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Screen Trek - December 2008

Repo Man Sequel: Repo Chick

December 23rd 2008 06:56

While Alex Cox’s 1984 film, Repo Man is perhaps not quite a classic, it’s certainly one of the most entertainingly oddball and esoteric pieces of modern cult cinema. Part of its appeal is its obscurity, being a movie that will trump even the most annoying hipster film student who thinks throwing abstruse quotes at you is the highpoint of film education.


Telling the tale of young malcontent, Otto (Emilio Estevez), his induction into the dark art of vehicle repossession and subsequent pursuit of a 1964 Chevy Malibu which may something funky in the trunk, Repo Man almost immediately won fans for it’s nourish atmosphere, hilarious dialogue and sharp stabs at a 1980s culture seemingly falling apart at the seams.

Repo Man still makes for great viewing. Besides being one of Estevez’s best performances, it also contains tight contributions from Tracey Walter and Harry Dean Stanton. In addition, its soundtrack is a cornucopia of 80s punk and thrash, including The Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Fear, Black Flag and The Plugz.

It seems however that even a film maker as stridently nonconformist as Cox isn’t able to resist the call of a sequel, with filming for Repo Chick due to begin next month. Cox completed the screenplay some time ago, while David Lynch is said to be producing the project.

While sequels to cult films typically leave fans of the original with a nasty case of the runs, it could be argued that there hasn’t been a better time for a Repo Man sequel. An introverted America seems to once again be searching for social meaning amid the all-consuming sub-prime and economic crises and it’s that frailty and darkness just under the surface that the first filmed tapped into so successfully.


With Cox obviously having a dominant part to play in the creative process and the steady hand of Lynch on the tiller, this may just be one sequel to get excited about.


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The Blunder From Down Under

December 20th 2008 04:24

Early on, the signs weren’t good for Baz Luhrmann’s epic production, Australia. Talk of multiple writers, casting delays and production problems bounced around the industry and, later, when the movie moved in to post-production, word drifted out of the Cutting Edge offices in Brisbane of the one million plus feet of footage being wrestled into a workable final cut.

Of course, troubled productions don’t always turn into botched films, with perhaps The Bourne Identity being the most cogent modern example of a chaotic creative process producing an efficient, well-balanced piece of celluloid.

Australia fails to pull off such a trick, proving to be a sprawling epic that rambles rather than enraptures. While already much has been made of the appropriateness of Luhrmann’s distinctive visual style and the over-the-top nature of the performances, the problems with Australia stem from much more elementary problems, most worryingly a poor script.

Australia features four different writers and it’s a movie that has the feel of having being rewritten almost on the fly. Beginning around the turn of the 1940s, the story initially concerns the efforts of Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman), Drover (Hugh Jackman) and a ragtag bunch of herders to deliver 1500 head of cattle to a waiting warship in Darwin. It’s a race against time, the elements and the bad guys employed by Ashley’s rival, the cattle baron King Carney (Bryan Brown). A classic set up, it’s built upon straightforward storytelling and echoes keenly the great westerns of the past.

Unfortunately, this part of the film only lasts until about halfway through, before the story of the drove is sacrificed and the momentum of the movie is brought to a shuddering halt. The story arc fails and the audience suddenly lose interest. Subplots on steroids seem to envelop the movie as it hurtles off into the stratosphere trying to address The Stolen Generation issues and the Japanese bombing of Darwin in World War II.

While many a compelling story could be (and has been already) told using The Stolen Generation as a backdrop, there is little use in trying to graft such a tale on top of that of a cattle drove. You’re left with the impression that it was perhaps added on a cultural relevance stipulation by the government to warrant the generous tax breaks that the production eventually netted. Likewise, the bombing of Darwin adds little to the dramatic momentum of the film and seems very much an afterthought.

One thing the film does do well is underline how much underused Aboriginal acting talent there is floating about in Australian cinema. David Gulpilil needs little introduction, but others, such as Lillian Crombie and the young Brandon Walters are revelations, whilst quietly stealing just about every scene that he appears in is the brilliant David Ngoombujarra. Ngoombujarra has an intimidating amount of charisma that is in full effect even when working with such a short amount of screen time.

Australia certainly isn’t unwatchable, but as a piece of story telling it is a failure, foolishly opening up a battle on multiple fronts. From the moment he allowed that to happen, Luhrmann was always going to be pushing a clumsy production uphill. With all the hype and expectation, the movie was perhaps bound to disappoint, it’s just a pity it made itself so easy to dislike.
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Sequelism, Serialisation & the Destruction of Two Bond Films

December 18th 2008 04:15

2006’s Casino Royale was in many ways a fine piece of filmmaking. Efficiently directed, it was full of pulsating action and meaty characterisations. Bond himself was given a new lease on life by Daniel Craig and in Mads Mikkelson’s Le Chiffre, he was placed against an intimidating opponent worthy of 007’s king-killer instinct.

Of course, Casino Royale ended disappointingly. With twenty-five minutes to go Le Chiffre was bizarrely killed off and the film suddenly cast adrift. Characters arcs were cut; story arcs destroyed. Having been denied a cathartic resolution to the two hours that went before, the audience stopped caring. A grand final action set piece in Venice was still to come, but when you couldn’t fathom who was doing what or why, it all seemed of little consequence.

Essentially, Quantum of Solace, the twenty-second James Bond adventure, began as soon as Le Chiffre hit the floor, a bullet in his forehead, with the final act of Casino Royale dedicated to setting up the following movie.

It’s unfortunate then that Quantum is an awful film. Poorly written, absurdly directed and edited to death, it’s the shortest Bond movie in history but somehow feels like the longest. Characters, supposedly the new focus of the franchise, are given short thrift here: Craig gets little opportunity to work his exceptional nuance this time around and the rest of the cast are wasted in undercooked parts.

Sequelism, of course, has for years been used by Hollywood studios to generate higher profits from diminishing artistic returns and it’s no secret that the celluloid landscape is littered with bung follow-ups. There was the disappointing demise of the Rambo films in the 80s (admittedly corrected to a certain extent by the efficient latest instalment), the appalling later Jaws films and more recently the hopelessly bombastic Matrix sequels. With each of these examples, however, you can strip away the later films, effectively ignoring their existence.

Not so with the latest Bond films. What takes place here moves beyond sequelism and drifts dangerously into serialisation territory, with one film making no sense whatsoever without the other to immediately call upon. The car chase scene at the start of Quantum of Solace would mean absolutely nothing to audience members who hadn’t caught the end of Casino Royale. Making matters worse is the fact that most of the questions arising from the flawed final act of Casino Royale aren’t answered in Quantum of Solace. It’s like watching the second season of Deadwood where something is always about to happen, but nothing ever does.

So, while Quantum of Solace should certainly be chastised for being a poor 007 flick, that’s not its ultimate crime; after all, bad Bond films are not particularly rare. What sets Quantum apart is the effect it had on its predecessor. In this case, the crime of making a poor film is greatly overshadowed by the folly of destroying its predecessor, with Casino Royale having had the potential to be one of the greatest 007 flicks ever produced. Instead, it was sacrificed to make an autistic mess, Bond’s creators managing the strangest of feats: the destruction of two films for the price of one.
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