bats left (no, right), throws right (no, left)

My work is rarely to-the-minute, and I rarely consider when a piece will be read.  I started this post long before Covid-19 and the consequent postponing of the baseball season.  If it doesn't elevate, nor replace peanuts and Cracker Jack, it is, I hope, of interest.         

Over the winter, news of an actual MLB game to be played at the location for 1989's Field of Dreams (left) summoned one of the all-time film flubs: Shoeless Joe Jackson hitting right-handed.  Ray Liotta, playing Jackson, failed badly to hit left-handed despite pro coaches on set (per this New York Post interview).  Finally, Liotta was given permission to switch sides.  It doesn't explain why the filmmakers didn't prioritize accuracy from the start.

The 1919 White Sox added disgrace to poverty when they threw the World Series.  70 years on, the "Black Sox" were in the zeitgeist: 1988's Eight Men Out had D.B. Sweeney as Jackson.  According to MLB Radio's Ryan Spilborghs (in a special devoted to Bull Durham), the athletic motions in Eight Men Out are "terrible."  Even so, that Joe Jackson hit lefty, at least.  Filmmaking is tough, but faking a base hit is still easier than the real skill (hitting a round ball with a round bat).  Faking is Hollywood's job.

Shoeless Joe Jackson

It's not that Ray Liotta was perfect casting otherwise: he doesn't look or sound like Jackson, who was from South Carolina.  (Actually, Jackson looked more like top-billed Kevin Costner.)  The production makes matters worse in the field: Jackson threw right-handed, but Liotta's Jackson throws left-handed (again, the actor's preference).  Effectively, the switch draws the attention of anyone still oblivious.  (Field of Dreams also flips Moonlight Graham left to right as a batter, as the redemption-mad narrative grants a sympathetic washout his first big-league at-bat.)

Liotta as Jackson

Thus, we've had non-answers regarding Field of Dreams and its Bizarro World Joe Jackson.  As with Marco Rubio's awkward lunge (addressed here), the baseball flick's "epic fail" may be rooted in polarization trauma.

If so, the filmmakers added their own reason for anxiety.  Their message is memorably spoken by James Earl Jones (as author Terence Mann):

The one constant through all the years ... has been baseball.  America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers.  It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.  But baseball -- has marked the time.  This field, this game ... (is) a reminder of all that's good, and could be again.  

Fans can only forgive the script's worst sabotage: the school-auditorium meeting.  All the parents arguing for exclusion of Mann's indecorous book (from the school library) fit the Hollywood-and-Left stereotype: they're ignorant, resentful, repressed.  As Annie Kinsella, Amy Madigan warns them not to be like "the Nazis."  Just as young Ray (Costner) insulted his father (who died before Ray could apologize), the film picks a side from which to decry division.

Even with this regrettable scene, Field of Dreams delivered a plea for unity.  It went unheeded, but we should have self-mercy.  Polarization, I've come to believe, is part of the normal operation of the United States.  The owner of a high performance car should expect road noise and greater maintenance; a nation based in diversity, democracy and ambition is comparable.  (Reading on 3/27, this is ~trite.  But who makes it so?)

If we get twitchy around moves left and right, we need the distraction.  The existential unknown may be displaced to a Jack Nicholson movie: "what if this is as good as it gets?"  How would we ever react, to the honest conviction all our American plans are good for a laugh.

This blog doesn't feature comments, but I very much appreciate your reading.  

checkdown: Brooklyn's Finest (2009) score: 1.5 (of 4)

"Checkdown" is overheard lingo from American football: a play called at the line-of-scrimmage.  Thus, a checkdown review is relatively quick and rough, an attempted end-around perfectionism.  

Cheadle and Snipes posture in Brooklyn's Finest

A tragedy of Hollywood is that the established filmmaker may be subjected to more pressure than the first-time director.  It can ruin an otherwise well-made film, like this one by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Olympus Has Fallen).  That it fools some (6.7 IMDb) doesn't make it less ridiculous.

Brooklyn's Finest is about men, as portrayed by stars, those being Wesley Snipes, Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Richard Gere, even Will Patton.  Over the course of the film, the characters plan, allude to and are accused of transgressions,  but we hardly see them do bad.  Repeatedly, the movie stops short: Hollywood stars are notorious for demanding likable, admirable characters.

And so Snipes is a compelling drug kingpin, for whom an undercover Cheadle nobly bleeds, while Hawke's up-against-it cop can't quite grab the loot once he has the chance, and consequently winds up shot.  Hawke's edgy NYC detective also won't allow ethnic jokes at his poker game.  As for Richard Gere's character, he seems well-preserved and virile, for a disgraced alcoholic.  He remains a cop for the pension, but redeems himself saving abused women.

Apparently, writer Michael C. Martin and Fuqua couldn't fit a scene with a cat up a tree.    

Legion (1998 TV-movie) score: 2 (of 4)

** minor spoilers only **

Legion gets a nod in Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan by Fraser A. Sherman, so I braved a stuttery stream.  A modest Sci-Fi Channel production (not yet "Syfy" in 1998), the tale of future war is like a facetious episode of the contemporary Outer Limits.  It doesn't quite work, but with points of interest.

Terry Farrell in more familiar guise

Moonlighting from Deep Space 9, Terry Farrell is Major Agatha Doyle, who's tasked with leading a dirty-dozen military offenders against an enemy "fuel processing plant" in a civil war for the solar system.  Her platoon of "scum" all have the requisite vital specialties and tragic backstories, e.g., Parker Stevenson's an officer cashiered for desertion.  There are multiple psychopaths (one a needle addict), a saboteur fragger, and a colorful distaff column: a nympho traitor, a rape-revenge case, and a religious fanatic.

Farrell doesn't convince as a hard-bitten officer, but it's partly the script: Doyle is so one-note tough, I suspected she was an android.  An interesting cast also includes Rick Springfield and Trevor Goddard.  Corey Feldman may be cast to type, but he gives a lazy, selfish performance as a (brainy) con.

The team starts 10-strong, and as they split up for patrol, the viewer may conflate.  Most turn out to have been falsely accused and/or acting in self-defense, suggesting the script/movie might've started as a pilot.

These heart-of-gold badasses don't know just what they're fighting, except that it's big and bad and leaves piles of uniformed corpses behind.  Once revealed, the foe makes an impression (less so, for those who've glimpsed the box art), but Legion takes too long getting there.  Worse, there's little progressive learning, though the viewer may triangulate from the premise, title, and Troy Donahue's character.

In a mystery-thriller, half the fun is matching wits with the protagonists as they strategize.  Without intell, Farrell in particular is left hanging, as Doyle incongruously agonizes over her fitness to command.  The all-at-once ending seemed confusing -- or maybe I checked out.   

These flaws could have been fixed, rather easily; it may've been (self-) sabotage.  While the film superficially resembles Space: Above and Beyond,  the relatively gung ho Fox series, these Legion-aires are entirely victims of their own command.  This cheeseburger of a TV-movie dares portray an American military on imperial business (pointedly, the flag is unseen until a likely suicide errand).  Even when tongue-in-cheek, subversive content draws flak.

War Machine (2017) rating: 3 of 4

War Machine is a dramatization of Michael Hastings' book about the Afghanistan war, The Operators (which expanded the 2010 Rolling Stone piece, "The Runaway General").  This film is welcome evidence Hollywood is still capable of satire (after Southland Tales, American Dreamz, The Joneses, Salvation Boulevard and Butter).

Brad Pitt as"MacMahon"

General Glen McMahon -- Brad Pitt, playing a cartoonish version of Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- seems more concerned with projecting affirmative masculinity than strictly military objectives.
It's a funny turn: ready with a buzzword, McMahon has a hilarious, stiff gait even when jogging.  Brow perpetually furrowed, his hands claw for odd emphasis.  But he rarely loses his temper, leaving it to a sycophantic posse.

As commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, his job isn't so much waging war as lobbying governments.  As said by a German official (Tilda Swinton in a lucid cameo), careerism renders  McMahon oblivious to whether American goals in the region make any sense.  When a U.S. soldier vents about the surreal conflict where medals are given for "courageous restraint," the general tells him "get un-confused."

The overall tone is sadly wry.  Though well-acted, some of the supporting characters smack of manipulation: the visiting wife (Meg Tilly) would be equally lonely during a necessary war; Ben Kingsley appears as the corrupt puppet-ruler of Afghanistan, but we don't see Hamid Karzai before the dubious office.

The pivotal scene is an airplane encounter between McMahon and Pat Mackinnon (Alan Ruck as a fictionalization of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry).  After one-or-more drinks, Mackinnon breaks down the general's task:

You're not here to win, you're here to clean up the mess ... (to) show everyone ... a nicer set of graphs.  Either that, or get yourself fired.  

These lines, along with McMahon's lack of "face time" with the president, illuminate the casual disrespect, reported by Hastings, of those up the chain of command.  Of course, President Obama soon fired McChrystal.

When a person or group consistently fails to achieve stated goals, we should question the desire to succeed.  Despite its wit and value as history, War Machine is ultimately disingenuous, in assuming American shortfalls in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East are problematic ... for anyone other than soldiers and the host nations (the word "insanity" is prominent). The opposite may be true, in the context of U.S. global dominance and, especially, the Pentagon's yearly allowance of over $500 billion.

underseen for Halloween 2019, Part 3: The Doctor and the Devils (1985)

(spoilers throughout)

           Roger Ebert called The Doctor and the Devils “unredeemed, dreary, boring, gloomy dreck.”  It is gloomy.  It's also mournfully distinctive, for this writer, and beautifully produced, both painterly and disgusting.  The last helps earn the horror tag, though it’s as much a period dramatization.  It's a based-on-truth Frankenstein movie.     

 from Shout! Factory

Despite the billing, the focus is the working class.  In early-19th century Britain, outdated mores forced a black market in fresh cadavers (for medical research), when the enterprising Fallon (Jonathan Pryce) and Broom (Stephen Rea) take up shovels.  Before it's done, at least one is a serial-killer avant la lettre.  Their patron is Dr. Thomas Rock (Timothy Dalton), a progressive surgeon secure in his own virtue.  Rounding the eclectic cast are Julian Sands (who’d become a minor horror star) as a naif who falls for a bleak-minded whore (played by ‘60s model Twiggy), with Patrick Stewart as Rock’s fuming rival.

The milieu may evoke Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (and Michael Radford’s), though the Orwellian hell is government surveillance, which could've helped here.  Also, we may recall Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and true-crime biopics like In Cold Blood.  As were the The Body-Snatcher (1945) and The Flesh and the Fiends (1960), The Doctor and the Devils was inspired by the real Burke and Hare, suppliers to one Dr. Knox.  (Fiction can’t improve on the names.)  

Mostly, this film gets mixed reviews.  On Slant, Chuck Bowen ends a mostly positive review thus:

The Doctor and the Devils shares Rock’s problem: decrying the state of humanity while displaying precious little of its own.   

the Fox release

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson charges Freddie Francis with indifference:

there's no indication of a director doing anything more than illustrating a script. … this picture just plays out in a flat line. It's handsome and intelligent, but it doesn't grab us.

Well, it’s a hothouse flower.  Still, degrees of success shouldn’t prevent wonder at what's attempted: it's a rare film that disclaims Manichaeism, portraying modernity as an exploitation matrix.  (It seems hard to deny; I've written of our moral entanglement, as in this essay on The Sopranos.)  

The film's pedigree is impressive, and instructive.  Poet Dylan Thomas's screenplay was a pre-Black List item, unproduced for 30 years.  Producer Mel Brooks reportedly wanted major changes, but director Francis lobbied for a faithful adaptation, leading to revisions by Ronald Harwood.  

Harwood, best known for The Dresser, also wrote a series of plays and films about 20^th century celebrities in relation to Nazi Germany, including The Pianist.  The Doctor and the Devils contains intimations of genocide, as do The Elephant Man and The Fly, other Mel Brooks productions.  (Of course, Mr. Brooks is Jewish.  He served in the U.S. military during World War II, later daring to make The Producers.)
             As Jim Knipfel describes on den of geek, several narrative films stay reasonably close to Burke and Hare.  Accuracy aside, and even with a tacked-on reprieve for the Twiggy character, The Doctor and the Devils is the least pandering version.  The others carefully delineate characters from viewers, as in casting the doctor: in The Flesh and the Fiends it's Peter Cushing, already known as Dr. Frankenstein, and it's uber-unnerving Henry Daniell in The Body-Snatcher (in an insipid subplot, Daniell initially refuses a disabled girl a needed operation).  Thriller "The Innocent Bystanders" (1962) is disgraceful, as it exaggerates a story that's terrible to begin with.  In each of these, one of the killers is made a (literal) moron, and a prominent victim, a beautiful woman.   

The Doctor and the Devils skips the doctor's noble, half-false confession (another trope), leaving him haunted by memories and conscience.  And if Dr. Rock was willfully ignorant of the origins of same-day deliveries, are we so different?  
             

The three films reviewed in these Halloween 2019 posts are prophetic works, and have been knocked about: It’s Alive was dumped by Warner Brothers, but Larry Cohen persevered, and it became a hit three years after initial release.  Both Vampire Circus and The Doctor and the Devils suffered late cuts.  The critics hedge, e.g., Danny Peary condemns It’s Alive for a “shameful premise.”  According to Peter Nichols, “Vampire Circus isn’t so much a good film as a good bad film” (whatever that means). 

However different in style — having the aspect of Fellini-gazing horror, grindhouse sick-joke, and PBS adaptation — the films share a moral perspective.  They lack villains, excepting the vampires (who only do-what-vampires-do), and heroes, vessels for the innocence of viewers.  If they overreach — if The Doctor and the Devils is self-serious, Vampire Circus, a bit overfed, and if Larry Cohen made a motion picture about an action figure — prophets also self-sabotage.  He wants to protect his culture, almost as much as he wants to damn it.

underseen for Halloween 2019, Part 2: the It's Alive trilogy (1973-86)

ballyhoo: "one thing wrong ... It's Alive"

(Spoilers throughout.)

               20^th century history seemed to destabilize, with new technologies, mass migrations, and a range of time-limited phenomena from rock n’ roll to genocide.  Industrialization, effectively, made us test subjects.  The fluctuations called for nervous parody. 

Larry Cohen, the late exploitation auteur, typically used high-concept as a stalking horse, building a provocative film around some scary-funny threat (e.g., revived Aztec god Q, addictive dessert The Stuff).  Recalling the shock of a baby’s tantrum, Cohen invented a movie-monster for the cocooning, post-Vietnam U.S.: homicidal infants.  Cradled in a Bernard Herrmann score, the blunt-headed metaphor remains morbidly funny (for some of us) half-a-century later.

The first and best of a trilogy, It’s Alive (1973) is the singular fertility narrative of Frank and Lorene Davis (the first-names evoke horror history).  Suburban and white, they’re habituated to television, prescription pills and cow’s milk — a motif, as when the Carnation man becomes prey — and live in California, where trends start.  Americans believe in “progress," and the new parents seem fairly indifferent to causes.  The smartly satiric horror film ends dropping-the-mic: “Another one’s been born in Seattle.” 

toughest job in the world ...

While acknowledging the comic angle, It’s Alive centers on John P. Ryan’s titanic performance as Frank Davis, as he's betrayed by friends and fate.  Still, he can’t erase his issue.  His Job-like travails deliver twin themes for the franchise: Americans have become fatalistic; the parent-child bond is nearly unbreakable.  The themes mutually reinforce, e.g., repeated speculation the mutants have superior resistance to pollution, similar to the children in These Are the Damned.

The series is less interested in the babies than in society’s reactions.  As in Night of the Living Dead, most characters are comically quick-to-adjust.  As writer-director of the trilogy, Cohen favors canted-angle shots of figures darting here and there: the “normal” characters are as flighty and reflexive as the babies.  If the sequels are less nimble than the original, and repetitive, that might also be the point. 

It Lives Again (1978) posits a hidden colony, for humane study.  Despite help from new dad Frederic Forrest, the rogue pediatricians are themselves too geriatric to manage their charges.  Meantime, the genetic shuffling seems to multiply, e.g., a birthday party where tykes crawl under low branches, and the birthday-girl looks like a  boy.  The location is a memorably cinematic hillside, symbol of the scramble for supremacy.

           The babies are unnerving (models designed by Rick Baker), but the filmmakers never solved movement.  Granted, the babies do more in the third film, but in the commentaries, Cohen cites Val Lewton, in saying both sequels showed too much.  Tone was a challenge, too: the premise is inherently funny, but Cohen wanted monster movies, first, so each suspenseful scene has to be (a little) funny, and vice versa.  He masters tone for the first two, but the third unravels, perhaps from anxiety over the series' misanthropic overtones.   

In the larkish It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1986), a new regime gives the babies an island to themselves.  Of course, these are babies, and the reparation is folly (compare A Clockwork Orange).  This time, the tragic dad is Steven Jarvis (Michael Moriarty, pre-Law and Order), a struggling actor with an antic sense of humor.  He takes to grandly introducing himself as “father of the monster.” 

Disillusioned with community — the movie begins in church, courtroom and '80s comedy club — Jarvis signs on for an expedition to the baby-island (Hawaii locations).  It’s Alive III becomes a stoner comedy, as Jarvis loses any interest in the social contract: imagine Apocalypse Now if Willard (Martin Sheen) and the photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) were one person. 

It’s Alive III isn’t the inspired lunacy of Cohen and Moriarty’s Q, but has its charms, as the latter sings sea shanties, threatens to defect, and muses on the babies’ telepathic potential.  The story defaults to an ending from midcentury space-invasions: an everyday element as deus ex machina.  Still, the viewer is free to imagine a next generation with stronger resistance.
           Nature gave "Larry's kids" a biting chance, whether or not in response to our behavior.  Pollution, abortion, and medication usage are only a few of the troubling associations.  Easier to miss: clawed and fanged babies are kin to Wolverine, Freddy Krueger, Ninja Turtles foe Shredder, and now, "baby sharks."  Like superheroes as a class, such forearmed characters may allude to narcissism, which seems increasingly common, even adaptive.  (If Americans dislike narcissists, why elect them president?)
            Larry Cohen died in March, aged 82.  In assembling an impressive (if spotty) body of work, he had the disarming knack for seeming less subversive than he was.  He's been deceptively influential, witness the Cohenesque likes of Gremlins, They Live, The Addiction, even Velvet Buzzsaw.  He also pioneered movie franchising, in devising Return of the Magnificent Seven, Hell Up in Harlem (sequel to his Black Caesar), and the Maniac Cop series.
            Like those films, the It's Alive trilogy helped validate small-budget, self-referential sequels, like the “dead” series of George Romero and Sam Raimi.  In having scientists study the mutants, the sequels are comparable to Children of the Damned, Day of the Dead and Terminator Salvation.  Finally, as in various franchises, notably the contemporaneous Planet of the Apes cycle, we're shown key engagements in what may be a global revolution. 

underseen for Halloween, 2019: Vampire Circus (1972)

These Halloween posts accumulate more hits than the others combined (my thanks to all who've read).  It seems to have provided inspiration, resulting in enough text for (a planned) three posts, the last for All Soul's.    

  

On usage: "underseen" can be contested, of course, but these titles merit attention amid a wealth of choices.  

Spoilers throughout.

Vampire Circus (1972)

he may know a way out ...

While more of an art film, and closer to didactic than Hammer’s usual line, Vampire Circus is typically sumptuous in evoking an indeterminate past.  It has a liquid quality, like stepping into a river.  It seduces the viewer, as Count Mitterhaus seduces Anna, and Emil, Rosa.

 “a hundred delights!  the Circus of Nights!” 

Vampire Circus caps the horrific-circus/carnival trend of midcentury: Shadow of a Doubt, Nightmare Alley, Circus of Horrors.  In being seasonal, on the edge of town, the Dark Carnival stands for a liminal threat, possibly genocide.  Of its title ruin, dialogue in Carnival of Souls says, "The law has placed it off-limits."  This pavilion is contrasted with what is "safe," "reasonable" and "seemly."  Shtettel (the spelling varies), the town in Vampire Circus, is Yiddish for “town.” 

Another trope, with similar meaning, has survivors crossing paths with perpetrators, as in The Seventh Victim, Seven Men from Now, The Last House on the Left and Eden Lake.  Here, both terms apply to both groups, humans and vampires. 

Vampire Circus is tough on Anglo-Americans, its trigger-sin crouched in our blind spot.  The townsfolk can be deceitful and waspish, but their damning trait is division.  They’ve had time: after the execution of bloodsucker Mitterhaus, 15 years pass before vengeance -- modernity descends -- as half the town decides vampires don’t exist. 

“We make our own luck.”

Early rationalists, Dr. Kersh and schoolteacher Mueller scoff at the notion of vampires.  The teacher is an intellectual feather: after losing his family and killing Mitterhaus, he reverts to scientism, but still can say of the circus folk, “they are death.”  Later, he redeems himself, by believing in what he can’t understand. 

Divisions between men tend to leave a divided population.  Inevitably, an opposing residence becomes hostile territory, as couples and families assume entitlement to (toxic) privacy.  Parents become unaccountable, then suspect.  Thus, the revolutionary insight of Vampire Circus: estrangement from traditional religion as a cause of sexual frustration.

The town’s young adults also assume a type of rabies to be the only plague.  (Indeed, rabies may be the origin of vampire lore: science and folklore interrelate, despite attempts at segregation.)  Only as the skeptics recover faith (intellectual humility) can the town defend itself.  The humility should be in the context of a supernatural: it's too easy to own ignorance if never actually wrong.  

“it’s not life, just distortions …”

the protean Serena

Filmed narratives about demonic encroachment don't necessarily specify demons, e.g., Circle of Fear "Earth, Air, Fire and Water," Twin Peaks.  The horror films of John Carpenter assume a force of pure evil, malignant to humanity.  In both Prince of Darkness and Vampires, the Catholic Church is uneasy ally of the protagonists.  Carpenter is an atheist, but his movies at least flirt with the idea of the Church as hedge against something even worse.  

Like Twin Peaks, Shtettel seems to have no church, and everyone’s lying to someone.  After her son is snatched from danger, the mayor’s wife kisses the rescuer, humiliating her husband.  A splinter group negotiates passage from the barricaded town, and is killed.  Dora, Mueller’s surviving daughter, is safely “in the city,” but journeys home unannounced and unescorted.  Rosa’s mother keeps her daughter’s secret, the affair with Emil.  

Two boys sneak to the circus after hours, joining those snared by the hall of mirrors.  (If funhouse reflections are a door to evil, it questions my daily, four-hour gaze.)  These vampires are magicians and shapechangers, with an (unremarked) immunity to sunlight, and implied psychic powers (the film gets choppy late, reportedly from budget cuts).   

Kersh slips the barricade but, unlike Ivy in The Village, gets revelation.  Now, unanimous belief in vampires gives the townsmen a fighting chance: "Without a vision [no plurality] the people perish."  Shtettel has the advantage of a common heritage, including a recent (cultural) memory of faith.  Still, those attempting “a new kind of nation” should gird for failure.  

“If your wife’s in there, maybe she wanted to go.”  

The film's beginning is both mythic and horrifying: Anna Mueller's fall isn’t frightening, but we know the horrible has happened.  Though soon interrupted, her debauch leaves no doubt why she'd bring her daughter for slaughter.  Here, evil is thrilling and erotic; this isn’t soft-serve Schindler’s List or 12 Years a Slave.

The ending, which is too busy, reveals the circus-leader to be a disguised Anna, even as she saves Dora.  Despite this partial redemption, Anna made the town a target, by placing personal desire above commitments to (original) family and tribe.   

Some films are social-critically present to the point of (evidently) crippling the careers of filmmakers, including Freaks, Sweet Smell of Success, Peeping Tom, Dirty Little Billy, Ganja and Hess and The Sopranos.  The pattern may help to explain the obscurity of the Vampire Circus duo, director Robert Young and screenwriter Judson Kinberg.  Their film attempts to collapse the walls between art and entertainment, sensation and narrative, the erotic and the dramatic.