Sixth Annual Allan Fish Online Film Festival: Day #5: Welcome Home, Soldier Boys

By J.D. Lafrance

In the wake of the Vietnam War, many films were made that examined what happened to American soldiers returning home, from classy prestigious studio films such as The Deer Hunter (1978) to B-movie action fare such as Rolling Thunder (1977). Some explored how soldiers tried to re-acclimate to “normal” life back home while others depicted how their friends and family reacted to their return. A common theme among these films is how the veteran’s war experiences affected them, be it emotionally, psychologically or physically. These films were an attempt for America to come to grips with a highly publicized war that they lost.

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Bad Santa

by J.D. Lafrance

Tired of all the sappy Christmas movies that play endlessly on the ABC Family (ahem, now Free Form) and Hallmark channels around the holiday season? Feeling jaded and cynical about the yuletide spirit? If so, then Bad Santa (2003) is probably for you. Like The Ref (1994) before it, Bad Santa is an anti-Christmas movie. They both gleefully thumb their cynical noses at the fake cheer and manufactured mirth of the holiday season. However, where The Ref betrayed its own misanthropic tendencies with a tacked-on feel-good conclusion, Bad Santa does not make the same mistake. As a result, it had a modest run at the box office and garnered decent reviews before going to home video where it gains the bulk of its following.

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H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator

By J.D. Lafrance

Armed with razor-sharp wit and a plethora of plasma, Re-Animator splashed its way onto movie screens in 1985 and more than 30 years later still continues to haunt the living. By using a then-obscure H.P. Lovecraft story as a springboard, director Stuart Gordon dove head first into the realm of postmortem peculiarities, and ironically offered a pleasing marriage of humor and horror. So, what exactly is being reanimated, you ask? Well that depends on what’s available: cats, colleagues, girlfriends. They have to be dead, of course, and the fresher the better. Okay, I know, once you’re dead, you’re dead: enter the Grim Reaper and good-bye soul. But what if death could be reversed? No, it’s impossible; death is the only inevitability that we know is certain…or is it?

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Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter

By J.D. Lafrance

Along with The Devil Rides Out (1968), Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1972) remains one of the great missed opportunities for Hammer Studios. Intended to be the first of a series of films featuring the titular hero, it was a commercial failure thus nixing any future installments, which is a shame as it is such an entertaining and engaging take on the vampire genre, creating its own unique rules for how to dispatch these creatures. More than simply a horror film, Captain Kronos is also a rousing action/adventure tale complete with a brooding swashbuckling hero portrayed by Horst Janson.

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American Psycho

By J.D. Lafrance

Every time I watch American Psycho (2000) I wonder why Christian Bale doesn’t do more comedies as he is so funny in this film as Patrick Bateman, a pathologically narcissistic Wall Street Yuppie that may or may not be a serial killer. Whether he’s pontificating about the best moisturizers for his skin or shimmying with reckless abandon to “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News, Bale looks like he’s having a blast playing up the more ridiculous aspects of his character which is in sharp contrast to some of the more depraved acts he indulges in during the course of the film.

Based on the controversial 1991 novel of the same name by Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho was considered unfilmable because of the long, detailed passages devoted to Bateman’s ruminations on the music of Whitney Houston and Phil Collins, punctuated by extremely graphic descriptions of sadistic violence inflicted on women. Anybody taking on this project would have to find a way to translate it in an interesting way without completely turning off audiences while also appeasing the MPAA.

For almost ten years filmmakers like David Cronenberg and Oliver Stone took a crack at adapting the book into a film while actors like Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio expressed interest in playing Bateman. In the end, Mary Harron, director of the critical darling, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), and Bale got the film made. The end result predictably divided critics and underperformed at the box office, but considering the subject matter this is hardly surprising. American Psycho went on to enjoy a second life on home video where it developed a cult following.

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Shattered Glass

By J.D. Lafrance

For awhile The New Republic magazine had the reputation of being part of an elite class of periodical with an impeachable reputation. It boasted being the in-flight magazine of Air Force One. For a short time, its most popular contributor was Stephen Glass, a young, up-and-coming writer who wrote dynamic articles and was being courted by other well-known periodicals like George and Rolling Stone. However, an online publication discovered that one of his articles was a complete fabrication which forced The New Republic to do its own in-house investigation. When all was said and done, Glass fabricated either completely or partially 27 of the 41 pieces he wrote for the magazine. Screenwriter Billy Ray decided that Glass’ meteoric rise and fall would be the subject of his directorial debut and the result is Shattered Glass (2003), a fascinating look at contemporary journalistic attitudes and practices.

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Steven Soderbergh’s Che

By J.D. Lafrance

Che (2008) began as a personal project for actor Benicio del Toro around the time he was making Traffic (2000) with Steven Soderbergh. Originally, he planned on making the film about iconic revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara with Terrence Malick and its focus was to be on the disastrous Bolivian campaign in 1967. Malick eventually dropped out to go off and make The New World (2005). Soderbergh helped out Del Toro by agreeing to direct and in the process expanded the film’s scope by depicting Che’s role in the Cuban Revolution as a way of explaining his motivations for going to Bolivia.

Amazingly, Soderbergh raised the $58 million budget entirely outside of North America which allowed him much more creative freedom. The result was a four and half hour epic that refused to champion or demonize Che and instead opted to objectively depict his rise in Cuba and his fall in Bolivia. This approach ultimately doomed Che’s chances in North America where, despite breaking the film up into two more digestible parts, it received limited distribution. Predictably, it divided critics and was criminally ignored by all of the major award ceremonies – rather fitting for a film about someone who refused to rest on his laurels, always hungry to get back to the jungle and get back to work.

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The Woman Chaser

By J.D. Lafrance

Based on the classic pulp novel of the same name by Charles Willeford, The Woman Chaser (1999) debuted at the New York Film Festival where it went on to play on the festival circuit before doing rounds at art houses around the United States. The film was anchored by the unlikely casting of sitcom stalwart Patrick Warburton playing a 1950s used car salesman that tries his hand at filmmaking. Unfortunately, the low-budget independent film ran afoul or ownership issues, which resulted in a lack of a home video presence and it disappeared, surfacing occasionally on the Sundance Channel. A few years ago, it resurfaced on digital platforms like Netflix and iTunes but with a lot of its source music (featuring the likes of Les Baxter) replaced but at least this fascinating neo-noir can finally be seen.

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Stripes

By J.D. Lafrance

Watching Stripes (1981) again after all these years makes me nostalgic for the early comedies of the first generation of Saturday Night Live cast members: Animal House (1978), Caddyshack (1980), Fletch (1984), and so on. They were goofy and silly but they also had an engaging, anarchistic attitude that is so much fun to watch. This is definitely the case with Stripes, a film that pits a “lost and restless generation,” as the film’s main protagonist (Bill Murray) puts it at one point, against rigid authority that is only interested in producing, lean, mean, killing machines, to paraphrase another character. Much of the film’s humor comes from the clash of these two ideologies.

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Fifth Annual Allan Fish Online Film Festival Day #6: Satan’s Triangle

By J.D. Lafrance

People have been fascinated with the enigma that is the Bermuda Triangle for decades. It is a region marked by the Florida coast and the islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas, a “danger zone that seems to swallow ships and planes,” as a vintage episode of the In Search Of… television show from the 1970s aptly described it. It is an area of 60,000 square miles where many planes and ships have mysteriously vanished over the years. Science has tried to explain the phenomenon but compelling anecdotal information endures and continues interest in it.

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