Ash Williams and the King of the Dead

EVIL DEAD TRILOGY: A Study of Cabin-Fever Extremes

Reviewed By Jerry Saravia

It has been twenty years since Sam Raimi's "Army of Darkness" first arrived in theaters to very mild box-office. The third in the "Evil Dead" series failed to attract any real mainstream attention and it was thought that Mr. Ash and his chainsaw arm battling demons from an unearthed portal came to an end. However, the series has since been highly regarded as a cult series and it made Bruce Campbell a B-movie household name (he can be seen in Raimi's new "Oz" film, and in the "Burn Notice" TV series, and has served as producer of the "Evil Dead" remake). The series inspired several video games and rumors surfaced of a "Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash" flick that now exists in comic book form. But will there be a fourth entry in the series? The latest news is that writer-director Sam Raimi and his brother will be penning the new installment this summer. For purists, the theatrical version is the happier ending with Ash back at S-Mart and offing one more demon before falling into the arms of a woman (not Bridget Fonda). The alternate ending had Ash in a future nuclear apocalypse screaming "No!" I would assume Raimi will go with his theatrical ending which can lead to all possibilities. Of course, he is also credited as a director for a possible "Poltergeist" remake! I hope the latter is not 100% true.

So let's go back to the beginning. In 1982, Sam Raimi's first tongue-in-cheek horror film, "The Evil Dead", was released in theaters and proved notable in receiving a rave review from Stephen King after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The concept behind the film was that a hidden force was unleashed in the woods, ready to devour anything in its path, including a group of young people staying in a remote cabin. The film was successful enough as a low-budget sleeper to spawn two sequels, each with a bigger budget than the next and all directed by Sam Raimi. What we have is a trilogy of horror, growing more tongue-in-cheek and goofy with each sequel. Below is a brief look at each film.

The Evil Dead (1981) - I will not say that "The Evil Dead" is one of the best horror films ever made - it is not - but it is often repulsive, humorous and full of enough major shocks to the system to make any true horror fan happy.

Bruce Campbell plays Ash, one of the group of college students who travel on an Oldsmobile to some remote cabin in the desolate woods of Michigan. In the opening sequence, a whirlwind force travels through lakes, swamps, and trees ready to attack the Oldsmobile. Things careen out of control briefly yet the students manage to make it to the cabin, even going through a decrepit bridge. But nightfall comes, and one of them makes the mistake of reading from an old copy of the Book of the Dead (entitled "Necronomicon," a nod to H.P. Lovecraft) and before you know it, evil spirits are unleashed and zombies manifest. The only way to kill these things is by dismembering and decapitating these ugly, evil spirits that possess everyone in the group. Naturally, Ash is the one that makes it out alive.

There is plenty of blood and gore, and there is an inventive use of a pencil as a weapon. The film certainly is cheap-looking and barely audible in certain scenes, and some of the makeup and special-effects are practically garden variety. The strength of "The Evil Dead" is in the straightforward directing by Raimi and the astoundingly good cinematography by Tom Philo - the latter makes every shot eerie and menacing. There is a sense of claustrophobia to the film, a sort of latter-day "Night of the Living Dead" where hiding in an isolated cabin can prevent one from dealing with unseen forces. Naturally, these forces find their way in the cabin.

"The Evil Dead" also has some superb moments of horror and humor, particularly the scene where one girl stares into a window (we only see the back of her head) as she is able to read all the cards that her group is playing before turning around and screaming...well, you get the idea. I also like the vines attacking one girl in the forest and being dragged across thousands of twigs, while one of the "shemps" inserts itself in an area...well, you know the scene, need I repeat it? Some of the sexual connotations I could have lived without but still there is enough going on here to make anyone squeamish about going into the woods again. "The Evil Dead" is goofy horror to be sure, but fun masterfully tongue-in-cheek horror nonetheless.

Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987) - Here is an example of not so much a sequel as much as a semi-remake of the original. With a bigger budget and even better special-effects, Raimi continues where the original left off, and brings us even more gore and humor.

At the end of the original "Evil Dead," Ash was pursued by that evil force in the woods. Now he is back in the cabin enduring more torture by these unseen forces. There is a moment where his right hand takes on a life of its own, and Ash chops it off with a chainsaw. Needless to say, the hand scurries, hides and makes fun of Ash in ways that are so funny that the film's haunting momentum pauses and becomes more of a kinetic horror-comedy. We see Ash's reflection in a mirror having a life of its own, dancing skeletons by the pale moonlight, giggling deer heads, heads being squashed in vises, lots of blood spilling into the screen from every direction (though nothing like the distasteful "Dead-Alive" by Peter Jackson from 1993), and ghouls and zombies yelling things like "I am going to take your soul!"

Though relentlessly inventive and often inspired, the pacing of "Evil Dead 2" begins to slack off a bit towards the end, especially with the inclusion of an archaeologist's daughter searching for her father who happened to live in the very cabin that is possessed. She thinks Ash may have killed her father, I mean, what would you think if you saw a man draped with blood and holding a chainsaw? But Raimi continues to make us feel the claustrophobia of being isolated and facing demonic forces beyond our own control. The humor and horror pays off, and the final sequence is certainly a doozy.

Army of Darkness (1993) - Ash is back again, now he is stuck in the 13th century fighting Deadites and more ghouls and zombies! Huh? Well, you see at the end of "Evil Dead 2," Ash was transported back into time before being able to finish an incantation that would have ended the evil spell. He and his beloved Oldsmobile landed in some foreign land in the 13th century, and now he is subject to the physical torture of some medieval lords. Ash does so well battling Deadites to the death that he is considered by the people to be their savior against the armies of darkness. Ash's goal, however, is to retrieve the Book of the Dead and get back home to his S-mart job where they "shop Smart!" There is also a love interest, a medieval damsel-in-distress, Sheila (Embeth Davidtz, who later appeared in "Schindler's List"), who convinces him to help her people.

"Army of Darkness" is hardly horror, it is an out-and-out campy comedy with plenty of thrills per second and less blood and gore than the previous entries. It is practically a new version of Ray Harryhausen's "Jason and the Argonauts," albeit less sophisticated in its content if not its form. Ash is like Marty McFly in "Back to the Future," uttering such anachronistic lines as "Groovy!" or "Give me some sugar baby." There are still some moments to treasure such as the Evil Ash sequence, the evil Ash Lilliputians formed by reflective shards of glass, and Ash screwing up the simple line from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" ("Klattu Barada Nikto") while trying to choose the real Book of the Dead in a scene that echoes Indiana Jones.

It is a fun-filled 82 minutes but some of the gags are desperate and repetitive, and we start to get the feeling that Ash has had enough of battling demons, ghosts, and the vast army of skeletons. Probably Raimi has had enough as well, considering the ending has been changed radically from its more downbeat finish (though clearly that may still not be the case). Still, if nothing else, "Army of Darkness" led the way to more anachronistic, self-aware medieval stories, especially the recent TV series "Hercules" and "Xena," both winking at the audience in its complete absurdity and anachronisms.

Save one life, save the world entire

SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

 

Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" remains both the most proficient and emotionally overpowering film of his career. It established Spielberg as a "serious" director, though he had already proven that with "The Color Purple" and "Empire of the Sun." Though "List" has its minute flaws, it is a frustrating, exhausting, emotionally manipulative, serene, pristinely beautiful and poetic film of the most tragic time in history, the Holocaust. It is not the definitive version but it stands as something of a raw though somewhat compromising cinematic event.

Based on the Tom Kennealy book, the film begins with Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) worming his way into the Nazi party by engaging in the munitions business. First, he integrates himself in nightclubs frequented by Nazi commandants and soldiers by paying for exquisite foods and liquor. Then he slowly builds interest in the higher elite by giving them chocolates, Cognac and shoe polish. Before you know it, Schindler has the financial backing from many supporters for a munitions plant, the kind of factory where arms and other weapons can be made with faulty mechanisms. All he needs is an accountant, and he finds one in Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), a Jew who questions Schindler's motives from the start. Nevertheless, Schindler hires many Jews to work for him, to ensure that not one manufactured weapon will fire. He also hires a bunch of women as secretaries. You see, Schindler is a ladies' man, sleeping with women he meets at clubs or restaurants. His wife, Emile Schindler (Caroline Goodall), has grown to accept Schindler's infidelities though she prefers to be called Mrs. Schindler as opposed to "miss."

Oskar's goal is to make money, nothing more. He knows his stature will be observed by all the Nazi officers. So he achieves this goal by making a "presentation," an effort to save several Jews from dying in the concentration camps. There are obstacles. One is the deadly Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), a brutal, handsome Nazi prison commandant who has no qualms of shooting a Jew in the head for any reason, including one with a work protest. Amon is merely serving the Fuhrer in his cause and helping to liquidate the ghettos is within his reach. He is also a killing machine, shooting Jews for sport from the balcony of his villa in one of the most chilling scenes in the film. He even wants a Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz), to live with him after the war is over. It takes someone like Schindler to convince Amon that it would be crazy to do such a thing. Schindler also convinces Amon to refrain from shooting every Jew he feels justified in killing.

In one of the most amazingly elaborate sequences ever directed by Spielberg, we witness the liquidation of a ghetto, from the forceful evacuation of people and their belongings in their apartments, to the random shootings on the streets and to the survivors being led into the trains. We also see children scurrying about to find hiding places under floorboards and other passageways. Schindler observes this chaos from a hill and when he sees one girl wearing a red coat wandering about on the streets, he decides he has a moral obligation - it is not about money anymore, it is about saving lives. And save lives he does, as he uses Itzhak to draw up a list of Jews who can work in the factory and prevent them from being shot or gassed to death. Ever the clever businessman, he uses money to persuade many officials to let these selected people go. "You are giving them hope. That's cruel," says Amon as he watches Schindler use fire hoses to give the prisoners in the trains water. Why did the real Oskar Schindler risk his own life to save 1,000 Jews from imminent death? Spielberg and screenwriter Steven Zaillian do not provide us the answers and we do not need them. We can draw our own conclusion that Schindler only did what he thought was right - money and artillery shells were no longer precious commodities. "The list is life" and "If you save one person, you save the world entire" are the themes of this Holocaust film. Schindler understands those things all too well. Yes, he is a cipher but he did what he thought was the right thing to do and not because he was sympathetic to the Jews (at least that is my impression).

"Schindler's List" succeeds greatly in absorbing us with all the details - especially seeing how Schindler thinks and maneuvers himself in this hellish world. The performances by all the actors contain refreshing restraint - no single actor towers over anyone else. The black-and-white cinematography by Janusz Kaminsi is nothing short of astounding, utilizing grain, deep contrast and shadows with the ease of early films from the same period. All told, the film is excellent but I'd be remiss if I agreed with the Academy in honoring it the Best Picture Award of 1993 (that honor should have gone to Scorsese's "Age of Innocence" or James Ivory's "Remains of the Day"). Spielberg's Holocaust is unflinching to be sure and masterfully horrific when expected, but there is a sense that the major characters are only affected by the horror emotionally. In other words, the major Jew characters, including Helen Hirsch, are memorably portrayed and their lingering faces of shock stay with us - we can't help but identify with them. But their characters survive thanks to Schindler's intervention so that we see the value of human life. That's fine but, call me jaded, I would have preferred if one of the main characters were killed. This would have made the ending more powerful, though I am aware the characters depicted did in fact survive (a fictional character could've been created to be one of the lead Jew prisoners). Consider an early sequence where a one-armed Jew worker is shot by the Nazis for being inefficient and useless. We hardly get to know the character (only that he is grateful to Schindler for giving him work) so that his execution is awful to witness but it affects us only because we know what horrors await these people.

The finale of "Schindler's List" is still genuinely moving, particularly the real-life survivors who place stones on the graves of people they knew. Just prior to that sequence is Schindler's emotional breakdown in front of all the people he saved. The emotions run the risk of being too sentimental, as if Spielberg wanted to suffocate the viewers with emotion. In real life, Schindler said goodbye to all the survivors and left in a car with his wife and mistress - no emotional breakdown took place. Still, these minor tidbits can be argued about endlessly by all Spielberg detractors and certainly don't diminish what Spielberg has invested in this grand epic. Harrowing, disturbing, terrifying and exhausting, this is Spielberg at his most humanistic and most vital.

The Future is Dumb and Dumber

IDIOCRACY (2006)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

(originally reviewed in 2007)

There is no better way to put it - America is headed for the dumb and dumber road. Just about everything in our culture, our pop culture, is watered down, bland and simply uninteresting. Well, maybe not everything. In the future world of "Idiocracy," being the smartest man in the room means you were once dumb.

Luke Wilson is ideally cast as Private Joe Bowers, an Army soldier who works in the library where he has not a single task to perform. The Army fires him from this post and uses him as a guinea pig for a government experiment - he will be kept frozen for a year, along with a prostitute, Rita (Maya Rudolph). They wake up five hundred years into the future, thanks to an Army mishap, and find themselves in a city populated by dunderheaded fools. We see two buildings held together by rope; garbage infesting every square inch of the city thanks to huge, fragile mounds of trash; a White House run by a former wrestler; a Costco that seems as big as the city; cinemas showing films about defecation and flatulence; TV shows where getting kicked in the testes is the biggest highlight; ER's where diagnostic machines provide information, not doctors; Starbucks offering literally more bang for your buck; lasers that read bar codes on people's wrists; and where whining is synonymous with homosexuality.

Some of this is quite amusing, especially the visual gags (the monster trucks at a show loaded with weapons, one of which doesn't quite fit through an entrance). I am more appreciative of the dialogue, some of which sparks with real ingenious situations (people of the future use advertising slogans consistently when they speak, a time machine is not what it seems, etc.). I also love how Joe sees that he is smarter than everyone, to the point that he garners attention from the White House. See, this city needs help. Clearing all the trash is not as important as clean air (clearing the trash might help first and foremost) but it might help if a sports drink isn't held as the healthiest drink (apparently water only comes out of toilets). Since there is no vegetation, Joe knows that water is needed to grow plants, not electrolytes. I also like how Rita, still a prostitute in the future, holds up her customers for several days while milking them for all their cash.

At 84 minutes, "Idiocracy" is almost too short and the finale, monster trucks and Joe hanging from a set of wires, seems too drawn out and anticlimactic. Mike Judge, the creator and writer-director, doesn't sustain the comic edge to really push the film to a more satisfying conclusion. However, Judge knows how to draw insight from the banalities of this future world where all one particular character can say is, "I like money." Money and sex, and breeding like cats, is all that matters (sort of the situation today as well). Advertising and commercial endorsements are part of the English language, and to say the future justice system is a joke is to miss the point - an effeminate quality or seemingly homosexual behavior leads to a guilty charge. How interesting.

"Idiocracy" was barely released in theaters thanks to Fox studios who had no real interest in this smart, subversive satire. Perhaps they saw too much of today's stupidity manifested in the film (or they missed the message about a lack of culture in these trying times). When pop stars like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton take precedence in the media over the war in Iraq, you can then see what Mike Judge is hinting at - pop culture is the culture. Or perhaps the Fox executives are worried that we are already headed in that direction. Either way, "Idiocracy" is a pure, engaging delight that ends too soon to really score a direct hit to the, um, nuts.

Manson spits at Abraxas

CHARLES MANSON SUPERSTAR (1989)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

In the eyes of the media, Charles Manson remains the epitome of evil, the counterculture carbon-copy of a Hitler on the rise who never quite fulfilled his agenda. As we all know, in the dark days of August of 1969, Charles Manson led a group of followers in Death Valley, known as the Family, to murder unsuspecting people in their own homes. They were actress Sharon Tate and friends in their home. The next day, it was the LaBianca couple in another home. The killers weren't apprehended for some time, but the nature of the crimes was so bestial that homicide detectives were vomiting in the bathrooms. The Family was eventually captured, Manson's piercing eyes graced Life magazine covers, and the rest is history.
Many films and books were written about this infamous chapter in the annals of crime, but little has been examined about Manson himself. Who was this little man (professing to be a hippie) and why did he think he was Jesus, Satan and above everything and anything, and what was this talk of a racial war? "Charles Manson Superstar," a crudely and badly edited yet never less than compelling document, attempts to deal with such questions but it never really succeeds.

Writer-director Nikolas Schreck filmed Manson in an interview at San Quentin to get some answers. Manson is seen sitting at a chair, uncuffed and not wearing shackles, waving his arms, getting into karate positions and diddling with a lavalier mike. He speaks admiringly of his Family members, including "Squeaky" Fromme who once attempted to kill former President Ford. He understands "Tex" Watson's desire to be a born-again Christian, though he insists that Tex is making a mistake following the Lord, something people have been doing for 2000 years. Manson claims he has all the answers and that he no longer inhabits the human form - he is a ubiquitous spiritual manifestation. He speaks admiringly of Abraxas, the ancient Gnostic god who is the "Symbol of the Eternal Now." Manson also claims to be a "beautiful woman," a "matriarch" for all the Manson girls! Now, I am no philosopher but this is obviously more than a man in touch with his feminine side.

Schreck seems to say that Manson was wronged by society, by the media, and turned into a monster because nobody understood his philosophies. Schreck also implies that killing Hollywood celebrities is no big deal, further supported rather chillingly in a powerful cameo by James N. Mason, the leader of the Universal Order, a U.S.-based Nazi organization. The question remains, what exactly is Manson's philosophy? To be the new Jesus? The new Hitler? The one who thought he could persuade 100,000 people to do his murderous bidding? Why start a racial war and stay in a bottomless pit? Why favor death as opposed to life, stating that death was a beautiful thing? This same pseudo-revolutionary was afraid to die when he thought he was going to get the death sentence. So Manson got away scot-free and remains in prison to this day, denied parole again and again. True, he was not allowed to testify for rather ambiguous reasons - it must have helped that President Nixon famously declared Manson guilty. How could the defense team top that?

Editing is not one of Schreck's strong suits, as his audio and video transitions are haphazardly pasted together. At times, Schreck seems to cut himself off before he starts a question, and even cuts off Manson in the middle of a speech. Also, his narration and his wife's, Zeena LaVey (Anton LaVey's daughter), can get grating but the use of Manson's bootlegged songs and other obscure music bring a sense of foreboding gloom to the proceedings.

"Charles Manson Superstar" is quite compelling overall, and many will find Manson either incomprehensible or profound. Still, seeing this man professing to be one thing or another while we, the audience, know what he had done makes one feel queasy and uncomfortable. In the end, you'll be left with those piercing eyes and more questions than answers.

Icy, cold, haunting Gallo

BUFFALO '66 (1998)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Buffalo '66" is the type of film that serves as a reminder of those small, lonely towns throughout America where you don't see or hear much, and the only excitement to be found is maybe at a third-rate bowling alley or a pool table at some tavern on a squalid street corner. In other words, a film about the kind of places you know exist but would never think of visiting - a place not unlike Buffalo. Vincent Gallo's directorial debut "Buffalo '66" focuses greatly on the squalid nature of such towns.

The scrawny Gallo stars as Billy Brown, a young man released from prison after six years for a crime he didn't commit. And what's the first thing Billy does after exiting the prison's front gate? He asks the guard if he can use the bathroom. This is something Billy tries to do for the first fifteen minutes of the film, but he can't seem to find one. Finally, he relieves himself at a tap-dance studio where he abruptly kidnaps a blonde, Lolita-like teenage student named Layla (Christina Ricci), and threatens her with words like "Don't wash the front windshield of the car like that!"

Billy's motive for kidnapping Layla is to make her pretend she is his wife so he can present her to his parents as a sign of maturity and responsibility. She calmly agrees, but wonders if his parents will cook meat since she's a vegetarian. When they arrive at his parents' house, they are greeted with indifference and the cheerless dinner scene, an absolute riot to watch, is beset by past humiliations, particularly when Billy is reminded that as a kid he was allergic to chocolate doughnuts though his mother didn't care.

"Buffalo '66" captures the seediness and icy coldness of Buffalo better than any other film could, but it's deficient in the screenwriting department. Gallo does a marvelous job of developing the hirsute antihero Billy, who is really just a lost soul in search of something. I also liked the way he wrote and shot the dinner table scenes, emphasizing the pain and dysfunction between Billy and his parents by composing a wide spatial distance in the reverse angle shots (the parents are superbly played by Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston). But the film suffers by not divulging much information about Layla - who is this girl? Is she a sexpot, a hooker, a forlorn dance student, an angel, or none of the above? The cherub-like Ricci plays her with great sex appeal and perfect comic timing, but she is much too enigmatic a character for my tastes - a nobody who is still a nobody by the end. And the feel-good ending negates most of what preceded it.

Still, in an era of bland blockbuster phenomenons and clever post-modernist horror flicks, "Buffalo '66" is surely different and it has an edge. It betrays its own edginess and sense of anxiety, but it holds your interest right from the opening black-and-white title credits to Gallo's imposing presence. He has one of the more hauntingly expressive faces I've seen in a long time, and it suggests anything but peace.

Revisiting Malick's War

THE THIN RED LINE (1998)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia 

(Original review written in January '99)

It took director Terrence Malick twenty years to make a film, which is about a decade longer than it would take Stanley Kubrick. Did he run out of ideas or was he sick of Hollywood? It is an inconsequential matter because Malick has crafted one of the most poetic, life-affirming statements on war that has ever been produced by a Hollywood studio. "The Thin Red Line" is a masterpiece - a quiet, powerful observation of men in war, their lingering thoughts on what war means to them, and how violent human behaviors affect nature.

The film's opening shot is not of bullets grazing and imploding on the beach of Omaha, but of a crocodile entering a lake. The next few shots centers on Private Witt (James Caviezel) cavorting among the natives on an island off the coast, but where are we? Why are we here? Isn't this a war film? Later, an American patrol ship spots Witt and another soldier, and it is up to First Sgt. Edward Welsh (Sean Penn) to remind Witt what their God-like mission is. Their mission, as Lieut. Col. Tall (Nick Nolte) explains, is to ascend upon a certain hill on the Guadalcanal island to infiltrate a Japanese bunker. This is the conventional section of the film - the war itself to find the bunker, and the risk of being shot down like flies by the Japanese. With its sweeping grandeur, artfully shot and edited battles and incongruous points-of-view, this long sequence caught me off guard and is thus tinged with more emotion and heartbreak than anything in "Saving Private Ryan." I think the reason it works so well is that we are aware how unfair and unpredictable war is - bullets and gunfire can come from anywhere. One soldier (played by Woody Harrelson) accidentally pulls the pin on a grenade thus literally blowing himself apart!

Malick also invests time on how his characters think of war in the context of their lives, and their loved ones back home. One particular soldier, Private Bell (Ben Chaplin), is always reminiscing of his days with his wife whom we see in short shrift during flashbacks. He wants to be with her, but knows that he may meet her "in the dark waters." Nolte's ferocious lieutenant wonders why he's fighting, then he realizes that war is what he's been working up to for twenty years. His fierce attitude is upheld by his notion that war makes a man virile - "My son is a bait salesman." When he speaks eloquently about his tough career to Captain Gaff (John Cusack), he says to him: "You are my son."

Malick also makes vivid points about nature, and how the brutal inhumanity of war affects it. This is where his artistry truly lies - his films, "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven," are inherently about nature. This time, along with the help of cinematographer John Toll, he shows us the raping of the earth by men of war. Although nature is a process of violence, war rapes the blades of grass and the soil by its incessant violence upon it, including explosions. This is a theme that the mass audience will not care to understand - close-ups of colorful parrots, bats, rattlesnakes, and crocodiles do not a war film make, do they? Yet these innocent animal species did not ask to be part of it, nor did the natives who walk among the pastures or the soldiers who are killed arbitrarily. That close symmetry between man and animal is repeatedly and intelligently paralleled by Malick.

"The Thin Red Line" is not the type of film that is character-driven but rather character-oriented. In other words, this is a film about faces within the confines of nature, and the chaos that surrounds them. The interior monologues are told through voice-overs (originally voiced by Billy Bob Thornton) of individual men and their perceptions of what war entails.

The actors who make the strongest impression are James Caveziel's divine Private Witt (the dreamy, poignant hero of the film), Nick Nolte's memorably furious Colonel, Elias Koteas's straight-arrow Captain Staros who refuses to send his men to death, Sean Penn's amazingly watchable Sgt. Welsh, Ben Chaplin's courageous Private Bell, and the stoic, eccentric quality of John Savage's McCron. Other actors (John Travolta, George Clooney, John C. Reilly, Adrien Brody) are left in the dust (there was extensive recutting), but Malick's astute direction always rivets our attention.

Malick has crafted a beautiful film full of some potent, sublime images. I'll never forget the shots of the tortured Japanese soldiers and their cries of pain; Caveziel's beatific face and the moment he's confronted by the enemy; the deployed cargoes crashing on the water; the sunlight peering through the trees. Overall, "The Thin Red Line's" overt, lingering lyricism indicates that nature should be restored and not ignored, in light of virile fighters on the terrain. Rarely has such a war film made the point that our surroundings, and what we make of them, is infinitely more important than the evil that men do. 

Pam Grier is FOXY!

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

(original review from Dec. 1997)

Aside from "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction," Quentin Tarantino has not exactly grabbed audiences with some of his later work. Anyone care to remember his minute directing bit for the awful anthology "Four Rooms"? Except for the over-the-top vampire activity of "From Dusk Till Dawn," Tarantino was in danger of overexposure since he appeared in dozens of less-than-wonderful supporting roles in other directors' movies. Now, at last, comes Tarantino's first major film as writer and director since "Pulp Fiction," and what a joy it is to see him back. "Jackie Brown" is Tarantino at the top of his game - foul-mouthed, wickedly funny writing with ball-of-fire performances by the whole cast.

The titled character is played by glamorous, former blaxploitation star Pam Grier as a 44-year-old airline stewardess who's carrying smuggled money from Mexico to a suave arms dealer, Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Jackie, however, is eventually apprehended and arrested by two ATF agents (Michael Keaton and Michael Bowen) as she arrives in California. She doesn't want to spend the rest of her days in jail so she cuts a deal with the agents to double-cross Ordell (and, naturally, the agents) out of his remaining half-million dollar stash. The switchover is to take place in a less conspicuous rendezvous - a mall.

Ordell's own life is always on the fringe. He has to contend with his beach bunny, pot-smoking girlfriend Melanie (Bridget Fonda) who reluctantly answers his business calls, and his sedate partner Louis Gara (Robert De Niro) who continually smokes pot with Melanie. Ordell bails out Jackie by talking to the taciturn, sensible bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster), who has been in the business for far too long. When Max escorts Jackie out of jail, he becomes deeply smitten by her. She loves the Delfonics, particularly on vinyl. He goes out and buys the album on cassette, not understanding why she hasn't succumbed to the "CD revolution." What develops is a sweet, subtle love story that is quite unusual for Tarantino, but he handles it with grace and vigor.

"Jackie Brown" is an unusual crime picture - it is slow, stately and handled with refreshing restraint. There are no car chases, no heads are blown up and there's not much gunfire. There are only four murders in the entire film and they are handled discreetly. Did I say this was a crime picture? You bet. If you're expecting the loud, pumped up volume of Quentin's earlier work, you'll be sorely disappointed. Based on Elmore Leonard's solidly good crime novel "Rum Punch," Tarantino's colorful, fast-talking writing is the movie's main star and his rhythmic dialogue has not failed him.

Another major plus is the star-studded performances. Samuel L. Jackson is terrifically engaging as the murderous, long-haired Ordell who is simultaneously trying to support three different girlfriends and run a business. He has a great scene, one of several, where he tries to coax "former employee" Beaumont (Chris Tucker) into going in the trunk of his car. Robert De Niro does a great job playing the unbelievably stupid, oily Louis who has a brief fling with Melanie. De Niro goes ballistic towards the end (during the switchover) in one of the most riotous scenes in the movie. Bridget Fonda is also cast against type as the flirty, naive Melanie who claims to "know as much about guns as Ordell does."

Pam Grier and Robert Forster, however, are the main attractions of this film. They both imbue the screen with a certain maturity and level of growing old with grace that is both sweet and regaling. Grier exudes sex appeal, toughness, charm and intelligence in various stages of distress and romantic interludes - she has no qualms about sticking a gun at Ordell's privates. Forster gives a beautifully modulated performance of understated humor and panache; it is one of his best character roles since "Medium Cool." Academy Award nominations are certainly in order here.

"Jackie Brown" is longish and suffers somewhat from Michael Keaton's mannered performance, but it is always entertaining and involving. It brims with many pleasures and surprises, and there are the trademark pop-culture references and sudden shocks of violence that are a major part of Tarantino terrain. Chock full of snappy 70's tunes, "Jackie Brown" is Quentin's most accomplished work by far - a twisty, exhilarating, revisionist take on film noir crossed with pulp fiction.