The Machine That Kills Bad People - 1952

"The Machine That Kills Bad People" - 1952
Dir. by Roberto Rossellini - 1 hr. 20 min.

Movie Clip
by Clayton Hollifield

I was lured into this one largely because of the bizarre, unwieldy title, "The Machine That Kills Bad People."  I'm not saying that I expected a murderous robot, but sometimes you just can't be sure until you watch the thing.  Also, I was aware that the title has been translated, and that the original Italian title probably sounds better.  I'm also unfamiliar with director Roberto Rossellini's work, although some quick Google-Fu reveals that he's someone that I probably should be more familiar with.  So watching "Machine" serves as my introduction to Rossellini's work, but is it a good introduction?  Well, there weren't any homicidal robots (spoiler!!!), but that's not make-or-break.

After a clever framing sequence, we're introduced to a small coastal Italian town, and some Americans who are returning after the war (that would be World War II) to buy up some land (currently the town cemetary!) and turn it into a resort for travellers.  They appear to run into an old man on a curvy road, but can't find hide nor hair of him, and continue on.  The town is the in the middle of a celebration for St. Andrew, which has ground everything to a halt.  The same old man that the Americans ran over appears, hale and healthy (sort of), in Celestino's (Gennaro Pisano), where he's begging for a place to stay for the night.  The entire town has St. Andrew on the brain, and Celestino thinks that the old man might be St. Andrew.  The old man shows Celestino a trick that allows Celestino to kill people with his camera (by taking a picture of a picture of someone).  Unfortunately, Celestino's judgment isn't perfect, and every time he kills someone, there are a lot of unintended consequences (mainly greed rearing it's ugly head), and he ends up having to kill someone else.

The first thing I was impressed with in "Machine" is the opening scene, a visually clever framing device that assembles the town out of cut-outs of buildings and people, before transitioning to the actual town.  I was less happy to see the device return at the conclusion of the film; I understand the bookend concept, but by the end of the story, having a omniscient narrator literally remove the pieces of the story that had just been told was an unwelcome reminder that the story was entirely artificial, which dulled the impact of the morality tale.   It might have been less jarring if the device had been revisited at any point during the meat of the story; as it was, I had forgotten about it until it reared it's head again at the end of the movie.

The story itself is basic, but effective.  It's a story of power corrupting, and greed getting in the way of anything good happening for anyone.  For me, it was functional, and was boosted by the great choice of setting, an Italian fishing town with seemingly endless amounts of stairs.  Visually, there's a lot to feast your eyes on, which is always nice.  And the comedy was solid.  Plus, the last act had a ton of people throwing around the sign of the horns; Ronnie James Dio would be proud.  My main problem with the story (and it's less of a "problem" than a glitch) was that the real story was about Celestino and his camera's drone strikes, and the story presents itself as something different.  We're introduced to the town through the planned machinations of the Americans, but their story ends up as not much more than having to shuffle from hotel to boarding house over and over again.  They're largely inconsequential to Celestino's story, whose reactions to examples of greed and selfishness (and his ability to punish those actions) make up the bulk of the movie.  By the time that becomes apparent, it seems in retrospect the Americans are there pretty much only to pad out the run time.  "The Machine That Kills Bad People" is already pretty slight at 80 minutes, and if they were excised from the film (along with the framing device, which I kind of like), it might barely be pushing an hour.

There's not much in the way of great performances, or unforgettable scenes in "Machine."  It's pretty good, a pleasant ride, and feels a lot like a stage play translated into a film.  But the setting is beautiful, and has Miss America 1946 (Marilyn Buferd) in what passed for a bikini in those days, and there are some laughs to be had.  From what I gather, "Machine" is important because the director did other important, memorable work, and without that this would just be some random Italian film about a camera that really will steal your soul.

2.5 / 5 - Streaming

The Big Sleep - 1946

"The Big Sleep" - 1946
Dir. by Howard Hawks - 1 hr. 54 min.

Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Part of what makes the best Humphrey Bogart movies the best Humphrey Bogart movies is a distinct sense of setting; San Francisco in "The Maltese Falcon," the collection of displaced expatriates biding time in Rick's Cafe in "Casablanca," the hard-scrabble Mexican mining camp in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."  The best of his movies couldn't have taken place anywhere other than exactly where they did, and Los Angeles is very much a relevant backdrop for "The Big Sleep."  Although there isn't much scenery shown, it's always looming just outside a window, and exerting it's influence on the characters living there.  The other thing that the best films have in common is a sense of inevitability; once you see how things are set up, there's really only one place Bogart and whomever is unfortunate enough to get tangled up with him can possibly end up.  It's kind of fun to watch the characters kick and scream and claw against their fate, but even they have an awareness of the road they're on.  In "The Big Sleep," once Bogey and Bacall size each other up for the first time on-screen, you know that the mystery isn't going to be the important part of the story.

Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) is hired for a case by a reclusive, sickly man named General Sternwood (Charles Waldron).  Marlowe's been hired to clean up a mess caused by one of his daughters, the wild and flirty Carmen (Martha Vickers), but the other daughter, Vivian (Lauren Bacall) thinks there's an ulterior motive.  Upon his investigation, Marlowe stumbles upon the body of a blackmailer, and a drugged Carmen as his only company.  Marlowe attempts to get Carmen clear, thinking that she couldn't have been responsible for Geiger's death, but every step he takes entangles matters further and further, and more bodies pile up.

Seeing as how I consider this a flawless victory of a film, there's not much to criticize.  Sure, you could bemoan the fact that the mystery aspect of "The Big Sleep" doesn't end up making much sense, but you'd also probably be the kind of person who complains about not knowing how the bowling tournament ends up in "The Big Lebowski."  The film isn't really about solving the initial crime, other than it compels the characters to movement.  For me, it was enough to know that things were very tangled, and that pretty much no one is clean, and that I should probably just not worry about that and instead focus on the ambiance and the budding romance between Marlowe and Vivian.  All of the crime stuff really just exists to either force them apart or push them together at various intervals, and that's just fine by me.

I wouldn't advance the notion that Lauren Bacall wasn't particularly good in this film, either.  The truth of the matter is that she was good enough in her scenes with Bogart (their off-screen chemistry surely helped) that I had no problem with her.  I'm not sure that another actress could have simmered and bantered back and forth with Bogart as convincingly (I love the scene where Vivian calls the police, and then she and Marlowe start playing dumb with the police back and forth - it's like capturing and condensing the best first date ever into a few minutes of screen time), and since that's what really sells "The Big Sleep" as an all-time great film, any criticism is unimportant.  Having seen a number of Bogart's films, Bacall is the one great romantic foil for him (and I mean successful one, there are plenty of tragic ones, but that's not "The Big Sleep"), and that should count for something.  And it's not as if there's just one great scene between the two of them, there are a handful, and there's also the single greatest line reading of telling someone you're in love with them ever, with Vivian slumped down in her car seat, resigning herself to the fact that she's spent some effort trying to deny.

So with the Bacall stuff out of the way, it's also probably good to point out that Bogart is fantastic in this movie.  This was a Hays Code-era film, so the fact that he rolls around town like a panty-dropper supreme is mostly implied (although the look that bookstore clerk gives him should have been accompanied by an audible "sploosh" and the sound of Marlowe's pants being ripped off telepathically), but his trademark rakishness isn't dulled much.  Bogart's stock character is usually pretty prickly, even moreso when he likes someone, and Marlowe supplies no shortage of great lines to that service.  He's reminded repeatedly that he "takes chances," which must be the 1940's way of telling him to fornicate himself, and it must be said that he usually has earned such a rejoinder.  But beyond Bogart's acting, pretty much everyone is good here, particularly Martha Vickers, who's frequently intoxicated and always playing the coquette, and who's character has boiled the world down to being either cute or not cute.

"The Big Sleep" is one of those movies that's elements might seem fairly standard, but they come together in a way that feels very authentic and fun.  Not everyone get involved in a complicated murder plot (that's the fantasy element), but most people know what it's like to fall in love with someone.  The fact that it happens in an unlikely setting somehow makes it seem more real than in many romance movies, where the romance is the full focus of the plot.  The fact that it's Bogey and Bacall elevates it, partly because it was real, partly because Bogey's so antagonistic that you can feel the pull when he starts including Bacall in his games instead of aiming them at her.  The result is one of the top tier of films that Bogart appeared in, maybe not the absolute finest, but in the top handful for certain, and always an absolute delight to watch.

5 / 5 - TV (HD)

The Running Man - 1987

"The Running Man" - 1987
Dir. by Paul Michael Glaser - 1 hr. 41 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

I know that Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting is just one of those things that's never going to get any respect, but I'll be damned if his films aren't still entertaining.  All things considered, they probably shouldn't be (especially if your lead actor isn't a very good actor, by traditional measures), but they usually are.  "The Running Man" comes reasonably early in Schwarzenegger's peak run (he'd done the "Conan" films and the first "Terminator" by this point), and while it's not among his very best films, it's still pretty good.

In the year 2017, everything has broken down, and America is a police state, full of food riots and banned albums.  Ben Richards (Schwarzenegger) is a policeman, piloting a helicopter to survey one of the riots in Bakersfied, running 1,500 strong.  He's ordered to open fire on the defenseless crowd and refuses, but his fellow officers overcome him and follow orders, leaving the slaghter to be pinned on Ben.  He's sent to a work camp, where prisoners wear explosive necklaces to keep them from escaping.  Finally, a few men figure out how to disarm the necklaces and escape back to the urban hellscape.  Ultimately, Ben is rounded up trying to escape the country with the credentials of a woman, Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso), who has taken Ben's brother's apartment over, whom he kidnaps as cover.  It is at this point where Ben is offered a choice by Killian (Richard Dawson), a television producer/host: be a contestant on the country's most popular game show, "The Running Man," or the men who escaped with Ben will have to compete in his place.  The game show is pretty simple; convicts are supplied to try to run the course in three hours, and if they are able to fight off the Stalkers and do so, they will be granted freedom.  Ben accepts, but promises aren't kept, and things go sideways.

While "The Running Man" is pretty violent (you will see a man's head explode, sort of), it's also a sharp satire of its culture of the time.  Although the idea that contemporary entertainment is too violent and degrading is a constant refrain (I mean, the Bible was pretty violent and ugly at times, and that's not exactly a new book), the notion of a life-or-death game show is one that's taken hold in popular culture.  I'm not saying the idea originated here; 1975's "Death Race 2000" certainly treads some of the same water.  But I can't watch this movie without immediately thinking about "American Gladiators," a TV show that similarly employed physical violence from fitness models and athletes using aggressive stage names to deter contestants from completing a physically-demanding course.  This film also takes sharp jabs at everything from amorality of producing entertainment to the then-current Senate hearings over explicit popular music.  For a movie featuring copious blood and gore (although much of the blood's impact is lessened through the use of color filters, which redden an entire scene, which removes a lot of the visual contrast the blood ought to provide), there's actually a little something here.

In terms of the acting, well, Arnold is Arnold.  His name is right there on the poster, so if you're choosing to see "The Running Man," you knew what you were getting in for, and no complaints will be heard.  And even if he's not what you would call a classically-trained actor, he does have a physical presence, charisma, and pretty good timing.  And on top of that, I always enjoy a bit of glee listening to him swear through his Austrian accent.  Beyond that, Richard Dawson not only does a good job with the sleazy game-show host Killian, his casting is stunt-casting that actually works.  This role came pretty close after a solid decade of hosting "The Family Feud," so turning a real game-show host into a sleazy, manipulative jackass in the exact same role is a fun way of both an actor bringing good baggage to a role, and messing with people's expectations of a particular actor.  And Jesse Ventura has a run smaller role as Mr. Freedom, a stalker turned exercise-tape hawker.  The only other actor with a substantial role is Maria Conchita Alonso, and she brings a pitch-perfect 80's-girl look, but not much else.  There's a kind of train wreck element to watching her and Arnold wade through their respective accents to communicate, but they don't share a lot of chemistry.

On the whole, you've got to just kick back and enjoy "The Running Man" for what it is.  In some ways, it's a throwback to 70's science fiction films, with a big concept that's explored.  Some of the elements of this film haven't aged well (or have aged so poorly as to have become completely awesome), and some weren't great to begin with.  But it's fun, and there's some intelligence at play here even behind the violence and vulgarity, and that goes a long way.

3 / 5 - TV (HD)

The Wolverine - 2013

"The Wolverine" - 2013
Dir. by James Mangold - 2 hrs. 6 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

As bad as "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" was, that's about how good 80% of "The Wolverine" is.  And "Origins" was absolutely terrible, a waste of both the character and of Hugh Jackman.  Thankfully, the 20% that's left of "The Wolverine" wasn't bad, but more or less standard super-hero movie material, so that still adds up to a pretty darned good film.

In case you haven't been following the Wolverine character in the four previous films he's appeared in (well, more than that if you include cameos), um, you might want to catch up.  Following a scene from World War II, Wolverine, aka Logan (Hugh Jackman) has turned into a woodsman in the current day, in the sense that he lives on the mountainside in Alaska (I think).  He's retreated from society in the wake of the previous movies, but is struck by a sense of moral outrage when some hunters injure a bear, but not badly enough to kill it outright.  Logan has to put the bear out of it's misery, and then heads into town to confront the only surviving hunter at a bar.  There, a young girl with bright red hair named Yukio (Rila Fukushima) intervenes, and eventually reveals that she's been trying to find Logan for a year.  She bears a gift, and requests (on the behalf of her employer) that Logan return to Japan so that Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi) can properly thank Logan for sparing his life in the past, since Yashida is now dying.

One of the things that makes "The Wolverine" engrossing is that the film shows a good grasp of what makes the character interesting.  The character may be a super-hero, and may have powers, but that's maybe the least interesting thing about Wolverine.  He's a man with a past, and barely functions around other people.  Logan would be content to be left alone, but sometimes that's just not possible.  When he relents, bad things usually happen.  A large theme in "The Wolverine" is the idea of trying to deal with one's past, and how to move forward.  For a character that's largely invulnerable to physical harm, he's very vulnerable personally.  He's literally haunted by the ghost of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), a woman that he loved deeply before things got complicated (you're going to have to watch the previous X-Men films to get a good grasp of the whole story), and unable to find a reason to move forward.  Yashida at one point calls Logan a ronin, which cuts to the bone of the matter.  Everything that Logan had wanted has been destroyed, and he doesn't see any reason to move forward, which kind of sucks when you're basically immortal.  His nightly dreams are nightmares, with his former love urging him to join her (presumably in the afterlife, although things are usually more complicated when you're dealing with mutants), the X-Men goal has dissipated, and everyone he touches ends up dying.

This is a much more fascinating character than when he's involved in standard heroics and battles.  I'm down for a good superhero fight, but the things that are interesting about Wolverine get lost in that dynamic.  Thankfully, much of the movie understands that, and everything is more about personal dynamics and relationships, with great backdrops (Alaska at first, then Japan) and the opportunity for spectacular action sequences.  There are three big action sequences, and two out of the three are fantastic.  The last is the least of the three, sort of your basic third act throw-down that has become standard issue in comic book movies.  It's not bad by any means, and it's a culmination of a confusing series of double-crosses where alliances shift very quickly.  But at the same time, after watching Wolverine try to run through a town against a fleet of ninjas to get to the castle, seeing him fight a giant robot and a lizard chick in the standard-issue superhero third act location of a giant laboratory is frustrating; until this point, there's been a decidedly Japanese flavor to the settings that adds a lot to how awesome everything looks, and that's gone once Logan enters the castle.

However, the other two action scenes are fantastic, the first one especially so.  It starts with an attempted kidnapping of Yashida's granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto) at a funeral, and turns into a chase across Tokyo, and then morphs into a battle atop a bullet train, which is literally one of the most nail-biting, spectacular action scenes I've ever watched.  There's no point in talking about it beyond that, if you don't enjoy anything else about "The Wolverine," this sequence is worth the price of admission on it's own.

There's a lot of good things about "The Wolverine," but you should probably expect that at this point.  Hugh Jackman owns this character, and the entire cast does a good job.  I thought that, aside from both films coming out in the same year, the fairest movie to compare this one to would be "Iron Man 3."  Both are deep sequels, so the characters have a lot of backstory to build upon, and both movies move the characters forward while using the events that came before in a meaningful way.  It was a great relief to have another satisfying Wolverine movie after "Origins," and I'm ready to see where Wolverine ends up next, which I couldn't say after the last installment.  And you'll probably feel the same way, especially if you keep watching until after the credits end, which you should already know to do with Marvel Comics movies.

3.5 / 5 - Theatre (2D)

Virtuosity - 1995

"Virtuosity" - 1995
Dir. by Brett Leonard - 1 hr. 46 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

I keep wavering on whether "Virtuosity" is a complete waste of time, or if it's just something okay that I shouldn't get all that worked up about.  I think the reason that the "waste of time" thought keeps running through my head is that it was a decent idea with a decent cast, and yet nothing meaningful comes of it.  But is that a useful way to think about a generic Hollywood movie?  Does "Virtuosity" aspire to be anything more than something that occasionally looks cool and a unchallenging way to pass a couple of hours?  Must everything be art?  Or is it okay just to exist without any additional purpose?

Some software company is using prisoners to test out their virtual reality program (and the virtual characters within).  Parker Barnes (Denzel Washington) and John Donovan (Costas Mandylor) are policeman, tracking down a serial killer named SID (Russell Crowe), but something goes wrong, and SID is able to actually kill Donovan.  Parker is sent back to prison, and his whole "troubled past" thing comes out in whole pretty quickly, waiting only for Parker to get into a prison fight with a white supremacist buddy of Donovan's.  And since this was made in the 1990s, the software people are complete sociopaths, and one of them figures out a way to make SID real, and sets him loose on Los Angeles.  At this point, everyone figures that Parker is the only man who has any real experience with SID, so they bust him out of the pokey and give him back his badge, and he and this psychiatrist chick, Dr. Madison Carter (Kelly Lynch) team up to chase SID down.

The main positives here are that Denzel Washington is pretty good at what he does (acting, in case you wondered), and so is Russell Crowe.  I don't remember ever having seen Crowe before "L.A. Confidential," and I'm not sure that his being the main villain made any difference to audiences back then, but even here Crowe is clearly a movie star just waiting to blow up.  There's also quite a bit of gloss to this film, and you might consider the first chunk of "Virtuosity" to be a precursor to "Crank," in blending life and gaming in a feature film.

Unlike a lot of computer movies, the computer-y stuff is pretty much contained to the first act, after which the movie turns into a more conventional pursuit film.  There's a lot of technobabble, and other than SID letting you know that his character is 50 terabytes big, there aren't many of those oh-so-fun "you think 1.44 MB is a lot of storage?!?" moments to be found.  If you're looking for a digital slice of the times, there isn't much in that vein, either.  There is a club scene that offers some fun visuals (if you know what "smart drugs" are, or went to Lollapalooza when it still toured, it's pretty fun).  There's also an early UFC appearance, although I'm not sure the filmmakers really understood how UFC worked, as there were always four men inside the cage, and I'm not sure that UFC has ever fully embraced the idea of tag-team ultimate fighting.  The idea of crossing the barrier between reality and virtual reality is a very 90's idea, although it's not meaningfully explored here, it's just an excuse to let loose a flashy, amoral serial killer.  And, of course, being a mid-90s film, even though it pulled an R-rating, there's nothing in the way of sexuality presented (or even a little bit of playfulness).  The lead actress, Kelly Lynch, plays the entire movie in a boxy gray pantsuit, and even though Traci Lords has a cameo in the club scene, she's covered neck-to-toe (in latex, but wasn't that really the latex-covered era?).

But then, I have to balance the decent performances from the lead actors and decent idea with the fact that there's not really anything about "Virtuosity" that isn't completely stock (TM Lars Ulrich).  The story is pretty straightforward, there's no real chemistry between the male and female leads, and the only butt they show is Russell Crowe's, in a bout of nude tai chi in a computer lab.  The execution is solid (although the swoopy pointless helicopter shot at the very end pissed me off in it's needlessness), but for what?  I've certainly enjoyed dumb films before, as well as ones that weren't very ambitious.  But usually, that's offset by some kind of charm, the kind of charm that "Virtuosity" lacks.  Denzel broods, Crowe struts (to a Bee Gee's song once, through a swap meet, which was pretty awesome), Kelly Lynch doesn't do a lot other than look gray and formless.  I know that theoretically I'm supposed to want to see the bad guy receive justice, but I mostly didn't (and not because I was rooting for SID, but just because I didn't care a lot one way or another).  Being roused to ambivalence is probably not the exact result that the people who made "Virtuosity" was aiming for.

1.5 / 5 - TV (HD)

The Chaperone - 2011

"The Chaperone" - 2011
Dir. by Stephen Herek - 1 hr. 43 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

So look, I'm partially to blame for this.  I keep subjecting myself to these WWE movies, knowing full well that they're likely to be completely awful.  Usually, I'm pleasantly surprised by the fact that they aren't 100% awful, but "The Chaperone" is the first one where I actually question what the point of making the film is in the first place.  I get that they're generally low-budget filler, and that no one's aiming too high for the most part.  I get that.   I get that they're trying to cruise on the appeal of whoever the star is, and that wrestling fans might want to see a movie starring that guy.  But "The Chaperone" is the kind of movie that fails to deliver anything approaching what it promises, from any angle.

Ray-Ray Brownstone (Paul "Triple H" Levesque) emerges from prison a changed man, thanks to the platitudes of radio show host Dr. Marjorie (Lucy Webb).  Up first on the agenda is patching things up with the wife, Lynne (Annabeth Gish), and daughter, Sally (Ariel Winter), that he left behind, right after he convinces people to stop calling him Ray-Ray, and start just calling him Ray.  But they're bitter, and his ex-colleagues are pressuring him to take up his old profession, being the best damned getaway driver anyone in Louisiana has ever seen.  Due to a mix-up, Ray ends up chaperoning a trip to New Orleans that his angry daughter is on, and his crime buddies are after him, too, with evil intentions.  Will Ray reconcile with his family and escape the clutches of his nefarious colleagues, or will evil prevail and will Ray duplicate back into Ray-Ray?  Only one hour and forty-three minutes stands between you finding out the answer to that question.

Lookit, I don't aim to just pointlessly shit all over movies.  That's not really my "thing" here.  I try to give praise where praise is due, and I focus a lot on the mechanics of storytelling because that's the main thing that I pay attention to when watching movies.  I'd love to faintly praise this film and tell you that it was competently done, even if not all that exciting or surprising.  But I can't even do that, because there was a soundtrack mistake that was so amateurish and badly timed that it damns the rest of the film.  To be clear, I'm talking about a street sequence in New Orleans, where Ray is trying to return a duffle bag to two baddies, and the tense background music starts, but it starts with a drum hit that sounds like gunfire.  No one in the film is shooting guns at this point, but the drum hit is so confusing that it took me a few seconds to figure out that I hadn't missed some random street shooting, that no one had been shot, and that the reason no one on-screen was reacting to the apparent gunfire was because it was just the drums in the soundtrack.  In a movie where people are routinely pulling guns (even though it's a comedy), it took me completely out of the movie, and left me shaking my head that no one involved with this film had noticed at how it made it look like no one was paying attention at any point during the production and editing of "The Chaperone."  More things that back up my point: the fact that no one's clothes fit well, Levesque's prison beard, and Kevin Corrigan's hair.

But there are more reasons that I feel like no one was paying any attention whatsoever, at any point.  Chief among them is that I can't figure out who this film was supposed to please.  If you're a fan of WWE and of Triple H, are you excited to see Triple H deal with ex-wife bitter beer face and a teenager talking down to him?  Is that the film you want to see Triple H in?  There's hardly any fight scenes at all, and they're pretty perfunctory when they happen.  So there's no satisfaction there.  If you're just a fan of mindless comedies, this isn't funny enough, nor is Triple H a strong enough personality to carry things on that basis, unlike Adam "Edge" Copeland in "Bending the Rules."  If you're a fan of muscly men on a bus full of fourteen year-olds, you're probably a pedophile, and "The Chaperone" isn't going to satisfy on that account, either.  Even in the context of the film, Ray is billed as being a fantastic driver, and the closest we get to see of that is him driving a bus over a curb, and him letting his daughter steer his car in a flashback sequence.  Put plainly, there isn't enough "WWE stuff" to make wrestling fans happy, and the movie simply isn't good enough to warrant attention from non-wrestling fans.  And if there's another way to find interest in "The Chaperone," rest assured that you'll finish this film with the cinematic equivalent of blue balls.

So I don't know why "The Chaperone" exists.  It's filler, but even by WWE Studios standards, it's not particularly good filler.  I was unbelievably disappointed to find out that this film was directed by Stephen Herek, who's responsible for one of my favorite films of all time, "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," among other films.  I don't think it's impossible to deliver something mildly entertaining starring Levesque, and with this general concept, but things needed to get a lot weirder, and a lot quicker.  There seems to be no awareness that seeing a big-time professional wrestler get run down by a jilted wife and kid isn't a set-up anyone who would go see that wrestler in a movie wants (and that people who are fans of Triple H might like a couple of fun, awesome movies with him before we get to the "The Tooth Fairy"/"The Pacifier" stage of his screen career), unless it ends in Triple H pedigree-ing the crap out of everyone in sight.  And, although this might be considered a mild spoiler, Triple H does not Pedigree anyone at all.  So what's the point?  I couldn't find one, and I'm not sure anyone involved here could tell you either.

.5 / 5 - TV (HD)

Videodrome - 1983

"Videodrome" - 1983
Dir. by David Cronenberg - 1 hr. 27 min.

Original Theatrical Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

The number of times that I've actually been freaked out by a movie is pretty low.  I distinctly remember watching "A Clockwork Orange" in high school with a friend late one Saturday night, and having a terror-filled late-night drive back home.  I don't remember anything recently having that kind of effect (I mean, I hated "The Doom Generation," but it didn't freak me out), until watching "Videodrome."  And to think, it had just been sitting there innocently on my DVR for months, pretending there was nothing abnormal about it, and that it was just another movie and not a messed up fever dream.  But "Videodrome" was lying to me about being nothing unusual, lying so hard that there ought to be a law.

Max Renn (James Woods) is a programmer for a UHF station in Toronto, and his network specializes in sleazy programming (the kind other networks won't air).  His techie, Harlan (Peter Dvorsky), comes across something called "Videodrome" on a pirate satellite transmission, and the images of straightforward torture immediately spellbinds Max.  Max sets about finding out who is responsible for it, so that he can air it, but this proves to be a difficult nut to crack.  He and his girlfriend, Nicki (Deborah Harry) watch the tape one night, and she's so into it that she bolts her job to try and get on the show (she's kinky that way).  At the same time, Max starts going a little bit crazy, experiencing hallucinations of growing intensity.  Max finds a thread about who's responsible for "Videodrome," but this just raises bigger questions.

"Videodrome" comes off like a surreal paranoid horror film.  Although the surreal elements grow throughout the run-time, it's not like the movie starts off normal and then ends up really weird.  It's pretty weird to begin with; Max is kind of an unrepentant pornographer of sorts (that's slightly overstating things, but he's not procuring Christian programming by any means).  And we're almost immediately introduced to the kind of flesh-centric programming that he's looking for.  Much of the sexual content is bundled up with pain of some kind, and I'll admit that it was unnerving to see Blondie asking Max to stab her with a Swiss Army Knife, and even more so to watch her burn one of her breasts with a lit cigarette.  Max participates, although there's a little unease about it, it's not clear that he's entirely comfortable with pushing these boundaries in his real life.  And this was even before Max's viewpoint becomes unreliable; when Nicki sees the torture tape, she's like a moth drawn to a flame.  That's fairly hardcore content, stuff that's designed to push emotional buttons: there aren't many films where the chief female character is overtly, sexually explicitly masochistic.  At least I don't remember Meg Ryan doing any roles like that.

But once the conspiracy plot starts to take hold, things really go off the rails.  Max's hallucinations grow, but are real at the same time.  For me, the "holy shit" moment was when Max develops storage capabilities in his sternum, and leaves a gun in there (to be retrieved later, and used, which is part of the epic mindfuck of "Videodrome").  That's hardly the craziest thing here, but it's the point where I sat there with my mouth open, wondering what the heck I was watching.  There were at least a couple of other moments that had the same effect, including the ending, but the whole stew of horror, sexuality, machinery, and violence seems chemically engineered to work it's way into every viewer's head and mess with whatever you've got going on up there.

One interesting element of the film came early on, during a panel interview that included Max, a provocative woman dressed in red, and a man named Prof. Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), who appears only on a TV screen, on a TV on the set of the talk show.  An argument is advanced about technology overwhelming people into a state of over-stimulation, which I thought was kind of comical, considering that this movie was made thirty years ago.  But it makes a larger point, that there is always an element of society that feels like they're losing control over their own lives to "progress," but the fact is that argument pops up continuously over the years.  Maybe the argument is right, but the amount of information and technology that we're all expected to juggle hasn't ever regressed, so it's a meaningless point.  The movie itself is summed up here; if the technology exists, someone will use it.  Doesn't matter if the result is good, bad, or indifferent, if it can be done, someone will do it.  Although "Videodrome" appears to be condemning the advances of machine's ability to influence man, it might better be viewed as a warning to keep up or get trampled.

There are a lot of ways "Videodrome" could have gone wrong, but it's a focused, pointed film that is more interested in raising questions than answering them.  The acting is universally good, with everyone feeling a little bit off (and James Woods' usual bluster comes off more like trying to cope with what's going on around him this time, which works very well).  This is just unusual, a very unusual movie, one that actually tries to make a point, but by the end, it's not clear who's side the narrative has been supporting.  But a point has been made, nonetheless.

4 / 5 - TV (HD)