Category Archives: Video

Saturday Matinee: Strange Brew

Posted on by
Reply

‘Strange Brew’: The Cult Comedy Classic that Married Canadiana with ‘Hamlet’

Beer. Hockey. Shakespeare. Beauty, eh?

By Lloyd Farley

Source: Collider

It’s August, 1983 at the local movie theatre.The lights go down, the curtains part. A trailer or two roll, maybe A Christmas Story, or the hilarious Yentl. The iconic MGM lion then comes on screen, and you wait breathlessly for his mighty roar to begin the film. And then…BURP.

No, this movie can’t possibly begin with such comedic absence of reverence, can it? The camera pans around to capture two parka and toque clad men, one of which is turning the lion’s tail like a crank to get it to roar. Absence of reverence, confirmed. The two men see the camera is running, so they run to the set, riddled with cases of beer and a backdrop with a large map on it, the words Great White North spread across, and so wide it includes England, Russia and Hawaii. The hilarious, absurd, Shakespearian, James Bond villainous, rife with all manner of Canadian stereotype film Strange Brew has begun.

The two men are brothers Bob and Doug McKenzie, played by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas. The duo came to life on SCTV as The Great White North, an improvised bit by Moranis and Thomas for more Canadian content. They used every stereotype — toques, parkas, back bacon, beer, the iconic “coo-roo-coo-coo” loon call, “hosers” — and simply talked. They would add “eh?” to the end of every sentence, a tic as Canadian as “oh yea, no, for sure”. The McKenzie’s took off with syndication in the US. Capitalizing on their popularity, they released the comedy album The Great White North, which included the song “Take Off” with collaborator Geddy Lee (his highest charting single, including his work with Rush). The success of the album begat the movie, which Thomas pitched as having creative ties with Hamlet.

The beginning of the film is a movie within the movie: Mutants of 2051 A.D., a home-made sci-fi classic, like the works of The Goldbergs‘ Adam (Sean Giambrone). When the film breaks, the brothers, watching the film in the theatre, flee from angered moviegoers, and lose their dad’s (Mel Blanc) beer money. Forced to get beer for their dad the next morning, they place a mouse in an empty bottle of Elsinore beer, hoping to leverage it for free beer. They are told to go to the brewery, where the new owner, Pam Elsinore (Lynne Griffin), gives them jobs watching for mice in beer bottles (and cases of free beer). They wander around the brewery and into Brewmeister Smith’s (Max von Sydow) operations room, where they can see patients from the nearby Royal Canadian Mental Health Facility playing hockey.

Wait, back up. Esteemed Swedish actor Max von Sydow, of Bergman‘s The Seventh Seal? Yep. His son was a huge fan of SCTV, and encouraged his father to take the role. The character has been working on a plan to take over the world by adding a mind control drug to Elsinore beer, testing on the patients from the nearby facility. Through certain musical tones, those under the drug can be made aggressive (shown in an amusing bit where Doug plays the iconic loon theme on the keyboard), with those results tested through games of hockey. Because, you know, Canada.

Tranquilized by Smith and his accomplice, Pam’s Uncle Claude (Paul Dooley), the brothers wake up and make a delivery in their van, not knowing that the brakes are cut and that the beer kegs in the back have Pam and her father’s friend Henry (Douglas Campbell) inside. They careen down the hill into the lake, and then…Intermission.

Police divers find the boys in the van, alive and drinking beer. Charged with attempted murder, they are found insane by the judge. The brothers are sent to the asylum and placed in Smith’s care, where they are straitjacketed, prompting a game of steamroller, and take turns using electric shocks on one another. Freed by Rosie, they return to the brewery to stop Smith.

Pam and Bob are captured by Smith and placed in a brewery tank, which begins filling with beer. Rosie and Doug find them, discovering that Bob drank the entire contents of the tank and is now cartoonishly bloated, and needing to ‘take a leak’, which he does by, um, expelling and putting out a fire at the asylum. Knowing Smith has shipped tainted beer to Oktoberfest, Bob and Doug stop at home to get the help of Hosehead (Buddy), who flies off — you read that right — to stop the party and indulge in beer and sausages. The brothers take the remaining beer away, and presumably home. The film ends…

… no, it doesn’t. Bob and Doug reappear on the set of The Great White North and talk throughout the credits, sending off those that stayed behind – not the hosers that took off after the movie was done — with a beer whistle and a “happy trails”. Right now you’re thinking, “Geez, we got hosed! What about Hamlet, you knob?”

Strange Brew‘s retelling of Hamlet ranges from the painfully obvious to a much subtler degree. An intellectual ribbon throughout the lunacy. The name Elsinore is the easiest reference, a clear nod to the Danish royal castle Elsinore from the play. Pam is the Hamlet, the heiress of the brewery/kingdom after the death of her father, who is still reeling from her mother Gertrude (Jill Frappier, Queen Gertrude) marrying her uncle Claude (Claudius) within days of the loss. Pam is shown by the ghost of her father, John (Eric House), how Claude and Smith murdered him. The ghost recounting the details of his death is taken directly from Hamlet, but the fact that he appears via a Galactic Border Patrol videogame in the movie is a clever reference to a feared invasion of Denmark by neighboring Norway. The presence of the Mental Health Facility would suggest a reference to the role of madness in Hamlet, from Hamlet’s acting as such to Ophelia’s descent into true madness, while the tinged beer a bow to the poisoned glasses of wine in the play’s final act. The McKenzie brothers themselves have a link to the play as a modern-day Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Strange Brew is as much an experience as a comedy, and, with the Canadian penchant for self-deprecation and a highbrow Shakespearian tint, its lighthearted jabs at the Canadian identity should be mandatory (well, at least suggested) viewing every July 1st on Canada Day. Happy trails indeed, eh?

Saturday Matinee: Catch-22

Posted on by
Reply

Classic Film Review: So was “Catch-22” the failure we remember it to be?

By Roger Moore

Source: Movie Nation

Perhaps it took a humorless, career-crippling George Clooney TV version of Joseph Heller’s novel to make us better appreciate Mike Nichols’ daring, infamously-expensive version of “Catch-22.”

Released at the height of the Vietnam War, suffering in comparison to Robert Altman’s equally anti-war dramedy “M*A*S*H,” seemingly more on a par with with equally cynical action comedy “Kelly’s Heroes,” which has had the benefit of a lot more TV exposure, “Catch” still plays the way it did way back in 1970 — as a pricey, “difficult” satire with a “difficult” shoot as baggage.

But wipe away the “Catch-22 lore,”the people cast and cast-aside, the fact that Nichols wanted the more age-appropriate Al Pacino as Yossarian, the young bombardier/anti-hero, and grapple with the film’s disordered narrative, the nightmarish focus of the story — an active-duty combat airman flying through and ranting through what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, coupled with a tinge of guilt.

It’s amazing to see now. And considering how our war movies, from “300” to “Midway,” “Greyhound” to “Flyboys” and even at times, “Dunkirk,” are made now — with digital planes and ships and sometimes tanks — they really don’t make’em like this any more.

Nichols made the most of his coastal Mexican location, showing off all 17 WWII vintage B-25s taking off and landing every chance he got. You couldn’t do that today.

And that cast. Alan Arkin makes a fine, perplexed and outraged Yossarian, a sane man trapped in the insanity of war, an actor who never hits a punchline too hard, never takes the character’s exasperation into parody.

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. In order to be grounded, I’ve got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I’m not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.”

“You got it,” Doc Daneeka (Jack Gilford) tells him. “That’s Catch-22.

“Whoo… That’s some catch, that Catch-22.”

Orson Welles as a grumpy general, Tony Perkins as a put-upon chaplain, Martin Balsam as the murderously vain Col. Cathcart, Buck Henry as his venal sidekick, Col. Corn (screenwriter Henry was never better, as an actor), baby-faced Bob Balaban as the always-crashing, always-tinkering, even-tempered Orr, it’s a dazzling corps.

Bob Newhart half-stammering through Major Major Major, a very young Martin Sheen raging as the pilot Dobbs, Art Garfunkel as the innocent co-pilot Nately who falls for an Italian hooker, Charles Grodin as an upper-class twit navigator, a smarmy, befuddlingly upbeat Richard Benjamin (cast, with his wife Paula Prentiss as a nurse Yossarian chases), the famous French star who fled to Hollywood Marcel Dalio is the wizened old Italian who figures Italy has already won the war, since it has surrendered and Americans are still fighting and dying. And there’s a sea of actors we’d come to recognize on TV (“The Bob Newhart Show” is over-represented) in the years that followed.

Jon Voight stands out, just enough, as the grinning opportunist Milo Minderbender, a stand-in for every war profiteer you’ve ever read about, working the angles, an impersonal unpatriotic multinational corporation who wins no matter who loses.

Like its two contemporaries, “M*A*S*H” and “Kelly’s Heroes,” it’s a guy’s movie with a dated leering quality about the opposite sex. It’s heavy-handed, here and there, betraying Nichols — feeling his oats after “The Graduate” — indulging in some serious “blank check” filmmaking.

And reading, over the years, of all the people Nichols wanted to cast, or cast and then replaced, you kind of wish he’d moved on from Gilford, a future Oscar nominee who doesn’t bring enough cowardly sniveling to the good doc.

“Catch-22” was popular enough that they did a pilot for a sitcom based on it, as was the case with “M*A*S*H.” Richard Dreyfuss had the lead in that.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed half a dozen actors from that all-star cast, and often, without prompting, they’d bring it up. It took half a year of their lives, most of them, and burned itself into their memories, even if it wasn’t the blockbuster Paramount expected it to be.

Watching it again, outside of the academic settings where it turned up in “film as satire” classes and the like, it feels more cinematic than the scruffy, Altmanesque “M*A*S*H,” a movie marred by that stupid screen-time-chewing football game. It’s less fun than the more-watchable “Patton” and even “Kelly’s Heroes” (which is FAR longer).

But as a darker-than-dark comedy about the futility and insanity of war, it towers above its contemporaries in ways that should have scared-off George Clooney. It’s the best film of a seemingly-unfilmmable classic novel we’re ever going to get.

MPAA Rating: R, graphic violence, blood, nudity, profanity

Cast: Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Buck Henry, Tony Perkins, Bob Newhart, Paula Prentiss, Richard Benjamin, Marcel Dalio, Bob Balaban, Art Garfunkel, Martin Sheen, Jack Gilford, Peter Bonerz, Norman Fell, Austin Pendleton, Jon Voight and Orson Welles.

Credits: Directed by Mike Nichols, script by Buck Henry, based on the Joseph Heller novel. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:02

____________________

Watch Catch-22 on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/3216674

Saturday Matinee: Possessor

Posted on by
Reply

By Norman Gidney

Source: Film Threat

In just his second feature, Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, has delivered the first great sci-fi horror movie of the decade with Possessor. In the future, corporations use internal agents to inhabit innocent people’s bodies to carry out high-profile assassinations for strategic gains. Tanya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) is one such agent. In fact, she’s the star player at her secretive killing firm. But when the brain implant process takes its toll during an assignment, she begins to lose a grip on her own identity. Exploring self and identity, Cronenberg deftly explores heady material in a sci-fi horror candy coating, delivering a challenging ferocious film.

The action and concept are presented straight away with a bloody assassination in a nightclub. Miles away, Tanya lays on a white leather chaise with her head in a contraption guiding the host body from afar. After the assassination, she is to kill the host body with a shot to the head. Yet with this latest contract, her boss, Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), notices that Tanya is losing her grip on her true identity. Hesitant, Tanya accepts one last job in the form of Colin (Christopher Abbott), a coked-out rich boy with access to the CEO of a major tech company. The goal is to inhabit Colin’s body and have it murder Colin’s soon-to-be father in law John Parse (Sean Bean).

After going home to visit her estranged husband and 7-year-old son, Tanya returns to the facility to complete her final assassination. After the transfer, trouble ensues as various glitches in the technology are creating artifacts, hallucinations, and unpredictable behavior. Worse still, Colin’s hijacked personality begins fighting its way back to the surface. Will Tanya get the job done? Will Colin take over and trap Tanya in his body forever?

Cronenberg’s script for Possessor deftly convinces the audience that its world is real. It sprinkles random details of the technology in context rather than laboriously over-explaining all of it. We watch the process and hear just enough technobabble to believe it, and then we are off and running. To this end, Leigh’s understated performance as the calm puppetmaster at the firm is grounded and unsettling.

After kidnapping Colin and implanting the device in his brain, Tanya transfers into Colin’s body and assumes his life. In a brilliant pair of performances, Abbot and Riseborough make us believe that Tanya is inhabiting a very alien male body. Standing before a mirror just after the transfer, Abbot portrays Tanya exploring her new host, lightly feeling the skin, looking at the odd genitalia in the front, and trying to act as normal. The two create a seamless illusion of a single personality.

Possessor explores all of the existential dilemmas this idea can afford to a frightening degree while telling an absorbing tale of corporate espionage. Cronenberg has created a mind-bending trip of a movie with more to say than your average actioner and is supported by spectacular performances and make-up and practical effects that seal the deal. Brace yourself. The film is brilliant.

____________________

Watch Possessor on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/13106284

Saturday Matinee: The Green Knight

Posted on by
Reply

By Brian Tallerico

Source: RogerEbert.com

Light snow, misty fog, and falling ash blend in the opening scenes of David Lowery’s magnificent “The Green Knight,” setting a surreal tone for what’s to come. You can feel the chill and smell the air. Immediately, you feel outside yourself, far from daily concerns, set for an experience that’s unlike anything else in nearby theaters. That feeling won’t subside for over two hours.  

Lowery has adapted the 14th century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into one of the most memorable films of the year, a fascinating swirl of masculinity, temptation, heroism, and religion. Arthurian experts may quibble with some of Lowery’s decisions and it is certainly a film that challenges traditional expectations of stories about heroic knights for modern audiences, but fans will be drawn to this mesmerizing journey guided by Lowery’s incredibly poetic eye, career-best work from Dev Patel, and an artistic sensibility that transports audiences to another world. It’s a film that embeds the concept of storytelling and performance into its narrative—whether it’s a King asking for a heroic tale or children watching a puppet show—while also weaving its own enchanting spell on audiences. More than any movie in a long time, I would have immediately watched it again, but it’s also a film that really strengthens in memory, swirling around your brain like the falling flakes of the opening scenes.

Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) is the nephew of King Arthur (Sean Harris) and Queen Guinevere (Kate Dickie), and the son of Morgan Le Fay (Sarita Choudhury), accused by some in the village of witchcraft. After a brief opening scene with his lover (Alicia Vikander) and mother, Gawain is off to a lavish Christmas banquet with the King and Queen, at which he is surprised to be asked to sit by their side. Arthur speaks to him of taking young Gawain for granted, and immediately Patel conveys depth with his striking eyes, relaying both the emotional pride that comes with finally feeling seen. (He does so much throughout the film in terms of physical performance, using his eyes and body to find emotion without dialogue.) Long, deliberately slow exchanges between Gawain and Arthur set the tone: This is not an action film. Arthur asks to hear a tale.

One unfolds in front of their eyes. The doors to the hall burst open and the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) enters. Half-man, half-tree, he casts an imposing figure, and he wants to play “The Christmas Game.” He offers a deal. He challenges any of Arthur’s knights to strike him. If they can, the knight will get his imposing weapon in exchange. But there’s a cost. A year hence, the knight must come to the Green Chapel, where the Green Knight will return the exact strike given him a year earlier. Gawain steps forward, and despite being reminded that this is a game by Arthur, beheads the Green Knight. The mythical creature picks up his head, which doesn’t seem too concerned about its detachment, and laughs as it rides off. Gawain is about to have a long year.

This is all really prologue to “The Green Knight,” the bulk of which consists of Sir Gawain’s journey to the Green Chapel to meet his fate. Along the way, he meets a scavenger played by Barry Keoghan, a mysterious young woman played by Erin Kellyman, and a Lord played by Joel Edgerton. Lowery’s script deftly matches the poetic structure of its source, circling back to themes like the rhyming structure of a poem, and unfolding his story in what almost feel like cinematic stanzas that repeat and comment on each other. Gawain’s journey becomes a spiral, feeling more and more like a dream, as if he never really left that banquet with the Green Knight to begin with, and the film gains momentum through a cumulative sense of disorientation. It becomes not so much a story of a physical journey but a mental and emotional one, a series of challenges before a young man faces his ultimate fate.

With its loose storytelling structure, the tech elements of “The Green Knight” become even more essential to its success. Lowery has brought his remarkable team, including regular composer Daniel Hart and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo. (He edits the film himself, and reportedly re-cut it dramatically from the version that was supposed to premiere at SXSW in March of 2020.) The fluid cinematography alternates between dreamlike and something deeply connected to Mother Nature. “The Green Knight” is about many things—and some of the best film writing of this year will unpack its themes in more depth—but a sense of man’s relatively minor role in the grand scope of history and nature is essential, and Palermo beautifully captures the lush greens of the world around Gawain, as if the Knight himself is already everywhere. Vikander gets a phenomenal speech about how much we all return to the earth and Gawain is constantly being reminded of his insignificance and fragility. If The Green Knight doesn’t get him, something else will.

While it may be his most ambitious film, Lowery has played with complex themes before in projects like “A Ghost Story,” and this reflects that film’s questioning of meaning in the relatively small window of a human existence. Once again, Lowery leaves just enough open to interpretation and yet never lacks in confidence. That’s the incredibly fine line that great films often walk—when a work can feel both assured in the voices of its creators and yet open enough to spark conversation. “The Green Knight” is one of those films. One never questions that Lowery knows exactly what he’s doing, and yet people will walk away with very different readings of “The Green Knight.” Again, that’s akin to a great poem that means something unique to each person that reads it, and some of those readings may even surprise the original author. 

“The Green Knight” asks a lot of its viewers—to stay engaged with what could be called its slow pace, to consider its themes without them being underlined for easy consumption, to be willing to see a film about famous knight that contains very little in the way of traditional heroism. It is scary, sexy, and strange in ways that American films are rarely allowed to be, culminating in a sequence that cast the whole film in a new light for this viewer. We’re all just sitting in that banquet hall, listening to the story requested by King Arthur, told by a master storyteller.