Billy Jack is no flip-flopper

BILLY JACK GOES TO WASHINGTON (1977)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Billy Jack, the violent pacifist, is an American icon I've grown to appreciate over time. The idealistic Tom Laughlin played the character with a touch of dignity and calm, even when kicking people in the face sans shoes. The message in "Billy Jack" and "The Trial of Billy Jack" was that in order to achieve peace, one had to resort to violence because there were no other alternatives. At the end of the first "Billy Jack" (exempting the biker film "The Born Losers"), the heroic crusader was sent to jail for murder. I believe the same thing happened at the end of "Trial of Billy Jack." Now comes the obscure "Billy Jack Goes to Washington," a remake of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," which had a minimum theatrical release and which was met with critical disdain (at least to the critics who actually saw it). I must say that this film is as involving and entertaining as the earlier films, if anything because Billy Jack doesn't need to get barefoot and kick the cajones out of any rednecks to get his message across. Maybe a filibuster can make a difference. 

This time, the setting is the nation's capital as members of Congress decide on recruiting an unknown for Senator (apparently in politics, experience is preferred but not essential). They get the bright idea to bring in Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin), whom they pardon for his crimes, and elect him Senator (he only gets a two-month term). It is that easy, especially since his election is endorsed by crusty Senator Paine (E.G. Marshall). The notion is that Mr. Jack will appeal to young voters who care about the environment and the Native American population (and presumably love martial-arts). Of course, Billy Jack is so naive that he assumes things will get done and laws will be passed to preserve lands and wildlife. He has no idea how to play politics. He is also oblivious to the creation of a nuclear power plant that will be built on land he owns, where he plans to build his National Children's School. Can Billy's wife, Jean (Delores Taylor), do anything to help him? Or how about the money-hungry Lucie Arnaz? You'll have to see it to believe it.

"Billy Jack Goes to Washington" could've looked and sounded ridiculous with its premise but, thanks to Tom Laughlin, it does grab at some of the truths of political corruption. A lobbyist who has top-secret info on an impending nuclear site may remind one of the real-life murder of Vincent Foster, lobbyist for President Clinton. Some dialogue focuses on how easily a life can be taken away in the face of corruption - murder is as consistent as getting votes passed. How can Billy Jack fight Washington to get what he wants? Will he kick some ass? Nope, he has to rely on his wits. The final thirty minutes of the film has Billy Jack in filibuster mode as he pleads his case in front of an exhausted Congress. It is here where Tom Laughlin proves his worth as an actor and his intensity builds rather well (never mind that James Stewart did it first and did it better).

For Billy Jack fans, do not expect any fight scenes. There is only one and it is too brief to register much enthusiasm - though it is funny that Jean kicks some ass as well. When Billy Jack gets passionate about his cause, he screams. This movie is full of dialogue, some of it is haphazardly written (or perhaps intentionally so since senators can sound flat sometimes) and some of it is superbly written (the corruption inside Washington as explained by Lucie Arnaz's character is as damning as any Oliver Stone film). Granted, you'll learn a lot about the machinations of Congress more than in any other fiction film.

Performances are sharp all around. E.G. Marshall glows in every scene as Senator Paine, as does Sam Wanamaker as Paine's ruthless boss. As for Tom himself, he has a certain charisma and natural quality that could have led to character parts beyond Billy Jack, but it never happened. Delores Taylor as Billy's wife, Jean, seems to be sleepwalking. And it is sweet to see their own real-life daughter (Christina Laughlin) speaking just as passionately about politics as Billy Jack.

By 1977, audiences were turned off by the Billy Jack phenomenon since you couldn't separate the character from the actor (that was by design). In fact, the film had sneak previews in L.A. and Omaha, Nebraska, and then disappeared completely (most fans of the series had not heard of this sequel). Originally, it was 155 minutes yet, on video, it is no more than 2 hours. According to Tom Laughlin (who ran for Governor of California when Schwarzenegger ran), the film was taken away from his hands by the government. On the whole, "Billy Jack Goes to Washington" is a reasonably entertaining film that is worth seeking out, especially if you are a conspiracy buff.

Not very user-friendly

TRON (1982)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Tron" is a migraine-inducing and jaw-droppingly boring mess of a movie. It has visuals that can elicit about as much interest as looking at an Atari video game with binoculars.

Jeff Bridges is Kevin Flynn, a former employee of a high-tech software computer company, ENCOM, who works at an arcade. Flynn believes that a certain Ed Dillinger (David Warner), an employee at ENCOM, plagiarized some of Flynn's video games. Flynn tries to hack into a mainframe computer with the help of someone from the inside, namely Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) who runs computer security at ENCOM and is concerned about hackers. Cindy Morgan plays another employee of ENCOM who aids the two male protagonists as they are all "users," meaning they play the game or run the program in their likeness. Kevin breaks into the company to defeat the MCP (Master Control Program) and is accidentally zapped into that world, the Digital World, by the MCP due to a teleportation device, but not as a "user." If you can follow this, terrific. If not, consider that my high school grades in Computer Science were not that great.

"Tron" was considered a milestone in the world of cinematic, computerized special-effects (as the head of Pixar, John Lasseter, said that without "Tron" there would've been no "Toy Story"). I am not in awe of these effects (and never was when I saw some excerpts back in 1982) nor do they seem all that special. They are monochromatic graphics combined with live footage of the actors shot in black-and-white and wearing white gear with an occasional burst of neon color. The movie itself is a bore, an insipid bore, with a closing shot of a helicopter arriving at the top of a building that is more impressive than the giant Atari screen effects we have to sit through.

The opening ten minutes of the film are actually entertaining. We are introduced to something cryptic with the cold-hearted antagonist, Dillinger, talking to the MCP. There is Jeff Bridges projecting a certain lively, upbeat kind of character and, for a moment, I was enveloped by "Tron." The rest of the movie is rotoscoping and a lot of computer graphics that wouldn't charm a human pinball.

Arthur partying like it is 1981

ARTHUR (2011)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Russell Brand is a wild live wire act, a man whom we try to catch up with while he spins his tales with rapid momentum. He does it so masterfully and with such electric precision that he is a unique comic persona - a tall, lanky cartoon version of himself. There is no one else like Russell Brand. There is also no one else like Dudley Moore. So when word got out that Brand got the Arthur role for the remake, my heart sank a little. Physically, they couldn't be more opposite. The late Dudley Moore was a diminutive marvel, a rat who scurried across the screen. Russell is more physically imposing and takes up much more space. How could this "Arthur" remake work? The surprise is that it works but its intentions differ wildly from the original 1981 film.

Brand is Arthur, a wealthy man who copiously drinks for laughs and to lure women in his bed, which has a magnetic field under it! In the opening scene, he drives drunk dressed as Batman in his own Batmobile and knocks down the Merrill Lynch bull (boy, my late father might not have enjoyed that). He is arrested and gets bailed out, and bails everyone else out. He is a drunk loon, or is he more of a playboy who loves playing with big, expensive toys, like a kid who never grew up. He is about to lose his billion-dollar inheritance unless he sobers up and marries the fake-as-fake-can-get socialite Susan (Jennifer Garner). Maniacal Nick Nolte (underused here) is Susan's father who threatens Arthur with a table saw!

Naturally, Arthur falls for an aspiring children's author, Naomi (Greta Gerwig), who takes tourists on unauthorized tours around Grand Central Station. They start dating and he gives her a Pez dispenser with her likeness, while they eat in an emptied-out Grand Central Station. All this is cute and lively enough but Greta doesn't have the pizazz of Liza Minnelli in the original, especially when Minnelli played a waitress who shoplifts!

"Arthur" has got a major saving grace in Helen Mirren as Hobson, the dutiful servant who is more of a mother to Arthur than Arthur's own mother. Still, Mirren's character is not written with the same kind of wit that drove Sir John Gielgud's own Hobson in the 1981 film to have some delicious and memorable zingers ("I'll alert the media!"). As for the rest of the cast, Jennifer Garner is rather unwatchable as the bitchy heiress who wants Arthur for his money. Garner has not had me at a remote "hi" since her best performance in "13 Going On 30." Since then, she has been saddled with characters who are emotionally mute and unappealing.

"Arthur" is a leisurely paced and often smartly funny film but it possesses a bit too much uplift for the story of a drunk. The original Dudley Moore picture made no apologies for Arthur - he was the same lovable drunk from start to finish. Russell Brand gives Arthur more sensitivity and plays him as some lost, misunderstood soul, as if this 2011 Arthur couldn't get in any bigger trouble than driving a Batmobile down a busy New York street. Dudley's Arthur toyed with drinking his life away. Big difference.

The Nutty German Clown

THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED (1972):

The Holocaust film as seen by Jerry Lewis and nobody else

By Jerry Saravia

Jerry Lewis has had a successful career as a comedian making films that have had audiences rolling in the aisles. His attempt to resuscitate his career in the 1980's with troubled productions like "Hardly Working" and "Cracking Up" did little to rejuvenate or reclaim his audience (playing the serious role of a Johnny Carson-type in Martin Scorsese's film, "The King of Comedy," also proved disastrous since it was the biggest flop of 1983). Despite Lewis's futile attempts to make audiences love him again, no film of his has caused more controversy than the unfinished and unreleased "The Day the Clown Cried," a 1971 effort whose original negative remains under lock and key in Sweden due to financial woes. Jerry reportedly has a VHS assist copy of the film and three scenes from the original film negative that he keeps under lock and key in his office. Why the secrecy and why can't this be seen, aside from behind-the-scenes footage shown on a Biography special?

The story of "The Day the Clown Cried" deals with Helmut Doork (played by Lewis), a drunk German circus clown who is arrested by the Nazis for making fun of Hitler. Helmut is whisked away to the internment camps and entertains the Jewish children - he does his job so well at making children laugh that Helmut is taken away yet again. This time, he is kept in Auschwitz and is told to do his job and lead the children to the showers, when in fact they are about to be gassed to death. Helmut becomes a Pied Piper and feels such remorse for the kids that he goes in the chamber with them. 

I first heard about this film through the Medveds' crudely funny book, "The Golden Turkey Awards." For years, "The Day the Clown Cried" is the one film, aside from "The Nutty Professor," that stood out for me. I am always fascinated by films that languish and are never completed for one reason or another. Bruce Lee's "Game of Death" comes to mind, as well as Orson Welles' "The Other Side of the Wind" and several other projects (as a director, Welles might have the record for more unfinished works than any other). But something gnaws at me about "The Day the Clown Cried." Maybe it is the fact that Jerry Lewis attempted something so far removed from his ouevre, perhaps an attempt to be taken seriously and not just as a clown. Robin Williams has tried it (and he even made a similarly themed picture to "Clown" called "Jakob the Liar"), Jim Carrey has had his share of serious roles, Billy Crystal, etc. From those who have apparently seen this film (Harry Shearer claims he saw it and hated it), Lewis's Holocaust picture is a disaster and wrongheaded and possibly morally problematic. After all, it is a about a German leading children to the gas chambers and the ending implies that he goes in the chamber with them, thus committing suicide as an act of self-sacrifice. I think that ending might be effective in hindsight but one wonders if it might have made more sense to put himself in the chamber first and keep the kids out, allowing the kids to live (they might get shot later by the Nazi soldiers but at least the kids are spared from a horrible death). Perhaps an allegedly dramatic and Holocaust-themed Jerry Lewis flick is not what Lewis fans had in mind. His tomfoolery and wackiness are what made people laugh, hence his role as a rich playboy impersonating a Nazi general who wants to kill Hitler in "Which Way to the Front?" (1970 - the last completed Lewis-directed film until 1981's "Hardly Working"). Of course, we might never know since it never got a release nor was it ever completed.

Jerry Lewis has not discussed the film at all (aside from his autobiography), though he had hoped in the early 80's to finish shooting the film and clear the rights to the material. That never came to pass, though one might surmise that interest may have accelerated after the success of Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful." No deal, no show, and the film negative is still in Sweden. It may remain the one and only Jerry Lewis movie that nobody will ever see. Somewhere, Jerry Lewis might still be shedding a tear over it.

Nostalgia for an old film stock

SUPER 8

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Super 8" is a sensational, crackling, scary, wondrous surprise of a movie. It is a lollapalooza, a doozy of a thrill ride, a reminder of the Spielberg films of the 1980's, and an absolute classic. It almost gives one faith that a surprising, original entertainment can be crafted with characters one can care about and equally filled with moments that can spook and amaze you. It is not just Spielbergian in its approach, loaded with J.J. Abrams own touches as well, but it also has that "Amazing Stories" vibe. 

A small Ohio town is the setting for the latest accident - the death of a kid's mother at a steel mill. We start right at the reception for a funeral. It is winter time and, for a second, I thought we were in the snowy landscapes of a Russell Banks novel. Not so because we shift to four months later where a group of kids are in the midst of shooting a zombie movie in the Super 8 film format (this is 1979, long before camcorders and cell phones). The pre-teen kids all gather at a train station to shoot an emotional scene with their reluctant lead actress, 14-year-old Alice (Elle Fanning, as good as her older sister, Dakota). The feisty Charles (Riley Griffiths) is the director of the film who says "It is mint!" whenever he gets a good take. Joe (Joel Courtney) is the 12-year-old kid who lost his mother at the beginning. He applies makeup to Alice in one of several touching scenes in the film. A train shows up ("Production value!") and collides with a truck causing one of the biggest train wrecks I've seen at the movies in a long time, complete with explosions and the demolishment of the station house itself! Something is in the train cars, and it isn't human. The train itself belongs to the Air Force and it may have come from Area 51! Most of my readers know that I enjoy anything having to do with Area 51 and nonhuman creatures (yes, even in the last Indiana Jones flick) so they had me at young teen kids making a zombie movie just when an astounding train wreck occurs! It definitely reads like a new tale from the "Amazing Stories" bin. 

"Super 8" never lets all of its tricks out of the bag too soon. When we get a big special-effects sequence, it adds to the story rather than detract. Also, the movie revels in the kids' personalities and the foreshadowing in background details (an action figure of Creature of the Black Lagoon in Charles's bedroom is a good example). Writer-director J.J. Abrams does his homage to Spielberg of the past proud by not revealing too much, by building tension slowly. Abrams wisely lets us soak in the kids' own dilemmas. Joe is lost in his own world of make-believe because of the loss of his own mother, and his father, a police deputy (Kyle Chandler), is not much help. Alice has issues with her drunk father (Ron Eldard) who wants nothing to do with Joe or Joe's father due to a trauma I will not reveal. Charles is the only kid who comes from a complete family, though he is wrapped too tightly around his zombie opus with hopes of making it a film festival selection. These are mostly incomplete families but rather than following the missing father dilemma from Spielberg's work (especially E.T.), these are families without mothers. And it is a sweet relationship that develops between Joe and Alice that had me rooting for them.

Yes, "Super 8" feels an awful lot like a Spielberg film. The flashlights in dark corridors or dark cemeteries; deliberate lens flares; the glowing objects from above that has its characters looking back in awe; the moments of heart-pounding suspense that echo "Jurassic Park" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"; the distrust of the military; the fact that adults are dumber than kids (even the non-Spielbergian "War Games" echoed this during the 80's of which "Super 8" echoes as well); dysfunctional, incomplete families; a high-school teacher played by Glynn Turman, who played a biology teacher in the Spielberg-produced "Gremlins"; the soaring musical cues by composer Michael Giacchino that respects composer John Williams and creates its own personality; and the careful use of curse words that can still shock when they are not abused repetitively. Yes, Spielberg's stamp is all over this since he was the producer of this film and had been on the set a great deal making suggestions, which echoed Spielberg's own distinctive stamp to Tobe Hooper's "Poltergeist". 

Despite the conscious Spielberg tropes, "Super 8" feels very much like a personal lark for J.J. Abrams and his own teen years when he made films with his friends using Super 8 film stock. It is that personal touch combined with a Spielbergian glow attached to a creepy, hysterically funny and vastly entertaining B-movie underneath it all that makes "Super 8" a classic for all ages. 

Slack Torture Porn, not too overbaked

30 MINUTES OR LESS

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"30 Minutes or Less" is a visceral, vulgar thrill ride of a slacker comedy, imbued with a touch of violence though not as torturously tedious or unsettling as "Pineapple Express." At least in this comedy, the humor is higher than the body count.

Based on the grim true story of an Erie, Pa. pizza delivery man who was strapped with a real bomb to rob a bank, Jesse Eisenberg plays the hapless pizza delivery guy, Nick, whose best friend, Chet (hilarious Aziz Ansari), is flummoxed that Nick would sleep with his sister. Bigger obstacles are headed their way when Nick delivers pizza to a junkyard address and is coerced by two nitwit slackers (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) to rob a bank. The catch is that Nick is to be strapped with a homemade bomb that will explode if Nick doesn't comply with their demands. With the time release of the bomb in question, Nick needs a crime partner and who better than Chet?

The two slacker losers who dream up this ridiculous bank robbery are Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson). They both clean the pool belonging to Dwayne's Marine father, the Major (Fred Ward), who won the lottery years earlier and spends his money on luxury gifts. Dwayne is told by a lap dancer named Juicy (Bianca Kajlich) that she can help Dwayne murder his father to collect the winnings by hiring a contract killer from Detroit (Michael Pena). Dwayne's dream is to open a tanning salon/massage parlor though his equally stupid accomplice, Travis, thinks an abortion clinic might be a good moneymaker.

Yes, this is the latest in what I would like to call "Slack Torture Porn." These are movies that are filled with plot twists and center on pot-smoking slackers who redefine their manhood (or maybe just their laziness) by robbing and killing people. "Pineapple Express" was a clumsy and profanely unfunny take on Cheech and Chong (if that is possible) that upped the ante on gratuitous and sickeningly blood-drenched violence. The film was so awfully violent that the humor was lost completely. Thankfully, "30 Minutes or Less" is funnier and not as violence-proned (though the plot might make some queasy). The Nick and Chet characters are so engaging to watch that I would have watched them in any sort of story, so why did it have to be about a bomb-strapped Nick forced to commit bank robbery? An excuse for some action and a car chase perhaps.

I laughed many times through this movie but the final fifteen minutes are overbaked and chock full of one too many coincidences after another (though I did like the car chase to the tune of "The Heat is On" and a laser pointer is put to good use). A scene between the marine and the hired killer feels extraneous and could have been more imaginatively handled. Still, Eisenberg and Ansari make a good team and I would not scoff at seeing them reappear in another movie.

Actress Sarah Polley once commented that Quentin Tarantino and his irony-fueled tales of pulp fiction extremes ruined Generation X. I disagree, I think the Tarantino imitators ruined it, imbuing graphic violence with fake irony. Now slacker comedies forgo comedy for ironic and graphic violence. As I said, "30 Minutes or Less" is not heavy on violence - it is breezier and pokes a little fun at itself. I would have liked more surprise in its plot and it is possible that Slack Torture Porn may reach an end sooner than expected, but this one is better than most.