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Saturday Matinee: Gremlins 2

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By Kevin Lyons

Source: EOFFTV Review

Conventional wisdom has it that Gremlins 2: The Last Batch, Joe Dante’s follow up to his hit 1984 film Gremlins, is an inferior film. In truth, it’s just a very different film – same idea (the first half is pretty much a remake of the original) but with lots of new jokes, some stinging satire, fewer moments of childhood-scarring darkness (you’ll find no analogue for the father-in-the-chimney speech here) and a big city setting. The original will always be the “better” film by virtue of having come first, but that doesn’t mean that this madcap sequel can be so easily dismissed out of hand.

The Christmas setting of the original is largely abandoned, though Gremlins 2 seems to be set in the early half of December. In New York, slimy business tycoon Daniel Clamp (John Glover), a transparent pop at Donald Trump, already a figure of mockery 26 years before he became US president, has plans to redevelop Chinatown into a soulless shopping centre. The only hold out is Mr Wing (Keye Luke) who still lives behind his shop and who has Gizmo the mogwai (voiced by Howie Mandel) with him. When Wing dies, the shop is demolished and Gizmo ends up at Splice of Life, Inc., a genetic engineering lab in Clamp Tower. Elsewhere in the building, Billy Peltzer (Zach Halligan) and his fiancée Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates), who have located to the Big Apple from Kingston Falls, are working menial jobs for Clamp – he’s an underappreciated and bullied draftsman and designer, she’s a tour guide in the building. When Billy hears someone humming Gizmo’s distinctive song, he rescue the mogwai from the clutches of Dr Catheter (Christopher Lee) and his assistants Martin and Lewis (Don and Dan Stanton).

Inevitably, Gizmo gets wet, spawns dozens of offspring who eat after midnight and transform into a pack of ravening and very aggressive gremlins on the loose (“All they have to do is to eat three or four children and there’d be the most appalling publicity!” frets Catheter.) And so far as plot goes, that’s pretty much it. The rest of the film is one gremlin-based set piece after the other as the curious and ravenous creatures ingest samples from Catheter’s lab (“I could get you diseases – you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he offers) transforming into a winged creature, a femme fatale who takes a shine to Clamp’s head of security (Robert Picardo) and an urbane and articulate “brain gremlin” (voiced by Tony Randall).

To make up for the lack of a plot, Dante and his writer Charles S. Haas pack the film to the rafters with sight gags, cameos (composer Jerry Goldsmith, actors John Astin, Henry Gibson, Rick Ducommun, Bubba Smith and Hulk Hogan, and even Dante himself all turn up and Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph return as Kingston Falls residents the Futtermans) and in-jokes, most of them film related: Octaman (1971) is being broadcast on Clamp’s cable television network (the film also takes aim at Ted Turner), renamed The Octopus People; Catheter is seen carrying a pod suspiciously similar to that seen in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955); any number of Universal classic horrors are quoted; and it goes on and on and on.

Some might find the constant callbacks to the films that informed Dante’s childhood – and even ones he made – all a bit too much, but there’s plenty of other humour to enjoy, much of it of a scabrously satirical bent. Where the earlier film had poked fun at the clichés of small-town American in cinema, principally as imagined by Frank Capra and the film’s producer, Steven Spielberg, the sequel casts a jaundiced eye at big city living – ” this is some crazy city” notes a holidaying Futterman, though the gremlins seem to love it, staging a rousing production number around their rendition of New York, New York. 60s action films, particularly Die Hard (1988) and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), genetic engineering, our over-reliance on technology that frequently lets us down, the venality of corporate millionaires and even the film industry itself all come under satirical assault too and the film doesn’t really hold back.

The clever thing about the film is how it manages all this while still somehow being more playful than its predecessor. It feels as though the darker elements of Gremlins had been deliberately toned down to make it more suitable for a family audience, particularly the younger children who had found the first film too scary. It still has its moments – the gremlins covered in pulsating sacs as they prepare to reproduce is a strikingly nasty image – but overall, Dante adopts a lighter touch. Perhaps to reassure anyone still worried by the cartoon-like mayhem (the film begins with a Warner Bros. style cartoon), the film even breaks down at one point, damaged by the gremlins, prompting a moment of weird self-reflexiveness as an angry mother (Dante regular Belinda Balaski, who had also been in the first film) to complain to the cinema manager (Paul Bartel) that “this is worse than the first one!”

The cast tend to play second fiddle to the gremlins created by Rick Baker’s Cinovation Studio but Christopher Lee stands out in a role that requires him to disappear for great lengths, but which gives him plenty of splendid dialogue to savour – “oh splendid, this must be my malaria” he exclaims gleefully when taking delivery of some new samples. He seems to have had a ball on the film, enjoying both the experience of working alongside Baker’s manic creations and the exposure that a big budget – though not entirely successful – blockbuster brought him. It’s often easy to forget that he could do comedy rather well and the chance to deadpan his way through lines like ” I swear to God, young man, I will never hurt anything ever again. There are some things that man is not meant to splice” is one he grasps with real relish.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch is unapologetically unruly, Dante skating perilously close to self-indulgence at times (film critic Leonard Maltin, who had pasted the original film, gets attacked by vengeful gremlins on the set of his new television show, while brandishing a videocassette of Gremlins) but just reins it in in time. You don’t see mainstream Hollywood films as wild and manic as this being made any more.

Sadly, despite toning down the horror, the film didn’t perform anywhere near as well at the box office as the original (it opened on the same day in the States as Dick Tracy and couldn’t compete with all the star power that far lesser film was able to bring to bear). It put a stop to the Gremlins franchise and apart from a few fan films, it remained dormant for many years, despite Dante’s best efforts to get a third film off the ground. And then in mid-2022, a third film, referred to by Dante on social media as Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, seemed to be edging closer to production. Whether it gets made, and whether its as anarchic, silly and as much fun as Gremlins 2 will remain to be seen.

Saturday Matinee: Dreams That Money Can Buy

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Watch Dreams That Money Can Buy, a Surrealist Film by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger & Hans Richter

By Colin Marshall

Source: Open Culture

“Everybody dreams. Everybody travels, sometimes into countries where strange beauty, wisdom, adventure, love expects him.” These words, a tad floaty and dreamlike themselves, open 1947’s Dreams That Money Can Buy. “This is a story of dreams mixed with reality,” the narrator intones. He can say that again. Directed by Hans Richter, painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, “film-experimenter,” and energetic member of the Dada movement, the picture takes a storyline that seems mundanely realistic — impecunious poet finds apartment, then must figure out how to pay the rent — and bends it into all manner of surreal shapes. And I do, literally, mean surreal, since several of the scenes come from the minds of noted avant-garde and surrealist artists, including, besides Richter himself, painter and photographer Man Ray, conceptualist Marcel Duchamp, sculptor Alexander Calder, and painter-sculptor-filmmaker Fernand Léger.

Joe, the film’s protagonist, finds he has a sort of superpower: by looking into the eyes of another, he can see the contents of their mind. He promptly sets up a sort of consultation business where he examines the unconscious thoughts of a client: say, an unambitious banker whose wife lives “like a double-entry column: no virtues, no vices.” He then uses the abstract materials of their thoughts to come up with a self-contained, somewhat less abstract dream for them to dream: in the banker’s case, a dream called “Desire,” which takes the form of a short film by Dadaist painter-sculptor-graphic artist-poet Max Ernst. For Joe’s other, differently neurotic customers, Richter, Man Ray, Duchamp, Calder, and Léger come up with suitable formally and aesthetically distinct dreams. While all these artists imbue Dreams That Money Can Buy with their own inimitable sensibilities (or nonsense abilities, as the case may be), I feel as though certain modern filmmakers would have the time of their lives remaking it. Michel Gondry comes to mind.

Saturday Matinee: Repo! The Genetic Opera

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By Michael Cook

Source: Thoroughly Modern Reviewer

I love a good, bad movie. Especially ones that aren’t trying to be bad. There’s something deeply enjoyable about a movie taking itself utterly seriously and being incredibly genuine with its material – especially when the results are probably not as objectively “good” as its creators might have intended. This is where Repo! The Genetic Opera enters. Repo! The Genetic Opera is a movie musical in the same vein as The Rocky Horror Picture Show – it’s a sci-fi musical made on a low budget that, in the years after its release, has found a cult following. And, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Repo! The Genetic Opera is just one of those films that have to be seen to be believed. It is all at once confusing, entertaining, delightful, baffling, and grotesque. It’s an experience to behold and it’s a film that I adore. (4 out of 5 wands.)

(NOTE: There are spoilers ahead.)

Repo! The Genetic Opera (written by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman)
In the mid-21st century, an epidemic of organ failures leads to the rise of GeneCo., a company providing transplants at a great price. Those who miss their payments become targets of GeneCo. mercenaries, who repossess the organs. In a world of drug addiction and legalized murder, a sheltered youth (Alexa Vega) seeks a cure for her rare disease as well as information about her family’s mysterious history. Her questions are answered at “The Genetic Opera.”

Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (of Saw II-IV fame), Repo! The Genetic Opera is the story of Shilo (Alexa Vega), a young girl with a blood disease who finds herself at the center of a feud between Nathan (Anthony Stewart Head), her father and a secret Repo Man for GeneCo, and Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino), the CEO of GeneCo (a company that specializes in organ replacements). It is a story about a young girl striving for freedom and seeking to find her place in the world. It is a story about corporate greed, feuding families, spoiled children, and drug-and-surgery addicts. And, most of all, it is an opera – but instead of traditional opera music, the score is comprised entirely of mid-2000’s-style rock music. And boy, do all of these elements make for a confused film.

The plot of Repo! is a royal mess. Rumor has it that about an hour of the film was cut from the original script, for one reason or another, and it shows. The plot, itself, is fairly simple but like any soap opera, the twists and turns in the personal relationships come quick and fast and it all becomes a bit hard to follow unless you’re paying extremely close attention. And, for the average moviegoer, Repo! is not the kind of film that will demand their rapt attention. You’re never entirely sure just what the film is trying to focus on – is it a story about Shilo’s quest for independence? Is it a story about Nathan’s failures as a father? Is it a familial drama between the Largo family? Essentially, the film is about all of those things and also none of them. The film’s first act simultaneously rushes through exposition while feeling like an endless pit of background information. There’s absolutely no sense of the passage of time throughout the film. The second act is so short that by the time the third act begins, you have no idea how the film is gonna manage to wrap up all of these plot threads by the end of its titular opera sequence. The film is the very definition of style over substance, prioritizing spectacle and shock value over any semblance of a coherent narrative. And that’s largely a reason why the film was panned upon its release. 

However, Repo! the Genetic Opera is a delightful movie in spite of all of that. It’s a baffling film to sit through, but that’s part of its charm. Plus, nobody who is watching Repo! these days is watching it for its plot. People enjoy this film because of its solid score, its bizarre atmosphere, and its wickedly enjoyable performances. Terrance Zdunich and Darren Smith’s score is this strange blend of rock, opera, traditional musical theatre, and alternative music. It’s something that shouldn’t work – and yet, it does. It feels a bit like Rocky Horror Picture Show in its sheer audaciousness; the film was literally marketed as “not your grandparents’ opera.” Like an opera, the entirety of the film’s narrative is told through its music. Unlike an opera, many of Repo!’s songs stand on their own as memorable, well-written and performed songs. Sure, some of them are a bit too over-the-top and cringey and there’s a definite lack of stylistic cohesion, but many of the songs are absolute earworms that will be stuck in your head for days. “Zydrate Anatomy”, “Chase the Morning”, “Legal Assassin”, “Infected”, and “At the Opera Tonight” are great examples of the variety of musical styles found in the film. None of those songs sound alike, but all of them are great. 

Equally eclectic is the array of talent gathered for Repo!’s cast. I have no idea how Bousman managed to convince some of these actors to do this movie but thank God he did. I mean, how many films can say they have the girl from Spy Kids, Giles from Buffy, Paris Hilton, and Sarah Brightman in their cast? Remarkably, everyone in this film does a great job – including Paris Hilton. Everyone is fully committed to their characters and the film’s silliness and it shows. It’s impressive how well relatively new actors like Terrance Zdunich, Paris Hilton, and Ogre do when sharing the screen with the likes of Sarah Brightman, Anthony Stewart Head, and Paul Sorvino. Everyone in the film is perfectly cast and they are all bringing their A-games. Obvious standouts include Zdunich, Paul Sorvino, Anthony Head, Sarah Brightman, and Alexa Vega, but there is truly not a weak member of this cast. Half of the fun of Repo! is its music, and the way the narrative is told through it, and half of the fun is found in the film’s eclectic cast.

At the end of the day, Repo! The Genetic Opera is simply one of those films you have to experience. The plot makes no sense, but the visuals are seeped in this gothic-yet-futuristic atmosphere that draws you into the world in spite of the baffling plot. It looks and feels cheap, but that never stops any part of the film from reaching for the stars. The songs are catchy, memorable, and serve the narrative as well as you could hope for given the constraints of the film. The performances are strong and, fitting with the film’s overall tone of insanity, absolutely bonkers. The fact that this film manages to work at all is a testament to all who worked on it. So many elements of this movie just shouldn’t work – and, to be fair, many of them don’t. But much of the film does work, and it’s held together by this glue of passion and genuine respect for what’s trying to be accomplished. Repo! The Genetic Opera is a memorable experience not because it’s a terrible film but because it’s a seriously good one if you’re willing to meet it where it is.

Watch Repo! The Genetic Opera on pluto here: https://pluto.tv/us/hub/home?utm_source=google&utm_medium=paidsearch&utm_campaign=12080790684&utm_term=pluto+tv&utm_creative=617765758688&device=c&campaign=Search_Brand_Desktop_E&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw16O_BhDNARIsAC3i2GAIga-xQVO3KmtJs6gYhD6oY6lKyzS5NTNwGocZ_0X20assMp28HhsaAraCEALw_wcB#id=5f0618c4d4495f0013a2a718&type=movie

Saturday Matinee: Stranger Than Fiction

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Who’s telling your life story?

By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

What a thoughtful film this is, and how thought-stirring. Marc Forster‘s “Stranger Than Fiction” comes advertised as a romance, a comedy, a fantasy, and it is a little of all three, but it’s really a fable, a “moral tale” like Eric Rohmer tells.

Will Ferrell stars, in another role showing that like Steve Martin and Robin Williams he has dramatic gifts to equal his comedic talent. He plays IRS agent Harold Crick, who for years has led a sedate and ordered life. He lives in an apartment that looks like it was furnished on a 15-minute visit to Crate and Barrel. His wristwatch eventually tires of this existence and mystically decides to shake things up.

Harold begins to hear a voice in his head, one that is describing his own life — not in advance, but as a narrative that has just happened. He seeks counsel from a shrink (Linda Hunt) and convinced he is hearing his own life narrative, seeks counsel from Jules Hilbert, a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman). Hilbert methodically checks off genres and archetypes and comes up with a list of living authors who could plausibly be writing the “narration.” He misses, however, Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), because he decides Harold’s story is a comedy, and all of her novels end in death. However, Eiffel is indeed writing the story of Harold’s life. What Hilbert failed to foresee is that it ends in Harold’s death. And that is the engine for the moral tale.

Meanwhile, an astonishing thing happens. Harold goes to audit the tax return of Ana Pascal, a sprightly, tattooed bakery shop owner (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and begins to think about her. Can’t stop thinking. Love has never earlier played a role in his life. Nor does she much approve of IRS accountants. How rare, to find a pensive film about the responsibilities we have to art. If Kay Eiffel’s novel would be a masterpiece with Harold’s death, does he have a right to live? On the other hand, does she have the right to kill him for her work? “You have to die. It’s a masterpiece.” But life was just getting interesting for Harold. The shy, tentative way his relationship with Ana develops is quirky and sideways and well-suited to Gyllenhaal’s delicate way of kidding a role. He doesn’t want to die. On the other hand, after years of dutifully following authority, he is uncertain of his duty — and he is so meekly nice, he hates to disappoint Eíffel. Harold himself has never done anything so grand as write a masterpiece. Although the obvious cross-reference here is a self-referential Charlie Kaufman screenplay like “Adaptation,” I was reminded of another possible parallel, Melville’s famous short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” made into the 2001 movie with Crispin Glover and David Paymer. Bartleby is an office drudge who one day simply turns down a request from his boss, saying, “I would prefer not to.” Harold Crick, like Bartleby, labors in a vast office shuffling papers that mean nothing to him, and one day he begins a series of gentle but implacable decisions. Harold would prefer not to audit any more tax returns. And he would prefer not to die. But he is such a gentle and good soul that this second decision requires a lot of soul-searching, and it’s fascinating to watch how Hilbert and Ana participate indirectly in it, not least through some very good cookies. And what is Eiffel’s preference when she finds what power she has? Her publisher has assigned her an “assistant” (Queen Latifah) to force her through her writer’s block, so there is pressure there, too. She chain-smokes and considers suicide.

The director, Marc Forster, whose work includes the somber (“Monster’s Ball“) and the fantastical (“Finding Neverland“), here splits the difference. He shoots in a never-identified Chicago, often choosing spare and cold Mies van der Rohe buildings, and he adds quirky little graphics that show how Harold compulsively counts and sees spatial relationships. His work with the actors seeks a low-key earnestness, and Ferrell becomes a puzzled but hopeful seeker after the right thing. Gyllenhaal and Hoffman never push him too hard. And I like the dry detachment with which both Hoffman and Thompson consider literature, which is conceived in such passion and received with such academic reserve. Alas, Forster never finds the right note for Latifah’s character, who may not be necessary.

“Stranger Than Fiction” is a meditation on life, art and romance, and on the kinds of responsibility we have. Such an uncommonly intelligent film does not often get made. It could have pumped up its emotion to blockbuster level, but that would be false to the premise, which requires us to enter the lives of these specific quiet, sweet, worthy people. The ending is a compromise — but it isn’t the movie’s compromise, it belongs entirely to the characters and is their decision. And that made me smile.

Watch Stranger Than Fiction on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/stranger-than-fiction-will-ferrell/18085460