Yeah, I’m rather shocked myself, but it seems like Herr Fuhrer is YouTube’s latest viral go-to guy. The new black is “reich,” as it were.
If you have no clue, or you’re still digesting the last of Tay Zonday mania (remember him?), then you’ve been away from the Web for a long time. On the sliding scale of the Internet time-space continuum, a long time is equal to the distance between last Wednesday and the Wednesday previous to that multiplied by the rate of your Twitter tweeting frequency, wOOt, and ROFLMFAO, and cubed at the rate of EPIC FAIL.
The specific scene used in these YouTube videos comes from a 2004 German film called Der Untergang, or Downfall, as it’s known in English-speaking countries. Hitler is portrayed by Bruno Ganz in a bit of foam-frothing scenery munching, and in the specifically co-opted scene, he’s being debriefed by his staff. Much to his chagrin, bad news has been delivered. He summons all but his inner circle to leave the war room and, upon their exit, goes absolutely apeshit.
I attempted to find a word that’s more becoming of a respected writer. Something less crude. Something with more imagination and depth. But it can’t be done. Hitler goes apeshit, and that’s all there is to it. And therein lies the fun — I couldn’t find a better word, but because everyone in the film is speaking German, anyone with a video graphics program can find their own words, plop them on-screen as subtitles, and make Adolf into whatever they please.
Few genres are as absorbent as film noir. Science fiction (Blade Runner), horror (Seven), and high school movies (Brick) have soaked up the world-weary, hard-boiled attitudes and atmospherics of Double Indemnity, The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly and all the rest. Steeped in French and German influences, American noir was this gun for hire further abroad as well. An excellent new set from Criterion, “Nikkatsu Noir,” shows how the darkness permeated the land of the Rising Sun.
Founded in 1912, Nikkatsu is the oldest of the country’s film studios, most noted by cinephiles for giving the great Shohei Imamura (Vengeance is Mine, The Ballad of Narayama) his start. By the mid-’50s, however, its output needed new blood, and with the success of 1956’s Crazed Fruit found it in ripped-from-the-headlines movies about the country’s causeless rebels. Nikkatsu’s answer to James Dean, Yujiro Ishihara, stars in the set’s first film, 1957’s I Am Waiting, playing a promising boxer who hung up his gloves after killing a man in a bar fight. A club owner who’s put a cabaret singer under his thumb forces Yujiro to put up his dukes as the movie reaches its punchy climax. (The content of these movies encourages you to write like this.) Mie Kitahara, Ishihara’s Crazed Fruit co-star, plays the singer. Atmospherically helmed by Koreyoshi Kurahara, the movie conveys postwar despondency with the country that extends far beyond its low-life waterfront setting; all Ishihara wants to do is leave for Brazil. (more…)
It’s Labor Day Weekend, and if you’re like me, you’re off to the movies. What to see: The unstoppable Sandra Bullock in another romantic comedy? Gamer? Hmmm…maybe a double feature, the unstoppable Sandra Bullock in another romantic comedy andGamer? (What the heck is Gamer? Doesn’t a sequel to The Crow usually fly into this spot?)
No, you’re not like me. But I’ve got news for you: I’m not like me, either. Drag me to hell: I’m not gonna sit on my ass in some multiplex when the best weather of the season has arrived at the 11.5th hour. I’m going to sit outside and taunt the kids who have to go back to school on Tuesday—man, I hated Labor Day Weekend when I was a kid, knowing that the school bus was going to pull up like Charon the ferryman to escort me back to Hades.
Summer. It was good, now it’s dead. And it’s time to reflect on the corpse.
Boxoffice-wise, the top five films of the season were the Transformers and Harry Potter sequels, Up, The Hangover, and Star Trek. I saw the last three. (In a simpler time in my life, say any day before Aug. 25, 2008, I would have seen them all. The franchises got the boot.) And they were good. Well, The Hangover and Star Trek were good; I can’t say I got down with Up, which struck me as minor Pixar, not out-of-gas Pixar like Cars but a little thin. Still, I’ll buy the DVD—except for Cars, I have them all, even Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo—and give it another spin. (more…)
Like (I suspect) most viewers, I wasn’t too troubled by self-recrimination at the end of Quentin Tarantino’s must-see exercise in “Jewish revenge porn,” Inglourious Basterds. (The description comes from the Jewish Daily Forward, not from me.) I wasn’t worried about Q’s preposterous deviations from history, nor was I concerned that some Jewish folks might not appreciate – indeed, might be appalled by – their forebears’ cinematic transformation from victims to vigilantes. Screw the strictures of morality, the heavy burden of humanity! The way I figure it, most people leave the theater thinking just one thing: Man, if only the Jews had been able to open up a can of whoop-ass on those damn Nat-zees – that woulda been sweet.
My wife – a (sorta) Jewess who emerged from the film similarly exhilarated, and ready to grab a baseball bat for some impromptu strip-mall justice – recovered her faculties quickly and asked to stop in at Big Box Boox (i.e., Barnes & Noble) to pick up some chick lit. So she went off to fiction and I stopped at the bestseller rack, where I was confronted by an entirely different array of “revenge porn.” The titles included Mark Levin’s “conservative manifesto” Liberty and Tyranny (which leaves some question as to where his sympathies lie), Glenn Beck’s Common Sense (the first of two oxymorons in this column), Dick Morris’ Catastrophe and Michelle Malkin’s Culture of Corruption. The latter two tomes, which see fit to pass final judgment on the new administration, were released in June and July, respectively – which, even accounting for the sped-up timeline for publishing political books, means they were written no later than March or April … before the stimulus bill had even been signed into law. (more…)
The Open Road, starring Justin Timberlake and Jeff Bridges as an estranged son and father who struggle to reconnect during a cross-country trip to visit Timberlake’s ailing mother, opens in limited release today. Sure, it sounds like a downer, until you consider that the next road movie coming out is October’s The Road, where Viggo Mortensen plays a father struggling to protect his son from cannibals in postapocalyptic America. Suddenly the Timberlake flick seems pretty rompy!
The Open Road is a dramedy, supposedly, but I usually like my road movies to have a little more whimsy in the engine. You know what I mean — they should have things like bears in Studebakers and phantom truck drivers and Paul Giamatti freaking out like a tightly wound wallaby. With that in mind, hop in and let’s take a ride down the Random Road Movie Highway.
The Muppet Movie (1979): I wouldn’t know what to think about somebody who doesn’t love The Muppet Movie, other than that he or she is probably a sociopath. In fact, that’s the first question the authorities should ask suspected serial killers: Do you love The Muppet Movie? If the answer is no — BAM! Throw away the key.
The Muppet Movie — directed by TV veteran James Frawley, who, frankly, Jim Henson should’ve kept around for the rest of the Muppet movies — is a lot of things: a musical, a comedy, and the best repository of cameo appearances since It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), but at its heart it’s a road movie. It’s even — dare I say it — an odyssey. (And unlike It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which I suppose could fit the same description, it’s aged beautifully. Even the Hare Krishna bits are still funny.)
I’ve been dying for Inglourious Basterds to reach its official release date, so I could finally talk with you about this movie.
When reading a review, everyone always wants to skip right to the point: Is it any good? Should I spend my hard-earned money to go see it?
Well, let’s cut to the chase then with a nice, small hint: Not only will Inglourious Basterds make my Top 5 Best Films list at the end of this year, but I’m already looking forward to buying the DVD whenever it comes out, so I can revel in the brutal playground of director Tarantino’s semi-historical revenge flick over and over again! So, yes…go see it.
New Yorkers aren’t a sentimental bunch. But there are some things we’re fiercely protective of. One of those is the 1974 crime drama The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. This was a year before the infamous New York Daily News headline that blared “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” when the president wrote off the Rotten Apple, awash as it was in debt and depravity. It was a deeply unsettled time. My dad, who worked on Wall Street, was mugged twice, and when we drove into the city it was always with the windows up and the doors locked. Left for dead the city got even worse, with the “Summer of Sam” and all that. Poor dad, as victimized as Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974; brutal year), was stuck in the chaotic blackout while we waited with bated breath for some news back home in New Jersey. John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) wasn’t just a title, but a prayer for deliverance.
Thirty-five years later, things are very different, even in the face of an asset-sucking recession. The crime has moved to the crystal meth labs on Main Street USA. We partied through our last blackout. And, like you, we enjoy our porn at home, not on Eighth Avenue. We made it through 9/11 and we’ll survive The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a remake for the unlettered. We dismissed a made-in-Toronto TV version in 1998 just by changing the channel. But this one, made on home turf—this one, we have to deal with.
The love for the original is easy as one, two, three. The movie took a hostage-taking scenario, outrageous even for its blighted times, and through it showed New York in all its resilient, workaday colors. It’s an appealingly plebian movie, with grumpy urban prole Walter Matthau pitted against the coolly European Robert Shaw, a pairing that struck a template most successfully exploited by the Die Hard movies. (more…)
Normally Bob Cashill does a top-ten list of films he’s looking forward to each summer and fall. As he’s “out of town” this week (which, in the writing industry, is code for “on a bender and can’t be found”), I’ve been asked to step up to the plate and cover for him while he’s “away.”
I’ve chosen ten summer films — well, nine as far as Hollywood’s definition of summer goes (the beginning of May all the way to Labor Day weekend), so forgive me for cheating with my first choice. I will now give my reasons as to why I’m either looking forward to these films or hope they die miserable, lonely deaths at the box office. Please be aware that while the majority of release dates have been locked down, film studios are sometimes fickle, and some later dates may be subject to change.
1. The Soloist (April 24), starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr., directed by Joe Wright.
I’ve been looking forward to this film, based on the true story of celloist-violinist Nathaniel Ayers, an extremely talented musician who suffers from schizophrenia, for quite some time in spite of the semi-mediocrity of its trailer. While I’m certain the film will deliver the expected highs and lows of the friendship between Foxx’s Ayers and Downey Jr. as the reporter who befriends him, all replete with the expected script beats (pg. 50: “Have characters realize they’re more alike than different in spite of their dissimilar backgrounds”), the real reason to see this movie is for the act-off between two great thesps, and to begin the debate about which one will deserve to walk home with a statue come next year’s Oscars.
2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1), starring Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber, directed by Gavin Hood.
Yes, this film’s already hit the Internet, so most of you have probably already seen it. I’m waiting till it actually hits theaters, though, because I’d prefer to see the completed effects, thank you very much. Although I don’t understand the fascination with Schreiber (overrated in my book), the real reason for me to see Wolverine is that it’ll be cool to see Jackman as the title character once again. Fanboys and fangirls who vowed to boycott this Fox film due to the studio’s lawsuit brought against Warner Bros. for partial rights to Watchmen profits will more than likely shut the hell up and see it regardless; it could very well be one of the biggest actioners at the box office this year despite its illegal release on the Web. I’m borderline on the story and characters, but I’m looking forward to Jackman’s Wolvie taking a long list of names while he kicks ass.
My wife – a (sorta) Jewess who emerged from the film similarly exhilarated, and ready to grab a baseball bat for some impromptu strip-mall justice – recovered her faculties quickly and asked to stop in at Big Box Boox (i.e., Barnes & Noble) to pick up some chick lit. So she went off to fiction and I stopped at the bestseller rack, where I was confronted by an entirely different array of “revenge porn.” The titles included Mark Levin’s “conservative manifesto” 
I’ve been 
2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1), starring Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber, directed by Gavin Hood.