The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Director: Wes Anderson

The wife and I have found ourselves unintentionally revisiting Wes Anderson's film catalog. It started with watching The Darjeeling Limited a couple weeks back, then continued with Rushmore last week. Having enjoyed those two, we kept it up with his follow-up to that latter film, and enjoyed it plenty.

The Royal Tenenbaums uses an impressive ensemble cast to follow the Tenenbaum family, a New York City-based clan which includes Royal, the self-involved, insensitive father; Etheline, a loving mother, and three budding genius children: Chas, Margot, and Richie. While the Tenenbaum kids all seem to be headed for greatness in their respective fields of interest - finance, playwrighting, and tennis - the dysfunction within the family (mostly due to their father) eventually derails nearly everyone's chance at great success. We mostly follow the children a little over two decades after they were all between roughly eight and eleven years old and still showed limitless promise. At this point, Royal, now completely broke and desperate but no better a human being, concocts a scheme to work his way back into his wife and children's lives.

This is the Wes Anderson movie I know best, having watched it every few years since it came out, and I still think it's pretty great.

The Royal Tenenbaums was the first film of Wes Anderson's to expand to the large-group ensemble approach. After his smaller-scale (and smaller-budgeted) films Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, we now got a story that juggles no less than a half-dozen major characters and their bizarre and dysfunctional relationships with each other. If there is any primary character, it is the titular Royal, played hilariously by Gene Hackman. His gruff, unforgiving turn as the thoughtless, selfish, destructive patriarch of the Tenenbaum family sets and keeps much of the rest of the story in motion. It's not always easy - not even in comedy - to create a character who's mostly despicable, but whom you ultimately empathize with. At least a little bit, anyway.

But the movie is more than just Hackman as the unfit, previously-absentee father. The all-star cast all live up the reputations that had either previously created and/or have since maintained. Anjelica Huston is as good as she's ever been, which is saying something. No surprise there. But the younger players - Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke and Owen Wilson, Danny Glover, Bill Murray, and others - are inhabit their quirky and damaged characters splendidly.

In an attempt to bond, Royal brings his newly-acquainted
grandsons to a dog-fighting circle. Perfect example his
insanely misguided (but hilarious) attempts to reconnect with
a family whom he himself drove off with this type of thing.

This movie was also the one which I consider the first of what the movie-going world would come to know as "the Wes Anderson movie." While we saw it almost fully formed in Rushmore, it is with The Royal Tenenbaums that we get the hyper-detailed, meticulously-crafted, super vibrant visuals and ultra-sharp cinematography in each and every shot and movement. It's not to everyone's taste, as it shatters any illusion that you're watching reality, and it can have a cartoonish feel to it. But for those who appreciate an eye for visual details, it's hard not to be impressed. The impeccable quality has been a part of every single film - both live action and animated - that he's done since, and this was really the one which set his own bar.

All technical merits aside, the movie is still just plain funny. Hackman delivers Royal's brutally insensitive lines and needling to perfection. The Wilson brothers bring their penchant for playing zoned out, sensitive types fully into Eli Nash and Richie Tenenbaum. The rest of the cast is just as good, and they're all given plenty of hilariously odd situations that actually don't seem too far off the detached, near-aristocratic pursuits of New York elite types. As with nearly every Anderson movie, it does take a brief, dark turn that's difficult to anticipate, but the proceedings never get overly bleak. There is heart and dysfunction aplenty, but this is, overall, a comedy.

I still rank this one among my favorite Wes Anderson films. I've generally liked them all to varying degrees, but The Royal Tenenbaums is in my top two or three. Along with Rushmore, it's the Anderson movie I would recommend to someone who hasn't seen any of his. From either one of those, you'll know if he's to your liking. 

Retro Reviews: Predator series Part I: Predator (1987) and Predator 2 (1990)

Having recently seen Shane Black's newest entry into the Predator film series, I had the urge to go back and watch (or rewatch) a few of the earlier movies which I hadn't seen in a number of years. This year's The Predator marks the sixth movie in the series, and I'd seen all but one of the previous five with varying degrees of recency. Without further ado:

This is the actual poster that I had on
my bedroom wall as a kid.

Predator (1987)

Director: John McTiernan

I didn't need to bother going out of my way to rewatch the original movie, as I watch it every couple of years or so. This keeps it rather fresh in my mind, even aside from the fact that my Predator-loving friends and I have been quoting the movie for a couple of decades now.

For those who have somehow never seen it, the brief summary is that a rescue team of special forces soldiers, led by Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger), go into the Central American jungle on what is supposed to be a rescue mission. After the mission goes south, Dutch and his team start to be brutally killed, one-by-one, by some mysterious, unseen being. The being turns out to be an extra-terrestrial hunter that pursues the most challenging "game" on this planet. Dutch and his crew try to survive, with all but Dutch and a local freedom fighter, Anna, being slain by "the Predator."

This movie is, quite simply, a masterpiece of action film-making. It was the first major film by action movie directing legend John McTiernan (Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October), and this was the movie that got him larger budgets for his later films. With a relatively paltry budget of $15 million, he transported viewers into a Central American jungle to follow Schwarzenegger's small platoon of completely badasses, as they are ruthlessly hunted by a mysterious killer using impossibly advanced technology. The story is relatively simple, but the characters are great, the pacing and dialogue are perfect, and the action and tension are top-notch. I have to assume that it was the quality of this film that urged movie studios to throw far greater sums at McTiernan for his next movie - the following year's iconic Die Hard, another absolute masterpiece of action cinema.

Back to Predator. It's not often that a movie gets made that is so much of its own time yet is timelessly enjoyable. The great noir cinema of the '40s and '50s comes to mind, as do several other films. Predator is one of those. A friend of mine once brilliantly described the movie as "Beowulf told through the lens of Reagan-era America," which I found astoundingly fitting. Like so many things in the 1980s, this movie was about undiluted machismo. You have several famously muscle-bound dudes: Arnie. Carl "Apollo Creed" Weathers. Jesse "The Body" Ventura. And several other obvious tough guys, most of whom were military veterans. This resulted in a very organic, humorous Alpha-male chemistry between everyone in the platoon. Without authentic soldiers playing these roles, it's easy to imagine how this movie could have fallen very flat. A strong argument can also be made that Schwarzenegger - never known as being a particularly great actor - was at his acting best in this movie. No, the role didn't demand much, but it fit Arnie like a glove, and he nailed it to a tee.

Two more of the obvious strengths of the film are the narrative pace and dialogPredator have tried to work in a fraction of this movie's great lines and flawless deliveries, and nearly all have failed.

Dutch and his men. They look like serious badasses probably
because nearly all of them were in real life. Even beyond the
muscles and hard stares, though, each character quickly
displays some charisma, making many of the deaths
meaningful to us viewers.

ue. The movie does spend a little time setting up the "rescue mission" story, but it's barely five minutes before we're with the guys on a chopper, listening to "Long Tall Sally" blasting over the radio and Hawkins fire off one of his crass jokes, and getting to love the entire squad through their busting of each others' balls. The movie is then off and truly running, with the slower, tenser moments bridged to the explosive action sequences through a highly memorable and quotable script, compliments of the punch-up writing of Shane Black, who plays Hawkins in the film. Countless action movies before and since

One last observation about this movie - the ending. I think it's often a somewhat overlooked piece of genius. Whereas so many lesser action/horror movies follow the trope of ending the movie with the surviving hero firing off a one-liner, or the movie leaving us viewers with an obvious teaser for a potential sequel, Predator doesn't do that. The final shots of this movie are of Dutch being carried off in a rescue helicopter, staring into the distance as the reality of his men's deaths sets in. No more pithy one-liners. No hints of further "Predators" arising to seek revenge. Just the haunted stare of an elite soldier who has survived a horrific ordeal - one which has taken the lives of every one of his closest brothers-in-arms. It's rare that such an overtly "action" movie chooses to end on such an effectively somber note, but Predator pulls it off.

There is a very good reason that this single film spawned so many other stories, mainly in movies and comic books. In terms of the films, none of the five succeeding ones has come anywhere close to matching the muscled-up magic of the original.

Predator 2 (1990)

Director: Stephen Hopkins

A sequel that was rather disappointing when it was released, given how very different it was from its predecessor. It is one, however, that holds up fairly well.

Predator 2 completely shifted the setting from a tropical rainforest to a blisteringly hot Los Angeles in which a wildly violent gang war is taking place. This was the first jarring shift away from the memorably primitive setting of the original movie. Another is that, while a sequel, not a single character and only one brief reference is made to the horrors which Dutch and his men suffered in Predator. And the final large difference is simply the complexity of the plot, which includes more than the simple survival tale of the original film. Here you have a Dirty Harry-like cop, Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover), who catches the eye of a new "Predator" alien. The Predator, for whatever reason, decides to toy with Harrigan by following him around and gradually killing of members of his squad. Hovering around all of this is a shadowy government group who is interested in trapping the Predator, in order to study it and its amazingly advanced weapons technology.

While it never really comes close to the overall quality of the original, Predator 2 is a decent follow-up and a solid enough action movie. I admire the film-makers' willingness to completely change settings, and it was fun to dig a bit deeper into the culture of the Predator species. While the drug war plotline never gets terribly interesting, it serves well enough as a hotbed of action in which the Predator and Harrigan can play their cat-and-mouse game. The cast it also strong. Although Maria Conchita Alonso can overact and over-inflect quite a bit, Ruben Blades, Gary Busey, and Bill Paxton are all great. There are a few moments when the tone is just a tad off - basically when anyone not named Bill Paxton tries to be funny - but this was a decent entry into the series.

Though never noted as an "action star," per se, Danny Glover
actually plays the part of hard-charging super-cop Mike
Harrigan fairly well. His epic chase-down of the hunter
alien packs a solid amount of intensity to it.

I feel that one thing that weakens this movie is that a fair bit of the violence is purely gratuitous. Namely, some of the gang violence, especially the scene in which Jamaican gang members string up a rival and mercilessly thrust a massive knife into his chest. This scene also includes one of several clumsy attempts to emulate the memorable one-liners from the original film. The knife-wielding Jamaican in this scene, for no clear reason, utters the line, "Shit happens," with his thick accent. This becomes a line that the Predator alien utters later, much the same way that the alien utters "What the hell are you?" in the original movie. These were just two of several moments which seemed to be going for a little more shock value or "cool" factor than the original movie, which achieved its strength and coolness in a nearly effortless and organic manner. When Predator 2 tries, it comes off as cheap B-movie fare.

I wasn't able to find a final budget for this movie, but it made notably less that the original. This is why, I assume, the series was put to sleep for well over a decade.

New Release! Sorry to Bother You (2018) [No Spoilers]

Director: Boots Riley

A wild ride of social satire, and one of the most unique films I've seen in a while.

Sorry to Bother You follows Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) in Oakland set within a near-dystopian alternate version of our modern world. Cassius is a smart enough guy, but he's down on his luck and desperate for a job. Desperate enough to take a gig at a telemarketing agency and do cold calls to sell customers all sorts of useless products that they don't need. When Cassius, an African-American, is given the suggestion to "talk white," he adopts a stereotypical "nerdy" white guy voice (by David Cross), and his sales go through the roof. Before long, Cassius is offered the highly-coveted job as a "power caller" - a mysteriously powerful position granted only to the best of the best ground-level telemarketers. Though he has to break a picket line formed by his exploited co-workers, Cassius is initially elated at the immense salary increase. However, what he is selling gives him some serious pangs of conscience. Cassius climbs the corporate ladder, things become ever stranger and more terrifying.

The relatively simple summary above gives a reader no actual idea of what this movie does. Sorry to Bother You is a satire that punches you in the face with all sorts of criticisms about modern culture. Some of them are biting. Many of them are funny. And nearly every one of them is about as subtle as a set of brass knuckles to the teeth. But this is OK. The primary targets of writer/director Boots Riley deserve no quarter: rampant capitalism; creeping cultural homogeneity; commodification of the bodies and souls of everyone on the planet by the ultra-rich. These are what Riley is bringing our attention to, and it is quite a trip.

Cassius celebrates his massive successes as a "power caller."
Only later do his full realizations about his action hit him,
along with the horrors connected to them all.

While unlike nearly anything I've seen before, Sorry to Bother You does show clear elements of several other great satires and counter-culture films of cinema's past. The vision of consumerism run wild bring to mind John Carpenter's low-budget They Live. The commentary on both office culture and the dumbing down of mass populations is not unlike Mike Judge's Office Space and Idiocracy. But none of these can quite prepare you for just how gonzo things get in the third act of the movie. It threw me off for a moment, but it quickly becomes clear that Riley has a cogent point, although one that is using a really far-out story device.

The acting is great here. Lakeith Stanfield, whom I only know from the excellent TV show Atlanta plays a great protagonist. Cassius is, while intelligent, not the strongest-willed guy, and his journey of getting buffeted around by forces far stronger than him is portrayed with the right blend of confusion and humor. The supporting cast, from Tessa Thompson to Armie Hammer to a smaller role by A-lister and longtime Boots Riley family friend Danny Glover, all bring just the right tone to this uniquely strange picture.

You have to be in the right state of mind for this one. If you enjoy satire, then this one is well worth checking out. It's a form of cinema that isn't attempted much, but Riley gets it right.