Karate masters, Swedish detectives, and aging comedians

Since I have been a little out of touch over the past couple of weeks, I wanted to include a few blurbs about my favorite goings-on around town…

Street Fighter (1974) /Return of the Street Fighter (1974)
Two of Sonny Chiba’s seminal martial arts films will be playing as a double feature at The Screening Room Saturday, July 31^st starting at 7:00pm. Both films are based around the character Takuma Tsurugi, a karate anti-hero who is often hired by the Yakuza for shady business. But as often as he his hired, Tsurungi is double-crossed and must set out to exact revenge on his employers. The first installment of the Street Fighter series was the first film to receive an X rating due to violence. This seminal Kung Fu film includes some great martial arts choreography. It also contains some excellent cinematography including an iconic final sequence shot dramatically in a rainstorm. All that and a bare handed castration. Return of the Street Fighter is an equally quality film and a nice companion to the original. I went to the Martial Arts Double Feature at The Screening Room last month and it was a lot of fun. Loads of fun trailers and cheap snacks. Take the opportunity to visit The Screening Room and revisit some martial arts classics.

Martial Arts Double Feature
Saturday, July 21^st
7:00pm at

The Screening Room
127 E. Congress St. Tucson, AZ
The Screening Room

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Held over at Crossroads 6 this week is a Swedish thriller that played for weeks at The Loft and has become an international sensation. The story is of an industrious young computer programmer living under the radar who spies for an insurance company and her friendship with an investigative reporter. The unlikely pair are sucked into a mystery involving a rich family with a dark secret. Take the opportunity to catch up at Crossroads 6 as the sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009), is on its way to The Loft starting August 13^th. I was late getting on this bandwagon, but I will not make that mistake with the sequel. Both films are part of a trilogy. With the first one held over at Crossroads and the second on its way to The Loft, there is no reason to get behind.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Now playing at

Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6
4811 East Grant Rd. Tucson, AZ
www.MovieValue.com

The Bookman’s Late Night Cult Classic this month is Harold and Maude (1971). Easily one of my favorites, this is a must see comedy if you have never had the opportunity. Here is a link to a review I did of it earlier this year.

Harold and Maude

Friday July 30^th and Saturday, July 31^st

The Bookman’s Late Night Cult Classic
Every Friday and Saturday night at 10:00pm at
The Loft Cinema
3233 E. Speedway Blvd. Tucson, AZ
www.loftcinema.com

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010)
Held over for another week at The Loft is a documentary about comedian Joan Rivers. Since this post is getting long with me catching up and much has been written about this documentary where a camera crew followed Ms. Rivers around for a year, I will spare you my extended thoughts except to say that it was a great story about show business and really well constructed documentary. If you had any thoughts about seeing it or are a fan of the business of comedy, you should check it out.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Now Playing at

The Loft Cinema
3233 E. Speedway Blvd. Tucson, AZ
www.loftcinema.com

Finally, an article I wrote about the life and films of the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar was published recently in the Los Angeles punk rock magazine Razorcake. The article appears in issue number 57. Check it out if you get a chance. Copies are available at Toxic Ranch Records.

www.razorcake.org

Off the Marquee
billupsallen@gmail.com
www.billupsallen.com

Harry Brown (2009)
Michael Caine is a terrific actor. I really can’t think of many living actors who the public has loved for such long stretch of time. Even his appearance in Jaws: The Revenge (1987) did not seem to damage his career at all. The producers played this card well in Harry Brown. If there is an actor we do not want to see terrorized, it is Michael Caine. Harry Brown is the story of an ex-military man living in a neighborhood suffering from gang violence. Through a series of unfortunate events, Brown is pushed into enacting his Royal Marine training for the purpose of challenging a group of drug dealers. If you are familiar at all with revenge fantasy films like Death Wish (1974), you can pretty much write out on a napkin everything that is going to happen in Harry Brown. Vigilante films are as formulaic as love stories. There are a bunch of really bad guys. There must, of course, be a vigilante. There must also be a police detective who is the only person who believes that there is a vigilante killer on the loose. The film checks all of these boxes.

Even for a revenge fantasy thriller, the bad guys in this film are a bit ridiculous. A particularly spectacular example is Stretch (Sean Harris). Stretch is a junkie who runs a Marijuana grow room that Brown infiltrates by, cunningly, knocking on the door. In spite of the fact that Stretch is sitting on millions of dollars worth of pot plants, he takes to time to screw with Brown’s head during the sale of a $700 pistol. He shows Brown homemade porno, smokes crack out of the barrel of a gun, and shoots heroin in his arm and into the arm of an unconscious girl lying on the couch. Even if I believed that Stretch is that despicable, I can’t believe he would arbitrarily risk his business trying to impress an elderly stranger with the depths of his depravity.

The rest of the bad guys in the film are equally as idiotic. The young hoodlums are portrayed as smacking hyenas that revel in the downfall of others. If any sympathy for the bad guys is allowed to seep in, then the concept of vigilantism becomes depressing. The down side here is that the kids are involved in a local drug trade. The kids being involved in organized street trafficking encourages too much thinking about whether it’s a good idea to start plugging young people in low-income housing blocks. In this arena, the movie tries to make a point and loses me a little.

The rest of the film is really just exploitation fare with Caine serving to class up the story a little. His performance as the aging victim getting control of his life is welcome in a film where the violence is as subtle as a brick tied to a baseball bat. The idea that functioning drug trades could be contained if only more octogenarians would start using kids for target practice is a bit naive, but as a revenge fantasy narrative, the movie is moderately entertaining.

Harry Brown

Now playing at

Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6
4811 East Grant Rd. Tucson, AZ
www.MovieValue.com

Also at Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6 this week:

The Secret of Kells (2009) : Reviewed here June 4, 2010

Off the Marquee
billupsallen@gmail.com
www.billupsallen.com

Survival of the Dead (2010)
Driving to the theater to see George Romero’s sixth entry into one of the most revered and influential horror franchises, I was struck with a feeling as if I had been set up on a blind date. You know it is probably going to suck, yet you hold on to a glimmer of hope that there could be some sort of connection. I love Romero. I want these movies to be good. And I feel Romero-style zombie stories can still have life. His catalog produces the best remakes. And I have no problem with him flogging a dead horse; it’s a horse people like me want to see dragged out and beaten every once in a while. If you are of a certain mindset, there is something cathartic about seeing the world fall apart gradually in a manner that allows for equal opportunity survival. I wouldn’t last long by the standards of any real survival scenario; I would be boned the first time I had to eat an egg without cooking it. But in the face of slow moving corpses and free grocery stores, I might stand a chance.

In Survival of the Dead, the strange disease that causes the dead to get up and walk around has spread to the point where there are more animated corpses than there are living people. A group of survivors travel to an island off the coast of Delaware. There, two families that have been feuding for years inhabit the island; both families have different ideas about how to weather the apocalypse. Here is where the movie comes to a grinding halt. The head of one of the families believes that zombies should be preserved for some reason. He also wants to teach zombies to eat horses. There is a lot of back and forth between to two families about what it means to be human. Plus there is a pointless subplot where the traveling group stashes some money. I can’t figure out what good money would do them with the world in such an advanced state of degradation. Evidently they are banking on an eventual upswing in the economy. Wouldn’t it make more sense if they were fighting for control over an 18-wheeler full of Campbell’s soup cans? It’s not worth thinking about; reason does not apply in this narrative on a lot of levels.

Chaos eventually ensues as it does every time someone tries to stabilize life in the zombie apocalypse. In time, the film gives you a taste of what you want in a Romero film, but it is a long road. I can understand if he gets bored flogging the same premise over and over again, but his attempts to make the movie too involved cause huge gaps in logic. The idea of trying to re-civilize an island is interesting, but too much theoretical debate about what it means to have a soul ruins the mood; the zombies become almost ancillary. Survival is superior to 2007’s Diary of the Dead, but I found Diary to be particularly abysmal. When it comes to zombie movies, I want as close to the same thing over and over again as I can get. Romero movies are like tea for horror fanatics; I don’t want a horse eating debate with my morning cup.

Survival of the Dead

Now playing at

The Loft Cinema
3233 E. Speedway Blvd. Tucson, AZ
www.loftcinema.com

Off the Marquee
billupsallen@gmail.com
www.billupsallen.com