Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with some thoughts on the big Butt-Numb-A-Thon celebration while everything's still fresh. Well, as fresh as things can be when mainlining cinema for 24 straight hours.
No, Star Wars didn't play (surprise surprise). In fact it was a light premiere year, but maybe because of that it also happened to be one of best programs of recent years.
New films are exciting, don't get me wrong, but many of them have to be wild cards by necessity. There's something great about discovering whether a new movie is shit or not with a group of people. Shared experiences like that always stand out when looking back, but when Harry's actually seen everything he's programming he can make sure we get quality stuff.
I'm gonna go movie by movie and talk about my thoughts, so let's do this!
MOVIE #1: Gunga Din
Like most movie geeks I have a lot of “need to sees” when it comes to classic cinema. Gunga Din was one of those. It's been on my priority list since I learned that it was the primary influence on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. We all know how much I adore that film, but I guess in my mind I built Gunga Din up as some kind of proper and uptight British war film.
I was so, so wrong. It's an adventure movie that's just as charming as The Adventures of Robin Hood or any of Errol Flynn's best Swashbucklers with a charming and funny trio of friends at the center. Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Victor McLaglen are three buddies in the British Army facing off against the rising Thugee insurgency in India.
All three are introduced in a big brawl and they instantly became one of my all-time favorite on-screen friends. They give each other shit, but are always there for one another. So much of the movie is these guys fucking with each other, even in life and death scenarios.
From a historical standpoint yes, there is quite a lot of brownface going on here, but it's not done in a way that plays up stereotypes, so it never pulled me out of the movie. Sam Jaffe's Gunga Din is reported to be the basis of Jar Jar Binks (Gunga Din = Gungan), but Lucas went a little too full-on stupid. Gunga Din has his heart in the right place and is a little goofy, but he's never a joke of a person. Let's just put it this way: he never steps in shit or electrifies his face because he's a moron.
Despite being the title character, Gunga Din is far from the focal point of the story. Instead his arc is the emotional grounding for the ridiculously fun adventure our three leads go on.
I was used to older Carey Grant, so I was shocked at just how lively he was here. He's somewhere between Indiana Jones charming and Three Stooges nuts and I love that sweet spot.
The film showed on a beautiful 35mm print and I couldn't imagine a better, more energetic way to kick off BNAT. It is a film about a bunch of friends coming together to go on a journey, afterall.
MOVIE #2: Southern Comfort
I wrote a little bit about this movie last year when I started a short-lived column looking at the releases of Scream/Shout Factory. Southern Comfort is pretty much Walter Hill's Deliverance. Some guys fuck with the wrong backwater folk and pay the price.
The setting is the swamps of Louisiana and our leads are pretty much all terrible people, Louisiana National Guardsmen on a training exercise. They run into some Cajun trappers and one of these idjits decides to fire his blank-filled machine gun in their general direction, which results in a bunch of pissed off trappers with real guns hunting some weekend warriors through the swamps.
The cast is filled with men's men (including Peter Coyote, Fred Ward, Keith Carradine and Powers Booth) and is one of my favorite sneaky Vietnam critiques. Was really glad Harry programmed it here. It played shockingly well with Gunga Din (another story about locals turning the tables on a military force) and tied in perfectly with the final film of the night.
MOVIE #3: Syncopation
Another vintage surprise. This one is a charming drama that tells us about the rise of Jazz. Considering when it was made, it's pretty respectful of the roots of the movement, even if the story is pretty much about white people repurposing it.
I'd bet that the movie was ahead of its time when it came out. It wasn't a guarantee that black characters would actually be played by black people back then and the whole opening of the movie is about a child who has a knack for playing the trumpet and that talent being fostered by an older wild trumpet player.
New Orleans is the setting (another great tie in, considering we spent the entirety of Southern Comfort in Louisiana as well) for the beginning and then our main character, a spunky little white girl who plays a wicked Jazz piano thanks to her friendship with the trumpet player and his mom, who is the girl's nanny, moves to Chicago and takes this new kind of music with her.
She grows and meets Jackie Cooper's character, a twenty-something baby-faced trumpet player who falls in love with her instantly. Like many movies of the era, this one is light and breezy and to my great surprise had an almost screwball comedy level of ridiculousness to it. For instance, the girl's Jazz piano is so shocking that when she plays it at a party the whole neighborhood goes crazy. Most are up and dancing, but some hate it like it was the Devil's own theme song, so she's put on trial for it with a spinning newspaper headline telling us that Society Girl Causes Neighborhood Riot.
The opening credits (and poster above) really plays up that folks like Benny Goodman and Charlie Barnett and Harry James show up and they do, but it's all at the end and takes up maybe 3 minutes of the movie.
This one was just crazy charming and fun and I highly recommend tracking it down if you dig Golden Era Hollywood flicks.
MOVIE #4: Eddie the Eagle
Our first premiere was a film called Eddie the Eagle, produced by Matthew Vaughn and starring Kingsman's Taron Egerton as a real life British Olympian named Eddie Edwards.
Afterwards I saw Devin Faraci tweet that the beauty of this film was that it's a sports movie about a guy who kinda stinks at sports and I don't think I could put it better than that. This film is Rudy if Rudy wasn't just too small, but also really kinda sucked at football.
Eddie is a dork and I mean that with affection. He's a bit of a doofus, kinda scrawny, totally socially awkward, but his super power is his eternal optimism. We see him as a kid and his many attempts to train himself to be an Olympian. The movie with him opens in the bathtub, holding his breath. He almost hits 1 minute, so in his mind that means he's ready to go to the Olympics.
He's got the drive, the heart, but that's about it. Turns out his calling is Ski Jumping. Again, not because he's good at it, but because nobody seems to give a shit about it in the UK, so literally the only thing he has to do to qualify is make one jump and sign up.
Hugh Jackman shows up as a drunk American who was a ski jumping superstar before letting ego and partying kill his career prematurely. And he's going full bore in this one, really playing up his rogue-ish charm.
This unlikely duo is the heart at the center of this absolutely charming feel-good audience-pleaser and I can't recommend it enough.
The flick isn't released until April, but make a point to see it. You won't be disappointed.
MOVIE #5: Tale of the Fox
This was the first completely stop motion animated feature and one of the first animated films theatrically released (it came out six months before Snow White), finished by Ladislas Starevich in 1930, but not released until 1937.
Harry intro'd the film saying it was a favorite of the Hitler Youth, but don't let that taint the film for you. It's a simple fairy tale based on a rascally fox named Renard. This guy is a huge dick. He steals from everybody and straight up kills and eats characters (sorry Chickens!) to the point where the King (a lion, naturally) orders him to be arrested, which causes all sorts of Looney Tunes level chaos as he outwits the whole animal kingdom.
I was shocked by how much this 85 year old animation felt contemporary. A big reason for that, I think, is that Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox seems to have taken much of its design look from this film. I don't know if that's just coincidence or if Anderson has cited this as an influence, but Fantastic Mr. Fox could almost be a sequel to this old black and white French stop-motion animated film.
MOVIE #6: Anomalisa
This was my second time watching this rather amazing film. Keeping the stop-motion animation trend going, Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's Anomalisa was brought out to wreck the audience after the fun and light tale of a rascally fox.
Anomalisa is pretty much about depression and how our main character feels completely isolated in the world. Everything is droll and the same to him. Every other person looks and sounds exactly the same. It's a film that could only really be done this effectively in this format.
Tom Noonan provides the voice of 98% of what you hear in the movie. David Thewlis is the main character and everybody he meets, male, female and even animals all sound like Tom Noonan. His wife, his kid, the cab driver, the people on talk radio, the waitress... everybody is Tom Noonan. Until he hears another voice and instantly becomes obsessed with it.
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Lisa, a mousy, wholly average and unexceptional woman, but to Thewlis' Michael Stone she's a goddess. The beauty of this movie is it's two things at once. It's both an example of how love works and how fleeting it can be. It's beautiful that these two characters find each other and find something special, neither thinking particularly highly of themselves, but seeing something beautiful the other doesn't see, but depression and human emotion is never that simple and we ride that rollercoaster the entire movie.
This is an amazing film and hit me even harder on the second viewing.
MOVIE #7: Phantasm 4k Restoration
This was the only title this year I head's up on and even then I was not prepared by just how amazing this restoration would look. I'm a big fan of Don Coscarelli's Phantasm series and have seen the first film easily half a dozen times on the big screen and every time the print has been beat up and red.
As I reported over the weekend, JJ Abrams' Bad Robot has taken the reins on this thorough restoration, many of the same technical geniuses who worked on Star Wars giving their time to give this weird-o cult flick a second life. I've never seen this film look as good as it did last night.
It also helped that Harry actually married two BNAT regulars who met at the fest before the film and their vows ended with confetti cannons and actual flying Phantasm spheres (attached to drones and piloted dangerously around the audience). The mood was right.
What can one say about Phantasm that hasn't already been said? The dream-like quality that propelled it to such success is only strengthened by this restoration (4k from the original camera negative). The blacks are jet black, so everything has a higher contrast look than I'm used to with this film. Dark shadows become more intimidating. The new 5.1 remix is loud and unnerving in all the best ways.
Yeah, some of the acting is still amateurish (mostly in the supporting cast department), but the iconography is as strong as it's ever been.
I don't know if we're getting a theatrical re-release or what, but there were whispers of big plans for this restoration in 2016. Hope it really gets out there!
MOVIE #8: Angry Red Planet (+Skull Island greeting)
Before Angry Red Planet started we were treated to a video from BNAT alum Jordan Vogt-Roberts from the set of his King Knog flick: Skull Island. He said hi, mountains of Hawaii clearly visible behind him, and then passed us off to a “P.A.” which, of course was not a P.A. Instead it was Tom Hiddleston in full costume.
He looked like an adventurer, much more Indiana Jones than Jack Driscoll. Hiddleston said he couldn't show us anything while holding the camera. He let it drift over his shoulder revealing a giant Ape's giant skull on the ground in the valley behind him. Oops! He tried to correct and spun the camera the other way, showing us even more bones before he panicked and dropped the camera to the ground, ending the video. Nice bit that showed us nothing and everything!
Now, Angry Red Planet. I've seen it before, I've seen it big before, but it's not my thing. It's totally Harry's thing, but outside of a few specific examples, I'm not a huge fan of cheesy '50s sci-fi films. Fiend Without A Face is pretty righteous and I like pretty much everything Harryhausen did effects for, but as a general rule I'm not the target audience for this genre.
That said, the iconic Bat-Spider creature is amazing and I got some entertainment from this viewing, mostly at hearing the audience groaning at how sexist it is.
MOVIE #9: Ninja Busters
My least favorite film of BNAT. It also didn't help that it ran at 4am-ish, but what can I say? I don't like the rising trend of discovering “lost” '80s movies, propping them up and laughing at how shitty and incompetent they are. Some movies are lost for a reason and Ninja Busters is one of them.
It's about two dudes who go up against a crime organization... kinda. Mostly they just goof around at a Karate class because they're trying to get laid. This is pretty much an Ernest movie if Ernest was a horny loser piece of shit and the director had only ever seen 2 movies in his life.
Call me a stick in the mud if you want, but it just feels mean to me to make fun of shit like this and when you ironically watch it that's exactly what you're doing.
MOVIE #10: Logan's Run
I've seen this movie a lot and love it. Logan's Run played great in this time slot for me. Much of that is probably due to my giant, massive, enormous, uncontrollable crush on Jenny Agutter in this film. Holy moly is she out of this world adorable in Logan's Run.
You've probably seen the movie, but if you haven't it was one of the last big pre-Star Wars sci-fi hits. It's very, very '70s in its aesthetic and costume design, but in a cool retro futuristic way. The idea is that nobody in this future world can live past 30, which isn't an idea that always sits well with people, so there's a police force, known as Sandmen, who are tasked to chase down runners. Michael York is Logan 5, the mid-20s lead who loves life as a Sandman, but his world comes crashing down when he's assigned to get to the bottom of an underground resistance who claim that there's a Sanctuary outside the protection of the big city.
Call me crazy, but it hit me over this rewatch that a remake of Logan's Run is actually a good thing. The original is so specific to the era in which it was made that any update could take the premise (which is still relevant) and update it without stepping on the original's toes, much in the same way the new Apes films have been able to respectfully reboot that franchise.
Anyway, fun film, played great and Jenny Agutter is still the bee's knees.
MOVIE #11: The Revenant
This was viewing #2 for The Revenant and yeah, fuck everybody else I think it's pretty amazing. I had no idea just how many critics were sharpening their knives for Innaritu post-Birdman, but I can't believe just how many people dismiss this movie.
I don't disagree it's overlong and more than tiny bit indulgent, but I don't think it particularly hurts the film.
Listen, the movie is about as simple as a movie can be. There's not much more to it on a story level than Leo Wants Revenge, but it's so well done on a technical level that I can't imagine dismissing it as a whole.
Tom Hardy is flat out amazing as the target of DiCaprio's hatred, a piece of shit trapper named Fitzgerald and DiCaprio himself gives it his all as Hugh Glass, the seemingly unkillable lead of the film.
Inarritu makes damn sure that the movie immerses you in time and place. You never feel like you're seeing a set. The “nothing but natural light” mandate helps this illusion and makes for one of the most sparse, immersive and beautiful films I've ever seen.
And brutal. Did I mention that? Everything is brutal, from the environments to the relationships to the altercations. Everything is rough, awful and realistic. You feel the cold. You feel the already-infamous bear attack. It's a rough movie, but in all the best ways.
At least I think so, but what do I know? I liked Birdman. ::shrugs::
That was my BNAT. Thanks for following along. Maybe I'll see some of you fellow nerds at next year's shindig?
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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