Fighting Aces

The idea behind Smokin' Aces is simple:Vegas magician and wannabe wiseguy Buddy "Aces" Israel (Jeremy Piven) is going to testify against the mob, so they put a $1 million contract out on him. He hides out in the penthouse of a Tahoe hotel and waits for the FBI to get him before the bad guys do.

The plot isn't really that simple. The FBI do the initial exposition, with all of the history, mysteries, politics and enemies list. That makes the plot more fun to follow. But it's really just about people getting shot and stuff getting blown up, and vice versa.

The bad guys gunning for Piven include - wait, I'll do it list style

• A pair of black lesbian killer cuties, played by Alicia Keyes and Taraji Henson
• Three 80's-style punk meth-head redneck berserkers, lead by Chris Pine (Capt. Kirk)
• At least 2 masters of disguise - I'm not sure how many because they were in disguise
• A team of bounty hunters who want Piven for jumping bail, lead by Ben Affleck in an awesome Fu-Manchu moustache
• Piven's bodyguard, played by conscious rapper Common

Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta, Jason Bateman, Matthew Fox and a couple of others are floating around as well. So, great cast. Also, hot action, clever dialog, and cute cutting.

This is squarely in the hip ultra-violent style of Guy Ritchie or the Crank movies. But I've got to say, it isn't quite up to their standards - not quite as tricky, fresh or imaginative. But I bet everyone had a good time hanging around Tahoe (I think we've stayed at some of the hotels shown), and we had a good time watching them.

Harry Potter and the Half-Formed Joke

The movies in the Harry Potter series seem to be getting better and better. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will be the next to last movie, and when the series is over, I'll miss them a lot. However, I seem to have less and less to say about them.

Harry and the gang are all getting older, and they are doing more than noticing the opposite sex. Hermione is caught with some white stuff on her mouth (Ron's toothpaste), and Harry's caught trying to pick up the waitress in a railroad cafe. But that is something of an afterthought. The real change in the series is towards darkness and more serious consequences. The actions of the Malfoys and Snapeses aren't just nasty, but have mortal effects, and maybe worse.

On the other hand, while Harry is getting older and angrier, he doesn't seem to be getting much smarter. He is quite a hothead, rushing into things without thinking, at least when he isn't sulking. Well, he's a teenager, I suppose.

Sorry not to have more to say, either about the relationships or the action. At least I'm not giving anything away. And at least I've stopped trying to come up with title gags.

The Song Remains "Stairway to Heaven"

So, we just watch a ton of Monkees, and now we watch Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same? Does that make any sense at all? I mean, the Monkees are a fun pop group with more musical credit than many people realize (they toured with Hendrix!), but Zep is one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands of all time. Does this make any sense?

The Song Remains the Same starts with some silly home movies of Plant watching his Houses of the Holy naked kids playing in a brook, Bonham plowing his field, their manager machine gunning a room full of faceless record execs and werewolves, and that sort of thing. Then they go on tour and we get a concert at Madison Square Garden.

As a band, they are magnificent. Plant is one of the great guitarists of the age, a brilliant bluesplayer and master of tricky rhythm. Bonham can follow him anywhere, and Jones does as well on keyboards as on bass. Page's voice is a wonderful instrument, as long as you kind of ignore the hobbity lyrics.

And there lies the rub. Because mixed in with this concert footage, we have the boys (Page mostly) acting out their Arthurian/Tolkienesque/Highlander fantasies, in little mini-movies. And frankly, it reeks of Spinal Tap's "Stonehenge".

Also, and some may disagree, the concert is probably not their best work. They do some great songs - I especially like "I Been Loving You So Long". There are some wild solos, including an extended drum solo (I like drum solos, so sue me). But some of the songs seemed to lose focus in places, and there was a little slack in some of the long stretches of the extended songs. And of course, there's the old warhorse, "Stairway to Heaven". Wasn't it getting tired even in 1976, when this was made?

Sitll, I can't deny that the music is great, if not perfect. Just ignore the silly medieval stuff and the home movies and enjoy the concert.

What I want to emphasize is this: the Monkees can't compare to Led Zep, but the bozos who made Song can't compare to Bob Rafelson, who directed the Monkees. That evens the playing field.

Sally and Fields

I just noticed that I forgot to review W.C. Fields' Sally of the Sawdust. We saw it on streaming, so I guess I should have mentioned it in my recent tirade.

This 1925 silent was directed by, of all people, D.W. Griffith. It features a young orphan girl, played by Carol Dempster, whose mother had run away from strict New England parents to be with the circus. After the mother's demise, young Carol is raised by her "Poppy", W.C. Fields. She grows up wild, with acrobats and elephants for friends. She is a tomboy and a circus ballerina. Fields is, of course, Prof. Eustace McGargle, a sideshow barker, a juggler, a pickpocket and conman. Sadly, we get to see only a snippet of his famous cigarbox juggling, an act which he later grew too drunk to perform. We don't get his melodious vocalizations, either, but he's still the great man.

Dempster is another story. She plays the uninhibited circus girl with a ton of silent era overacting and mugging for the camera. Yet, as the film goes on, she either finds her range, or just gets better situations. I got to like her a lot, and even found her style verging on the modern and natural in places. Performing at a charity function, she does a tableau vivant as a fashionable lady, and it is quite a striking change from her plain tomboy image.

Not altogether a successful effort. Griffith doesn't seem to know much about comedy or how to handle Fields. He even makes Fields imitate Chaplin in places, or was it Fields idea, and he failed to prevent it? But well worth watching for fans of the silents, and mandatory for Fields fans.

And of course, available to Watch Instantly.

Don't Cross the Streaming

Just checking into my New Year's Resolutions:

• Cut the Netflix queue down to 300: Close - I've got it down to 314
  
• Rate movies more strictly in Netflix: I have been giving out more 3-star reviews. But still plenty of 4s and 5s. Hey, if I didn't think it would be good, I wouldn't queue it up.
  
• Watch more movies (at least one) in a theater: So far, no. But the year is still young.
  
• Watch Instantly more: Here's the problem.

Netflix is promoting Watch Instantly pretty hard. It's an interesting business model: Instead of having 3 DVDs at home to watch at any time, you can watch any movie anytime, as often as you want. Sounds like a great deal, doesn't it? But here's the thing:

• Pretty much any DVD ever made is available through Netflix
  
• A lot fewer movies than that are available through Watch Instantly

This reminds me a lot of the Napster debacle. Most people thought that the great thing about Napster was that the music was free. Sure, that's great, but the best part about Napster was that it had everything: 1920's jazz 78s, Serbian brass bands, indie rock from Idaho, whatever you want.

That's the joy of Netflix. If it is on DVD, you can get it, delivered by mail in a day or two. When I first signed up, I rented all of the movies I had always wanted to see, but could never find at Blockbuster (at least I queued them up - some of them are still waiting - but that's another post).

With Watch Instantly, I have to watch whatever they have on offer. It's not all junk, by any means - my Instant queue has 75 movies on it. But they aren't my first choices. They are just what's available. So now, we watch DVDs first, Instant movies when we're out of DVDs.

I still want streaming to work. In fact, I'm planning to buy a computer, just to attach to the TV, mainly for Netflix streaming. And I know that some day - probably soon - the selection will be as good as or better than the DVD selection. Then convenience, selection and quality will converge. When that time comes, I'll find something else to complain about.

Anyway, we can barely watch the 3 DVDs/week that we get.

On Tour and in Your Head

We polished off the last disc of the Monkees first season: The Monkees: Season 1: Disc 6. It only had 2 episodes: Monkees at the Movies and Monkees on Tour. We were upset at first, thinking these were recent vintage documentary-type blather, ut no, they were regularly aired episodes.

But On Tour was far from regular. The Monkee's had been touring since early in the first season, and getting Beatles-worthy response - with huge crowds of screaming girls. So director Bob Rafelson decided to make a tour documentary and air it as the last episode of the first season.

It is very verite, with handheld cameras and Monkees "improvising schtick" (quote from Peter Tork's commentary track) in hotel rooms. We also see them in contemplative moods, talking about their views on the crazy rock 'n' roll life they were living (Tork called them "phony").

Through the episode, as well as Tork, Nesmith and (songwriter) Bobby Hart's comentary, ran the question of the Monkees credibility as a "real" group. The tour proved they could play their own instruments (although Boyce and Hart's band helped out a lot). But reading between the lines in the commentary, I think that Peter felt they could be a real band - he was a talented multi-instrumentalist who was kind of stuck on bass. In concert, he gets to a solo banjo, frailing a nifty "Cripple Creek". Nesmith, more songwriter than guitarist, seemed to think that they were a TV show first, not really a musical group. Funny, most people think of him as the serious one.

Philosophical differences, personality clashes, and the strain of working under the thumb of the Man in the freethinking 60's must have been tough on all involved. Rafelson, who had been a dutiful company man for three seasons, wanted payback when the show was over. He got it in the form of a formless movie, Head.

Head starts with the Monkees running headlong across a newly opened bridge and jumping off into the Pacific off Long Beach, to the accompaniment of the Goffin-King composition "Porpoise Song". This is an immediate subversion of the usual Monkees "romps", musical interludes with the Monkees mugging and clowning - in this romp, they seem to be running in fear of their lives, then killing themselves.

We cut to a short patter song manifesto ("Ditty Diego"), describing the present movie as manufactured to please the crowd, meaningless, without form or end. And then it's off to the races, with scraps of war movie, western, commercial and who knows what. And just when it's getting good, a Monkee will decide they don't want to do it anymore, walk off the set and behind the scene to talk to Rafelson about their problems. In one scene, co-writer Jack Nicholson comes along in a heinous white cloth cap and sports shirt with a clipboard, probably to figure out the script.

We also get Frank Zappa, leading a cow, telling Davey to work more on his music, because the youth are counting on him. We get a giant Victor Mature trying to stomp the boys. We get to see Sonny Liston beat the stuffing out of Davey. And we find out who the dummy is (it's Peter. He's always the dummy). Terri Garr dies of snakebite. Annete Funicello sheds a glycerin tear. Tor Johnson plays a security guard extra. And it all ends as it began.

A few reasons why I love this movie:

• The songs - not the Monkees' best (I like their Boyce and Hart garage classics), but some interesting pop-psychedelia like "Porpoise Song" and Tork's "Can You Dig It?" and "Long Title (Do I Have to Do It All Over Again)".
• The surrealistic formlessness of it all, jumping from chase to dream sequence to dance number to back lot, to a steamroom, to ...., and holding your interest the whole way.
• The movie's love for the Monkee's characters, even as it subverts them.
  
  • Davey is the performer, a song and dance man, a little guy who thinks he can take out Sonny Liston.
    
  • Mickey is a wiseguy, frustrated and itching to break out of the role.
    
  • Mike is the serious one, coming across cold and cruel in Head.
    
  • Peter (my favorite Monkee) is the wise dummy, caring and nonviolent even when he punches a lady.

And were they a real rock group? Hey, not every group wrote all their own songs, and even the Beatles had studio musicians fill in (sometimes the same ones the Monkees used). My opinion, they were if they wanted to be.

Who was your favorite Monkee?

Super Cool Kung Fu Treachery

We aren't exactly blaxploitation experts, but I feel we have a solid grounding and appreciation for the genre. Which is good, because that allowed us to enjoy - the greatest film of the century - Black Dynamite!

Black Dynamite stars Michael Jai White with a cool Afro, as the title character. When his brother is killed by people dealing drugs in the community, he goes to war. He takes on the pimps and gangs, the CIA, the Chinese Tongs and all the way to the top. And over the top.

This is a hilarious tribute to classic 70's blaxploitation. Not a spoof or parody, but loving tribute. White, who conceived the film and shares writing credit, is ideal as Black Dynamite. If he didn't have the muscles, the hair and the kung fu chops, it would have been a funny movie. With him, it is inspired.

In conclusion, he's super cool and he knows kung fu. He's Black Dynamite!