movies as a result.
Like a lot of high school guys, I watched a lot of kung fu when I was 16 or so, mostly laughing at it. Bad dubs, silly sound effects, blood that looks like red ink, all very silly. I would have said they were Bad, I guess. Now, 20 years later, I see them more like opera, or a musical: no, people don't sing or bleed that color in real life. Relax! It doesn't matter! The things that are silly are really just conventions of the form, like how in the John Wicks Keanu is constantly holding up his bulletproof jacket to shield his face, or how nobody bleeds when James Bond shoots them.
The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1984), directed by Lau Kar Leung, knows that a lot of the conventions of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies are silly or internally inconsistent. The classic shaolin temple plot: a man is betrayed, his family or boss or whoever is killed, so he goes to study the mystical arts of kung fu on top of a mountain, where he gets really good at fighting and then kills whoever the bad guy is. His master at the temple says, whoah there, murdering the bad guy isn't very buddha of you, but eventually he does it anyway, and often returns to the temple now that the plot is dispensed with to be a regular, non-murdering monk.
Pole Fighter flips it inside out. Our hero, Fifth Brother, is one of two survivors of a big betrayal in the opening scene. Five brothers and one father are murdered using, like, articulated staffs that can wrap around you? He's a famous general and spear fighter, and goes to the temple to try and calm down. The abbot keeps trying to teach him not to kill, to just "break the wild wolf's teeth" instead, which seems like a metaphor for a while, until the finale where a whole team of buddhist monks shatters the teeth of every bad guy. Just tooth after tooth being spit out. It's wild! And Lau Kar Leung knows it's wild! The monks never really convince Fifth Brother that he should stop murdering, they end up helping him, and the final battle happens on a pyramid of coffins, to really drive home the theme: some guys just want to kill everyone. When his vengeance is complete, Fifth Brother just leaves. Walks off into the mountains, nobody will ever see him again.
The action is impeccable, of course, and it's filmed with a sense of framing and lighting that some of the weaker Shaw directors can't manage. The whole thing has a melancholy feeling, much less triumphal or tragic (which is another kind of triumph in these things, someone dies achieving their goals) and maybe that's because actor Alexander Fu Sheng, who played the other surviving Sixth Brother, died mid-production in a car crash. He disappears from the story, and the ending pivots from one of justice or revenge to one of violence for its own sake. Right before he leaves the temple to seek revenge, Fifth Brother has a fight-argument with the abbot and says, when he looks up, the light of Buddha shines on him, but when he looks down, all he thinks of is family and loved ones. The movie knows that it wants it both ways: a story of getting good at fighting and being cool, and of bashing out everyone's teeth. Is this good and just? Is it just bad and self indulgent? Nobody knows, not even the abbot.
Christian Brown is a writer and animator living in Los Angeles.
Smiley Face (2007) - dir. Gregg Araki
I think this is maybe one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Anna Faris is so perfect in this, I felt like I was laughing through the whole thing. It’s like any classic stoner movie where our main character Jane (Anna Faris) has a couple of things she needs to do today, but she’s gotten cripplingly high, which turns this simple couple of things into many many complicated things. But she’s not worried— she’s keeping a list to keep track of all of it. I really love that most stoner movies kind of boil down to exactly that. There’s a simple task that has to be done, but it gets complicated because you’re too high.
We follow Jane through her little odyssey around Los Angeles as things spiral further and further out of her control. Throughout the movie we get an ongoing internal dialogue between Jane and her inner voice (Roscoe Lee Browne), which is just a delightful and true look into what it’s like trying to reason something out while you’re high. We also get some fun moments of seeing things through Jane’s perspective followed by a cut to how it actually looks in the real world. I don’t know, nothing feels more stupid and unfunny than trying to describe funny bits in a stoner movie on a blog, so I’ll stop trying, sorry. All of these wild situations and crazy characters are held together by Anna Faris’ skill at playing a charming doofus. I’ve never seen such a good head empty, vacant expression, and I laughed every time it cuts to her with this totally checked out look.
Where Smiley Face differs from a lot of the stoner comedies I’ve seen is that the movie makes the interesting choice of playing out the ending fairly realistically. There’s no silly deus ex machina to bail Jane out of trouble, there’s no happily convenient ending where she gets what she wants and we all end up at an Afroman concert on Venice Beach or whatever. After all the wild shit that Jane’s gotten up to throughout the course of the movie, she ends up getting arrested and sentenced to community service, picking up trash by the freeway. Given how stoner movies usually go along, it seems like kind of a bummer, but it’s not so bleak, and I think it’s just because Jane seems to take it in stride, content to know that she can get back to doing what she does (ie, getting lit and drinking her year’s supply of root beer) once this is over.
John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) - dir. Chad Stahelski
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
I had pretty mixed feelings on the other John Wick sequels, and I think overall my interest in John Wick has kind of waned since seeing the first one (which I still love), but I really liked this one! You know how sometimes you have friends who you mostly only see via their online presence? And sometimes that online presence is just really annoying? And then you’re kind of like “Why’d this guy get so corny? When did this happen?” But then you hang out in real life and you realize this guy is still delightful and a great friend and having to be online has just forced a lot of people into brand-building for themselves, which is bleak and annoying, and that’s what you’re actually mad about. That’s kind of how I feel about John Wick. The endless iterations on its style from other, lesser movies looking to cash in, the online fandom obliviously turning Keanu into yet another stale meme— it’s all so exhausting to me, but none of that stuff is really John Wick’s fault. I don’t think John Wick as a series of movies is perfect, but I need to remember to dislike things on their own merits and that my annoyance is mostly at the way people talk about these things online for engagement. John Wick: Chapter 4 is not as charming or novel as that first movie, but it was still a nice reminder of the things I love about John Wick movies— fun fight sequences, a little bit of intrigue, and escalation after escalation.
I didn’t go back to rewatch the previous sequels before watching Chapter 4 so I had completely lost the plot of what happens after the first movie, but ultimately I think that was ideal (I remember something about getting into the larger bureaucracy and hierarchy of the assassin world, which, wow yeah who wouldn’t remember something as exciting as bureaucracy and hierarchy in a movie that is about shooting everybody in the head until you don’t have to work anymore? “I love the shootouts and the choreographed fights, but what I wanna hear more about is tokens and contracts and speaking to the manager"). It took me a while to kind of piece together what was actually happening in the overarching sense of the plot, but I think that kind of made it better for me? So much of what I loved about John Wick (2014) was getting a small glimpse into the mysterious world of professional assassins, and kind of piecing it all together on the fly, and what kind of turned me off with the sequels was what I felt was too much of an insistence on the details of world building, so it was nice to feel like I was getting just a taste of a larger world without having it all spelled out for me again. I think it’s kind of symptomatic of algorithm life, the online world just stuffing more and more of the thing that you like down your throat until you either come to dislike it, or you just give in and eagerly await more of the slop.
Part of what makes Chapter 4 more palatable for me was that there was less of a need to explain how all of this works. I remember the sequels spending a lot of time explaining the ins and outs of this assassin society, but by this point I think the movie expects you to understand enough about how the world works, so they can just get right into the good stuff that we all came here for. There’s a bit of exposition about who our bad guy is, what the stakes are, how a formal duel works, etc., but the majority of this long movie is about dropping John into different countries, different set pieces, and watching him do what he does, which is fun! It’s what I came here for in the first place!
There’s a lot of fun in this movie! Donnie Yen’s blind assassin Caine was an incredible foil for John. We get a couple of classic action things there— highly skilled blind fighter (the bit with the remote alarm chimes was so cool), one last job, doing awful things to protect his family, a nice parallel of themes and values with our main character’s— and he sells them so well (he’s a legend and a pro!). Bill Skarsgård’s cartoonish (maybe borderline disrespectful?) French accent and fancy boy looks were perfect action bad guy things. I also loved Rina Sawayama in this! Her fight scenes were exciting, her relationship with her father was an interesting parallel to Caine’s with his daughter, and even though it’s absolute nonsense to bring a bow and arrow to a gigantic gunfight, it managed to look very cool, and that’s the only reason to do that. This is an action movie, things gotta look cool! (Also, as a quick aside, this is absolutely not a horny blog, but, respectfully, I would love for Rina Sawayama to hop on my back and stab me over and over, and if any MOVIE DIARY 2023 readers can arrange for Rina Sawayama to mortally wound me, please email me.) There’s also Scott Adkins in a fat suit and a ton of prosthetics (he’s having fun) getting chased by John through the classic action movie set piece of a German club loudly playing heavy industrial music, the hilarious mechanic of everyone wearing bullet proof suit jackets and holding their jacket over their face while they’re getting shot at (was that in the other movies? It’s so fucking funny), John repeatedly shooting the henchmen with the bulletproof masks and helmets in the head over and over and over again, the entire Arc de Triomphe fight in traffic, the staircase fight and John falling down hundreds of steps (hilarious), all of that’s good stuff. Also the first long one shot scene in a while that I actually thought was fun. The camera tracks John through a shootout in an empty building and the camera moves to an overhead position so you see the layout of the floor and the hallways and you watch the bad guys swarming John from all sides. It’s kind of gamer-y, but it was really thrilling to watch John just work his way through this building and upgrading his weapon as he kills bad guy after bad guy. Huge laughs in the theater every time John shot someone point blank with the grenade launcher, Nicole Kidman should talk about stuff like that for her next AMC commercial.
The bad stuff is stuff I’m mostly willing to forgive because I was having so much fun with the good stuff. It’s kind of funny that they introduce a bunch of cool assassins with some kind of gimmick in this one, and the guy who seems to be giving him the most trouble is “Nobody,” the mysterious assassin who’s gimmick is that he has a dog and a big backpack that he takes to the club like a huge dork. I thought his whole deal was kind of stupid without even looking cool, plus I’m not sure what he brought to the table thematically was even that necessary. On one hand, Caine believes that following the rules and taking the Marquis’ contract to kill John will eventually lead to his and his daughter’s freedom. On the other hand, John believes the only way he can get his true freedom is by killing his way out, which is absolutely against the rules (except in one case, which is what this movie is built around). On a third, completely superfluous hand, Nobody bides his time on the contract for John until the price gets high enough for him to buy his way out of the game, which I don’t think makes a whole lot of sense. It’s a pretty weak third angle that throws off the already satisfying duality of John’s approach vs Caine’s approach. Also, if you could buy your way out, couldn’t John have already done that? The man had so much assassin gold buried under his garage in the first movie! Whatever. There’s also a bunch of corny needle drops and a half hearted homage to The Warriors (1979) and every other movie that has done that whole close up on the lips of a DJ talking into the microphone and sending a message to us on the airwaves, and just sort of fan service-y type things like that. Again, I liked the good stuff enough that the bad stuff just feels kind of nit picky or inconsequential when I write it all out. Fran Magazine had a good one on Chapter 4 that touched on some other stuff that I wasn’t super into about this movie, and I think Fran is much better about talking about what didn’t work for her than I am. I also really liked this piece on Chapter 4 from Boy Movies that talks about the charms of the movie that get lost as the setting gets expanded to become more international.
Ultimately I think this movie gives a lot, and I’m very much hoping this is the end of the John Wick series. I think in this era of movies, it’s nice for something to have an end, rather than hobbling on, getting further and further diluted. Chapter 4 is a nice return to what I enjoyed from the first movie, so you know, end on a high note, leave ‘em wanting more, all of that. I went longer than I was expecting to on this, and I’m not even sure that I covered everything I wanted to, but we can talk more about it in the Discord if you want.
Wow! What a big post! We did it! Thanks to Fran and Christian for joining us this week! Fran and Christian are both on the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord (along with some of our previous MOVIE DIARY special guests), so please join in if you wanna talk more about any of the movies from MOVIE DIARY 2023.
See you soon!