Kojo Reviews

The Conqueror (1956)

Couldn't stop laughing

[15 September 1999]

My friends and I were lounging around watching a boring football game when we chanced onto this 1950's spectacular on TCM. We were astounded, stupefied. I'm not normally one of those people who gets off on really bad films--most bad films are just plain bad. But this was so bad, it was surreal--and hilarious. John Wayne, as usual, plays John Wayne, except this time America's iconic cowboy Real Man is in phony Oriental make-up, prancing around in fuzzy pelt vests, spouting lines in Medieval Mongolian Shakespearian barbarian-speak with a Western twang. (Example: "Ya didn't suckle me ta be slain by Tartars, my mo-ther.") With lavish pretensions toward epic grandeur, the sweeping outdoor vistas of the Central Asian steppe looking suspiciously like southern Utah, where the movie was indeed filmed. You think I'm making this up? I beg you, please rent this film! You won't regret it. Unlike most bad films, this film really is so bad that it's good. It's a bona fide disaster!

That '70s Show (1998–2006)

Polyester wasn't pretty

[29 June 1999]

I hated the freakin' 70's: Grafitti all over the subways (I grew up in then-crime-ridden New York City), Jimmy Carter's "malaise," Son of Sam, Patty Hearst, dumb detective shows on TV, disco, and polyester. So why, then, does this show make me all misty-eyed? I particularly love the drug innuendo. The obvious parallels to "Happy Days" break down there--that and the fact that people nowadays dress the same as the characters, whereas back in the 70's we didn't dress anything like the characters on "Happy Days," but instead we dressed just like the people on "That 70s Show." Does that make sense? Wow, far out. Maybe I should get a tape recorder so I can get all this down.

Juarez (1939)

Politically correct historical flick

[5 May 1999]

It's always refreshing and heartening to see an old film that isn't too racist or condescending towards people of color. Juarez concerns itself with one of the more interesting episodes of Mexico's fascinating history: The brief and rather tragic reign of the puppet-emperor Maximilian, a liberal-minded Austrian nobleman who was foisted upon the Mexican people by the machinations of Napoleon III. The movie divides its time between Maximilian and his wife Carlotta (Bette Davis), and their chief antagonist, Benito Juarez, the so-called "Abraham Lincoln of Mexico" (an image that is emphasized rather heavy-handedly). Benito Juarez was a full-blooded Native American, but aside from a stereotypically stoical demeanor ("Indians never cry," someone says, "not even as children"), he is portrayed with immense dignity by Paul Muni as the honest champion of democracy and equality that he is widely held to have been. The movie is a rather straight-forward historical narrative, without much in terms of psychological depth or irony or anything like that, but is interesting for what it says about Mexico in 1867 as well as Hollywood in 1939 (i.e., that there apparently were industry types who saw Mexicans as human beings, even though 5 years down the road Los Angeles would be witness to the anti-Mexican pogrom known as the "Zoot Suit Riots," and Hollywood as a whole wouldn't begin to acknowledge Latino demographics for another 50 years after that). I don't know much about Bette Davis, but it's probably safe to say that this isn't one of her more stellar roles.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Awesome flick

[9/10 · 22 April 1999]

It's hard to believe this fresh, fast-paced, off-beat film is nearly 40 years old. Also hard to believe that it was released the year BEFORE "America lost its innocence" in front of the Dallas Book Depository. It's the perfect political thriller, with dastardly villains, Freudian conflicts galore, a party convention, satire, and a not unappreciable sense of humor amid the grim psychological horror. The thing I found weird was the Abraham Lincoln imagery. My guess is that back in '62 Lincoln was even more of a universal symbol of goodness than he is today, and that therefore it's supposed to be ironic, but who knows?

Slums of Beverly Hills (1998)

A pleasant surprise

[6 April 1999]

For some reason, when I picked up the video I thought this was going to be a rock-n-roll party movie, but instead it's an odd little coming-of-age movie about a girl and her odd little rootless family. I spent the first 45 minutes wondering when the plot would come along, but when I figured out there wasn't going to be one, I realized I liked it anyway. The characters, though exaggerated, are familiar and true-to-life in their grotesque ordinariness and individuality. A pleasant surprise, overall.

The Vanishing (1993)

Thinking man's psychopath

[4 April 1999]

For all his intellectual credentials, Hannibal Lecter was just a pretentious dandy. The true thinking man's psychopath is Jeff Bridge's "Barney" in this story about one man's (Kiefer Sutherland's) obsessive, years-long search for a girlfriend who disappeared during a vacation. Barney is also perhaps the nerdiest, most passionless movie psycho ever, and for all these reasons one of the most terrifying. This film is light on gore and action (some might say "slow-paced"), but it is a disturbing look at the "banality of evil." I'm told that the original Dutch film of the same name is far more disturbing than even this.

The Langoliers (1995)

Faithful to the book

[31 March 1999]

An almost obsessively faithful adaptation of the Stephen King novella, which, like most of King's stories, is essentially a screenplay already. It's deja-vu all over again, because it's filmed on location at a deserted Bangor Airport, which King described so vividly in the book. Good thing he hadn't set it at busy JFK or Heathrow--almost as if he knew it would be made into a movie. Hmm.... The computer animations near the end are a little cheesy, as is the doting reliance on the actors' earnest mugging to convey horror. The computer stuff should have been blurred just a little so that imagination could give it the benefit of a doubt. King's philosophical take on the nature of time is thought-provoking in a mystical kind of way. Fun, if you like King type stuff.

Fail Safe (1964)

Remembering the good ol' days of the Evil Empire

[31 March 1999]

If you don't remember the Cold War, you might have trouble relating to the extremes of patriotism, duty, fear, cynicism, and hopelessness played out in this film, but it is a skillfully tense and claustrophobic rendition of the book. The short and simple initial dream sequence sets the nightmarish tone of the lucid techno-political thriller to follow. We seem to assume nowadays that the threat of nuclear holocaust went the way of Marxism; Fail-Safe suggests that the true danger lies elsewhere. Something to keep in mind when you ponder the fact that those bombs are still out there!