Vinsanity - The Oeuvre of Vin Diesel

"I don't have friends.  I got family," growls Dominic Toretto in the trailer for Furious 7, the latest installment of one of the hardiest action franchises in cinematic history.  The line is wholly applicable to the career of the man who's now played Toretto six times: Mark Sinclair Vincent, better known to audiences as Vin Diesel.

Diesel's best-known characters are practically like familiar relatives, anchoring both nascent (Guardians of the Galaxy's Groot) and long-running franchises (Toretto in the Fast movies, sci-fi badass Richard B. Riddick), each sequel catching us up with what Uncle Vin has been doing.  It's a career so franchise-dependent that Diesel hasn't portrayed a live-action character other than Toretto or Riddick since 2008.

Nevertheless, being the face of a franchise (or two) obscures the individual underneath.  It isn't unusual for movie stars to become brands unto themselves, but the schism in Diesel's career is so abrupt and severe that it bears closer examination: both the glowering, gravel-voice action star who causes a ruckus on the internet simply by singing or dancing, and the hungry Hollywood neophyte with designs on being the De Niro or Pacino of his generation.

Diesel's debut feature Strays (1997) invites comparisons to Rocky and the career arc of Sylvester Stallone.  Both films were written by their stars, and feature gritty urban settings and marble-mouthed mooks with hearts of gold.  This being the peak era of the no-budget, achingly personal Sundance film, Diesel also directed and produced his story of an unambitious hustler taking tentative steps toward maturity in order to romance the wholesome girl next door (Suzanne Lanza).

Strays is a feature-length argument for Diesel's sensitive side.  The movie's mission is to subvert expectations, presenting a romantic drama that's more like John Cassavetes filtered through the sensibility of Kevin Smith than the next Mean Streets.  If that sounds dubious, well, that's because it kind of is - beyond the clunky dialogue and jarring tonal shifts, the film's main pairing suffers from a lack of chemistry.  But there's something appealing in Diesel's unpolished sincerity, an admission that both the movie and its star are rough around the edges, and thus more vulnerable than the film's macho bluster or the actor's superhero physique would have you believe.

You can see that same mystique in Diesel's first mainstream roles, which often capitalized on the "less is more" theory - witness his supporting role as a chiseled Army grunt in Saving Private Ryan (1998) and the voice that launched a million tears in The Iron Giant (1999).  But he's most cleverly utilized in David Twohy's Pitch Black (2000), an entertainingly efficient sci-fi thriller that's a bit like Stagecoach in space: when a star freighter carrying a cultural cross-section of passengers - including a dangerous criminal named Richard B. Riddick - crash-lands on a deserted planet, the survivors must pull together and find a way off the rock before they're hunted down by nocturnal alien predators.

As Riddick, Diesel finds an ideal route to his signature archetype: the noble tough guy.  He laps up the character's humor, menace, and singular code of ethics.  Like the film itself, he's convincing enough to allow the audience to buy into the conceit without taking it too seriously.  At the same time, Pitch Black smartly positions Diesel as the featured player in a slowly dwindling ensemble cast, gradually building his ass-kicking aura instead of relying solely on his charisma to elevate a fundamentally silly premise - a good move considering Diesel's baseline of campy self-awareness is somewhere far south of Schwarzenegger.

Of course, that didn't stop the creators of xXx (2002) from betting the farm on Diesel's potential as an above-the-title action hero.  And though it's hard to blame them after the runaway success of The Fast and the Furious made Diesel a household name, xXx fails to capitalize on the actor's strengths, casting him as an extreme sports enthusiast named Xander Cage recruited by a national intelligence agency to infiltrate a terrorist group run by a Russian mercenary (Martin Csokas).  But asking Diesel to play the part of the suave, globe-trotting spy - a kind of in-your-face James Bond for the Mountain Dew generation - is like trying to crush an anthill with a boulder.  Unsurprisingly, he responds with the phoned-in performance that this cheesy, cynical cash grab of a film deserves.

Xander's initial recruitment resembles a theme park version of a Hitchcockian "wrong man" conspiracy thriller, which Diesel plays like a prickish volunteer at a magic show who refuses to go along with the deception.  xXx quickly gives way to strident soda commercial edginess with heroes who think and talk like middle-aged Hollywood executives desperately trying to grasp what those crazy kids are into these days ("Stop thinking proud police, start thinking PlayStation - blow shit up!" is a typical xXx bon mot).  There's also something weird about watching a physical specimen like Diesel ordered to pursue the delicate business of espionage, which sounds the premise of a comedy, not the beginning of the next huge action franchise.

Not that his track record in comedy is sterling.  While The Pacifier (2005) is a dreadful attempt at giving Diesel his own Kindergarten Cop, the courtroom comedy Find Me Guilty (2006) should inspire more faith based on its director, Hollywood legend Sidney Lumet, alone.  Diesel plays New Jersey mafioso Jackie DiNorscio, who boldly and eccentrically served as his own counsel during a massive organized crime trial in the late 1980s.  A wiseguy in every sense of the word, DiNorscio stumbles his way through the legal proceedings with off-color jokes, waggish questions, and a constant shit-eating grin - Diesel's chompers are indeed on frequent display, making up for nearly a decade of grim stoicism.

It's not hard to see why Lumet cast Diesel in the film - the actor's success comes from the same elixir of streetwise charm and chutzpah that, in larger, more dangerous doses, breeds an overreaching big city hustler like DiNorsico.  Alas, a creeping phoniness sets in when you realize that the movie is actually trying to garner an uncomplicated sympathy for DiNorscio and his shady associates, sloppily rationalizing their defense by casting the prosecution as a bunch of shrill, smug tricksters.  It falls to Diesel, swaddled in the bulkiest of '80s fashions to hide his He-Man physique, to try and sell the idea of the populist antihero - a tall order in a film this flippantly corny.

While Find Me Guilty might have been too much of a stretch for audiences, it's preferable to the disappointing familiarity of the abysmal Babylon A.D. (2008), in which Diesel once again plays a taciturn mercenary comfortable in the criminal element - but only for the right reasons.  It's not often that a movie has me clamoring for more exposition, but the lack of guidance through Babylon A.D.'s incomprehensible mythology made me pine for the idiotic simplicity of xXx (which is clearly the superior film where Diesel traipses around Russia in a giant winter coat).

With a lot of material obviously left on the cutting room floor or omitted entirely in a cynical appraisal of Diesel's fanbase, Babylon A.D. is setting up its star to fail.  Yet Diesel remains remarkably self-possessed throughout the ordeal.  On the other hand, there's not much he can do with a character as stunted as Toorop.  Babylon A.D. is, to date, Diesel's last starring role before retreating into the comfort of his multimillion-dollar franchises - and given the quality of such unchallenging, one-dimensional roles, it's hard to blame him.

Looking at the arc of Diesel's career, it looks like one of two things happened: either he learned to play exclusively to his strengths as a intimidating screen presence; or he resigned himself to the industry's lack of imagination about how to use him.  The truth might be a mixture of both.  Still, it's interesting to consider a couple of Diesel's deeper cuts, particularly the fascinating Boiler Room (2000) - where he gets to be light, funny, charming, and everything else that seems improbable at this stage in his career - and Knockaround Guys (2003), where he gives his most underrated performance as an avenging ass-kicker who's deployed with great restraint and thus greater meaning.  Somehow, some way - perhaps when we run out of ideas for implausible car stunts - Mark Sinclair Vincent will once again get to spread his wings.

Jump Cuts: The Movies Get Religion

For many years since the birth of cinema, religious storytelling remained something of a parochial concern.  Aside from notable big-screen epics like The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Story Ever Told, the theater was not a place for proselytizing.  Even when mainstream narrative films tackled religious subjects, it was more about experiencing the grandeur and mystery of some of humanity’s oldest stories, or revealing something about the institutions behind their propagation.

All that changed with The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s graphic 2004 blockbuster about the last hours and death of Jesus.  The film galvanized Christian production companies - some of which had existed for years, churning out media with varying degrees of polish - and Christians in the mainstream entertainment industry alike, and inspired commentary about the vast untapped market for entertainment aimed at evangelical audiences.

Since Hollywood is so obsessed with duplicating anything that remotely resembles a financial success, observers weren’t wrong to speculate about the emergence of a new trend.  But making religious films is a trickier proposition than pandering to the mania for vampires or zombies, with even more limited commercial prospects.  Until 2014, of course, when suddenly religious-themed entertainment proved to be a good investment, as micro-budgeted and quietly-marketed films like God’s Not Dead bested the returns of heathen studio efforts such as Sex Tape and Jersey Boys.  Either these films are connecting with more than just the faithful, or the evangelical contingent is larger than previously thought.  In any case, their surprising box office success demands a closer examination of the movies themselves.

One advantage faith-based films have is their willingness to tackle a kind of internal spiritual conflict that most American cinema wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.  Heaven Is for Real attempts to dramatize the struggle of Nebraska pastor Todd Burpo (Greg Kinnear) who tries to reconcile his own beliefs with a health scare that nearly takes the life of his 4-year-old son Colton (Connor Corum).  Even more challenging for Todd, however, is the aftermath.  While undergoing emergency surgery for a burst appendix, Colton claims to have risen out of his body and experienced a place he recognizes as "Heaven," describing the appearance of Jesus and meeting relatives who passed long before Colton was born.

Contrary to the way religious devotion is usually portrayed onscreen, Heaven Is for Real tries to reclaim the role of critical thought in religion and explores the way people react to ideas or beliefs that clash with their preferred worldview.  It's too bad, then, that the subject matter is more suited to an even-keeled, white-bread Protestant sermon than a narrative film.  I mean no offense to such sermons - I've heard plenty, and much prefer them to the fire and brimstone style that assumes our individual day-to-day lives resemble a kind of grandiose cosmic struggle.  There's just a lot of inexplicably-produced drama and heavy-handed exposition to wade through before we get there.  

The pacing is somewhat mitigated by an immensely qualified cast including Kelly Reilly, Thomas Haden Church, and Margo Martindale, and led by Kinnear, a man who is likability incarnate and perhaps one of a handful of actors who could convincingly portray the almost unbelievably wholesome combination of a pastor/volunteer fireman/high school wrestling coach that he does here.  Heaven Is for Real is pretty slight for a film that made $100 million worldwide, but its undemanding nature is likely the key to its financial success; what it lacks in vitality it makes up in pleasantness.

At the other end of the spectrum lies the campus drama God’s Not Dead, which traffics in confrontation and hysteria.  Kevin Sorbo stars as an atheist philosophy professor who requires his students to sign a pledge that states "God is dead" in lieu of spending valuable classroom time debating the existence of a supreme being.  When Christian freshman Josh Wheaton (Shane Harper) enrolls in the class and refuses to deny his beliefs, he is challenged to convince his classmates that God does exist or else accept a failing grade.

Though clearly inspired by several recent religious discrimination lawsuits brought against universities by Christian evangelical students and organizations, the sources of the film's bias become laughably less connected from reality as it goes along.  God's Not Dead is a persecution fantasy, using a glowering bully of an atheist - who, as the film helpfully points out, is also an intellectually intolerant snob, an emotionally abusive boyfriend, and an all-around horrible human being - to argue that Christianity is being unfairly attacked, despite its centuries as the foundation of political, cultural, and economic hegemony in the Western world, and enough influence to allow a micro-budget film from an unknown distributor to play multiplexes and gross over $60 million in the United States.  

It doesn't help that the movie is a tonal mess with problematic subplots galore.  God's Not Dead seeks only to confirm the most negative assumptions about the secular world, making it most useful as a psychological profile.  In the movie's estimation, only non-Christians are the ones telling others what to do and how to live.  Only Christianity liberates the oppressed - including a Chinese exchange student, the daughter of a conservative Muslim, and a liberal blogger suddenly diagnosed with cancer - with the gift of self-determination.  If it wasn't so eager to accept a defensive stance, God's Not Dead could have expanded on its legitimately interesting portrayal of the Christian intelligentsia's approach to knotty philosophical questions; instead, it simply expands a rigid, combative tautology and turns religion into a zero-sum game of conformity that ought to offend Christians and non-believers alike.

Though not the highest-grossing film discussed here, Son of God perhaps illustrates the current clout of faith-based films better than any other.  It attracted a considerable audience - grossing nearly $70 million - to see what is essentially a Jesus-centric edit of The Bible, the Mark Burnett-produced miniseries that aired for free on the History Channel a year ago.  The film spends most of its first half turning the gospel into a kind of street magic tour, heavy on the miracles and light on characterization.  It's a hyper-literal Sunday School lesson, right down to the fact that just about every word Jesus utters is taken directly from scripture.

What's more interesting is the way that Son of God portrays the established power structure - the Roman bureaucracy and the Jewish priesthood - reacting to Jesus' rise from harmless backwater prophet to the leader of a popular religious movement.  The leaders of both institutions are ultimately the villains of this story, but they worry convincingly about the socio-political questions presented by this challenge to their authority.  

Meanwhile, all Jesus does is win, beaming a beatific smile and projecting an eerie calm among his disciples.  (The placid performance of Portuguese actor/model Diogo Morgado as Christ is about as conventional as they come.)  Mercifully, the crucifixion is toned down from the bloody nightmare of The Passion and it all ends on a hopeful note.  Still, with all the tools of a visual medium at its disposal, it rarely reaches a level of inspiration you couldn't get from just reading the Good Book.

Noah is the obvious outlier in this discussion - a true-blue blockbuster that arrived with lofty financial expectations and succeeded to the tune of over $350 million worldwide - starring Russell Crowe as the last righteous man in the world who’s warned of an impending cataclysm that will purge the wickedness of all humanity from the face of the Earth.  Darren Aronofsky’s film is a brawny, action-oriented retelling of the Genesis flood narrative made in conventional Hollywood style not meant to satisfy any single religious audience - which is fitting, given the story's importance to the world's Abrahamic religions, as well as its similarity to stories in other faiths and cultural traditions.  (That didn't stop a skittish Paramount even cautioned evangelical groups not to expect a literal recounting of the Bible story, but an artistic interpretation of its characters, events, and themes.  Or, you know, a movie.)  

It’s telling that Noah, more than any of these other films, inspired me to go back and learn more about its source material.  Despite its inherent grimness - "The time for mercy has passed," says Noah, "and now our punishment begins" - the movie nonetheless has a flair for the exotic and the sublime.  Aronofsky utilizes a pleasing blend of CGI and massive practical sets, along with Matthew Libatique’s sweeping and sensual photography, to give his film the proper epic scope.  Positioning itself as a big-tent origin story for all humankind, Noah buries any moral instruction deep within two hours of pure Old Testament ownage.  Whereas most faith-based films derive their identity by standing an alternative to mainstream cinema, Noah ultimately trumps them all by mimicking the look and the tone of popular secular entertainments.

Jump Cuts: Reconsidering Visual Effects and CGI

If editing is the invisible art of moviemaking, then special effects are its eminently visible counterpart.  It’s what we mean when we refer to the “spectacle” of the movies.  And once upon a time, the backstage craft of effects specialists was just as visible in the onscreen result.  Whether a special effect was produced through matte paintings, rear projection, miniatures, or some other ingenious form of optical trickery, they usually had some sort of tactile quality, making it easy for audiences to extend the same suspension of disbelief afforded to an actor playing a character or a director constructing a fictional world.

Then came the computers.  The ubiquity of computer-generated imagery (CGI) today is a story of a decades-long technological revolution that has completely changed the way we perceive special effects.  First, there’s the general audience fatigue that seals the fate of one or two CGI-heavy blockbusters every year.  There’s also the studio arms race to create films full of “trailer moments” that show off expensive effects work, paradoxically leading to subsets of jaded viewers clamoring for a return to “practical” effects, as well as eliding the fact that CGI is often used to enhance movies in smaller, more subtle ways.

As is often the case with the Hollywood rank-and-file, CGI artists toil in anonymity and rarely receive personal recognition when a film succeeds.  With the exception of George Lucas' pioneering Industrial Light and Magic and maybe Peter Jackson's Weta Digital, visual effects companies are not recognizable brands.  Aside from those two titans, the most famous effects house is probably Rhythm & Hues, which made headlines last year by filing for bankruptcy shortly before winning a Best Visual Effects Oscar for its work on Life of Pi.

The Rhythm & Hues case is indicative of how little respect the CGI craft receives from the public and the industry at large.  It's even reflected in the nomenclature: somewhere along the line we went from "special" to "visual" effects, underscoring the paradox that surrounds the effects industry that painstakingly creates the CGI wizardry we've come to expect in big blockbuster films, only to have its work dismissed with a yawn.  Been there, mo-capped that.  To that I say: CGI deserves better.  And to prove it, I'm looking at four films that demonstrate 1) how far CGI has come since the turn of the century and 2) how visual effects can give bad to mediocre films one of their few (and often only) notable qualities.

Animation has often been ahead of the curve when it comes to film technology, and CGI is no exception - witness the massive success of Toy Story in 1995.  But Disney's Dinosaur (2000) was something different entirely.  Hatched from an idea for a dialogue-free stop-motion epic from director Paul Verhoeven and effects legend Phil Tippet (who worked together on RoboCop and Starship Troopers), Dinosaur evolved into a more conventional Disney picture, albeit with a risky twist: it places completely CGI characters onto backgrounds that were filmed on location across the globe.  Telling the story of a herd of dinosaurs and their lemur companions struggling to survive after a cataclysmic asteroid impact, the movie has a surprising fluidity in its painstakingly detailed character designs.  And while the close-ups trend toward the uncanny valley - especially when framed by lush real-world vegetation - Dinosaur contains a number of striking images, the best being a procession of dinosaurs in long shot moving through a dry wasteland and silhouetted against a setting sun.  It's not only impressive, it's damn near poetic, and an important stepping stone in the compositing of CGI creations with live-action footage.  (Something had to fill the sizable gap between Blarp and Gollum.)

Much like Dinosaur, Kerry Condon's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) was an audacious experiment: the first studio film to be shot entirely on blue screen.  Form supports function in this swashbuckling actioner that imagines an alternate 1939 as a whirling dieselpunk fantasy where the famous mercenary Sky Captain (Jude Law) is called upon to find out why giant robots are terrorizing cities around the world.  Resembling the fever dream of a a kid obsessed with Indiana Jones, old-school flying aces, and pulp sci-fi magazines, Sky Captain has an entirely unique visual sensibility that nails the look of a 1940s action serial with big budget production values, right down to the classic low-key lighting that was (wait for it) mostly computer-generated.  Still, despite coming in at a modest budget by modern blockbuster standards, Sky Captain was a financial failure.  Many blamed the "gimmicky" technology for detaching audiences from an acceptable cinematic reality, but I would argue that the clumsy dialogue and overstuffed plot are the real culprits. 

 

Sure enough, other filmmakers began to follow Condon's lead.  Robert Rodriguez's Sin City and Zack Snyder's 300 proved the financial viability of hermetic blue screen cinema, paving the way for films like Frank Miller's considerably less awesome The Spirit (2008).  Miller (who co-directed Sin City with Rodriguez) was considered the perfect choice to bring Will Eisner's 1940s Everyman crime fighter to the big screen based on his long personal relationship with Eisner, despite Miller himself hinting that their friendship was oftentimes contentious.  There's definitely a major disconnect as the film oscillates between cartoonish, tongue-in-cheek action and Miller's tiresome faux-boiled attitude and creepy leering gaze toward the movie's considerable roster of femme fatales.  It's best to focus on The Spirit''s daring visual style, culled from Miller's hand-drawn storyboards and brought to life by effects artists who manage to make Central City the movie's most vibrant character.  The CGI suggests an alternate past that's moodier and more convincing than Sky Captain, but it's the subtle enhancements, like the splash of color in the hero's fluttering red tie and the glowing soles of his shoes, that give The Spirit a true personality and almost transcend some of the movie's conspicuously wooden performances.

Blue (or green) screen acting remains a market inefficiency few have capitalized on (see: Fraser, Brendan), and while Immortals (2011) is not a game-changer in that sense, it does illustrate how CGI re-affirms and deepens the old wisdom about cinema being a collaborative medium.  Director Tarsem Singh described the look of his 3D sword-and-sandals adventure as "Caravaggio meets Fight Club" and you can see every department of his crew pulling toward that visual benchmark.  Sumptuously detailed costumes, props, and built sets convey Singh's vision for both the audience and the actors (though Mickey Rourke's half-rabbit, half-piranha helmet is more menacing than any part of his phoned-in performance).  But it's incomplete without the work of the effects house - essentially a crew-within-a-crew - which conjures towering Aegean cliffs, the fortress of the gods above Mount Olympus, and every location in between from footage shot on Montreal soundstages.  Simply put, Immortals' heavy use of CGI sure beats the generic deserts of the Clash of the Titans remake, and adds a painterly quality that distracts from the film's gradual transformation into a brutishly violent revenge flick.  The spectacle, however, is appropriate for a story steeped in Greek mythology.  And as CGI becomes commonplace in movies big and small, such tensions between the "practical" and the digital, tactile craftsmanship and technological mastery, are being met more often with a simple question: why can't we have both?

Jump Cuts: Ralph Bakshi Edition

An industrial school graduate who got his start in the animation business at the age of 18 cleaning dust off of painted cels, Ralph Bakshi doesn’t immediately spring to mind when thinking about the cowboy auteurs who birthed the New Hollywood movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.  But within the confines of feature animation, he starts to resemble a Coppola or a Scorsese: a larger-than-life visionary who used his medium to document his own obsessions and hang-ups, and pushed his field in the direction of gritter, more adult storytelling.

Bakshi burst into the public consciousness with 1972’s Fritz the Cat, an X-rated tale of urban-dwelling anthropomorphic animals that established the viability of “cartoons” for mature audiences.  Over time, he began to flirt with mainstream success, perhaps achieving his greatest notoriety by adapting roughly half of The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 1978.  The failure of 1992’s Brad Pitt-starring Cool World led Bakshi to quit Hollywood, though he still continues to work: earlier this year, he took to Kickstarter to help fund his first new film in more than two decades, The Last Days of Coney Island. 

In between those points of entry and exit, however, lies much of Bakshi’s most interesting work.  His oeuvre paints the portrait of a quintessential artist, consumed by his passions and the unrelenting tension between the personal fidelity of his work and the need to court commercial interests.  Ultimately, Bakshi’s greatest strength and his Achilles heel were one and the same – whatever the charge, he always crammed as much of himself into a project as possible. 

A wildly grotesque, out-of-control portrait of urban life, Heavy Traffic (1973) could be the most determinedly unpleasant cartoon ever made.  It’s also one of the most personal, and an obvious labor of love for Bakshi – the film he was born to make.  In the film, a Bakshi avatar – a struggling cartoonist named Michael – wanders out of his parents’ house and around New York City, seeking money, companionship, and sex, not necessarily in that order.  In this gritty, decaying landscape full of freaks and lowlifes, he hooks up with Carole, an African-American bartender whose race and demeanor upsets Michael’s bigoted father, a low-level Mafioso, who plots to murder his son and preserve his twisted sense of family honor.

Much like Fritz the Cat, the X-rating of Heavy Traffic is like a badge of honor.  Its cavalier depiction of violence is unsetting, with acrobatic fistfights like something out of Looney Tunes, only queasier.  One particular scene sends a self-loathing transvestite caroming around a bar; in another, a naked women is shoved off a rooftop, the “punchline” being that she’s saved by a tangle of electrical wires.  The movie’s, ahem, complex relationship with good taste also extends to sex, but it’s more focused on the frustration of the virginal Michael and his inability to get laid.  Not that Heavy Traffic condones the behavior it depicts – in the end, it’s a metaphorical fantasy of city living, massive warts and all – and an exercise in pure id.  As Bakshi and his crew thumb their noses at society’s self-filtering mechanisms and behavioral taboos, they create something so misshapen and so wrong that it can’t help but be completely human and alive.

Bakshi takes his first plunge into genre with Wizards (1977), built around a normal swords-and-sorcery template – two warring magicians stage a climactic battle of good against evil – that’s complicated with political undertones and apocalyptic imagery evoking man’s darkest and most violent impulses.  In a future where nuclear war has scarred the earth and turned most humans into a race of hideously mutated monsters, there is one enclave where the inhabitants remain unafflicted.  Under the watchful eye of Avatar, a kind and generous wizard, they provide a haven for all elves, fairies, and other fantastical creatures.  Meanwhile, the evil wizard Blackwolf, having eschewed natural magic in favor of technologically advanced weaponry, dispatches an assassin to kill Avatar while simultaneously planning to invade the unspoiled lands he so covets.

Wizards most resembles a psychedelic road movie as Avatar and his cohorts – buxom half-human/half fairy Elinore, elf warrior Weehawk, and Necron-99, the robot assassin that Avatar enchants and re-dubs “Peace” before it can murder him – spend a good chunk of the film on the run from Blackwolf’s minions.  Bakshi augments their hijinks with battle sequences that rely heavily on rotoscoping:  a compositing process that utilizes live-action footage that’s then traced over by an animator one frame at a time.  The uncannily fluid visuals produced by rotoscoping would a major part of Bakshi’s signature style, but in Wizards it’s almost charmingly primitive and fits the identity of the movie as a bridge between his highly personal, urban-inflected work, and his subsequent forays into more commercial fantasy stories.  And while it would be a stretch to call Wizards an unqualified narrative success, it’s an invaluable glimpse into Bakshi’s schizophrenic imagination, combining the dark fantasy of Heavy Metal magazine with the lingering psychological effects of World War II and the Holocaust (Blackwolf hypnotizes his enemies with old Nazi propaganda filmstrips he finds in the post-nuclear rubble) to make a highly conflicted, yet memorable, case for pacifism.

Such personality is absent from Fire and Ice (1983), a failed attempt at launching an epic fantasy franchise with Bakshi’s wilder impulses toned down for a younger audience.  Released the same year as the debut of Mattel’s He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon, Fire and Ice is a dull, punchless simulacrum that invites unfavorable comparisons to the toy-centric television series, as well as the adventures of Conan the Barbarian.  The similarities to Robert E. Howard’s classic hero make sense, as Bakshi co-created the characters of Fire and Ice with Frank Frazetta, the legendary comic book artist who also illustrated iconic paperback covers for the stories of pulp authors like Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  This creative dream team was backed by a script from a pair of equally talented writers: Gerry Conway, co-creator of the Punisher, and Roy Thomas, the first successor to Stan Lee as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics.

With all of the assembled talent, it’s baffling and painful to watch Fire and Ice struggle to meet the standards of merely diverting entertainment.  The movie recycles several elements from Wizards, including the character name “Nekron,” who’s another evil sorcerer leading an army of sub-humans as they try to force their way into a nicer neighborhood.  As Fire and Ice is a more commercial endeavor, it loses the idiosyncratic perspective of Bakshi’s earlier films while finding a way to exploit their puerile elements within the boundaries of a PG rating.  Unfortunately, sex and violence do not a movie make, and the lasting impression made by Fire and Ice is one of boredom and squandered potential.

Though Bakshi will always be remembered primarily for his envelope-pushing subject matter and visual flair, he also has a case as one of the fathers of the modern movie soundtrack – Heavy Traffic was one the first films (along with American Graffiti, released the same year) to take advantage of what were, at the time, dirt-cheap licensing rates for classic pop songs.  By the time he directed American Pop (1981), the practice was increasingly common – and much more expensive – yet Bakshi still had no trouble pulling together almost a century’s worth of popular hits for his multigenerational saga of a Russian Jewish immigrant family making its mark in the music business. 

A propulsive tale about the risk and reward of the American dream, American Pop is an ingratiating oddity with a surprisingly dark backbeat.  This being Bakshi, the movie indulges his preoccupations with violence, often in ways that have almost nothing to do with the story.  But Ronni Kern’s script is mostly successful in reining in his worst habits, putting the focus firmly on the music and its parallel representation of upward mobility and exploitation.  With rotoscoping superior to that of Bakshi’s fantasy films, American Pop doesn’t shy away from the fact that hard work and gumption are not always rewarded with riches.  American lives, as Bakshi well knows, are peppered with mishaps and misfires for those seeking a path outside of the typical conformity - but for those willing to endure the rough times, it makes for a better shot at a lasting individual legacy.

Jump Cuts: Exhuming the Hollywood Action Hero

Jump Cuts is the place where I zoom in on a handful of films linked by certain elements (cast, genre, director), discovering recurring motifs, mining important themes, and comparing different approaches to filmmaking.  Next up: the state of the Hollywood action star, circa 2013.

Where have all the action heroes gone?

That’s actually an easy question to answer.  Today's action heroes are typically action superheroes, ripped from the pages of comic books both popular and obscure.  Pumped up with fantastical powers, they do battle with larger-than-life villains, with entire cities and sometimes entire planets watching their every move.  And you could even call these movies fundamentally character-driven, in the sense that you can replace the man behind the mask (Tobey Maguire, meet Andrew Garfield) and still keep the franchise going.

That's a far cry from the halcyon days of star-driven Hollywood action cinema, where the name above the title was the most important element, the person standing for the physical and moral (and almost always masculine) ideal of the times.  Think Sean Connery and Steve McQueen's sophisticated sangfroid in a rapidly globalizing world; Sylvester Stallone's Carter-era American underdog morphing into the steroidal Cold Warrior of Reagan's dreams; Arnold Schwarzenegger going from imposing slab of Austrian beef to playfully self-aware pop culture icon of the go-go '90s.

It's this latter breed of action hero that is on the brink of irrelevance in 2013.  With the summer season dominated by heroes of the super variety, old-school action flicks have sought refuge in the mid-winter dumping ground, where the competition is lighter and the expectations lower.  It's one of the few ways that a meat-and-potatoes thriller like Contraband can become a modest hit.  It's also an increasingly dubious business model, given that medium-size budgets and stars that can reliably open a movie are two more things that are nearly extinct in Hollywood.  But studios keep trying, driven largely by nostalgia and the promise of a quick buck during a traditionally fallow period for new releases.

Schwarzenegger was the first out of the gate in January with The Last Stand, the American debut of cult Korean director Kim Ji-woon.  It's an underrated achievement in which Kim finds a comfy home for his quirky humor in the center of a preposterously dumb and exuberantly violent chase movie that gives equal billing to a grating Johnny Knoxville and a slumming Forrest Whitaker.  But it represents a curious choice for Schwarzenegger, who stars as the sheriff of a tiny Arizona border town that represents the last line of defense against an escaped cartel kingpin speeding to Mexico in a souped-up sports car.

Given the chance to re-establish himself among audiences as the heavily accented quip machine tweaking the macho pretensions of the action genre, Schwarzenegger traps himself in a bland, shapeless role where his only glimmer of individuality comes in telling the drug lord that he's making his fellow immigrants look bad.  Ironically, everything else in The Last Stand is pitched to the memorably goofy, devil-may-care spirit of classic Schwarzenegger heroes, but the star's natural charisma seems dulled by his long political sojourn and his once-sharp onscreen timing rusty from lack of maintenance.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Schwarzenegger - who, given his age and his detours into politics, is essentially now a part-time actor - is the veritable Iron Horse of action cinema:  Jason Statham.  Hardly a winter passes without Statham scowling at and creatively punching baddies in a straightforward beat-em-up while waiting for the next Expendables summons from Stallone.  The Taylor Hackford-directed Parker, however, is the exception that proves the rule.  It's Statham trying on the clothes of a character who's not just "Jason Statham," but rather the eponymous criminal with a code appearing a series of novels by the author Donald E. Westlake.

While the basic outline of the character resembles Statham's type (there's nobody better at playing the chivalrous crook rattling off his list of "rules"), the movie itself is a wannabe-Elmore Leonard potboiler, a Florida-set heist flick pitting Parker against the thugs who betrayed him on his last job, with grafted-on elements of screwball romance courtesy of an opportunistic realtor played by Jennifer Lopez.  (Except Parker already has a girlfriend, who apparently pops up to do his laundry when he's on the lam.)  Unfortunately, the famously intense Statham just isn't suited to the tonal juggling act that Parker requires, and the way he undersells his reaction to everything doesn't quite work in a film that wants to take itself more seriously than, say, the Transporter series.  It also doesn't help that his adversaries are the less-than-hard bodies of guys like Michael Chiklis and Wendell Pierce.  Statham himself looks unconvinced of the potential danger, and it's easy for the audience to feel the same.

The Sylvester Stallone vehicle Bullet to the Head is about as paint-by-numbers as it gets, but at least it does well to populate the criminal underbelly of New Orleans with actual tough guys.  Stallone, still possessing the solidity of a concrete pillar in his mid-60s, stars as Jimmy Bobo, a hitman who teams up with an out-of-town cop (Sung Kang, the unsung hero of the Fast & Furious ensemble) to seek vengeance against his double-crossing employer.  Along the way, he literally butts heads with the hulking Jason Momoa - best known as Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones - as the reluctant partners gradually reveal the extent of far-reaching economic and political corruption within the Crescent City.

Stallone and Walter Hill, the veteran director of The Warriors and 48 Hrs., do right by their target audience and turn in a lean, propulsive adaptation of Alexis Nolent’s graphic novel.  There’s nothing groundbreaking here - just a couple of old pros reliving the glory days of balsa wood bathroom stalls and remarkably contained explosions.  It would all be rather ho-hum if not for the new blood.  Kang is a welcome presence, although he’s mostly wasted as a goody-goody dartboard for Stallone’s stereotypical barbs.  Momoa, however, delivers a very interesting performance as the film’s main heavy, internalizing the macho codes of ‘80s action cinema and spitting them out in a nightmare inversion of Stallone’s iconic heroes.  He fights simply for the sake of fighting, a blessedly inelegant motivation that stands out amongst Bullet to the Head’s contented mediocrity.  

It's actually a stretch to classify Ric Roman Waugh's Snitch as an "action" film, considering that Dwayne Johnson spends so much of his screentime cowed by the drug smugglers and murderers that he's voluntarily aligned himself with.  It's actually a bold move for the imposing former wrestler, letting his character’s elevated social status and bourgeois mannerisms tell the story: Johnson plays a well-to-do owner of a shipping company who agrees to help the feds arrest dope smugglers in a deal to free his teenage son from prison.  He's extremely vulnerable yet unshakably determined in an action Everyman tradition crystallized in the original Die Hard.

And with Snitch, Johnson takes another step towards claiming Bruce Willis' mantle as America's most bankable seriocomic action hero.  (Though here is where I note that the execrable A Good Day to Die Hard quadrupled the box office take of these four films combined.)  The key here is not being a cut-up - though he can certainly handle humor - but forcing a disconnect between his physical musculature and his mental acuity.  Next to Johnson, bad guys like Michael Kenneth Williams and Benjamin Bratt are positively scrawny, but they're the ones with the cunning and guts to violently remove the obstacles in their paths.  Johnson, meanwhile, mostly relies on his wits to escape his precarious position; when he finally does get the chance to physically dominate his enemies, it's an earned moment of triumph in his character arc.  Snitch is completely unbelievable and wildly compelling...and yes, even a bit funny in the reconciliation of its dad-becomes-drug dealer plot with its heavy-handed message about mandatory minimum drug sentencing.

Jump Cuts: TV Adaptations of the 2000s Edition

Welcome to Jump Cuts, a feature where I watch a handful of movies that have something in common in genre, theme, casting, etc. Today's topic: (fairly) recent films based on TV shows.

You have to look hard to find the signifiers of the 1980s “MTV cops” drama Miami Vice in Michael Mann’s 2006 adaptation, which casts undercover Miami police officers Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) as grim, determined professionals infiltrating the ranks of a major South American drug trafficker.  While the TV series played up the go-go culture and exoticism of its South Beach milieu (not to mention the garish fashions and music of the era), Mann presents a perversely morose morality play about two world-weary detectives and the ethical tightrope they walk to keep the bad guys at bay.  It’s a fascinating, stylish look at the consequences of unchecked hedonism, as if imagining versions of Crockett and Tubbs who’ve seen some shit in the intervening two decades but managed to preserve their youthful good looks.  

Yet all this amounts to a relatively minor wrinkle in a film that’s still pitched to a modern level of cinematic machismo; as the protagonists’ respective love interests, Gong Li and Naomie Harris amount to little more than mission objectives (protect the girl, save the girl, avenge the girl, etc.).  Miami Vice can’t escape its destiny, delivering a final fist-bumping, butt-rocking, bullet-spraying shootout - as well as a Farrell performance that’s sullied by his Scott Stapp haircut and a weird vocal register that’s deep in the Batman zone - but Mann’s unabashed embrace of superficiality is often intoxicating and always jaw-droppingly gorgeous.

A decidedly different look at law enforcement in Magic City, Reno 911!: Miami transplants the bumbling Nevada deputies from the eponymous Comedy Central faux-documentary sitcom (think Cops meets The Office) to Florida for some wacky vacation antics.  When a national police convention is the target of a bio-terrorist attack, Reno's finest - having been denied entry to the event - become the last line of defense against crime in Miami.  Reno 911!: Miami was released during the first run of the series that inspired it, so it's disappointing that the movie makes little attempt to vary the action beyond the same minor disturbances and cringey sexual tension featured on television.  

Reno 911! co-creators and cast members Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, and Kerri Kenney-Silver treat the film as a roll-call for cameos by their comedy pals rather than an opportunity to push the envelope of the series' humor, with its heavy intimation of darkness and perversion.  (A funny sequence depicting the officers' awkward ballet of nighttime desperation and simulated masturbation - all in a single take! - is the exception, not the rule.)  Drop-ins from the likes of Paul Rudd, Patton Oswalt, and series mainstay Nick Swardson give Reno 911!: Miami a little extra comedic mileage, but fans of the show will likely get the same amount of enjoyment out of a weekend of Reno re-runs.

There's a certain ramshackle charm to the Will Ferrell-starring, Brad Silberling-directed Land of the Lost, based on Sid and Marty Krofft's groovy children's show about a scientist and his family trapped in an alternate dimension similar to a prehistoric Earth.  In this version, Ferrell is a disgraced paleontologist/physicist who is warped to this strange land alongside an admiring female colleague (Anna Friel) and a crass redneck (Danny McBride, obviously).  Right from the start, they run afoul of the local fauna including a cranky tyrannosaur and a shuffling race of lizard-men called Sleestaks; their only ally is an ape-like creature named Cha-ka (Jorma Taccone) who seems to indulge his nihilism as much as he helps his new friends.  

Sadly, the film never embraces the free-form weirdness suggested by its entertaining opening act, settling into a dull pattern of alternating action and comedy beats.  It's an enormously expensive lark that suffers for being too polished, for saddling Ferrell with such a lame milquetoast character, and for padding the runtime with D.O.A. gags about showtunes, dinosaur urine, and Matt Lauer.  It's nice to see Ferrell learn the value of taking risks through his adventures, but it's shame that the exceedingly safe Land of the Lost doesn't heed its own advice.

Then we have Josie and the Pussycats, which isn’t content to just poke and prod at the flimsy pretenses that support the TV adaptation sub-genre - it gleefully bites the hand that feeds it, turning a pedestrian Archie Comics spin-off into a sly satire of consumerism and the vapidity of youth culture.  Josie is actually an amalgam of three films personified by its trio of leads: ditzy Melody (Tara Reid) represents the broad comedy of the original ‘70s Hanna-Barbera cartoon, responsible Valerie (Rosario Dawson) supplies its perfunctory moral center, and the adorably spunky Josie (Rachael Leigh Cook) serves as a mouthpiece for the subversive wit of co-directors/writing partners Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan.  The duo - also responsible for the superlative teen comedy Can’t Hardly Wait - creates a delightfully daffy world where pop stars are used to transmit subliminal advertising messages to the masses, a plot carried out with villainous aplomb by Alan Cumming and Parker Posey.  

The movie’s wall-to-wall product placement is part of the joke, but like many of Elfont and Kaplan’s ideas, it simply went over the heads of most tweens who apparently couldn't appreciate a murderous turn by Carson Daly or a Backstreet Boys-eque band whose biggest hit is titled “Backdoor Lover” (one of the many earworm-y tunes on a soundtrack produced by Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger).  Josie and the Pussycats may yet have all the elements of a cult classic and a generational signpost - its audience just had to grow up first.

Jump Cuts: Less Loved Michael Crichton Adaptations Edition

Though critics hailed Jurassic Park as a return to blockbuster form for director Steven Spielberg after a mini-slump in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, it’s also the high water mark for the movie career of best-selling author Michael Crichton.  A Harvard med school student moonlighting as a novelist (most of his early books were published under pseudonyms), Crichton left the medical profession for good in the late 1960s and in his writing established a thematic pattern of technological or biological systems gone awry.  The ‘70s appetite for disaster flicks also helped launch his burgeoning film career, notably in the Jurassic Park progenitor Westworld, about a theme park overrun by malfunctioning robot ‘actors.'

Though a whopping 13 of his books have been adapted into feature films, it took the success of Jurassic Park to boost Crichton’s Hollywood profile into the stratosphere.  On the occasion of Jurassic’s 20th anniversary 3D re-release in two weeks, I decided to take a second look at a handful of films based on ideas from one of the premier high-concept yarn-spinners of the 1990s.

In the 1980s, a tide of Japanese investment in American corporations inspired a minor media hysteria fueled by paranoid fears of insecurity and espionage - at least until a crippling economic recession that severely weakened Japan’s economy throughout the 1990s.  The exhumation of this economic boogeyman instantly dates Rising Sun (1993), but still it chugs along with a lurid tale of sex, death, and xenophobia, starring Wesley Snipes as a cop called to investigate the apparent murder of a call girl in the Los Angeles high-rise of a Japanese company.  Snipes reluctantly accepts the assistance of Sean Connery, a retired police captain introduced as an expert in Japanese culture who nonetheless relates to his beloved people as if they were dangerous circus animals.  (“The Japanese find big arm movements threatening,” he sternly warns.)  

Rising Sun attempts to salvage its warmed over mismatched-partners premise with gratuitous Eszterhas-ian sleaze, earning the dubious distinction as one of the first mainstream films to bring erotic asphyxiation to the masses.  Crichton’s interest in cutting-edge technology surfaces in the film’s key plot point: a doctored security camera video presented as the best way to blow early-90s minds.  When a disbelieving Snipes expresses his skepticism, cyber-sleuth Tia Carerre haughtily sneers, “What, you don’t think videos can be altered?” and demonstrates how easy it is to swap his face with a video still of Connery’s.  It’s a rare moment of personality in this repetitious, by-the-numbers thriller that was already woefully behind the zeitgeist before it was released.

Lumbering along in the wake of Jurassic Park was Congo (1995), another tech-infused jungle adventure story that tried to duplicate Jurassic’s success in tossing a bunch of colorful characters with competing agendas into a tense life-or-death struggle against nature.  To say that Congo fails on this front would be an understatement.  It’s more like a plunge into a smoking abyss of camp and terrible screenwriting with several unintentionally distracting cameos (Bruce Campbell!  John Hawkes!  Mr. Eko from Lost!).  

The overcomplicated plot concerns a communications executive (Laura Linney) hoodwinking a Berkeley primatologist (Dylan Walsh) into leading an expedition to a remote corner of central Africa, for multiple stupid reasons including lasers powered by diamonds and a gorilla whose gestures are translated into speech by a virtual reality armband.  Joining them are an inexplicably fey survival guide (Ernie Hudson) and an opportunistic Romanian looking for King Solomon’s fabled diamond mines (Tim Curry).  While Hudson and Curry complete for the movie’s worst accent and Walsh registers as bland and gullible, only Linney emerges unscathed in a role that allows her to be an awesomely no-nonsense badass - by the climax of the film, she's howling ridiculous one-liners that would make Arnie blush.  Directed by Spielberg’s long-time producing partner Frank Marshall and written by Oscar-winning scribe John Patrick Shanley, Congo’s ill advised attempt to re-capture lightning in a bottle instead produces a perversely fascinating hot mess.

The underwater sci-fi spectacular Sphere (1997) features arguably the most impressive cast of any Crichton adaptation, pulling in Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone (when she still commanded above-the-title billing), Samuel L. Jackson, and a young, fidgety Liev Schreiber (in a fitting homage to Jeff Goldblum’s tic-filled performances in the first two Jurassic films).  But despite its intense star wattage and blockbuster aspirations, the Barry Levinson-directed film is best at delivering the tension of a superior TV bottle episode.  Sphere takes place almost entirely in a high-tech laboratory at the bottom of the ocean floor, where a team of scientists is investigating a mysterious metallic orb that houses an extraterrestrial lifeform.  

Hoffman is perfectly cast as the dry, nebbish psychologist who succeeds in divining the sphere’s emotional intelligence but is too late in fathoming its true intentions.  His romantic chemistry with Stone, however, is less than convincing, as is the movie’s rather silly cop-out ending.  And clocking in at more than two hours, Sphere displays a tendency towards narrative bloat that almost spoils the fast-paced, economical thrills of its first half.  Still, it’s a surprisingly effective B-movie adaptation of an above-average Crichton novel that also includes Huey Lewis in a cameo as a helicopter pilot and Peter Coyote getting crushed by an emergency door, so that’s fun.

The awkward conceit of Timeline (2003) - the last feature film based on a Crichton novel to date - begins with the casting of the decidedly non-Scottish Paul Walker as the son of twinkly Scottish archaeologist Billy Connolly, and continues with the marriage of a hokey time travel story with a superficial re-creation of the sword-and-shield epic.  After Connolly’s team discovers modern artifacts while excavating a French monastery, the professor visits the headquarters of the technology firm sponsoring the dig and mysteriously disappears.  The corporate benefactors reveal that they've stumbled across a wormhole connecting medieval France to the present, and admit Connolly is stranded in the past and needs rescuing.  

The zippy script initially does a good job of depicting the inevitable flailings and culture shock of Walker’s extraction team (which includes a pre-romcom Gerard Butler as a muscular academic).  But the film quickly abandons any intellectual pretense as it morphs into a silly adventure tale where the visitors from the future improbably steer the outcome of a pivotal battle in the Hundred Years’ War.  Superman and Lethal Weapon helmer Richard Donner lends a professional touch to sequences like an impressively-staged castle siege; however, most of Timeline wallows in the director-for-hire doldrums.  It’s an uninspiring swan song for Crichton (who passed away in 2008), but like most halfway-decent adaptations of his work it succinctly captures the freewheeling promise of technology alongside its chilling potential for disaster.