The Calamari Wrestler (2004)

Immersed in a popular culture dominated by DVD commentaries,  Lost easter eggs and blogs devoted purely to revealing spoilers it is easy for one to forget the pleasure by experiencing a film only through the moments in which it is projected onto the screen.  When we see a film we begin with darkness and we end on darkness, and the filmmaker can only hope that we see that second darkness as something recognizably different.  Going into the Calamari Wrestler, I knew nothing of Minoru Kawasaki and his films.  My lack of expectations for this film made it all that much more absurd, surreal and captivating.

The Calamari Wrestler is a sports movie that follows a professional wrestler’s road to the championship title and his efforts to keep that title.  It contains all the conventions of an American sports film:  the detailed fight scenes, at least one training montage and a cleverly woven love story that works in conjunction with a buddy story.    These standards of genre are executed relatively masterfully considering an obviously minuscule budget.  Lets see… Oh, I guess I’m forgetting something:  the main character spends the majority of the film in an unbelievably ridiculous squid costume.

Minoru Kawasaki is no stranger to stories that center around animal characters that are thrust into human worlds, only to be alienated and outcast.  The titles of many of his films seem to boast their contents: Executive Koala is about an office worker who is also a koala and Crab Goalkeeper is a “Forest Gump story” (according to Kawasaki himself) that happens to be about a crab.

Knowing a little bit about the plot, one might expect The Calamari Wrestler to be filled with over-the-top action an dialog to go with its nonsensical story.   However, Kawasaki seems to go an entirely different route by letting a the gaudy costumes speak for themselves.  Aside from the obvious and easy puns regarding seafood, ink and the anatomy of a squid, there are many jokes in the film that play out a lot more subtly.  Don’t get me wrong, this movie is completely absurd and it was literally an effort for me not to audibly say “what the fuck?” every couple minutes of watching it, but there seems to be something hidden underneath its cartoon appearance.  Despite his own assertions that he is “Japan’s Roger Corman” or “Ed Wood Jr”  it  seems clear to me that Kawasaki has intention that extends beyond the depths of mere exploitation.  In The Calamari Wrestler he gives us archetypal characters like the professional wrestling executives who see the sport as the force that will rescue Japan’s economy and in the meantime grow their pockets.   In the first half of the film there is a parallel drawn between racism/classism and the outcast Calamari Wrestler.   Kawasaki lightly travels through musings on the “self” and the “other” without completely losing  touch with the story’s ridiculous premise.   By the end of the film, there was almost a moment where I forgot that I was watching a movie about a humongous squid… almost.

Wall Street (1987): Our Fathers, the Free Market

I found Wall Street in a video exchange for one dollar.  I didn’t really have a large movie buying budget, which is at least in part due to our terrible economy, which in turn is at least in part due to the actions of the real Wall Street.  Of course, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my dollar than on a VHS copy of Oliver Stone’s denunciation of corporate greed and excess.

Wall Street tells the story of a young stock broker named Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) whose persistence earns him the ear of one of the worlds most lucrative investment bankers , Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas).  Gecko takes Fox underneath his wing and takes him down the dangerous and winding road of sweet success.   Wall Street has its fair-share of  oh-so-very-80s moments:  the text-only computers that look like toaster ovens, the Zach Morris foot-long cell phones and the kitschy montage of an empty apartment transforming into the hippest bachelor pad on the east side.  Despite all of these dated scenes Wall Street still holds up, 22 years later, a near perfect cautionary tale of dark and skewed morality.

A couple of Wall Street’s key scenes take place in elevators.   The first is our introduction to Bud Fox.  Our man is trapped behind dozens of commuters in the back of an elevator on his way up to his  tiny cubicle, where he is a small-time broker with big investment banking dreams.  This scene is part of a claustrophobic establishing sequence in which Oliver Stone gives us a real sense of the dark yet promising world this film exists in.  Dean Martin’s “Olde New York” this is not.   This is a new New York.  This is a place packed with people who find themselves alone.  This world is also illustrated through screenwriter Stanley Weisers sharp dialogue.  Some of Gordon Gecko’s lines are what remain memorable about the film.   Gecko gives Fox this advice in the sauna of a private club:  “if you need a friend, get a dog.”  Later on, we learn that Gecko would not only   “sell his mother for a deal”  but he’d “send her C.O.D.”  This is Wall Street. There are no friends in this world, there are no family ties that are not worth breaking.

We find Bud Fox on an elevator again towards the end of Wall Street, but this time it is with his father.  It seems the relationship between father and son is integral to the film.  Bud Fox is torn between two fathers:  his surrogate father and mentor, Gekko and his real father (played by his REAL real father, Martin Sheen).  When we return to the confined space of the elevator at the climax of the film we truly discover the person that Bud Fox has become.  The person he will never truly come back from.  Other than Douglas’ Gekko, the performances in Wall Street are mediocre at best (Darryl Hannah actually nabbed a Razzie for her “acting”) , but it is in this elevator that Charlie Sheen finally shines. This scene is shot entirely hand-held, not a common convention of a 1980s film, a testament to the fantastic skill and precise vision of Oscar winning cinematographer Robert Richardson’s.  Richardson began his career working with Oliver Stone but later went on to work for other high profile directors such as John Sayles, Scorcese, Tarrintino and even acclaimed docucmentarian Errol Morris (on the film Fast, Cheap and Out of Control). Its no surprise that Richardson would find himself working a documentary, though, because this climactic scene between father and son Sheens in an elevator is as real as you can possibly get.

Wall Street‘s end credits roll behind a sketch of a classic New York skyline while the Talking Heads melancholy ballad “This Must Be The Place” plays. Just before the credits, there is a dedication of the film to Louis Stone.  Louis was Oliver Stone’s father, a successful stock broker who used his influence to get his son summer work in banking and finances.  No doubt, Stone has projected one perspective of his father as a stockbroker onto Douglas’ corrupt Gekko, but perhaps there is more than this  to Stone’s view of his father.  Maybe Martin Sheen represents a different side of Oliver Stone’s father, or maybe he’s a purely fictional version, the father Oliver Stone wished he’d had.

Wall Street is often remembered for Gordon Gecko’s mantra: “Greed is good.”  The film ends with a resitance of that idea, a triumph of responsibility over greed.   One can only hope, in our nation where our greed has become greed, we can follow suit.

Finally! an Update

So… I bought this domain and started this blog because I wanted to start writing about movies. I came up with the theme of Paracinema, meaning fringe or outsider cinema, because I wanted to take movies that nobody ever heard of or weren’t indoctrinated into the mainstream canon and recontextualize them or something.

The thing is, I have a full-time job and 2 bands and a million other responsibilities, so trying to find appropriate movies to write about and then getting around to writing about them became pretty frustrating so I just never updated.

Now I am hopefully going to get back into the swing of things, but instead of just writing about fringe movies, I am going to write about all movies and possibly even some music and comic books. Its my blog, so I will do whatever I damn well please. Thanks.

the Trip (1967)

The Sixties, LSD, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson.  This probably sounds at least a little bit familiar to you.  Easy Rider can be found on AFI’s 100 Best American Movies.  What you might not know, though, is that the landmark 1969 film wasn’t the trio’s first attempt to capture the independent spirit of the nineteen sixties on film.  The Trip (1967) was directed by King of B-Movies Roger Corman, penned by first time writer and frequent Corman-collaborator Jack Nicholson, and stars Fonda with a small appearance by Hopper.

Perhaps the most exciting part of The Trip is the “forward” title card that begins the 81 minute film.   As the words scroll, it is read to the audience:

“You are about to be involved in a most unusual motion picture experience.  It deals fictionally with the hallucinogenic drug, L.S.D…Can have fatal consequences…This picture represents a shocking commentary on a prevalent trend of our time…”

From this ominous title card we are presented next with a commercial for perfume.  From this commercial as the camera jarringly zooms out and pans to the right, we are thrust into the world of Paul Groves (Fonda), a tall and handsome film director who makes television commercials.  Groves is about to sign papers on his divorce, so he does what any sweater-off-but-around-the shoulders TV director, he finds some hippies to give him some spiritual guidance.

About 12 minutes into the movie,  with a bearded Bruce Dern playing his LSD guru,  Fonda begins to take a backseat to Nicholson’s boldly minimal (or perhaps, inadequate) story telling and apathetically bizarre dialogue.  Paul Groves acid trip is Corman’s entry point into experimental camerawork, kaleidoscopic strobe and colored-lighting, optical printing and quick editing .   Without giving too much away:  there are dwarves, dark ring-wraith-esque horsemen, long walks in the desert,  dungeons, carnival fun houses and nude-walks through a meadow at dusk.

Supposedly, while, preparing for the film, Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson all took an LSD trip together.   One might assume that it was during that trip that they came up with scenes like “Which chair am I going to sit in?” and “The washing machine is Incredible!”.   Somewhere in the jumbled mess of contrived, superficial-but-sweet symbolism of this film is an equally contrived message.   Paul Groves looks inward and discovers his guilt for not loving his wife too much and for taking a job in television advertising, a field that is predicated on lying to the world.

If the filmmakers really wanted to promote love and slander the evil advertising industry (and the rest of “the man”) then they probably didn’t recognize that what they had created was essentially an 81 minute advertisement for acid.  I doubt that at the time of its release The Trip really changed any lives for the better.  I would bet, though, that it got some kids into during drugs.   This, of course, was no shock to the studio that released the film, hence the text that begins the reel.

in 1967, I can only imagine the  anticipation brought on by the title card preciding the film.   Like a flower child waiting for a spiritual enlightenment to come from a chemical reaction, that audience is left with a film that never really delivers what was on the label.   Now, over 40 years later, this film has fallen into obscurity and stands only as a quirky, entertaining relic of the times.  A notch in the belt of Roger Corman and an peculiar first draft of Easy Rider.

Videodrome (1983)

In Videodrome, director David Cronenberg allows the elements of psychological, technological and “body” horror to coalesce to build his first truly personal film. Though the story crescendos into complete chaos by its final moments, he communicates a more concrete theme than he ever has before. In a world that is media saturated and over stimulated our ability to tell the difference between reality and simulated reality begins to disintegrate.

In the beginning of the film we see that Max Renn (James Woods) suffers from techno-dependency. He wakes up to a daily video alarm clock recorded by his secretary. Before the plot even begins, we see his detached interactions with other people. First it’s the video secretary, than we see him in an interview on television (through a camera lens interacting with the even more detached Brian O’Blivion), and when he visits Nikki Brand, he first watches her through glass. When he sees Videodrome, he moves further and further away from reality. In the end we see that he “got bit not by Videodrome, but by his own dependency on technology and his subsequent detachment from reality.

It’s easy to say that Videodrome is a satirical comment/criticism of Cronenberg’s experience with censorship, but I think that his intention broader than that. Cronenberg addresses his own doubts about why he presents graphic images. Though he makes it clear in Cronenberg on Cronenberg that he doesn’t believe in censorship (on an institutional, domestic or artistic level), he also mentions that Max Renn’s frustration with why he watches (and shows to Nikki) the violent images, mirrors his own uncertainty about his work.

The dichotomy set up between “actual” reality and a false or simulated reality that exists in Videodrome is something that Cronenberg revisits in a lot of his later work, especially eXistence. The idea that one can unravel different layers of falsehood and ascend to new levels of consciousness can be found in philosophy from Buddhism to Plato. Plato’s allegory of the Cave comes to mind in Videodrome’s final sequence, in which we see Max Renn watching himself commit suicide on the television in the shot, and then we see him do it real life. Plato holds that there is an absolute reality at the end of the series of illusions. Max Renn’s universe doesn’t seem to have that absolute at the end of the tunnel. He recognizes that simultaneously that the fictional isn’t real but also that nothing is. He was so disconnected and unfulfilled from the beginning, even without Videodrome-induced-hallucinatory tumor, Max Renn might have found himself at this conclusion.
Videodrome at IMDB.com