Movie Monday: Cannery Row

This week's movie is the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's classic Cannery Row!

A few weeks ago I took out Cannery Row from the library (The Grapes of Wrath was checked out) and found that, despite its brevity (less than 180 pages) I found the book difficult to comprehend. There isn't much plot really, just a series of vignettes about the various denizens of Cannery Row, and I kept saying to myself, what is Steinbeck saying here?

I was interested enough to keep reading, and I eventually finished it. I still felt confused as to what the deeper themes were, so I did some research online and came away with a greater appreciation for the book. I did genuinely like Cannery Row, so it made me think maybe the movie version was worth checking out as well?

The films stars Nick Nolte as the main character, Doc, a marine biologist. After a quick tour of the other locales in Cannery Row, it's clear that while Doc is admired and respected in the town, he doesn't really fit in: highly educated, he has a purpose of intent that a lot of the others do not (including a comical gang of underemployed fisherman, led by Mack, played by M. Emmet Walsh). Doc collects octopi for research, much to the general confusion of the others.

New in town is Suzy (Debra Winger), who comes looking for work but finds there isn't much. She's forced to look for room, board, and work at the local bordello, run by Fauna (Audra Linley).

The film tries to recreate the book, in presenting a series of short sequences about the citizens of the town. The one story thread from the book adapted here is when the motley gang of fisherman, all of whom like Doc very much, decide to throw him a party. But the festivities get out of hand and a brawl breaks out, which ends up breaking Doc's octopus tank.

The other story thread is lifted from Steinbeck's Cannery Row sequel, 1954's Sweet Thursday (which I have not read). That's where all the stuff with Suzy comes from, for she is not a character in the original book. Here, Suzy thinks she recognizes Doc, and wonders why such an accomplished man would choose to live in such a depressed (in more ways than one) little burg like Cannery Row. That sets up the movie's main plot, and gives the chance for Doc and Suzy to fall in love.

I had a difficult time with Cannery Row the movie as I did with Cannery Row the book, but for different reasons. From the Steinbeck I have read (which is, admittedly, not all that much), one of the virtues of the man's work was a directness and lack of sentimentality, even when he's talking about eccentric bums like the ones here, or his faithful dog Charley in Travels with Charley. But the movie--directed by first-timer David S. Ward (Major League and, er, Major League 2) is so cutesy presenting these lovable losers that the whole thing feels quite twee, an experience I've never had while reading Steinbeck.

Nolte is good as Doc, and Winger is okay as Suzy, but everyone else in the movie just doesn't feel real. There's narration from John Huston(!) which feels like the voice of Steinbeck himself. It works some of the time, but other times it feels like you're just having someone read the book to you. Visually, everything is shot through a gauzy haze, which again romanticizes all the goings-on, when living in Cannery Row was actually probably pretty depressing at times. I'm not saying the film should have been some gritty drama, but I can't help but feel that Ward just couldn't quite pull this tricky tone off. As I was watching, I wondered what Robert Altman might have done with this material.

Even with all my misgivings, I found Cannery Row tough to actively dislike, because it seems like the cast and crew is in their pitching (no pun intended, for those of you who have seen it). But overall the movie just doesn't really work, so I think you can call Cannery Row a noble failure.

"4 Reasons Why Aquaman Deserves More Respect: A Fan Speaks Out"

Upon news of Jason Momoa's casting as Aquaman in Batman v. Superman, Yahoo Movies was nice enough to ask me to write an article about why Aquaman is no joke. The piece, "4 Reasons Why Aquaman Deserves More Respect" can be found here!

Movie Monday: Mansion of the Living Dead

Note: This scene does not appear in the film!

I was watching some trailers at work the other day (actually part of my job!), and there was a series of films that were the work of infamous sacred cow-poker Jesus "Jess" Franco. I had heard of the man before but, like Eddie Romero, I had never seen a single example of the work, despite the fact that Franco has over 200 films to his credit! So I thought why not give one a shot?

Mansion of the Living Dead's plot, such as it is, is both childlike in its simplicity and also bizarrely confusing. Four girls go on vacation, ending up at hotel resort. They are quite obviously looking to party hard, so much they barely notice that there doesn't seem to be a single soul anywhere around:

Director Franco wastes no time--literally--in getting the girls naked. They pair off into two rooms, and each set starts going to town on each other, convinced that the other pair are frigid prudes. They are all willing to sleep with the first guy they see but, for now, bedding each other will suffice.

They decide to bathe topless when someone from a few floors up throws a meat cleaver at them. It misses but, instead of, you know, leaving, they stick around and have more sex, some of it so explicit I wondered just how far Franco was going to go. Soon after, one of the girls wanders off to take photos, never to be seen again. The other three run into the hotel's gardener, who is only interested in peeping on them.

Another one ends up getting grabbed and dragged off to a nearby courtyard (has anyone seen a mansion yet?), where she is deemed to be a sacrifice but a cult of hooded bad guys wearing skull masks:

They talk a bunch of gibberish about their god and stuff, which all leads to the woman being gang raped then murdered. Meanwhile, not all that far away, Meryl Streep was making Out of Africa. Anyway, Girl #3 stumbles her way into another room where she finds the wife of the hotel's manager, who is kept chained to the wall in perpetuity.

As this woman explains what's going on here, she shovels food in her mouth, explaining that she's only fed once a week. I have to admit, watching her smear food all over her face was, for me, the most difficult scene to watch in the whole enterprise:

Basically, this whole place is built on sacred ground, blah blah blah, and they lure innocent people to this place (damn Travelocity!) and kill them as holy sacrifices. The hotel manager is in on it of course, and he plays a large role in the final scene, where Girl #3 is about to be sacrificed (having, in a stupor, killed Girl #4 earlier):

There's more, but what's the point? If you're the kind of person who wants to see this kind of movie, it doesn't matter how it ends!


I wasn't sure what I was hoping for, trying out some of Franco's work. I've seen enough horrendously gory Italian horror to last me a lifetime, so I wasn't looking for extreme violence. The sex is not very tittilating, either: the girls are shot in such unflattering ways and in such dismal settings that the whole thing just felt dirty, which may of course been part of the point.

Sure, there are some nice moody scenes: Franco shoots this empty hotel in ways that make the place seem terribly threatening, even though there's nothing inherently scary about these bland halls and florescent lighting. A few minutes in, when it becomes clear these four dingbats have exactly zero sense of self-preservation, you have to accept that this world is not like ours, and thereby plays by its own rules: while you or I would put the car in reverse once we saw how big and creepy the hotel is, these girls' natural reaction is to get as naked as possible as quickly as possible.

With literally another 200 films to choose from, I can't say this will the first and last Franco movie I will choose to hunt down, but I'm not exactly in a hurry, either.

Movie Monday: Wonder Woman (1974)

You're sort of a wonder, Wonder Woman!

Pretty much every comic book fan is aware (if not having actually seen) Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, from the 1975-1979 TV series of the same name. Fewer people, however, know that this was not the first live-action Amazing Amazon to appear on television! No, a year earlier, then-tennis star Cathy Lee Crosby, trying to break her way into acting, nabbed the title role in a TV movie that was intended as a pilot for a series.

After an intro that shows us various MPs seemingly stealing volumes of top secret information from various locales (Paris, Istanbul, etc.) and delivering them to the very 1970sish George Calvin (Andrew Pine), who summarily has his field agents executed by a brother and sister assassin team!

Our first shot of Diana Prince (the very blond Crosby) is on Paradise Island, as she prepares to leave this paradise and enter Man's World. She bids a melancholy goodbye to her mother Hippolyte and some of her Amazonian sisters, one of whom who all but begs to go with Diana.

The whole Paradise Island sequence must be a flashback, because after a jump cut we find Diana comfortably ensconced with some sort of government agency, with her boss being one Steve Trevor (Kaz Garas):

Trevor calls a meeting of the top brass to tell them about how the code books (seen at the beginning of the movie) have been stolen. Diana seems to be Trevor's secretary and, after fending off the advances of some other guy, overhears her boss's meeting. Trevor seems to know that Diana is Wonder Woman, or something, because she heads out to find the person who stole the books, with Trevor's winking approval.

This George Calvin guy is working for another guy, named Abner Smith, played in a series of scenes by Ricardo Montalban where you never see his face. I'm not sure what the makers of this movie thought they were doing here, since Montalban is credited at the top of the show, and his voice is so unmistakeable that there's zero suspense trying to guess who it is.

Diana starts tracking down Smith, starting with a trip to a posh hotel. Calvin meets her there, and he asks her out, going so far as to saying how much he'd like to make love to her(!). Diana takes all this sexual harassment in stride, never wavering from her mission (more on that in a second). 

For the first 2/3rds of the movie, Crosby never wears any sort of costume, preferring to beat guys up in red slacks. When she finally does put on a superhero suit, it's a sort of Adidas-style running outfit, though it's not without its charms:

This scene--where they lure Wonder Woman into some sort of weird-ass mud room--is the only prototypical comic book moment in the whole movie. Otherwise, it's pretty much all talk talk talk, even when WW escapes and finally meets up with Abner:

Even the final scene, with Wonder Woman apprehending Smith (spoiler alert!), is done in such a low-key, almost comical way that I was scratching my head, wondering (no pun intended) just who this movie was supposed to appeal to: probably way too silly for adults, but too bizarre and idiosyncratic for kids. Ratings were medicore, but apparently ABC had enough faith in the Wonder Woman concept that they recommissioned a new pilot, starring Lynda Carter, and the rest was history.


The one worthwhile element to Wonder Woman is not so much Crosby's portrayal (which is dull, if not bad), but how Diana is written: she is never anything but completely confident in herself and her ability to finish her mission. You get the sense she's pretty much just toying with all the men in her way, willing to lead them on in one way or the other to get what she needs. I found that quite refreshing, especially when you compare it to the starry-eyed schoolgirl version found in the failed 2011 Wonder Woman pilot. This is progress?

Other than that, this is pretty much a disaster: the effects are nil (Wonder Woman mentions, but we never get to see, her Invisible Plane--what a tease!), the dialogue ranges from weak to bizarre, and the whole thing just feels like a Bionic Woman episode. I guess this was simply a reflection of when it was produced--clearly, filmmakers didn't think a "straight" superhero show would work, so they had to dress the comic book parts in standard TV fare--Wonder Woman feels like a spy show, Dr. Strange was in parts a medical drama, etc etc.

Like Justice League of America a few weeks ago, this is only worth tracking down as a curio. It will be interesting to see if Warner Bros. has learned any lessons between 1974 and 2016, when the first silver screen Wonder Woman makes her debut!

Movie Monday: The Wrath of God

I came across the trailer to 1972's The Wrath of God--a movie I had never heard of before--at work. Once I saw it featured Robert Mitchum as a machine gun-wielding preacher, and featured Victor Buono, Frank Langella, and Rita Hayworth(!) in the cast, I knew I had to see it!

The film opens in a very Wild Bunch-y way: In some unknown Mexican town, three "revolutionaries" are gunned down in the street. As they fall, the screen turns red, and we get our title, zooming out at the audience:

We meet Irish adventurer Emmet Keough (Ken Hutchinson), who has finally scrounged up enough money to buy a train ticket out of this town. He is offered a bootlegging job by a local businessman named Jennings (Buono), and when he turns the job down, Jennings has Keough's ticket and passport stolen. Later, Keough meets a beautiful Indian girl named Chela (Paula Pritchett), and he is forced to risk his life saving her from being raped by some local hoods.

 

Keough is strung up, about to die of hanging, when Catholic priest Oliver Van Horne (Mitchum) shows up, and...persuades the bad guys to rethink their actions:

Soon after, Van Horne, Keough, and Jennings are arrested and sentenced to be executed. After an inventive use of the subjective camera during the execution scene (a nice goofy touch from director Ralph Nelson), they are spared by Colonel Santilla (John Colicos), who says they won't be executed if they do a little "job" for him.

The job entails assassinating a local warlord, a real loose wire who keeps his people in the iron grip of repression. His name is Thomas De La Planta and is played by an impossibly young Frank Langella. His mother is played by none other than screen legend Rita Hayworth, in her last film role:

Apparently Hayworth was already starting to suffer from the Alzheimer's Disease that would later (much later) take her life, and I think you can see a little of that here: she sort of seems like she's in a different movie than the rest of the actors. Her scenes are minimal, and short, but it's still a thrill seeing someone from Hollywood's Golden Age showing up in what (then) such a post-modern movie. While she is Thomas' mother, Hayworth's character is a deeply religious woman and is happy to have a priest in town, thinking it will help save the souls of the locals.

Our three heroes hatch a plot (pretending to be investors in the town's local mining operation) to lure La Planta out into the desert and kill him, but (as you might have guessed) it doesn't quite work out that way. The Wrath of God has a kind of sleepy, laconic tone, led by Mitchum, despite the occasional burst of violence. Barney Miller's Gregory Sierra shows up as a one-eyed bandito, who gets in a fistfight with Keough, and the final ten minutes or so is one long action sequence that's both funny and kinda horrifying.

I did enjoy The Wrath of God, though it wasn't quite the lost classic I was envisioning when I saw the aforementioned trailer and cast. Still, Mitchum is a lot of fun (of course), and enough general 1970s weirdness to make it worth your time.

Movie Monday: Justice League of America

Sure, WB announced there's going to be a Justice League of America movie in 2018, but did you know there already was a live-action JLA movie, from 1997?

Yes, back during the Clinton Era, CBS commissioned a live-action Justice League of America pilot movie, with the hopes of it becoming a series. And as any comic fan knows, that never happened. Maybe we can figure out why:

Justice League of America opens with a talking head segment (a recurring motif throughout the show) featuring Meteorologist Tori Olafsdotter (Kim Oja) discussing how she ended up being part of this unusual bunch of people. We the city of New Metro get attacked by a tornado, which is the work of a super-powered terrorist named The Weather Man (Miguel Ferrer), who is actually Tori's boss.

The citizens of New Metro are saved by the members of the Justice League, which include Fire, Green Lantern, Flash, and The Atom (respectively, Michelle Hurd, Matthew Settle, John Kassir, and Kenny Johnston):

Tori finds a secret room at work, and discovers some sort of strange device. She spills water on it, which causes it to malfunction and strike her with blue electricity. That night she discovers her touch turns everything to ice, including a lake in an attempt to save a drowning man.

The JLA see this, and kidnap Tori(!), believing she is the Weather Man. But after being convinced of her innocence, they let her go. Tori thinks the whole thing was a bad dream.

As the Weather Man/Tori plot unfolds, we are given background to all the JLAers, who each struggle with Friends-like problems: B.B. DaCosta (Fire) is a struggling actress, Guy Gardner is having troubles with his girlfriend, Barry Allen looks for work, any work, and Ray Palmer realizes he is crushing on Tori. As I mentioned before, amid all this are scenes of the heroes talking to the camera, both by themselves and in a group:

Tori learns that her boss is the Weather Man, and takes that info to the JLA. They bring her to their secret underwater base, and introduce her to their commander, none other than the Martian Manhunter (David Ogden Stiers--yes, Major Winchester from M*A*S*H):

The JLA tries to train Tori how to use her powers more effectively, and after The Weather Man attacks again, it is Tori who saves the day by turning a tidal wave into ice. Later, Tori is asked by the heroes to join the team, using the code name Ice. She agrees, and takes the solemn vow to fight for justice:

As The Weather Man plots his escape from prison, Tori suits up and now the Justice League of America is more powerful than it's ever been, ready to fight fo truth and justice:

...off to series!

Well, no. Of course, CBS saw this and flatly rejected it. Justice League of America was shelved, never to be to be aired in the United States. The cast, mostly unknowns, all went on to careers of various levels of success. John Kassir was the voice of The Crypt Keeper on Tales From The Crypt, so both he and Stiers had careers in full swing when this pilot came along, and they kept right on going after JLA died a quick death.

There are a lot of reviews out there of this thing, and almost all of them are overwhelmingly negative: the effects are bargain-basement, the jokes are weak (one, involving the Atom, is horrendous), the subplots come straight from Friends and a dozen other sitcoms, and of course the premise isn't really Justice League at all: with Manhunter acting as their behind-the-scenes mentor, this is really more akin to X-Men than any version of the Justice League I've read.

And while all of those criticisms are essentially correct, I find I just can't hate this thing the way other people do. I feel like Justice League of America is in there trying, and its heart is in the right place, but it's simultaneously too ambitious and too derivative to really work. Trying to pull off five different sets of super powers on a late-90s TV budget must have been nearly impossible, and of course the costumes (especially the Atom's Linebacker-esque duds) are awful. But I liked the chemistry the actors had with one another, and, H'ronmeer help me, I actually dug just seeing a live-action Martian Manhunter! Because of his appearance, he's always going to be a longshot for live-action, and it took guts to try and pull it off here. Stiers, despite his distinctly non-superhero physique, has the quiet gravity to play the very serious Manhunter, and it would have been interesting if the show had gone on to see if they would ever let him leave the underwater HQ.

Is Justice League of America worth tracking down? It's available on bootleg DVDs at every comic con, as well as being online, so it doesn't take much. After a decade of multi-billion-dollar comic book franchises, there really isn't much here worth discovering, since it's all been done much better in the movies and on TV. But seen in its proper context, I think Justice League of America still has some charms that make it a cut above all the other failed superhero pilots that are collecting dust on network shelves.

Movie Monday: Elvis: The Movie

Before Escape From New York, before The Thing, before Big Trouble in Little China, there was...Elvis The Movie?

Yes, Elvis: The Movie, a fairly obscure title in the filmography of John Carpenter, it was the director's first project after Halloween, and his first collaboration with star Kurt Russell. Apparently the producers of this TV mini-series assumed that since Carpenter famously did the score for Halloween, he must know a lot about music. Ergo, let him direct a bio-pic of one of the most famous people of the 20th Century, a mere two years after he died so prematurely. Apparently no one was more surprised than Carpenter (he mentions getting the gig on the audio commentary to The Thing), believing he was not that appropriate a choice. He took the job anyway.

Elvis: The Movie opens in the early 1970s, featuring the King getting ready for yet another gig, surrounded by his retinue of buddies and body guards. As massively successful as any one could be at their chosen profession, Elvis is nonetheless not a happy man:

After a tense meeting with his wife Priscilla (Season Hubley, Russell's future real-life wife), Elvis does one of the things he is still most famous for: shooting out his hotel TV. The film then jumps back to the 1940s, and follows Elvis as a kid who from the beginning has a passion and knack for music. As the opening scene hints, Elvis: The Movie follows a rigidly predictable bio-pic formula: all the major moments that even the most cursory Elvis fan knows about: the early recordings with Sam Phillips, Elvis' close relationship with his devoted mother (Shelley Winters), his meeting with the Col. Tom Parker (Pat Hingle), his ascension to stardom, his marriage to Priscilla, his movie career, etc. It's all here:

Russell makes a pretty good Elvis, and that had to be a tough job: Elvis: The Movie was shot less than two years after the King died, and was filmed with cooperation of the Presley estate. So there aren't a whole lot of dark corners for the role (and the film) to venture into. There are brief moments where we see the man desperately unhappy, and he flies off the handle at Priscilla and his famous crew of hangers-on. But for the most part, Elvis is shown pretty much exactly how you'd expect his estate would want him to be shown: as a legend. Heck, even after three hours, the movie still ends in 1971, long before the King grew obese and became (mostly) a parody of himself, a walking, lumbering example of showbiz excess.

You'd be hard pressed to find any of John Carpenter's signature filmmaking touches here; it almost seems like he took this job to show people that he could do more than gritty genre pictures where people got killed left and right. It's a predictable movie, sitting squat in the middle of an era where it seemed like the man couldn't make a predictable movie to save his life (seriously; I don't think there are many directors who can match Carpenter's run of movies from around 1976 until 1986 or so).


There was, however, one scene in Elvis: The Movie that really stood out to me, and seemed like a hint of the kind of direction the film could have gone: Elvis records a version of "Suspicious Minds" (one of my favorite songs of his) with his band in his living room, with the band and back-up singer sitting on couches and whatnot:

 

Having to fit such an extraordinary life in just three hours, Elvis: The Movie tends to just fly from one Big Moment to the next, but here Carpenter lets the whole recording session play out, with no cutaways, and the sense of energy is palpable. It's the closest the movie comes to conveying just how good Elvis was, what made him so special.

Late in his recording career, Elvis insisted on cutting songs live with his entire band, all at once. That's not conducive to grinding out product like record companies want, but a lot of great musicians have insisted on doing it this way, feeling it produces the best results (an Elvis disciple if there ever was one, Bob Dylan, has almost insisted on this approach his entire career). When I read that in a book about Elvis, I got the sense that he knew he had gotten far away from his roots, and wanted to retain some sense of artistic control, to hell with Col. or RCA. This scene, on purpose or not, really puts that across in a thrilling way. I could have watched a whole lot more of this, and less of Elvis and his Momma, or Elvis arguing with Priscilla.

Elvis: The Movie is available on DVD, but I don't think anyone outside of die-hard Elvis fans bother with it; it doesn't feel like a John Carpenter movie and of course Russell went on to a huge career as a movie star. But of course any fan of their film collaborations (me!) is happy they did this, because without it we might never have gotten their later, enduring body of work.