Capsules

CAPSULE: JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (1973)

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DIRECTED BY: Norman Jewison

FEATURING: Ted Neeley, Carl Anderson, Yvonne Elliman

PLOT: The last days of Jesus Christ, including the Last Supper, his betrayal by Judas, and his crucifixion, sung to a propulsive rock score composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Still from Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though the very premise – a rock ‘n’ roll passion play – is inherently offbeat, and this particular version is laced with anachronisms and unusual characterizations, this is at heart a straightforward, earnest account of the story.

COMMENTS: When Superstar debuted on the Broadway stage in 1971, the very notion of a rock-n-roll passion play must have carried an unmistakable air of sacrilege. (Although another pop-oriented take on the story, “Godspell,” premiered off-Broadway the same year, and a film of that musical also came out in 1973.) But the show struck a chord with audiences; spawned from a concept album that had sold millions of copies, the musical ran for nearly two years on Broadway and spent eight years on the London stage, closing as the longest-running show in British history. A film version was probably inevitable; that the adaptaion would be placed in the hands of the director of In the Heat of the Night and The Thomas Crown Affair might not have been.

To Norman Jewison’s credit (the screenplay is credited to him and British broadcaster Melvyn Bragg), the movie faithfully retains the show’s determination to treat its characters as human beings, rather than the religious icons they have become. Lyricist Tim Rice sparked some controversy by suggesting that he and partner Andrew Lloyd Webber simply wanted to portray Jesus as a man, but they doggedly stuck to that vision, and the results are intriguing: Jesus is beleaguered and plagued by doubts. Judas is a buzzkill true believer, hectoring Jesus for being insufficiently pious and ultimately betraying the man he idolizes out of a sense of moral outrage. Pilate is the most reasonable man in Judea, Mary Magdalene is hopelessly confused, and the apostles are shiftless hippies. It’s probably not the version taught in Sunday school, but it lends the events a greater dramatic heft.

If Jesus Christ Superstar is controversial, it’s because it doesn’t traffic in the more mystical Continue reading CAPSULE: JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (1973) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

LICENCE TO KILL (1989): DEBUNKING THE DALTON BOND MYTHS

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James Bond aficionados all tend to have their favorite 007. While I prefer the first four films, three of which were directed with style by Terence Young, I do like most of the series. The Roger Moore Bonds get picked on a bit because of their cartoonish qualities. Moore, in realizing the silliness of the scripts, chose to play 007 at an absurd level, and that was not an unwise choice. Even an overblown dud like Moonraker (1979) has its guilty pleasure moments, although by the time of View to A Kill (1985), the franchise had clearly gone stale and desperately needed a reboot. Still, Moore’s good-hearted, light approach was so popular that it proved a hurdle to new Bond Timothy Dalton. When Dalton’s severest, most fundamentalist Bond fanboy critics take their pot shots at the actor, they normally propagate the following myths:

Dalton Myth 1: The Bond producers really wanted Pierce Brosnan, who could not get out of his Remington Steel contract; they settled on Dalton at the last moment.

Fact: The Bond Producers had long wanted Dalton, as far back as 1969. Dalton was approached for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service but the actor felt he was too young for the part and turned it down. In 1984, Roger Moore considered leaving the series and Dalton was approached for a second time. However, Dalton’s schedule was full and Moore renegotiated his contract. In 1987 Moore permanently retired from the part and it was Dalton again whom the producers asked first. Dalton was committed to do Brenda Starr (1989) but expressed interest after his deal was done. The Producers then went to Brosnan, who was unable to get out of his Remington Steele contract. Luckily for the producers, Brenda Starr was then put on hold and so Dalton was asked again and finally signed, some eighteen years after producer Albert R. Broccoli first sought him as 007. Broccoli understood the box office appeal of the frothy Moore as Bond, but the producer wanted to get back to the gritty Bond of Ian Fleming and the first films. When Dalton, always a literary actor, insisted that he would play 007 like the Bond of Fleming’s novels, Broccoli believed Dalton was the man for the part.

Still from License to Kill (1989)Dalton Myth 2: The Living Daylights (1987) and License to Kill (1989) were box office failures due to Dalton.

Fact: Living Daylights did very good box office and received the best reviews for a Bond film in twenty-two years. To Broccoli, Dalton was hugely responsible for this reboot of the Bond franchise. When Licence to Kill was released two years later, it was released the same summer as Batman (1989) and did poorly at the American box office. Continue reading LICENCE TO KILL (1989): DEBUNKING THE DALTON BOND MYTHS →

Canonically Weird (The List)

108. BAD BOY BUBBY (1993)

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“Christ, kid, yer a weirdo!”–Pop

DIRECTED BY: Rolf de Heer

FEATURING: Nicholas Hope, Carmel Johnson, Claire Benito, Ralph Cotterill

PLOT: With only a rudimentary vocabulary but a gift for mimicry, middle-aged Bubby has been raised by his mentally ill, abusive mother with no knowledge of the outside world inside what is essentially a fallout shelter. One day an interloper enters their underground hovel, shattering the only reality Bubby has ever known. Eventually he finds himself released into a modern Australian society he can hardly comprehend, but must learn to fit into somehow.

Still from Bad Boy Bubby (1993)

BACKGROUND:

  •  Partially as an experiment and partially for practical reasons, de Heer chose to shoot the film with thirty-two different cinematographers, essentially one for every location.
  • Bad Boy Bubby uses binaural sound: the film’s soundtrack was recorded and mixed from two microphones Nicholas Hope wore behind his ears, so that the audience would experience the sonic world exactly as it would be heard from Bubby’s perspective. On home video the effect is largely lost, with the end result being only that a few of the conversations in the film sound frustratingly muffled.  The director suggests that the theatrical experience can be reproduced by listening to the movie while channeling the sound through a pair of stereo headphones.
  • Originally, the underground scenes were to have the sides matted to create a narrow, claustrophobic aspect ratio, and the film was to expand into widescreen when Bubby surfaces into the outside world.  Director De Heer thought the effect was too intense and made the film “unwatchable” and dropped the idea.
  • Bad Boy Bubby won a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, along with several less significant festival awards.
  • We initially passed Bad Boy Bubby over for inclusion on the List, declaring it to be only “borderline weird.” You can read the original review here.
  • A search for reviews of “Bad Boy Bubby” on the Los Angeles Times website yields no results, but offers the helpful suggestion, “Did you mean ‘bat boy’ bubbly?”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Bubby the punk rock front man performance artist, on stage in a priest’s collar, holding a blowup doll with enormous breasts wearing a gas mask, backed by a band whose heads are swaddled in cling wrap.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: In my original review of Bad Boy Bubby, I demurred adding the film to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies by noting that the movie “has a unique tone that’s hard to capture, but the first words I’d choose to characterize it are ‘relentlessly offbeat,’ rather than ‘weird’… for the most part de Heer chooses to tell his story using a straightforward, realistic narrative style that makes us believe bizarre Bubby is a real person in a real world.” The first words I’d use to describe it are still “relentlessly offbeat,” but on further reflection I’ve concluded that Bubby‘s offbeat moments come relentlessly enough that “weird” is a fine choice for the second word I’d use to describe it. I do not want to be in the business of denying the weirdness of movies that feature middle-aged feral children, cling-wrap murders and bizarre swings in tone, especially when they have rabid cult followings and excellent critical reputations.


Short clip from Bad Boy Bubby

COMMENTS: Bad Boy Bubby is a film that moves slowly from deep darkness into light. It is Continue reading 108. BAD BOY BUBBY (1993) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: MY JOY (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Sergei Loznitsa

FEATURING: Viktor Nemets

PLOT: A Russian truck driver veers off the main highway and into a hinterland of institutionalized

Still from My Joy (2010)

corruption and disjointed narrative.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: My Joy is serious, slow, bleak, oblique, and political; put together, all these adjectives coalesce into “important” in the mind of the average film critic or festival programmer. They do not, however, add up to “entertaining” in the eyes of the average viewer. Add to this the fact that the adjective we are most interested in—“weird”—is present in the film only at trace levels, and My Joy is more of interest to cineastes who make it a point to see important films, as well as to those with a special interest in the sociopolitical situation inside modern day Russia, than it is to pure weirdophiles.

COMMENTS: My Joy‘s confusing journey into the Russian heart of darkness makes more sense after a second viewing, although thanks to plentiful narrative elisions there are still many mysteries that are never resolved. After an unexplained funereal opening, the story proper begins when long haul Russian truck driver Georgy slips away from a couple of crooked checkpoint cops as they are distracted by a more attractive detainee. In a brutal flashback to the days of the post liberation of Berlin Red Army, an aged hitchhiker tells him a story of how military bullies stole his suitcase, his wife, and even his name. (It’s not the last time the film will travel back in time to that particular era; this bitter nostalgia suggests both that the current Russian situation resembles those anarchic times and, more fatalistically, that graft and thievery are the way business has always been done in this part of the world). A child prostitute then shows Georgy a detour around an accident, and he finds himself lost in the wilderness with his cargo until he meets a group of petty thieves. At this point, about an hour has passed—very slowly, in the Russian style, with lots of long shots of people milling about and cab-level views of the trucker driving along deserted roads between the sparse action. Suddenly, it seems that Georgy (the only decent and honest man in all of Russia, as far as we have seen) disappears from the story, as we find ourselves Continue reading CAPSULE: MY JOY (2010) →

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