Cuts Like a Machete

Grindhouse was the ode to 70's era exploitation movies Robert Rodriguez co-directed with Quentin Tarantino. Machete is the grindhouse movie Rodriquez promised but failed to deliver in his half of the twin-bill extravaganza. Machete which appeared in Grindhouse as a cheeky one-off trailer for a movie never made, is everything Rodriques' bloody but aimless Planet Terror is not. It is forward-paced kinetic thriller and classic 70's grindhouse actioner with plenty of bad(ass) dialogue and gratuitous nudity glommed on like so much icing on a cake.

Hatchet-faced Danny Trejo was born for this role as "one mad Mexican" who has a literal axe to grind with evil political operative Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) who double-crosses him while in the employ of evil Senator John McLaughlin (a thinly veiled John McCain), played with giddy, greasy slipperiness by Robert DeNiro, and under the thumb of the even more evil Steven Segal, who essays the paunchy but serenely venal power broker, Torrez.

Add to this savory stew a estrogen heavy dose of Michele Rodriguez as a tough mama amalgram of Cesar Chavez and Che Guevara and Jessica Alba as a sweet-faced Federal Agent who plays "beauty" to Trejo's machete wielding "beast."

The gratuitous nudity is delivered in a small but bracing dose by actress Mayra Leal as a naked chica who gives new meaning to "reaching out to touch someone" in the opening sequence. It is delivered in large, loopy, (hopefully) drug-induced gallops by former A-list actress Lindsay Lohan, who plays Jeff Fahey's wild-child daughter, and Alicia Rachel Marek, who plays Lohan's alcoholic mother. Lohan looks great naked but you can't help but wonder "WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?" when she agreed to take this role.

In one great set-piece, a character explains how the human body has twenty feet of small intestines right before Machete puts the knowledge to bloody and effective use. You'll never think of seven yards of guts in the same way again.

Machete the movie holds together better than most Robert Rodriquez movies, which often come off as half-baked despite great cinematic ingredients. One wonders whether to ascribe this Rodriguez or his credited co-director, Ethan Maniquis or, perhaps, even his co-writer, Alvaro Rodriguez. In any event, rarely has ten million dollars been better employed on the big screen.

~rave!

Wi-fi and other revelations

I have been busy as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.
Just completed a major move and moving is always been an
ordeal for me because I always try to drag fifty-four years of my
life with me. In fact, for eight years I lived in an undesirable sit-

uation (two break-ins in the last three years; horrible landlord;
worse neighbors) because I absolutely abhor moving.

This time I did a major purge, throwing away stuff I had been
toting around for thirty years. Still, there were hundreds of books
to move and scores of boxes to lug them in.

I threw away hundreds of video tapes. Turns out my late brother
and I were delusional, self-appointed archivists: we recorded
every episode of The Cosby Show and A Different World and
every movie we loved because we could not foresee a world where
Netflix would put anything we could possibly want to see at our
fingertips with a wi-fi connection.

I had boxes of old Jet magazines - all of which are available on-
line in their entirety.

Ditto for boxes of skin slick magazines collected during my sane
and sober youth - all content available on-line for a monthly fee
(although, there's nothing like the real thing, baby).

I did tote my hundreds of vinyl records and my thousands of CDs.
I did not tote my hundreds of cassette tapes and scores of 8-tracks
(although I did preserve a few).

It was a blast rediscovering books, magazines and photographs
that I had forgot I had (even though trips down memory lane
slowed down the moving process quite a bit - it took me three
weeks to move a three-story townhouse - if I ever ask you to help
me move - RUN!)

Lastly, I have been without a home wi-fi connection from
November 17th until yesterday (worse than Chinese water torture).

~(no)rave!

Bloom Day

Undercovers, J.J. Abrams new I Spy/He Spy/She Spy high concept espionage series is as improbable as it is watchable. Steven and Samanta Bloom (who despite being played by actors whose birth names are Boris Federic Cecil Tay-Natey Ofuatey-Kudjoe and Gugulethu Mbatha-Raw have character names that sound like they came straight out of James Joyce's Ulysses), are upscale caterers who used to be highly competent spies. They are called back into the game because an undercover operative has disappeared and in all the world these retired former spies, five years removed from their last assignment, are the only ones capable of handling this particular assignment.

I am willing to suspend belief and believe that five years ago the Blooms were elite covert operatives (despite the fact that actress Mbatha-Raw is only 27, which means she would have retired at the top of her spy game at 22) which makes it easy for me to appreciate the pure J.J. Abrams-ishness of Undercovers. Given carte blanche by the covert agency that covets their particular skill sets, the Blooms are able to globe trot while wearing great looking clothes.

With a single phone call to their star-struck, overly obsequious factotum (Ben Schwartz) the Blooms are able to parachute into Spain, France and Russia at the drop of a hat where their sudden appearance goes unnoticed because they also speak Spanish, French and Russian fluently.

As pure escapism, Undercovers is kind of a kick. For one, for once, although the leads are not of the Caucasian persuasion, no expense has been spared in making Undercovers look rich. Martha Stewart would die for the Blooms catering kitchen and I would die for the office/loft that overlooks said kitchen.

And the action, while occasionally derivative, steals from the best. When little bitty Mbatha-Raw has to hoist a big rocket launcher to stop a bad guy, it is reminiscent of Rae Dawn Chong doing the same thing in Commando and the couple stopping mid-caper to tango is right out of True Lies.

The married Blooms are probably improbably fond of each other but I rather liked that, too.

~rave!

The Socratic Method

I have been waiting eleven years for a follow-up to Walkin' the Dog, the second of Walter Mosley's profound and moving Socrates Fortlow short story collections. I devoured Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned in 1997 and voraciously consumed Dog in 1999. I am such a fan of Mosley's Fortlow novels that I find it incomprehensible that I missed the publication of The Right Mistake: the Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow (2008). And, yet, somehow I did. In a remarkably serendipitous "recommendations" e-mail from Amazon.com (received in the summer of 2010) I was advised of a hardcover edition of Mistake at a bargain price ($8.74) - less than both the paperback and e-book editions.

Some things are meant to be. Two years ago I may not have been in the proper frame of mind to fully appreciate the delicious irony and profound wisdom of something, anything, being the "right mistake." Today finds me not only in the right frame of mind but primed and ready to receive Fortlow's sad, savvy and always deeply human further investigations.

It is also somewhat fitting that I come into possession of the third book of the Fortlow trilogy in the fiftieth anniversary year of the publication of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. Atticus Finch (played in the movie of the same name by Gregory Peck) is To Kill a Mockingbird's most upright character, representing the moral ideal of both a lawyer and a human being: he is brutally honest, highly moral, extremely opinionated, a tireless crusader for good causes (even hopeless ones), a virtual pacifist and, for the most part, devoid of any of the racial or class prejudices afflicting the other citizens of fictional Maycomb, Alabama.

Finch goes to great pains to instruct his children on the importance of being open-minded, judicious, generous neighbors and citizens. He is eventually revealed to be an expert marksman, but he had chosen to keep this fact hidden from his children so that they would not in any way think of him as a man of violence. He was once the best shot in Maycomb County, but quit shooting because he felt he had an unfair advantage.

Now, Socrates Fortlow is everything Atticus Finch is - brutally honest, highly moral, extremely opinionated, a tireless crusader for good causes - and he is everything Finch is not. While Finch is better than his peers, a lawyer, a state representative, a loving father, Fortlow is the worst of us - a double murderer and a rapist. While Finch has been re-elected to the state legislature many times, often without opposition, Fortlow has spent twenty-seven years doing hard time for the crimes he committed. Finch is our highest ideal; Fortlow is nothing nice.

This is what makes Fortlow the greater literary creation.

When we first meet Fortlow in Outnumbered he is living in negative space, in a hallway between two burnt out furniture stores. His kitchen is "only big enough for a man and a half" and the second room, where he sat and slept, was no bigger. He has a card table for dining and a fold-up plastic chair for a seat. He cooked all his meals on a single hotplate and drank his beverages, mostly water, out of mayonnaise jars.

Fortlow is a man living off the grid. He is literally a man who has nothing and no one. But, from the opening pages of Outnumbered to the last pages of Mistake Fortlow does what he do - teaching life lessons, doing favors small and large, and gaining grace from his noble, selfless actions.

From the depths of depravity, Fortlow becomes the eminence grise of his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood - a journey movingly and memorably examined in The Right Mistake.

~rave!

El Sargento Negro

I know this is a day late and a dollar short but TMC had a Woody Strode marathon on yesterday.

Strode, an All-American athlete at UCLA (he played football with Jackie Robinson) was one of the first blacks to play in the NFL. He is probably best remembered for his brief Golden Globe-nominated role in Spartacus (1960) as the Ethiopian gladiator Draba, in which he fights Kirk Douglas to the death.

Strode played memorable villains opposite three screen Tarzans. In 1958, he appeared as Ramo opposite Gordon Scott in Tarzan's Fight for Life. In 1963, he was cast opposite Jock Mahoney's Tarzan as both the dying leader of an unnamed Asian country and that leader's unsavory brother, Khan, in Tarzan's Three Challenges. In the late 1960s, he appeared in several episodes of the Ron Ely Tarzan television series.

He became a close friend of director John Ford, who gave him the title role in Sergeant Rutledge (1960) as a member of the Ninth Cavalry falsely accused of rape and murder; he appeared in smaller roles in Ford's later films Two Rode Together (1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Seven Women (1966).

I watched Sergeant Rutledge, which contains some of the best and worst black characterizations I have ever seen on film juxtaposed against Ford's iconic Monument Valley tableaus, and Once Upon A Time in the West, a truly great spaghetti western directed by Sergio Leone and starring Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Jack Elam, Strode and Claudia Cardinale.

The opening shot of 6 foot four inch Strode from his boots to the top of his cowboy hat is worth the cost of admission.

Henry Fonda, as a truly evil man; Bronson, as a zen-like drifter, and Cardinale as a strong-willed frontier heroine, are all revelations.

~rave!

Dream Weaver

Viewing a movie in a darkened theater has long been called a shared dream experience. Christopher Nolan's Inception gives a whole new meaning to this idea; a notion he twists into pulse-quickening knots before turning the whole enterprise on its head - not once, not twice but three times - and then once again for good measure.

It is hard to quantify how good Inception is. It is a two and one half hour roller coaster ride with enough thrills and chills to keep you glued to your seat - when you are not perched on the edge of it. Inception is full of good actors doing good work, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

DiCaprio gives another fine performance confirming himself as "the actor" of his generation and, for anybody who hasn't already seen his indie work in films like The Lookout (2007), Levitt is surprisingly good. He gives a steely performance that is lean, sinewy and remarkably balletic. Add to this heady stew Oscar winner Marion Cotillard. She is chillingly affective as DiCaprio's dead wife and dream nemesis.

To the aforementioned trio, Nolan brings his favorite players from the Dark Knight franchise for which he is most famous. There is Michael Caine as DiCaprio's father-in-law and mentor, Cillian Murphy as the rich industrialist/mark, and Ken Watanabe as the murky client who sets the whole enterprise in motion.

Full of action and fantastic but seamlessly integrated and organically woven-in landscapes and dream-scapes, Inception is a cinematic recitation on artistic inspiration, the nature of dreams and questions about what is and is not real. We explore dreams, yours and mine, their necessity, their siren call and the dark, murky depths hidden just beneath.

It is mind-boggling and mind blowing and yet, at its core, it is a Hitchcockian story about love, lost and redemption that is both harrowing and heartwarming. Through it all, Nolan is our Morpheus, our dream-weaver, a benevolent and malevolent conductor who takes us on a mystical, magical tour of the dream world and all its environs.

~rave!

Fifty Years Old and 30 Million Strong

June 11, 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. A staple of English classes nationwide, the book has sold well in excess of 30 million copies and been translated into three dozen languages. The book continues to sell one million copies in the U.S. every year. I have yet to read To Kill A Mockingbird, a glaring gap in my cultural literacy, but I have seen the excellent movie directed by Robert Mulligan often and it pisses me off each and every time.

In acknowledgement of the golden anniversary of Harper Lee's magnum opus, I re-watched the movie this weekend and, once again, it irks me mightily that Tom Robinson, an innocent, upstanding black family man gets railroaded for a rape he did not commit - a rape that, in fact, did not even occur - and is subsequently shot dead "trying to escape" while Arthur "Boo" Radley, the white town idiot, commits murder, albeit altruistically, and walks away scott free. This, I am lead to believe, is a happy ending.

I think Harper Lee's only published novel continues to endure and prosper because most readers want to believe they are Atticus Finch, the principled lawyer who is the moral center of the novel. That, in fact, they are probably closer in thought and action to the drunken redneck Robert E. Lee "Bob" Ewell (who actually commits the crime for which Tom Robinson is tried and convicted) or, more charitably, to Walter Cunningham (the dirt poor farmer who begrudgingly pays off his legal debt to Finch with bags of nuts and other forms of barter) who allows himself to be coerced into the mob that converges on the courthouse to lynch Tom, notwithstanding.

They want to believe in a man as good and kind and decent as Atticus Finch, a man who refuses to judge any man less he has walked a mile in that man's shoes. They want to believe America, at its core, is as good as Atticus Finch. They want to believe that they, at their core, are as good as Atticus Finch. But while the road to Rome may have once been lined with hundreds of martyred men nailed to crosses and each proclaiming "I am Spartacus!" - there isn't, and never has been any profusion of men like Atticus Finch.

Fifty years out and thirty million copies sold and there remains precious few of us who would stand up in the face of withering opposition and do the right thing.

~(no)rave!