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Incompetent Killer of Incompetent Killers.

He’s a BLADE RUNNER. He hunts Replicants – robots that resemble humans. And he’s terrible at his job.

Deckard (Harrison Ford) is regarded as the indomitable hero of BLADE RUNNER, especially since his captain (M. Emmett Walsh) pulls him out of retirement to do a job that his best officer failed at doing – “retire” four Replicants illegally in the city.

The city – is Los Angeles, 2019. Hey, that was last year! Where’s my flying car?…

But re-watch this movie with an objective eye, and discover that this supposed hard guy – considered the best “Blade Runner” by his police captain – should have been dead meat at the hands of almost every one of his robot victims, if it weren’t for the intervention of others or the haphazard manner the robots toyed with their prey.

Yes, Deckard is the hero, and every hero must necessarily be brought low to rise again (the Hero’s Journey) but Deckard does not go through any existential crisis when he is beaten by the robots – no, he is beaten in a simplistic way at each robot interaction, until some intervention occurs that allows him to triumph. In the Philip K. Dick novel (Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?), from which this movie lifts many ideas and discards even more, Deckard does question his expertise, his job, his marriage and his social status at many points, but screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples straightened out the complexities of the novel, which allowed director Ridley Scott to invent cyberpunk…

Geez, they let anyone into this party if they wear a bow tie!

Truly, the world Scott forges from book pages that never describe the mise en scѐne is the real stunning genius of this psychedelic day-mare work of art. Dick is more concerned with the noir detective story integrated with futuristic moral dilemmas; whilst Ridley concerns himself with integrating a simplified detective story into a tapestry of raging visual gluttony. I doubt even Dick would have envisioned what Scott brings to screaming life on the screen. This vision of the future is not so much gorgeous as stifling; everything we see onscreen is “futuristic” – from building facades to room designs, from guns to computers, vehicles and street peripherals – yet run-down, beaten into age; skyscraper-sized holographic ads, flying cars and neon storefronts, tilted tech-noir buildings crowding in on themselves, iron streets dank with steaming rain, filthy rusted alleyways, poverty and huddling food shops; above the chaotic cityscape, factories spew flames as gliding police cars slowly slink through the fog; claustrophobic colors and catastrophic beauty… (If you want to see where Luc Besson stole his vision for THE FIFTH ELEMENT, look no further.)

Nominated for Oscars and winning BAFTAs for Production Design, Art Design and Cinematography, BLADE RUNNER’s scenic impact alone raises it light years above the engine-pit of “futuristic” sci fi actioners of the age, like SOYLENT GREEN, LOGAN’S RUN or ROLLERBALL with their bland plastic élan. Scott had just helmed ALIEN (1979) with the same age-worn, rugged production design, and his art directors and effects mavens here create not just a world, but an environment where Dick’s story would authentically take place.

BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT (released in 2007) is the director’s vision realized without studio intervention. Not only does it completely excise Harrison Ford’s superfluous voiceover narration, it re-edits the film in subtle ways, to cast doubt on Deckard’s origin. Since this version’s release, Ridley Scott maintains that Deckard is a Replicant. Harrison Ford says he isn’t. And it is our job to discern who has the fake memories…

Only the lower classes are cursed to remain on the abandoned Earth, while most humans of any means have moved off-world with their Replicant aides. After the new Nexus-6 Replicants, impossible to distinguish from humans, rebel in an offworld colony, Replicants are outlawed on Earth. Now four Replicants, led by Nexus-6 “combat model” Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) have infiltrated Earth, seeking their creator in the Tyrell Corporation, to extend their four-year lifespan – a failsafe mechanism built into them.

Blade Runners use the empathy test known as Voight-Kampff, to identify Replicants, which involves the subject’s cooperation in sitting and taking the test – probably the weak link in the process – as the first Replicant discovered (Brion James as Leon) kills his interrogator when the questions get too revealing.

Deckard is called in, and his boss gives him just a little too much information that he should already know – I mean, does the best Blade Runner need to be told the basics of Replicant behavior?

Perfect beauty. What every man wants in a sex doll.

Deckard first visits Tyrell himself (Joe Turkel), who asks Deckard to test his salubrious female assistant Rachael (Sean Young). Deckard unwittingly discovers she is the next step in Replicant development – as Tyrell boasts, “more human than human” – a model with implanted memories, who thinks she is human. And Deckard gets moist. (Distracted by the first pretty robot face he sees. See? Bad at his job.)

Probably the only canny detective work Deckard performs in this movie is to identify a snake scale that leads him to Replicant Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) – a singer who shows him her tits to distract him, then beats him down (see? bad at his job). Why she leaves him alive is conjecture, but it allows him the chance to shoot her in the back, in one of the film’s iconic scenes – the “woman” in the transparent mac breaking through walls of glass as she falls. (I quote “woman” because in the Theatrical release, it is clearly a man-dancer with stubble who takes the fall, while FINAL CUT neatly replaces Cassidy’s face onto the stuntman, and somehow edits the fall so as not to look like a man’s muscled arms and legs.)

Leon gets the drop on Deckard and thrashes him like a red-headed step-child (see? bad at his job), and is about to gouge out his eyes — when Rachael shoots Leon in the head. So now he “owes one” to a robot! He tells Rachael if she runs, he won’t come after her. (Man, can this guy get any worse at his job?)

Deckard tracks down the “pleasure model” Pris (Daryl Hannah) who head-locks him in glamour thighs, about to twist his head off (because – refrain: bad at his job), until she simply releases him and goes into an acrobatic routine that allows Deckard to shoot her in the back. This guy is — terrible at his job!

If you gotta go, I can think of worse ways than betwixt shaved thigh.

Firstly, if Deckard was skilled at all in surveillance, he wouldn’t let the robots get the drop on him; secondly, if he is grabbed (which is, let’s face it, all the time, because, yeh, bad at job), he has no particular set of skills to extricate himself from their superhuman grasp. So no evasive skills and no defensive skills; his one resort is to stand there and get bitchbeaten.

Maybe this guy should get a desk job?

Ultimately he must meet the Aryan-blond, sinister, muscular Roy Batty, who we’ve followed as he tracked down Tyrell only to discover that nothing can be done to extend his life. So he’s in a mood when Deckard confronts him. In an eccentric game of cat and mouse, Batty breaks two of Deckard’s fingers (sigh, need I say it again?), then toys with Deckard as he beats on him (and again?), Deckard finding himself hanging from a ledge (what a surprise!) from his two broken fingers, which he cannot maintain – so let’s himself drop! (sooo bad at his job!) — only to have Batty save him by grabbing his arm and bodily lifting him to safety.

Let’s face it: no matter the eye-warping production design and ominous techno-glaze soundtrack by Vangelis, no matter the visionary thrust of the mise en scѐne, which is the singular driving factor that leans this movie into immortality, Deckard should have been dead ten times over by this point…

Heeere’s Batty!

Velvet-voiced Harrison Ford was a supernova at this time – hot off THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. So we took his primacy for granted, but this story really made him look quite… impotent. Until he forced himself on Rachael – in a dominant-submissive scenario that would make twitter crap its vagina in this gutless pc age. On the other hand, this movie put the striking Dutchman Rutger Hauer on the American map with his wild-eyed power performance; Sean Young in her first leading role, and Edward James Olmos tooling around the middle-background as a snarky, icy-eyed deputy monitoring Deckard’s kills.

During Batty’s final monologue, Deckard is a helpless lamb, driving rain streaming down his aghast face, simply gazing wordlessly at Batty, who has learned his quest for longer life was futile, and so let’s his engine run down in a flush of introspection: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.”

Deckard looks sad, introspective himself, as the rain belts down his face. With no narration in this FINAL CUT, we are open to speculate on the allegories and metaphors of the final battle: When his hand involuntarily clenched on itself, Batty drives a nail through it to keep it open — Jesus? Intimating he is the superior, godlike version of man? Batty catching Deckard only after he let go — demonstrating free will? Demonstrating the robot’s HUMANITY? Demonstrating that Deckard is terrible at his job? The dove released at the moment of his death — his soul ascending? Dove signifying he is at peace with himself for his final act? The whole theme of this story – inherent in Dick’s novel and expanded in the movie – is divining that line that makes humans human and robots Replicant. And if a Replicant were to illustrate that it could cross that line, how sinful then were its creators to build it with a less-than-human lifespan? Roy Batty, in his final act, in every way, proved he was more man than Deckard…

more human than human…

END

Up against The Wall.

Veteran stockbroker Gordon Gekko wakes upstart stockbroker Bud Fox in the middle of the night with a phone call, to remind him the Hong Kong markets are open: “Money never sleeps, pal!”

WALL STREET is a powerful albeit slightly cheesy look at the inside of insider trading. Co-writer/ director Oliver Stone, with his characteristic insider knowledge on his filmic subject, conveys another wider world out there that we are not always privy to; amongst the cloying office environments, frenetic relationships and insecure personalities, the people of Wall Street do that mysterious thing they do with imaginary money that isn’t theirs – illegally, unethically and with a plastic 80’s soundtrack.

Bud (Charlie Sheen) is a hungry young stockbroker in a bull pen who dreams of breaking out into something more substantial. Like TWO AND A HALF MEN. Rampant charging corporate bull Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is on the pedestal Bud would like to inhabit. Through persistence, Bud gets a five-minute meeting with Gekko, to try and land a position as broker for him. Gekko is unimpressed – until Bud lets slip some “insider information” about an airline company that piques Gekko’s buy-and-chop-up instincts.

Bud’s dad, Carl (coincidentally, Martin Sheen) is a union boss at that airline, which is how Bud “just knew” it was ripe for the picking. The elder Sheen brings a stately ease to his role, paternally looking down his nose at Sheen The Younger, both in real life and in character, calling him a “salesman” when Bud insists he is an “account executive, soon to move onto investment banking.” When young Bud asks Carl for a loan, Carl inquires of Bud’s $50K Manhattan job, “Where does it all go?” Bud breaks down his payments on car, apartment, suits, etc. to make him look like the richie he aspires to be, ironically adding, “There is no nobility in poverty any more, dad.”

WALL STREET truly is a snapshot of WASP life in the 80s; young fantasizers throwing themselves into the river and hoping they don’t sink. It’s ultimately what we’ve all become used to doing with our lines of credit and the powerful agitprop of capitalistic culture. Wall Street: convincing Americans that in order to grow your money you have to risk it. And dumb cluck Americans buying into the Orwellian dream.

Gekko is under no illusion how he retains his 1% status. He tells the naive Bud that insider trading (the corrupt kind) is the difference between riding in a private jet and owning a private jet. He’s brash (“I’ll talk atcha!”), he spouts the most amusing axioms (“A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place”); he rationalizes his unethical practices (“Money itself isn’t lost or made. It’s simply transferred from one perception to another”); he coaches Bud in Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War. In essence, Gekko tempts Bud like a modern Mephistopheles, gradually claiming more and more of Bud’s soul, as Bud acquiesces to performing more dangerous and fevered favors for Gekko in the pursuit of treasure. I’m sure TWO AND A HALF MEN was not part of the equation…

No matter how big of a dog you think you are – there’s always a bigger dog. The dog bigger than Gekko is Terence Stamp as Sir Larry Wildman. He’s richer, scarier and Britisher. Gekko puts Bud on Wildman’s tail for inside info, exploiting Bud’s hunger and rewarding him with riches.

WALL STREET is the same parable espoused in TRADING PLACES (1983): engage in insider trading, lose your shirt. That is, being drunk on power makes you as likely to screw up and go to jail as being drunk on alcohol. Bud’s downfall looms as he moves into a swank penthouse apartment (decorating it in 80’s Gaudy), scores a sophisticated blonde, Darien (Daryl Hannah), and develops a penchant for preparing sushi for dinner. His hubris would lead him to try brokering a deal to chop up the small airline company where his father is a union boss.

Of course, the downfall of the padawan presages the downfall of the Master…

By the late 80s, it was established that the richest 1% in America “owns half the country.” Gordon Gekko would make a speech that would become infamous for the catch-phrase “Greed is good,” making it seem as 80s-dated as Adam Ant, but the speech is relevant in 2011 for various reasons. The opening phrase, “You do it right – or you get eliminated” is still the model for everyone in business – except for the corporate dishonest who do it wrong and still get rewarded (the “Too Big to Fail” asshats).

It is ominous that even back then, director Stone and corporate raiders were acknowledging that the USA was run by corporations; what they couldn’t predict was that greed would not save the corporate model but set it up for takeover by other countries with a better grasp on capitalism.

…The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be Survival of the Unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right – or you get eliminated… I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies and cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward search of mankind, and greed – you mark my words – will not only save Teldar paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
— Gordon Gekko, WALL STREET.

Will that “malfunctioning corporation” ever learn its lesson when there’s a steal-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich bailout around every corner?

In the end, both Gekko and Bud have met their downfall, Gekko ending up in jail and Bud ending up in TWO AND A HALF MEN.

END

Bridal Power.

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
— William Congreve, “The Mourning Bride” (1697).

The second installment of Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL masterpiece blasts in with “Chapter Six”– Yes, a movie starting at Chapter Six is audacious enough, but this chapter itself is a flashback to the events that engined the revenge of VOLUME 1 – the previous film. Audacity, genius, or insanity?

chapter six: massacre at two pines

DAUGHTER TO THE SLAUGHTER! Assassin Beatrix Kiddo aka The Bride (Uma Thurman) attends her wedding rehearsal with her redneck fiancé (who looks like Bobcat Goldthwait) at Two Pines Chapel, when Bill (David Carradine) unexpectedly appears. We learn, though cryptic dialogue, that Bill is the leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, of which The Bride was a member, that he is The Bride’s ex-lover, and that the baby she is gravid with is his. To Bobcat, she introduces Bill as her father (and we see a “surprised” look cross Carradine’s face that is simultaneously hilarious and a testament to his acting prowess).

Then the rest of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (Michael Madsen, Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah) enters the chapel and guns down everyone.

With this wedding, The Bride aka Black Mamba wanted out of the Squad, but, like all assassins, her boss would not let her leave with her life.

And KILL BILL VOLUME 2 continues its mad dash for gory…

chapter seven: the lonely grave of paula shultz

ANOTHER NAIL… Flashforward from the end of Chapter 1 in the last film. Keeping up, pagans? Having disposed of O-Ren Ishii and Vernita Fox, The Bride goes after Budd aka Sidewinder (Madsen)–

And I have a problem with her method.

After all her expertise, after knowing her wily enemy, after all the skulking to deal a death blow efficiently, she stupidly flings his trailer door open and rushes headlong into a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Quentin, you do us an injustice! Are we to believe The Bride could be that girly-silly? Further, Budd does not simply shoot her dead, but buries her alive in the manner of a Batman villain. Will she escape? Doi…

chapter eight: the cruel tutelage of pai mei

COCKY CHOP SOCKY! Flashback to The Bride’s training by an overcheesed Chinese sensei ripped from the reels of old kung fu cinema. Master Pai Mei is Chia Hui Liu (he played Johnny Mo in VOLUME 1!) so it’s quite laughably obvious he is a young guy with old guy makeup. But with Liu’s eccentric, sarcastic performance, the audacity works!

Tarantino leaches and grains the filmstock to make it look like those trashy 1970’s kung fu films; wirework, superhuman disciplines and Pai Mei’s cruel swishing of his footlong beard.

chapter nine: elle and i

EYE-EYE! The Bride takes one step closer to Bill by meeting the eye-patched Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) head-on. Here again we marvel at fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping’s inventiveness, as what could have been just another samurai fight is transformed into a scrabbling, punching, trash-filled mêlée in the confined space of Budd’s trailer. Elle continually tries to unsheathe her sword and bangs it on the roof and walls, while the camera itself seems to fight for space to film the hand-to-hand blonde-on-blonde. And we eventually “see” the pun in the title of this chapter…

last chapter: face to face

KILLING BILL. The Bride has come a long way for just this vengeful, bloody moment and finds – her daughter B.B. (Perla Haney-Jardine), thought dead, happily playing with Bill.

And before we can forget that Tarantino is the master of making mundane dialogue sound compelling and nerve-wracking, Bill launches into monologue after monologue. He speaks of B.B.’s goldfish, he speaks of Superman being the real identity and Clark Kent being the disguise, he speaks of his love for The Bride, yet everything he says in that measured rasp is like winding a spring tighter until it threatens to explode in your face. (We even get a quick, darkly funny flashback to The Bride discovering her pregnancy – just as an assassin has tracked her down. The dialogue in this scene is bravura not only for Tarantino’s writing but for the actors pulling it off so convincingly.) We wonder whether Bill isn’t speaking so much because he knows a reckoning is imminent and that one of them is going to die tonight, so wishes to prolong his time with the woman he obviously loves, but whom he must kill out of principle or be killed out of principle.

After the massive fight sequence with the Crazy 88s in VOLUME 1, we wondered how Tarantino and Woo-Ping could top each successive fight scene. They did. It was not a case of escalating the violence, but moving it in different directions. Unlike the STAR WARS saga, where Lucas and his choreographers kept repeating themselves (see one lightsaber battle, seen ’em all – even poor Yoda got boring with his dynamic ghetto moves), Tarantino and Woo-Ping never rehash the same old moves. As Elle’s fight was an ingenious closed quarters brawl, The Bride and Bill’s last pitched battle is fought with katanas and hands and the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique (ain’t the language just beautiful?!) – while sitting in chairs!

Like Leone on heat, like Kurosawa on angel dust, like an American pioneer, like a Japanese traditionalist, the KILL BILL saga proves there is only one person who makes movies – like Quentin Tarantino.

END

Revenge is a Bumblebee.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.
— opening text, KILL BILL, VOL. 1

Something about Uma Thurman in her yellow and black top-to-toe leather, lopping limbs and severing arteries – how hot is that?!

Quentin Tarantino writes and directs KILL BILL VOLUME 1, an epic masterpiece of simple brutal story, brutally vicious direction, viciously creative dismemberment, and revenge as cold as liquid nitrogen.

Tarantino once again defies modern movie convention and structures KILL BILL not in Three Acts but in two whole movies, this VOLUME 1 made up of five chapters of dynamite keg vignettes. And, sticking to his own inimitable convention, each of the Chapters hits the ground running like a reservoir dog.

We are told the KILL BILL epic is “Based on the character of The Bride, created by Q & U.” That would be Quentin and Uma. This was the period in Tarantino’s life when he was infatuated with Thurman, calling her his “muse”; and why wouldn’t he be? Uma possesses that intangible inclination to sometimes look like a man with her big nose and strange lips, yet throughout this rambling saga, she is absolutely beautiful – and my summation of why may not sit with most men; it is because she never tries to be feminine or sexy or alluring – most of the time she is covered in blood, mucus, sweat, grime, snow, water; she is intense, threatening, sarcastic, haughty, baleful, desolate, determined. Never weak. Never dependent. Never “feminine.” So hot.

chapter one: 2

CATFIGHT! Girl on girl violence between Thurman as a vengeful warrior known as The Bride (although her actual character name is purposefully bleeped out) and Vivica A. Fox as Vernita, her opponent from the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. We do not realize until the end of this sequence why the Chapter is called ‘2.’ Before she drives off, Uma crosses Vernita’s name off a list – it is the second name crossed off. The first name already crossed off is “O-Ren Ishii.” True to non-chrono form, Tarantino has dropped us somewhere in the middle of his movie and half the fun is in putting the jigsaw together while his crazy train is going off the rails.

chapter two: the blood splattered bride

MASSACRE! A wedding chapel in El Paso, Texas; a heavily-pregnant bride (Thurman) left for dead. Four Years Later, this Bride wakes from a coma in a hospital bed, just in time to stave off another unconscious rape from one of intern Buck’s paying customers. She makes off with Buck’s “Pussy Wagon.” (“You know that I ain’t braggin’ / She’s a real pussy wagon – greased lightning!”… Greased Lightning, from GREASE, 1978.) He won’t need it anymore on accounta her thoughtful crushing of his head in a hospital door.

Though we still do not know exactly what is going on (except that The Bride is out for revenge on the people who “killed” her), Tarantino has an uncanny knack of keeping his films kinetic with his gunslinger direction and eclectic soundtrack. Every element of the film works in concert to create a perception of immediacy, of wanting to be a part of this hip, cool animal; there is narration, there are flashbacks and flash-forwards; there are split frames and crafty reveals; there are Eastern musical motifs overlaid with Western rock, and suddenly–