Category Archives: 2000s

Alan Smithee Podcast 85: Red Planet (2000, Antony Hoffman) / Mission to Mars (2000, Brian De Palma)

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In this episode of an Alan Smithee Podcast we conclude our two-part look at Mars on film for the month of Mars…March. Unlike our previous episode, these Mars movies portray a more benign look at the planet’s inhabitants (benign to the point of boredom in one case) and center around visits to the formidable fourth rock from the sun rather than invasions from it.

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Red Planet was not the first of the two Mars movies to come out in 2000, but it was certainly the lesser. Misrepresented as some kind of horror film, the story is an extremely directionless account of astronauts on a mission to repair terraforming technology installed on Mars due to Earth becoming uninhabitable. What happens next is so boring and inane that the Mars’ stature in popular imagination as a place of wonder, mystery and danger is irreparably reduced in the mind of the viewer. The mostly-talented cast helps add a moment or two. Val Kilmer is a total pro, as always, but one-and-done director Antony Hoffman’s mise-en-scene is even blander than the screenplay. It’s a real waste of a planet.

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Mission to Mars is an entirely other kind of space exploration film, one in which the danger of Mars is primarily the matter of getting there, as the title implies. The purpose of the mission is to unravel a mystery with echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey – echoes so strong that the entire mainstream critical establishment seemed to dismiss the film out of hand as another case of Brian De Palma being unoriginal (a charge Quentin Tarantino stopped having to defend by embracing his lack of originality, but no matter.) Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise and Don Cheadle are all very good at selling the human drama which leads up to a heavy sci-fi conclusion that actually has a point, unlike Red Planet.

Download this episode and get your ass to Mars – again!

NEXT EPISODE: WE’RE LATE FOR PASSOVER! THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988, MARTIN SCORSESE) & THE PASSOVER PLOT (1976, MICHAEL CAMPUS)

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Alan Smithee Podcast 78: The Blues Brothers (1980, John Landis) / Blues Brothers 2000 (1998, John Landis)

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The Blues Brothers is one of the great all-time overrated “great” ideas (and movies) of all time. Andrew and I wanted to like it, truly we did, but even if the gulf between overhyped expectations and the film itself weren’t so yawningly wide, there’s nothing but sheer scale to recommend – the amount of music, the amount of stunts, the multitudes of wasted cast members – all of which were compiled along the edict of “more is more.” In this way John Landis was somewhat visionary towards the way the film was developing in the new decade of the 80s. The Blues Brothers is the terrible poverty of imagination heralded by “Star Wars,” applied to a non-fantasy film, and to a comedy about “blues men” for heavens’ sake – historically the salt of the Earth. This is a bad live action cartoon before the second dialogue scene has elapsed.

“The Blues Brothers” aren’t real characters; they’re a premise conceived so two white comedians got to do live Karaoke of old music they like. Nothing wrong with that, but expanding that nothing premise into a two-plus hour film is, let’s say, overconfident. This hasn’t stopped any film based on a Saturday Night Live sketch since, which is another grievance to hold against Messrs. Ackroyd, Belushi and Landis. To cover up the lack of content – they don’t even bother developing Elwood and Jake Blues into anything but two dimensional caricatures – there are endless guest stars in every scene, and where there aren’t guest stars, there are explosions and car chases courtesy of Landis, who at this point was still at least two years away from the day his lack of talent killed three.

The wholly superficial nature of the film, with its repeated catchphrases (“We’re on a mission from God” does not does not get any funnier the tenth time), repeated music cues (the Peter Gunn theme is admittedly catchy) and stunts for their own sake are all supposed to be offset by egomaniacal reason behind the film’s creaction: to “re-focus attention” on blues music (as Landis phrased it on the eve of its 25th anniversary.) Ah, the White hipster’s burden; bringing black culture to other, less cool white people than yourself. These delusional jerks actually thought James Brown and Aretha Franklin wouldn’t sell enough white tickets if Landis hadn’t poorly directed cameos for them.

By perpetuating this farce with the lesser (Jim) Belushi after the latter Belushi left this unhip coil, Ackroyd was just as much to blame for the excruciating continuance of the Chicago-deep-dish-style White-guy-”Blues” movement. In the late 90s, after probably his first exhaustively failed attempt to spearhead “Ghostbusters 3″, he resorted to the maybe the feeblest nostalgia cash-in in movie history: Blues Brothers 2000, a 20th anniversary sequel made two years too early and with even less goodwill than if they’d attempted to remake the original film tomorrow. Which, come to think of it, ought to be any day now.

“Blues Brothers 2000″ is every bit as pointless, poorly made, and frantically stocked with guest stars and musicians to mask the pointlessness – except Landis and Ackroyd no longer have even the reckless confidence of youth at their backs.

Sacred cows AND dead horses get what’s coming to them in this highly iconoclastic episode of An Alan Smithee Podcast.

NEXT EPISODE: GODZILLA SPECIAL! GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS (1956, ISHIRO HONDA & TERRY MORSE) / GODZILLA (1998, ROLAND EMMERICH)

Alan Smithee Podcast 76: I Married a Witch (1942, René Clair) / Bewitched (2005, Nora Ephron)

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Regular listeners of An Alan Smithee Podcast know that we’re pretty shameless when it comes to being topical. When your movie podcast is basically about whatever the hell movies you feel like talking about, you have to be a little topically trendy to catch new listeners. However, don’t assume that this episode’s choice of Nora Ephron’s worst movie (probably) was chosen to dishonor her memory. This is mere coincidence and frankly, we do a fine enough job dishonoring her memory with ad hominem insults (mostly mine, Andrew has class) when we were under the assumption she’d live at least another week or so.

In deference towards Ephron’s M.O. – after the fact – let’s say this episode is sort of about feminism, vis-a-vis the short niche history of romantic farces about women with magic powers and the zany predicaments they put their men into. On stage and screen the concept doesn’t date back much further than Noël Coward’s play Blithe Spirit, in which a séance brings back the ghost of a man’s nagging wife. This play was only produced a year before the 1942 film I Married A Witch, surely one of the most famous romantic comedy fantasies that people know by name without having watched. As a key work in her career’s meteoric rise and fall, Veronica Lake plays heavily into that as the titular witch. In the long run, the film begat Bell, Book and Candle (1958), with Kim Novak as another romantic trickster witch, which then begat the TV series Bewtiched in 1964.

I Married A Witch is a devious, playful and tart treat. Veronica Lake is not an innocent sugar cookie like Elizabeth Montgomery, initially intending to torment rather than marry the hapless Fredric March until literally falling in love with him by accident. The story and dialogue are as brisk and witty as any great screwball classic from Hollywood’s golden age and director Clair, who began in the silent era, devises a good deal of photographic tricks and practical effects to bring the magical elements to life. The battle of the sexes at play here carries a lot more weight than the Grant-Hepburn variety, as essentially March’s soul is on the line. Only March’s bitchy fiancé Susan Hayward makes Lake look likable by comparison, which doesn’t exactly present the ideal picture of womanhood between the two of them. They are both STRONG women, however, which is less than can be said for the women in the bad movie of this episode…

Bewitched is, without hyperbole, a failure on every conceivable level. Worse, one wonders what dramatic or comedic purposes Nora Ephron and her co-writer sister Delia Ephron even had in mind. A Marxist critic in 1942 would probably hate our being asked to identify with an opportunistic politician of family money and connections; Frederic March is running for governor and that’s not exactly necessary for the story of his love triangle between a cold fish and a Satanic nymph. However, only a commoner with no ability for class critique whatsoever could stomach, let alone enjoy the sucking vortex of insulated world views that comprise the scenario of Bewitched 2005. Forget for a moment that literally not a single character in this film is not rich, famous or endowed with magical powers. Could the meta-story of a Bewitched movie being about the remaking of the Bewitched TV show possibly be any more unnecessarily convoluted? Exactly what aspect of this plot could anyone possibly relate to?

Here’s the only corpse kicking that needs to be done: Nora and Delia Ephron wrote a story in which the unlimited powers of witch Nicole Kidman and her warlock father Michael Caine are unconsciously represent the privileged life they grew up in. Mister and Mrs. Ephron were East Coast professional screenwriters who moved lil’ Nora and Delia (those NAMES, good gravy!) to Beverly Hills as small children, where they proceeded to graduate from Beverly Hills High School. Afterwards, Nora fled back across flyover country to one of the most snobby elitist schools in America, Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She then interned at the JFK White House, presumably performing executive maintenance functions alongside Mimi Beardsley. After starting her career as an essayist, she married Carl Bernstein and divorced him before finally following in mom and dad’s footsteps as a screenwriter. She then defined the modern brainless-in-Seattle rom-com chick-flick with When Harry Met Sally and, yes, Sleepless In Seattle. Phillip Wylie, Robert Crumb and Rush Limbaugh combined couldn’t conceive a more exaggerated parody of a liberal feminist Jewess than this woman’s life.

In Bewitched, Nicole Kidman wants the execrable Will Ferrell to love her LITERALLY because he’s a “helpless” dope and as a super-powered witch dabbling in civilian life, any helpless dope will do – even if he’s a movie star. After using her magic powers to conjure a home worth millions in Los Angeles, she resolves not to use her powers to make Ferrell fall in love with her, except she changes her mind about that, twice. Ferrell and his Hollywood ilk in this film are vulgar Hollywood stereotypes, not like those sophisticated and literate New Yorkers who agree to write the scripts for meta-remakes of 1960s sitcoms. So far as Ephron’s feminist street cred, Kidman’s utter lack of personality whatsoever should posthumously wipe the record clean. She’s merely a cipher for Ferrell, whom Ephron presumably had more interest in working with. Arguably the show itself was similarly constructed – with Dick Powell and Dick York getting all the laughs in reaction to Samantha’s antics – except Ferrell doesn’t even know Kidman is a witch until the last 20 minutes of the horrific 101 minute running time. So there’s no farce, and at least Elizabeth Montgomery had some kind of charm.

Presumably, had Bewitched been a hit, Ephron’s version of I Dream of Jeannie would be about Billy Crystal finding a real genie to star on an off-broadway musical remake of the TV show, who then blogs about it on The New York Times Magazine website. Blecchhh.

NEXT EPISODE: SPACE BABE SPECIAL! BARBARELLA (1968, ROGER VADIM) & GALAXINA (1980, WILLIAM SACHS)

Alan Smithee Podcast 65: Black Book (2006, Paul Verhoeven) / Bloodrayne: The Third Reich (2010, Uwe Boll)

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This week on An Alan Smithee Podcast we look at two World War II films about heroines fighting Nazis armed with only their wits and their breasts: Black Book and Bloodrayne: The Third Reich.

This episode also marks our last look at an Uwe Boll film, at least for a while. As the man’s filmmaking improves, it just gets harder to mock him for stupid technical choices that were once abundant in his early works like House of the Dead. Worse, he has no particular personal hang-ups to creep their way into his stories like an Ed Wood, Tommy “The Room” Wiseau or James “Birdemic” Nguyen. If Uwe Boll is making a cheap movie about vampires in an old West town, as we saw in our Bloodrayne II episode, that’s exactly what it’s going to be about. We’d have more luck finding subtext in a Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie.

Uwe Boll doesn’t seem to make these bad video game licensed action movies because he enjoys them, but to fund a few of his more personal film projects and get great deals on German tax incentives for funds. His only distinguishing stylistic trademarks are boobs and mechanically rote violence. Thus does Bloodrayne: The Third Reich bring back his Ingenue Natassia Malthe as Bloodrayne the vampire ass-kicker with twice as much nudity, and three times as gratuitous. This film may contain the most gratuitous lesbian scene in the history of b-movies.

Bloodrayne: The Third Reich is, like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, only as reverential to the events of World War II as need be to fulfill quotas for the World War II genre. The low budget production values only add to Boll’s workmanlike lack of taste, especially in the opening sequence where Bloodrayne and some resistance fighters liberate a concentration camp-bound train car with less prisoners inside than a coffeeklatsch on Passover. The film’s best actor is Clint Howard, who occasionally lends his strange face to low budget horror or sci-fi, playing “Dr. Mangler” – a sensitive, respectful nod to the man who made infamous Nazi doctors of human experiments, Joseph Mengele. To give Uwe credit, he only thinks he’s goofing on Nazis. Yet how ignorant and uncaring toward history do you have to be to end your World War II movie with the line, “Guten Tag, motherfuckers”? And he’s German!

Speaking of tasteless, and moving slightly elsewhere in the European continent, Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven was met with some skepticism in the mid-2000s when he announced his long awaited return to filmmaking (after the ill-respected Hollow Man of 2000) would be a World War II film produced in his native Netherlands, the 2006 release Black Book (Zwartboek), most critics assumed it would be similar to his pulpy American hi-gloss Hollywood trash but in World War II: Basic Instinct with Nazis. That film would have been spectacular in ways that Inglourious Basterds only hinted at, yet the resulting work is far and away the most mature, assured work from Verhoeven since Robocop, or anything from the time before Verhoeven came to America.

Black Book was apparently a tremendous success in the Netherlands and the only reason one could venture why the film was rejected by the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Picture is payback for Verhoeven having turned his back on the enclave of Hollywood to go back overseas. The film takes all of Verhoeven’s accumulated filmmaking skills and applies them to a World War II yarn which is part pulpy thriller and another part empathic tale of survival, inspired in part by Verhoeven’s own childhood on the run during the war. The heroine, played by Milhouse’s great-aunt Carice van Houten, is a Jew hiding in plain sight with dyed-blone hair amongst the Nazis as a secretary secretly spying for the resistance.

The pulpy elements of Black Book are pulpy as hell; the premise of a hot Jewess screwing and screwing with the Nazis is both pulpier than Inglourious Basters and less pulpy than than the Jew-amongst-Nazis drama Europa, Europa.” Carice van Houten’s furtive, oft-agonized role as Rachel Stein / Ellis de Vries is perhaps best understood in the context of Verhoeven’s other put-upon but strong heroines. There’s the dogfood-eating but proud Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls), medieval firebrand Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh in Flesh + Blood), and who could forget the toughest female cop this side of Heather Locklear, Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen) of Robocop?

The corniest pulp element of Black Book is probably the one which involves Rachel sleeping with a Nazi SS officer who apparently discovers her Jewishness, and doesn’t seem to care. The difference between Verhoeven and Boll is that while Boll including such a scene in his upcoming film Aushwitz (really? yes, really) Verhoeven’s gimmicky film about a Jewess in hiding is offset by an informed perspective on deadly historical realities, like people who pretended to be benefactors of Jews on the run only to double cross them and take their money while leaving them for dead. Amidst twists like that in Black Book there is full frontal Nazi nudity and literal buckets of shit dumped on our long-suffering heroine, proving that if there’s one director who can out-trash and out-class Uwe Boll in the same movie, it’s Paul Verhoeven.

NEXT EPISODE: MAE WEST SPECIAL! (SHE DONE HIM WRONG (1993, LOWELL SHERMAN) & SEXTETTE (1978, KEN HUGHES)

Episode 54: Please Teach Me English (2003, Sung-su Kim) / Zardoz (1974, John Boorman)

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The book of Genesis, written and illustrated by Robert Crumb, tells of an enormous tower built by a united humanity following the Great Flood through which Noah floated his boat. And God said, “They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withholden from them which they purpose to do. Come, let us go down and confound their speech.” The resulting divine wrecking ball on the tower of Babel scattered the languages of the Earth into those which confound us to this day: Spanish, Italiano, Farsi, L33t speak, Esperanto, English, Korean and Science Fiction. This episode of An Alan Smithee Podcast attempts to disseminate the latter three for normal talkin’ folks.

South Korean flicks discussed previously on the podcast (Conduct Zero, Asako in Ruby Shoes) tend to successfully juggle more than one genre of film within a broader category – a dash of action and/or drama to spice up comedy, or vice versa. This happens because S.K. filmmakers are apparently not too hung up on pigeonholing their film’s storytelling potential – which is unlimited, because it is film – based on marketing demographics. They trust their audiences to enjoy being pleasantly surprised and not explode when the movie they’re watching isn’t all tragedy or comedy, much like life.

Please Teach Me English is a comedy about Koreans taking ESL classes. In terms of filmmaking language, Sung-su Kim is already multilingual himself. Although the main character is a girl, this is not a “chick flick.” Although the crux of her story is a romance, this is not a “romantic comedy.” Although the film is very funny, there is drama, but don’t dare call it a “comedy-drama.” To be sure, this film speaks all those languages – enough to get by. The dialect however is unaffected by the lazy American slang we’re used to.

Zardoz is a tongue twister of a movie, and not just because the title requires an explanation. Everything does, from names to history to “second level meditation.” Science Fiction authors with grandiose ideas to depict have their work cut out for themselves translating concepts that must take place hundreds of years in the future to seem remotely possible. Sometimes the aesthetics of a piece are beyond technobabble or quasi-plausible scientific language though, like a giant floating stone head named Zardoz who pukes up guns. This is why dense sci-fi / fantasy novels like Dune are usually laughed out of theater before their lengthy pre-credits exposition prologues are even finished.

John Boorman followed his commercial and critical smash hit Deliverance with this satirical dystopic adventure of his own devising and although as a director his command of visual language is impeccable, he just didn’t seem to understand how to translate his ideas as anything but terminally silly. Every film of this type has a good share of made-up vocabulary and terminology, but when every other scene introduces more and more there’s just an information overload. Deciphering the code of Zardoz is an especially difficult study and we do stay a little late after class to crack it.

An Alan Smithee Podcast will slowly talk you through the trickier phrases of post-Planet of the Apes, pre-Star Wars sci-fi after a delightful bilingual flirtation.

NEXT EPISODE: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE SPECIAL! THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974, TOBE HOOPER) & THE RETURN OF THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE aka TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION (1994, KIM HENKEL)

Episode 52: Far Cry (2008, Uwe Boll) / Conduct Zero (2002, Geun-shik Jo)

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This week on An Alan Smithee Podcast we follow the exploits of two tuff furriners taking on the very very odds. Our wonderful global village produces many multicultured approaches to encroaching perils. In South Korea, where coming-of-age dramas are just as dangerously wacky as ghost stories, a tuff man will alternate between buffoonish badassery and doe-eyed sensitivity to accommodate the hodgepodge of genres at play in the typical SK flick. The stoic German, on the other hand, accepts an escalating hodgepodge with laconic forthrightness – even or perhaps especially when the tones attempting to be juggling by the filmmaker keeps dropping to the floor.

Conduct Zero, aka Zero In Conduct and No Manners is almost maddeningly typical of South Korean movies: it incorporates different moods within a single category, in this case a high school comedy-drama, and does so deftly. As the trailer helpfully explains, this is an “Ultra Spectacle Sup Cap-jjung Romance Comic Action Drama” type picture. Charmingly roguish Seung-beom Ryu is Jung-pil, the worst behaved delinquent at Moonduk High. Life turns upside down when he falls for a goody two shoes named Min-hee and has to romance her while retaining his bad boy image to the rest of the school. Befitting the fact that this is also an unannounced 1980s period piece, Jung-pil seeks the help of a nerd to get closer to his geeky girl. Unlike your average teen movie though, writer-director Geun-shik Jo is almost as interested in the peripheral characters of this drama as his protagonist and a little sympathetic to almost everyone, even Na-young, the girl gang leader equivalent to Jung-pil who targets Min-hee out of jealousy for Jung-pil’s attention. Empathic humanity combined with digitally enhanced slapstick direction makes Zero In Conduct a perfect example of why South Korean movies are so uniquely well made and accessible to American audiences.

Far Cry is technically several kinds of bad movie, the action-syfy channel-horror timekiller, yet this hybrid has been around so long it’s practically one genre. There only annotation required to explain why it caught our attention over all the others is that the director is Uwe Boll, king of German tax sheltered crap video game tie-ins. While we hate to admit the guy has become somewhat a more competent director since 2003′s House of the Dead – if not of actors then of middling action scenes – his resident screenwriting team of Michael Roesch (Alone In The Dark,) Peter Scheerer (Alone In The Dark) and Masaji Takei (Bloodrayne II: Deliverance, as featured previously on An Alan Smithee Podcast) definitely haven’t evolved in the least. The dialogue and unbalanced interspersing of comic relief with the genetic super-soldier carnage seems more a ploy to keep their boss from getting bored while making his own movie than creating an emotional rollercoaster ride. Lead teutonic tuffman Til Schweiger – recently featured in Inglourious Basterds as another German, Hugo Stiglitz – fares a lot better with the comedy than the action, and faring well in any regard under the auspice of Uwe is no small feat.

Prefacing this episode of An Alan Smithee Podcast is a special spirited wrap-up on the subject of Piranha 3D, a film heavily theorized about in our previous Piranha themed episode and our look at the James Cameron 1981 sequel. What happens when two fans of the original don’t see eye to eye on the new version? Who will survive and what will be left of them?

NEXT EPISODE: SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962, RICHARD BROOKS) & BATS (1999, LOUIS MORNEAU)

Episode 44: Watchmen: Ultimate Cut (2009, Zack Snyder)

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Raymond Chandler, creator of the archetypal American private eye detective Philip Marlowe, was once asked how he felt about what Hollywood had “done to” his books and famously responded that Hollywood hadn’t done anything to them – they’re right there on the bookshelf.

Directed (assembled?) by Zack Snyder last year, Watchmen is so breathtakingly appalling that it may have ruined Alan Moore’s original comic book serial for an entire generation. Unlike terrible adaptations which play loosely with their source material, or for that matter even good adaptations which play loosely with their source material, this film (special?) is a turd painstakingly sculpted into an exact replica of Rodin’s “The Thinker”: a virtual replica full of crap and bad taste.

In the greatest con job of superficial fidelity ever, Snyder crams the experience with as many visual cues and lines of dialogue from the original books as he can while methodically removing with tweezers anything remotely resembling a point of view, let alone that of the author and save perhaps for some trendy environmentalism which the book explicitly deflated as a non-issue. The result is a perfect storm of placating so-called “purist” comic book fans, flattering their desperate longing for mainstream legitimization by finally making the damn movie after 20-odd years of false starts, and pandering to the lowest common denominator across America by amping up the violence to obscene levels.

Everyone’s happy, no one’s happy, everyone’s already forgotten this movie existed. As Rorschach would say, hrm. Right before dropping Zack Snyder down an elevator shaft.

The difference between the “Ultimate Cut” and deleted-scenes-laden “Director’s Cut” of Watchmen is the addition of animated segments from “Tales of the Black Freighter,” the digressive pirate comic book within a comic book of the original series which serves no narrative point whatsoever in a bloated extravaganza already pushing 2 hours and 40 minutes in its theatrical cut. This only points up the unthinking patchwork of the entire enterprise.

The only remarkable thing about Watchmen is the revival of Jackie Earl Halley’s career, decades after becoming a child star in The Bad News Bears. After playing the most anticipated role in the film, one requiring him to remain almost completely under cover of mask, he shortly thereafter won the fool’s errand of playing another nerd favorite with an obscured face, Freddy Krueger in the upcoming Nightmare On Elm Street remake.

This episode of An Alan Smithee Podcast is therefore something of a prelude to our next week’s episode, a Nightmare On Elm Street special to commemorate the event!

NEXT WEEK: FREDDY’S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE (1991, RACHEL TALALAY) & WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994, WES CRAVEN)

Episode 40: Gosford Park (2001, Robert Altman) / Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981, James Cameron)

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With the Academy Awards once against swelling like a malignant infection, An Alan Smithee Podcast takes a completely inadvertently coincidental look this week at two films from frequent Oscar nominees: the late great Robert Altman and the not so great lately James Cameron. Altman’s career began anonymously in television before graduating to film and earning the acclaim of the academy when it was fashionable for them to do so. Only by making a film about Hollywood years later did he fall back into their favor, receiving at least the courtesy of nomination for the remainder of his life and career while the honors ultimately were bestowed upon keepers of the middle brow like Robert Zemeckis and Ron Howard.

James Cameron blossomed in the special effects boom of the 80s which drove directors like Altman into the darkness. He also did arguably more for the mainstreaming of special effects driven films than Steven Spielberg or George Lucas by making The Terminator and Aliens, blockbusters which established a permanent market for violent action films involving robots and/or aliens targeted at teenage boys instead of the entire family. Flash forward to the present day when serious Academy Award nominated dramatic actors vie to play villains in superhero movies and Cameron stands to sweep the industry’s highest self-congratulatory accolades for directing a 3D aliens and robots movie. Male adulthood has been replaced by perpetual adolescence and Cameron is truly king of the world. Yet even kings have to start somewhere as big fish in little ponds, before they spread their wings.

Gosford Park contains many of Altman’s trademarks, most prominently a sprawling cast with overlapping dialogue in the service of social satire. Ostensibly a murder mystery, the first half of this long story is spent establishing a myriad of ladies and gentlemen and their faithful servants gathering for a party in the countryside of England, 1932. Their social protocol is antiquated yet not so far in the past as to be unrecognizable, and the duality between the hosts and help is a fascinating look at the function and perception of privilege. The depiction of the servants behind the scenes is of particular interest to anyone wondering what the daily lives of maids, butlers et all were busy exchanging bon mots and stabbing each other in the back. Altman’s roving camera and Julian Fellowes kaleidoscopic screenplay create an amazing tour through the waning days of the British empire’s high society and one of the director’s most transportive works.

Roger Corman is scheduled to receive a lifetime achievement award at this year’s Oscars. The actors and directors he gave breaks to are legion and it will be interesting to see whom among them have enough self confidence to be associated with him, or even give their permission to be shown in the inevitable compilation reel alongside Jack Nicholson in The Little Shop of Horrors and Sylvester Stallone in Death Race 2000. Actually, Stallone will probably be too proud to OK the use of that clip.

Whether Cameron will give a tip of the hat to his earliest employer is a toss-up. Corman’s 70s outfit New World Pictures not only gave Joe Dante his first directorial work on Hollywood Boulevard and Piranha, but Cameron’s first special effects work on New World’s Galaxy of Terror and Battle Beyond The Stars. Surely this got Cameron the recommendation for the non-Corman produced sequel Piranha Part Two: The Spawning. Whereas Dante’s original spoofed Jaws while simultaneously making an exciting monster movie, Cameron’s sequel rather straightforwardly takes itself seriously even with the idiotic premise that some of the killer piranha have learned to fly.

If nothing else – and there really is nothing else – at least Cameron got some more special effects expertise under his belt for the future, which was only looking up. There’s a half-eaten Jamaican who looks remarkably similar to a battle damaged Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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NEXT WEEK: COMMENTARY TRACK SPECIAL! BATMAN (1989, TIM BURTON)

Episode 36: The Stranger (1946, Orson Welles) / Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001, Kevin Smith)

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Kevin Smith and Orson Welles have a lot in common. Firstly, they’ve both written and directed many of their own films. Secondly, they star in their own films. Thirdly, they like to eat. Okay, so they have three things in common.

The Stranger is quizzically one of Welles’ lesser known works despite being one of his most accessible. In a plot seemingly inspired by Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt, Welles himself portrays a Nazi war criminal hiding undetected in the milieu of small town America while plotting his future schemes. He’s so evil he kicks dogs! Hot on his trail is Edward G. Robinson, who nyaah sees through his perfect American accent and begins to turn the screws on Welles’ newly married bride, the lovely Loretta Young. When confronted, Welles strings her along as long as he can. But for how long?

Many sophisticated crane and tracking shots distinguish this modestly budgeted thriller as a warmup for later Welles classics such as Touch Of Evil. Despite his own dismissal the project as mere work for hire – which it certainly is – work for hire from Orson Welles amounts to an entertaining thriller easily in league with any other. While Robinson’s character is not particularly developed, Young’s is a minor masterpiece of tragic love for a man she has begun to understand is bad without fathoming the true extent of his evil. Welles does not give so much as a single noble quality to his beast.

Unlike a work-for-hire job, Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is nothing less than one man’s completely unwarranted magnum ode to himself. Back in 2001, Miramax was far from bankruptcy and was actually willing to fund such folly. This is 22 million dollars they probably wish they had back right now. Smith has never been a serious moneymaker screenwriter on the level of, say, Joe Eszterhas or Shane Black, but what he lacked in misogyny he made up for with good casting, unpretentious comedy and the cutting edge gimmick of having his characters talk about Star Wars and Marvel comics for no reason.

His accumulated goodwill as the comic writer-director for geeks in the 90s finally put him over into the mainstream with Dogma. Then he had a choice to make. Either branch out beyond his New Jersey buddy comedy that began with Clerks five years earlier, or do more of the same. Promising to his lovingly patronized merchandise-consuming online fan following that Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back would be the final film in that mold – replete with cameos by the characters of each previous film – he wrote a stream of consciousness ripoff of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure starring himself. Then he broke his promise with Clerks 2 after Jersey Girl bombed.

We give a little extra time in this episode to his evisceration, but only because we were once fans ourselves.

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NEXT WEEK: MEAN STREETS (1973, MARTIN SCORCESE) & SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO (1991, MARK L. LESTER)

Episode 29: The Bank Dick (1940, Edward F. Cline) / The Beach (2000, Danny Boyle)

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This week on An Alan Smithee Podcast, the great W.C. Fields makes a grand return and Leonardo DiCaprio does some dopey navel gazing.

The Bank Dick like many Fields pictures is the story of a man who never meant anyone a bit of harm, whom the whole world has conspired against to keep from his next drink. With the sudden opportunity to be mistaken for a hero, he takes it. With the sudden opportunity to better himself and his family, he wastes it. With some good production value from Universal, there’s a little more traditional plotting happening than at Paramount Pictures in 1934 (the place of his last film we saw, It’s A Gift) but Field’s fractured, unique approach to funny screenwriting is perfect onto himself: never before has one man been so besieged by everyday life and taken it so laconically.

As if he needed it, Fields is joined by an excellent supporting cast of comic supporting actors like Preston Sturges regular Franklin Pangborn as J. Pinkerton Snoopington, baby faced Grady Sutton as Og Oggilby, chorus girl Una Merkel and spinster Cora Witherspoon as Agatha and Myrtle Souse, and America’s least favorite stooge, Shemp Howard as Fields’ faithful bartender.

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From 1997 to 2000, Leonardo DiCaprio was the biggest movie star in the world thanks to a little sleeper called Titanic and every 12 year old girl who saw it 12 times each. By not starring in any movies during that period, he rode a rising tide of expectations for his next role as one in a series of many great roles to come. Then he starred in The Beach, a completely pointless exercise in Thai island cinematography. As an aimless jerk, DiCaprio travels to a secret island that’s an exclusive club apparently for underwear models, where everyone can party all day and all night and look fabulous. How boring is the dark secret behind this seeming paradise? More boring than you can possibly imagine, and not even really a secret. There’s actually sharks in the water, and that’s not even the dark secret. What dark secret is about to harsh Leo’s mellow buzz?

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If this hipster porn came out today it’d be a huge hit, and would still suck.

NEXT WEEK: SLAP SHOT (1977, GEORGE ROY HILL) & CRUISING (1980, WILLIAM FRIEDKIN)

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