DVD Fail. – Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2

Despite your feelings on Inglourious Basterds, one cannot deny that Tarantino’s influence on American film has been great. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown (my favorite) left their mark on an eager film world ready for something different. Knock-off and copycat filmmakers plagued the 90s, all trying to recapture the pop-culture infested dialogue and disregard for the traditional three-arc narrative. However, after the release of Jackie Brown, Tarantino waited nearly six years before releasing his next film: the kung-fu, Spaghetti Western, Anime, samurai flick hybrid Kill Bill.

I would like to think this time helped Tarantino develop and mature as an artist, but rather than evolve and build upon his excellent portfolio from the 1990s, the talkative auteur took nearly three steps back. Tarantino has always borrowed (or stole, depending on who you ask) from other films, but in the past, and even with Basterds, I felt as if the director was building upon the genres and films he was referencing. In Kill Bill, Tarantino is just the ultimate fan boy.

This isn’t today that the film doesn’t have its redeeming qualities. The first time around, Vol. 1 is exhilarating fun. The rapidly paced and action laced scenes make the run-time fly by as you revel in the violent spectacle of it all. But the pace change in Vol. 2 brings this locomotive revenge flick to a grinding halt. Tarantino tries to get serious.

He attempts some sort of feminist/social commentary about women, revenge and the genre films he is referencing. However, for all of the ways he tries to challenge gender stereotypes or genre cliches, he spends twice as much time recalling moments in his favorite genre films. What does Tarantino have to say that is new about Spagthetti Westerns? I really don’t know, but I do know that Ennio Morricone’s music is iconic, not to mention a quick way to make a scene epic (as POWSO video fans surely already know). There seems to be no other purpose aside from this. What makes his references ultimately problematic is he also adheres to a multitude of genre cliches. By haphazardly picking and choosing which of the genre’s elements he wishes to use, he eliminates any possibility for a coherent or clear critical statement. Watching these movies just gives me a headache.

I know, maybe that last paragraph makes me sound like a pompous ass, but it’s not like I can’t appreciate a fun time at the movies. I love From Dusk ‘Till Dawn and Planet Terror. This is generally why I respect Robert Rodriguez more than Tarantino. Rodriguez makes the genre films Tarantino tries to mimic. Rodriguez has no delusions of grandeur, he is just making fun, ridiculous films. Tarantino tries to elevate his films to the status of high art.

He wants to have it both ways and I am sorry to say that it just doesn’t work through the methods he’s using. Worse yet, this actually affects the overall enjoyability of re-watching Volume 1. There is no satisfying ultraviolet conclusion to this revenge quest. What the audience gets is some of Tarantino’s most over-done and masturbatory dialogue – i.e., Bill’s Superman speech. It’s a great premise and a wonderful idea that fails due to poor and misplaced execution.

But aside from offering my critique of the Kill Bill series, let’s get to whether or not you should buy the DVD of these particular films. Short answer: no.

The “no” doesn’t come just because I am not a fan of the movies. Even fans of Kill Bill get the shaft when it comes to the DVD. Both the Vol. 1 and 2 DVD release are gimped and offer modest, if almost non-existent special features. There are a couple of “Making Of” documentaries that look like they were part of some E television special. In other words, pure fluff. Those looking for substantial insight on the film’s production won’t find it here.

These slim pickins’ on the DVD are primarily the result of Tarantino’s promise to release some definitive, director’s cut version of the film at a later date. Since their initial release in 03 and 04, it has been all quiet on the special edition front. Tarantino is notorious for having ADD when it comes to his projects. He becomes extremely dedicated and devoted to one, but as soon as something else comes along he drops the previous one like a brick.

The introduction of Blu Ray just provides the man with another excuse to delay production and release of the “definitive” Kill Bill DVD. Hell, it took nearly eight years to get the special editions of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.

DVD special features may soon be going the way of the dodo. With DVD sales in sharp decline, the studios are axing the supplementary content with the hopes that this will make this business much more profitable. I still must contest that even a director or cast commentary could have been extremely insightful. Opportunity fail.

Rabid Tarantino fans already have the DVDs, so my warnings and opinion will mean nothing. However, those who loved Basterds and are working on polishing up their Tarantino knowledge should considered yourself warned. Stick to a rental or cheap download, the DVD is not worth your time or money.

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College Killed the Hardcore Gamer in Me

The gamer is dead, dead as doornail. I should clarify that statement; the gamer in me is dead. Allow me one more clarification, the hardcore gamer in me is dead and the culprit was college.

While I may be a bit superfluous in revealing the untimely demise of a part of my former self, this is because it’s something I have struggled with since I first noticed it happening.  I didn’t want it to die and like a hidden tumor growing in my brain, it snuck up on me and did its damage before any preemptive measures could be taken.

It seemed to happen in no time at all. In fact, it feels like just yesterday I was fiending to get home from school so I could unload on some n00bs in endless rounds of Counter-Strike, or level up my Hunter with some invested hours in Phantasy Star Online. It really feels like no time at all since I inhaled the news feeds of IGN and made dozens of daily posts on G4’s message boards under the username Snowmiser.

Then one day I sat down for a game of Super Smash Bros. Melee with my cousin. He is seven years my younger and I introduced him to the absurd fun that is Nintendo’s character brawler. I was generally used to schooling the boy in the ways of Mario or Captain Falcon, but this time I was shocked to find that he had suddenly developed gaming skills on par with Vince Vaughn in Swingers. He was handing my ass to me and made sure to smack talk the entire time. If I had ever seen the movie I would have probably felt like Stallone in Rocky V, but everyone has told me to avoid that low-point in the series for the betterment of my own existence.

Pop-culture similes aside, I was humiliated. Even my uncle commented on my withering gaming skills. It was my junior year of college and I realized it had been two years since I had completed a single player game of my own volition. I decided I needed to recapture my old glory, but when I sat down in front of my console ready to crack back into an all engrossing adventure game, I realized my zeal and passion for games and gaming was gone.

I couldn’t do it. Why? First off, the time commitment. Most games are ten-plus hours of gameplay and I had homework, reading and papers to get done. Then there’s the antisocial behavior. I was in college surrounded by people my own age. I didn’t want to become one of those recluses who only leaves his dorm to hit up the late-night drive thrus and empty his trashcan of used tissue.

No, single player games were dead to me and I found myself only gaming when it was in a social or group setting. Rounds of Halo, some heated games of FIFA and, of course, setlists of Guitar Hero were the only way to go for me. I could game for five or twenty five minutes with a group of my friends and feel like I had some fun without compromising my work or social life. I had become the casual gamer that the old hardcore gamer I used to be would have mocked and ridiculed.

But regardless of any amount of self-loathing and no matter how much I missed it, I just couldn’t get back into the single-player, hardcore gaming niche. Aside from Metroid Prime 3, I haven’t completed a full-length quest game since my freshmen year. Even after graduation, this is still the case.

This stems from the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult to justify long hours devoted to a medium in which I consistently question what in the hell it is that I am actually getting out of it. It isn’t a new debate, but I find myself posing the question as to whether or not video games are art on a consistent basis.

I want to say yes. There are some great examples in the potential for artistic expression in video games, but when I think about the ways I experience other forms of art and the way they effect me, well, video games rank pretty damn low on the list.

When I listen to music, read a book and, of course, watch a movie I can feel moved or inspired to look at myself, my life or life in general in new and exciting ways. When I experience art that moves me, it inspires me to go out and create my own work. When I beat a video game, you know what I usually feel?

“So what?”

This isn’t to say that there aren’t certain games have inspired me or games that have moved me. But those are few and far between. For every Ocarina of Time, Metroid Prime and The Secret of Monkey Island, there are at least a hundred more empty, first-person shooter frag-fests featuring excessive gore and computer generated big tits. The market is dominated by egotistical male escapist fantasies. Imagine if the majority of movies released were Michael Bay type extravaganzas, if every book were Twilight and every song some more Auto-Tune club crap. I don’t think people would take film, books or music very seriously either.

Video games need great character depth and character development. While it’s true that there are RPG’s that offer such an experience, they usually require around 40 hours of gameplay. There is a gap in the market for gamers who are looking for an artistic experience that don’t want to be anchored in front of a television for such an absurd block of time. I believe games have the power to move players and speak to something greater about our existence. Can it be done without having to master 17 types of shotguns and terribly cheesy voice over? I hope so, many just haven’t found out the “how” to that question.

That isn’t to say that there are not artists working right now to expand the expectations and limitations of the medium. However, these are mostly indie developers with much smaller budgets and much smaller fan bases. Like comic books, indie video game artists looking to do something more must face a dominated market in terms of both production and consumption.

I don’t want to come off as anti-gamer or anti-gaming. I want to love games like I used to. When I first beat Ocarina of Time, I was depressed. I didn’t want the adventure and my time in that world to end. I fell deeply in love with the characters and music in that world. I would go back and play the game just to wander Hyrule Field and play the songs on my ocarina that I loved. I remember the feelings associated with that game so well because it was rare that I felt something like that after finishing a game. I want to feel that again.

I want games to be respected, studied and discussed on the same level that film, music and literature are. If you know of any games that fill that void, let me know. I just feel that the medium just has a lot of growing up to do before the gamer in me is resurrected and video games are considered a true art form.

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Free Run House – Storefront Hitchcock

An increasing number of folks are tapping into the multimedia possibilities which bandwidth offers with the likes of YouTube and Pandora. So too the long form medium of the feature film has begun to reach with increased frequency the monitors of film fans looking for a quick–and free–movie hit. Most major motion pictures, if they are offered online at all, are restricted to pay services, leaving most free and legal streaming video sites like Hulu with significantly limited options of forgotten studio backlog pictures and copyright-orphaned public domain films. However, within the greater body that makes up the catalogues of such sites remains a multitude of great films. This column is devoted to separating the wheat from the chaff, and discovering some of the cinematic gems that may be viewed for free by anyone with an internet connection.

Storefront Hitchcock (1998 dir. Jonathan Demme) 77 minutes

Where You Can Find it for Free: http://www.hulu.com/watch/39076/storefront-hitchcock

Jonathan Demme loves Hitchcock. Jonathan Demme loves Hitchcock so much that in 1998 the former filmed the latter standing lone in a nigh-abandoned room against the interior of a Manhattan storefront window as a feature film. In this feature, the Englishman strums an acoustic guitar, plays selections from his folk music career and rambles on the occasional odd subject for seventy-something minutes.

I know very little of Robyn Hitchcock’s musical career. The sole song of his that I had known before watching this film was hosted on a website (left playing in my headphones ad nauseam while high school computer class insisted itself through the hour) for the Largo club in Hollywood. It takes little to recognize Hitchcock’s musical milieu: singer/songwriter folk when the rest of the world was turning to New Wave, coffee shops in New York instead of arenas, the literate insights born from a poetically drained urban world, eternally hip to their dedicated few. For those who respond to this sort of music, this Brit hits the spot.

Jonathan Demme, on the other hand, is a presence I am more familiar with. This is faintly ridiculous given that Demme is one of those names inveterately reluctant to associate itself with a singular style. His filmography shoots across the radar with a calligraphy that subtly spells “What auteur?” He started his career in the higher-brow classes of the Corman school, moving on to make his name with the great Melvin and Howard (1980, stylistically quoted by his biggest fan P.T. Anderson in Hard Eight, 1996). From there his career has been marked by saturated charges of pure pathos (Philadelphia, 1993), eternal cinematic iconography (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991), faux-classical romantic comedy (Something Wild, 1986), etc. What’s more remarkable is his comparable variability in the “non-fiction” realm, The Agronomist (2003), Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains (2007), and Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia (1987) to name a few.

Music, often of an atypically matching style/subject, is consistently one of the most interesting features of a Demme film. A director so taken with music may also misrecognize the task of a concert film and become beholden to his or her personal passion for a particular artist. This can be a successful formula a la Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), but it is too tired a path for what Demme is interested in: the music. The inimitable Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense (1984) is naturally his most prominent and surely his most ambitious concert film, and yet it successfully represents its intimation of the musical group precisely insofar as the cameras never leave the stage for non-concert interludes.

Demme doesn’t indulge the extra-musical aspects of his concert subjects. Storefront Hitchcock even shuns photographing the audience inside the building with the artist, regarding instead the sidewalk passers-by immediately behind Robyn as the unobserving audience of this music. It services the mood of the music exceptionally well, alluding to the indescribability of lyrical importance, in styles applicable to and bred from the world on view outside this empty city shop. Rather than avoid the occasional interested pedestrian—there is never a crowd—the camera indulges in the curiosity of their faces, the “someone’s making a movie!” finger pointing. Of course, no one sticks around too long. This is New York City, afterall.

The film has no biography or interview segments. It is an effectively miniscule scale for a concert of any sort, with the act simply standing in front of a window as the night gradually sets in (the film begins in the early evening, passes through a candle-lit magic hour and ends in darkness). Hitchcock wears a garish shirt, plays his songs, and provides absolutely insane interstitial speeches about radiation, beef and midgets (incidentally, no, Julius Caesar would not have stood up only to your waist). His logical process is, in a word, “artistic.”

The music is wonderful and the film’s practiced style is appropriately skeletal. It’s a great sound to have on in the background, and the visuals likewise. I’ve let it play through several times while I busy myself with things completely irrelevant to an abandoned Manhattan storefront. Sort of like a 77-minute piece of furniture. If the music floats your boat, you won’t regret jumping into the musical career of a name on the periphery of modern folk music, nor should you hesitate to peer into another nook of the colorful and various pool of cinematographic style they call Demme.

If you get to the movie then leave some feedback below, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Bonus: Charade

In 2002, Demme remade a classic Cary Grant mystery from 1963 called Charade—which ironically also did not include that Hitchcock—as The Truth About Charlie. Now, the remake was a fairly failed experiment in good intentions, but the original Stanley Donen-directed film is a fine romp through the wacky world of international intrigue so prevalent in the ‘60s (“the greatest Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made”). It also happened to fail to copyright itself properly in the credit sequences…rendering it public domain for all and sundry. Enjoy!

Where You Can Find it for Free: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APm7oRuMwaM

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On The Practice Of Musical Monogamy

Hello Friends!

Today, I would like to address an important issue. We’ve all become music sluts. Since the advent of MP3 players, we have had the ability to store countless hours of audio on plastic squares the size of a box of Nerds candy, which has allowed us infinite control in customizing and selecting our musical pleasures at virtually any moment.

Being a musical slut is really not anything to be ashamed of. Our newfound abilities to switch from The Smiths to Classic Jazz to Rob Zombie to the Sonic The Hedgehog Theme in mere seconds does not necessarily express some sort of entertainment ADD, as some would lead you to believe.

Rather, I’m inclined to think that our penchant for aural adultery merely shows how vibrant and diverse our personalities and moods are. Our relatively new freedom to move from one song to any other song in our possession on a whim is a really cool thing. If nothing else, it allows us to increase the amount of good songs and artists we’re familiar with (of which there are so many).

Think back on the days of yore when we were stuck with our Walkmans and Discmans. It was often too cumbersome to carry around a CD sleeve, so most of the time you were confined to just one CD for the duration of your outing.

Nowadays, you step outside the door in the morning and you can listen to ten different genres and bands before you even finish your daily commute to work. That’s certainly how my music-listening patterns shaped up to be during the past four years that I’ve owned an mp3 player, at least.

Earlier this month, however, that all changed for me. I lost my iPod, and thus my ability to be a musical swinger. Good old Papa Schryver let me borrow his iPod Nano, though, which meant that I could upload only a fraction of my mobile music that I had before. But instead of cramming the Nano to its maximum capacity, I decided to see what would happen if I just put a couple CD’s worth of material.

The results have been wholly rewarding for me. By “limiting” myself to around 25 tracks of music, I found myself enjoying the listening experience even more. I realized what I had been missing from my Discman days…there’s a real beauty in not being bombarded by near-infinite choices of what music to listen to. As American psychologist, Barry Schwartz has written extensively on, there is a “tyranny of choice” phenomenon that arises when too many options are available to a person. Counter-intuitively, we feel less satisfied and more miserable when we have a plethora of options laid out before us, as opposed to just several.

Here’s an example of the benefits of the “less is more” approach to music:

I remember when I got A Crow Left Of The Murder (a far better album than most people give it credit for) in my junior year of high school and listened to it on my Discman. For months and months, I lived and breathed that CD. Each of the fourteen tracks were ingrained into my psyche; they came to match the movements of my day like clockwork. On the way to school in the morning, in between classes, on the train ride home, and as I fell asleep, it was the welcome soundtrack to my existence. In short, I truly got to know that CD, in a very intimate way. Instead of jumping from track to track, I just let it run through from start to finish, without the slightest twinge of restlessness or a longing gaze at another tempting CD. It was pure marital bliss.

Likewise for Bran Van 3000’s Discosis, 311’s Evolver, dredg’s El Cielo, and countless other CDs throughout my high school CD player days; being constrained to one album at a time was immensely enjoyable. When I listen to the songs on these albums now, I am flooded with rich memories, sights, smells, and sounds of the months during which they were listened. It’s like an audial-psychic scrapbook that cannot be erased.

Having 30+ gigabytes of tunes in your pockets is a blessing, for all the reasons mentioned above, but it can also be a curse. When we can scan mindlessly and impatiently through the songs at our disposal, we start to miss out on deeper connections. We develop fickle relationships with the new albums we look forward to, and instead of the deep, complex relationships we developed to music in the past, we now settle for more superficial and ephemeral musical pleasures. I’m starting to get a little dramatic, but the point is that in periodically limiting what we listen to, our depth of enjoyment and appreciation for what we hear can be multiplied many times over.

So I dare you to take the challenge of musical monogamy. Here’s what you do: choose one or two albums that you really want to get to know a little better and take everything else off your MP3 player (I’m not saying delete it permanently off of iTunes…don’t come crying if you didn’t read this right).

Then sit with those albums for a couple weeks or a month…or longer. Listen to them on the bus, during workouts, as you fall asleep, during dumb movies your friends drag you to, or in the shower (you might want to make sure your electronics are not rub-a-dubbing inside the shower with you, though). Restlessness and desires for musical infidelity might set in, but if it does, that’s all good.

More likely, however, you will find yourself growing more attached and appreciative of what you’re listening to than you ever thought you would.

Gerry’s Top 10 Movies…EVER

Lists are a pretty frequent trend on the internet and I am merely hoppin’ on the trolly by contributing one of my own. However, I believe it’s hard to read someone else’s opinions on movies when you have no clue where they are coming from. Well, since I do my fair share of ranting about film on POWSO, I figured it would be only fitting to provide you all with my top ten favorite films of all time. I just want to make one minor disclaimer: I am simply presenting ten films that are MY personal favorites. I don’t think these are the most important films technically, culturally or historically. They just each speak to me for one reason or another and I love them all.

10. Toy Story (1995) – Directed by John Lasseter

Great characters, great storytelling and a marvel in animation. This movie is a terrific model for the traditional three act movie script. It’s timing, execution and emotional points are all perfect. While I am also a huge fan of Toy Story 2, and pretty much anything Pixar does, I had to go with the one that started it all. I saw it when I was in third grade and I’ve been hooked ever since. I use to carry a pull-string Woody around with me when I was younger.

9. The Conversation (1974) – Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

How does a director follow up a movie like The Godfather? Francis Ford Coppola answers this question with the story of an isolated introvert in his film, The Conversation. Gene Hackman stars as Harry Caul in this often overlooked mystery/thriller. It features some of the most incredible sound design I have ever heard as Caul, a paranoid middle-aged man, investigates a murder through his own audio surveillance company.

8. The Dark Knight (2008) – Directed by Christopher Nolan

Usually when someone puts a movie that is barely a year old in their top-ten list you begin to question the list’s integrity. However, it’s hard to argue that The Dark Knight will not go down in history as the best movie about a comic book character ever made. It also happens to be about my favorite comic book character, Batman. Guided by Christopher Nolan’s superb direction, the film delivers a compelling crime drama with memorable performances across the board. Few films can hold my full attention for their entire runtime, but this one had me from the opening scene and did not let up until the end credits.

7. A Fistful of Dollars (1964) – Directed by Sergio Leone

Yes, I know that this movie is basically a shot-for-shot remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo that merely replaces the samurai with a cowboy. However, this film began the illustrious career of Sergio Leone and his incredible Dollar’s Trilogy while introducing us to Clint Eastwood’s Man-With-No-Name character. Shooting an American Western in Spain gives Leone’s films a mythical, almost surreal quality that is only enhanced by Ennio Morricone’s memorable score.

6. Blade Runner (1982) – Directed by Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott’s eerily accurate adaptation of one of my favorite books is also one of my favorite films. A moody and beautiful piece of cinema, not to mention eerily accurate in some of its predictions of the future. I saw this film for the first time a couple of years ago and I remember thinking that George Lucas was completely full of shit when he said that he couldn’t do the Star Wars prequel films until he had the proper computer technology. The effects are breathtaking.

5. Vertigo (1958) – Alfred Hitchcock 

Count me in the group that considers Vertigo to be Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece. It features my favorite actor (Jimmy Stewart) and it was the first film I ever saw that I felt like absolutely everything in frame was at the will of the director. When you watch this film you know you are watching a master at work. The film also work as a powerful commentary upon the way in which men behave in relationships: obsessors or controllers.

4. The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974) – Directed by Arthur Rankin Jr.

While nearly all the Rankin/Bass stop-motion films have a special place in my heart, this one stands above the others for one reason: Snow Miser. He is such a great character and has this whimsical charm that I am forever endeared to. 

3. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – Directed by Frank Capra

This film use to not even rank on my top-ten list. Then someone asked me if there was any film that just made me happy to be alive and I immediately thought of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. I have never seen an actor give a more powerful performance than Jimmy Stewart gives in this film. He breaks my heart every time I see it. It wouldn’t be Christmas without this movie. 

“Remember George, no man is a failure who has friends.” I may have teared up just writing that quote…

2. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) -Directed by Irvin Kershner

Star Wars pretty much sums up my childhood. I was a fanboy. Action figures, video games, books, Taco Bell collector’s cups…Yes, I had it all, but The Empire Strikes Back is still a great film even without all of the merchandise attached. I still wish I was as cool as Han Solo and I still dream of visiting Cloud City some day.

1. The Aviator (2004) – Directed by Martin Scorsese

It feels odd to tell people that, not only my favorite Martin Scorsese film, but also just my general favorite film of all time is The Aviator. What can I say? This film speaks to me a in a strange way. It creates a world that is a fusion of both fantasy and reality while simultaneously addressing many themes that I can easily identify with. Every time I watch this film I feel like I just went to a three hour therapy session. Leonardo Dicaprio is easily my favorite actor of the current generation and I adore the work of Martin Scorsese. Everything about this film just comes together in a package that seems specifically addressed to me.

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