The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Wake the Witch is not a bad first feature, although with a bit more time in the editing room, it could have been quite a bit better. Regardless, it’s worth a watch if only to say that you’ve definitely seen that horror film made in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  WALL-E (2008)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 29 June 2008

  I have to admit upfront to being a somewhat fallen Pixar fanboy. I was with them all the way up until Cars, when the concept and cast lost me completely. I still haven’t seen either Cars or Ratatouille, but both of them managed to perform at the box-office more or less as well as Pixar’s previous roster of animated features. When I first heard the concept for WALL-E, I had no idea what to expect, but I was excited about what the final product might be like. True to my expectations, WALL-E is a serious departure from Pixar’s previous work and a huge gamble–are kids (and their parents) going to flock to a film with very little dialogue that takes place in a future where mankind has trashed the planet to the point of having to live on a spaceship while robots clean up our mess?

  WALL-E opens with a shot of Earth from space, the view clouded by millions of man-made satellites orbiting around it, set to a song from Hello, Dolly! The camera zooms down through the satellites to the surface of the planet, where huge holographic ads for the Buy-N-Large Corporation continue shilling away to empty cities and piles of garbage higher than the skyscrapers that surround them while the somber score creeps up over the main titles. Seemingly the only other thing left moving is one small Waste Allocation Load Lifter–Earth Class (or WALL-E) robot, still packing up garbage and stacking the bricks some 700 years after the evacuation of the planet to the Buy-N-Large spaceship Axiom.

  The first half of WALL-E is almost completely free of dialogue and features something completely new to Pixar: live actors appear in the ads for Buy-N-Large, including Fred Willard as the president of the Buy-N-Large Corporation (and, presumably, the Earth). During his 700 years of cleanup duty, WALL-E has developed a personality, collecting toys, silverware, and other remnants of human culture. His most beloved treasure is a VHS copy of Hello, Dolly! that he watches through a VCR hooked up to an iPod. WALL-E seems to be okay with his work for the most part, but he longs for companionship.

  He seems to find it with the appearance of EVE, a robot sent to Earth on an uncertain mission. The second half of the film moves the action to the Axiom ship, where humanity has devolved to the point where everyone is obese and sedentary, carried everywhere by hover chairs and communicating with each other entirely through holographic screens displayed inches in front of their face. Once on the Axiom, WALL-E also meets a wide variety of other robots made for various purposes, all of which are designed to have their own distinct personalities and quirks.

  WALL-E is a gamble for Pixar on several levels, not least of which is the fact that it’s a blatant critique of voracious consumer culture. Buy-N-Large can easily be read as an extremely popular and ubiquitous chain of department stores, extrapolated to its logical endpoint: it’s the only corporation left on the planet, making literally everything people need, including the spaceship that takes humankind away from the planet and the robots left behind to clean up humanity’s mess. For adults, the film’s message may seem a little obvious and overly preachy, but for a My First Anti-Corporate Message film, it will doubtless find a lot of young fans who take its message to heart.

  All of this, however, is almost beside the point: more than almost any other Pixar movie to date, WALL-E harkens back to the simple pleasure of the possibilities of animation and giving life (and personality) to things that only exist in the imagination. The film is absolutely gorgeous, and while there are certainly nits to pick (for example, the live-action actors don’t really work as ancestors of the CGI people of the future) it’s hard to fault Pixar for trying something wildly different and running with it. WALL-E is beautiful and exciting, and one of the best films of the year so far.

  Weekend Pass (1984)

  Originally published on Criticplanet.org

  Oh, Weekend Pass. I nearly turned you off because you have the worst theme song I’ve ever heard. But I stuck it out! And honestly, I’m mostly glad I did. As it turns out, Weekend Pass is a very enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes… minus the time it takes to play the theme song at the beginning and end of the film. Seriously: it’s really, really, really horrible.

  Four Navy recruits are on a weekend pass before shipping out to their various posts around the world. Webster (Patrick Houser), Bunker (Chip McAllister), Paul (D.W. Brown) and nerdy Lester (Peter Ellenstein) hop in a jeep and take off for Los Angeles, naturally stopping at a depressing strip club to start the weekend off right. However, each of the boys also has their own mission for the weekend: Webster has a slot at a stand-up show hosted by Joe Chicago (Phil Hartman!), Bunker wants to find out what happened to his old girlfriend, Paul has a hot date lined up with an old high school flame, and Lester just wants to have a nice date. In between each character’s storyline, the guys all try to get Lester laid, with typically disastrous results.

  Weekend Pass is a departure from many Crown International Pictures in that one of its four leads– Bunker– is African-American. Not especially noted for their progressive racial politics, it must have been a pretty big deal for Crown to make such a bold casting decision. Perhaps even more surprising is that for the most part, Bunker is just one of the guys, and their camaraderie is endearing. Of course, there’s no way they could get through the whole movie without visiting Bunker’s old neighborhood and get entangled in a gang fight, but even that scene only flirts with cringe-worthiness. Overall, white people and their terrifying obsession with stand-up comedy come out looking much worse, despite the best efforts of “Chinese masseuse” Chop Suzi (Cheryl Song). The guys hire her to have sex with Lester. It’s a bad scene in more ways than one.

  At the end of the day, though, Weekend Pass is typically light Crown International fare. The four guys do some living, some laughing (none of it at all during the truly depressing comedy club sequence), and maybe learn a few lessons about themselves. All in just one weekend! It’s weirdly touching to see the guys go their separate ways at the end of the film, not knowing what their futures may hold. It’s just a goofy, low-budget comedy, but the four leads are likable enough to carry it off and make it much more endearing than it needs to be.

  Werewolf: The Beast Among Us (2012)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 9 October 2012

  Universal’s remake of The Wolf Man suffered from two major problems: its CG-heavy wolf man transformation scenes came up short, and it was so dull even the cast seemed constantly on the edge of falling asleep. However, a franchise is a franchise, and there’s more money to be made, so someone at Universal decided the best course of action would be to continue The Wolf Man story with a direct-to-disc sequel that has literally no connection to the previous film. Other than the software they used for the werewolf transformation scenes, anyway. One of the best parts of The Wolf Man was its ending, setting up a sequel in which a werewolf would terrorize Victorian London. Sorry to say that’s not exactly the sequel Universal has delivered.

  Unlike The Wolf Man, Werewolf: The Beast Among Us takes place in a world where werewolves are not just known to exist, but a sort of natural disaster like hurricanes or ice storms. A small Eastern European village is being plagued by a particularly picky beast that seems to be smarter– and more vicious– than any previous werewolf that has rolled through town. The town coroner (Stephen Rea) is being kept much busier than usual dealing with the piles of bodies, and his young assistant Daniel (Guy Wilson) is getting more experience than he probably bargained for. As word gets out about the town’s misfortune, bands of werewolf hunters visit to offer their services.

  Daniel believes he can assist the hunters, but his mother Valdoma (Nia Peeples) and his girlfriend Eva (Rachel DiPillo) want him to stay out of harm’s way. The werewolf hunters don’t take Daniel seriously anyway, and the dashing Stefan (A
dam Croasdell) even makes a play for Eva himself. While the hunters try to figure out a strategy to hunt the beast, the townspeople grow restless and begin throwing anyone even vaguely suspicious in jail, including Valdoma. Daniel tries to join the hunters again so he can prove his mother is not the wolf, but the truth behind the attacks and the beast itself puts Daniel and the monster hunters in a very difficult position. Can they team up to save the town from a monster lurking in plain sight?

  Right away, there’s one huge difference between Werewolf and The Wolf Man: an emphasis on action. The film opens with a werewolf siege of a small cabin, and the story line is punctuated with frequent action sequences. The wolf doesn’t really look any better than it did in The Wolf Man, but its somewhat unreal, slick look makes a lot more sense in a direct-to-disc film than a big-budget spectacular. The practical effects are gruesomely effective, and the gore level in general is higher than expected for a major studio release. As effective as the blood and action set pieces are, the cast is mostly faceless, the werewolf hunters in particular defined by their weapons (Stephen Bauer’s quick draw artist, Ana Ularu’s quasi-steampunk flamethrower). Werewolf: The Beast Among Us is just a few steps up from a SyFy Original, but it’s undeniably a lot more fun than The Wolf Man. If you’re looking for some fast-paced werewolf fun, you could certainly do worse.

  What We Do Is Secret (2008)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 1 September 2008

  Last year, the number of musician biopics finally hit critical mass, and the result was a dead-on parody (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) that lampooned the by-now familiar broad strokes of seemingly every film in the genre. The fact that the biopic is an easy target didn’t make Walk Hard any less brilliant–the problem is that there’s no denying the broad strokes of many famous people’s lives are very similar. This applies in pretty much any case, even with subjects as iconoclastic as Ian Curtis of Joy Division (as portrayed in Anton Corbijn’s excellent Control) and now Darby Crash of The Germs in Rodger Grossman’s What We Do Is Secret.

  The film depicts the brief history of the influential punk band The Germs and, more specifically, their self-destructive leader Darby Crash (Shane West). After being given straight A’s in school in trade for never coming back to classes, Darby decides to start a band with his friend Pat Smear (Rick Gonzalez) and “two girls who don’t know how to play” the bass and drums–leading them to find bass player Lorna Doom (Bijou Phillips) and into a famous history of drummer problems. Crash has a five-year plan for the band, and eventually drummer Don Bolles (Noah Segan) completes the band’s lineup. What follows is the quick rise and abrupt disappearance of the band, as Darby becomes more and more dependent on hard drugs and the support of creepy superfan Amber (Missy Doty).

  Like Control, What We Do Is Secret is anchored by a strong lead performance (Shane West is excellent) and punctuated by exciting live performances. However, they are otherwise entirely different films, even if they can’t help but share some similarities in portraying the too-short lives of their tragic subjects. Whereas Control was distinguished by its gorgeous black and white cinematography and straightforward narrative, What We Do Is Secret is presented as a series of in-character interviews that bookend scenes out of Darby’s (and the band’s) life. The interviews seem to occur around the time that events happen in the film’s narrative, other than Darby’s interviews, which are all shown in black and white. While the “in-character interview” is not new, playing the interviews around the time of the depicted events keeps the film moving at a lively clip.

  It’s a sad fact that the biopic is an inherently derivative and familiar style of film. Sad in that so many of those depicted suffered the same problems and in that it makes things very difficult for the filmmaker who wants to distinguish his subject’s story from so many others. Control stood out from other similar films because of its singular style and careful attention to the fine details of Curtis’s life. What We Do Is Secret doesn’t quite give the same feeling of getting close to Darby Crash–it’s unlikely that if you don’t know much about him you’ll come out of the film feeling like you learned all that much. However, the film is still well worth a look for its all-around great performances and as a tiny peek into the fringes of early L.A. punk rock.

  Wichita (2016)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 20 June 2017

  (Note: I posted this review and then almost immediately removed it from Film Monthly because I felt somewhat guilty about how uncomfortably the film struck a nerve with me. I’m including it here for the sake of completion.)

  In the following, I am going to detail pretty much the entire plot of Wichita. This is because it provides an important object lesson in things to avoid while making a movie. Having watched it myself, I can say that I do not believe anyone else needs to make the same mistake.

  In the opening scene of Wichita, creepy protagonist Jeb (Trevor Peterson) has a meeting with executives at the network where Jeb's cartoon series Amy and the Aliens airs. One of the executives is cruel and unpleasant; the other is oblivious and was probably intended to provide a humorous counterpart to the first. Within about 30 second of opening his mouth, Jeb is clearly established as extraordinarily weird at best and possibly insane at worst. After a hit first season and what the audience can infer was a disastrous second, the executives task Jeb with retreating to a cabin with a group of writers to knock out the 30 scripts for the third season of Amy and the Aliens in 30 days. We don't know enough about Jeb--other than that he's kind of twitchy--to really get invested in his plight. And there's no way any decent person would identify with the cartoonishly hateful TV executives. So this scene launches the film from a point of fundamental miscalculation: Who are these people and why should we care about what happens to any of them?

  This is a basic problem with far too many films, independent and otherwise, and horror films in particular often make this mistake. When Jeb's writing team arrives at the cabin, they're nearly all immediately revealed to be irredeemably awful. There's Natalie (Caitlin Gerard), voice of "Amy" and entitled daughter of one of the bigwigs at the network; Billy (Christopher Wolfe), the alpha frat bro; Raven (Persia White), a best-selling young adult novelist whose tattoos stand in for anything else that might define her character; Clark (Demetri Goritsas), a struggling writer and "recovering" alcoholic; and June (Melinda Lee), the only character in the entire movie who is actually nice to any of the others without trying to further an agenda. Jeb is supposed to be running the cabin like a writers' workshop, but it is quickly established that he is more interested in peeping on everyone and setting everyone against one another than getting any writing done. Or at least that's how it looks--barely any screen time is spent showing the characters actually doing any work, which makes sense given watching people sitting at a computer typing for long periods of time is not interesting. However, it also makes it look like nobody's doing anything other than indulging in terrible behavior. Jeb uses his hidden camera to gather footage of everyone for some unknown purpose. The audience still lacks a compelling reason to care about any of this.

  At what feels like a completely arbitrary point, Jeb is fired and goes to visit his mother (Sondra Blake). "Mama" greets him at gunpoint because he sneaks in a window to his childhood room and knocks over a bunch of stuff like an inept thief, but before the reunion is over she has kissed him full on the mouth and expressed pleasure that the "man of the house" has returned. She waves the gun around some more and asks Jeb to confirm that he is "walking with the Lord." There are suggestions of all sorts of things in their interactions, none of which are explained or particularly useful in understanding Jeb's psychology. He invites his old friend Bart (Max Kasch) to come over and hang out in the dark in his room and smoke weed while projecting an image from one of the cameras at the writers' cabin on the wall. Mama comes in and shoots Bart; Jeb chases her through the house and strangles her, then returns to finish Bart off and film it. But Jeb despairs that Bart's death won't fit in the mov
ie he's making because "no one cares" if Bart dies.

  Anyone still watching might find themselves asking if this comment was a middle finger from the filmmakers to the people watching this movie. The film's sociopath protagonist knows that killing characters in a movie is meaningless if the audience doesn't care about them, but the entire movie we're watching is populated with characters nobody could possibly care about? And presumably we're about to watch Jeb go back to the cabin and kill all of them? That is in fact what happens next, with some mild tension introduced by Jeb attempting to frame Clark as the murderer. But as he tears his way through the writers' group, the only one that elicits any sympathy is poor June. As the only character written as a reasonably decent person, June would seem to be the natural pick for "final girl," but that is not to be. Whether this is because the filmmakers don't realize everybody else is insufferable or they thought it would be a wicked twist on audience expectations doesn't really matter, because by the end of Wichita you have just watched a bunch of exceptionally unpleasant people do and say a bunch of awful things to one another, and you have learned nothing.

  Well, actually I did learn one thing: It's not worth watching these movies any more. It doesn't matter if the cast is good (which it is) or the movie looks nice (which it does) or the sound mixing and design are solid (which they are). From a technical standpoint, Wichita is a competent and even occasionally impressive independent production. But at heart it's just ugly and mean-spirited. It offers no insight into its characters or their behavior. It is content to wade in their misery and rub the audience's face in it to no discernible end. In the end I have to thank Wichita for showing me that life is too short to waste on watching these kind of movies, much less taking the time to review them afterward. Maybe that will be of use to anyone reading this, although chances are that if you made it through this whole review you probably learned that lesson yourself long before now. It appears, however, that I only learn lessons the hard way.