The Adults aren't All Right

To-day, Herrington High School, to-morrow, the world. Such seems to be the thinking of the alien invaders in 1998's The Faculty, a science fiction horror film directed by Robert Rodriguez. It's not on the level of Desperado or From Dusk Til Dawn in Rodriguez's '90s output but it still has a lot of life in it, particularly in its editing and cast.

What a cast. The titular faculty has Robert Patrick, Bebe Neuwirth, Salma Hayek, Jon Stewart, Famke Janssen, Daniel von Bargen, and Piper Laurie. And every one of them has something fun to do.

I especially liked Famke Janssen changing from a shy young teacher, apparently struggling with her attraction to a delinquent student, into a ball buster whose head can walk independently from her body.

Josh Hartnett plays that delinquent drug dealer while the other students staging a final resistance to the alien threat include Clea DuVall, Jordana Brewster, and Elijah Wood. Even Elijah wood's dad is played by Christopher McDonald. Nearly everyone in this movie is someone I remember from a good role in another movie or TV show.

Like Scream, a lot of dialogue in this movie is spent comparing it to other horror and science fiction, particularly Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This was in the years before people realised that acknowledging within your film that it's not original doesn't actually make it more original. The movie would've been fine without that self-aware stuff. The cgi near the end is weak but Rodriguez was still mostly in top form as an action director.

The Faculty is available on The Criterion Channel. I know, a Robert Rodriguez movie on Criterion? What next, Tarantino? Could it actually happen?

The Forgotten Movie About Forgetting

Did you see 2023's Hypnotic? Have you even heard of it? It stars Ben Affleck and was directed by Robert Rodriguez, it cost 65 million dollars and made 8.7 million. I guess that's no surprise since it doesn't seem to have had much promotion. It's not a bad movie, it's just not great. Which is too bad because we need more movies like this.

Affleck plays a cop named Rourke who's trying to cope with the fact that his young daughter was kidnapped and is still missing months later. His therapy session is interrupted by a tip off about a bank heist.

He watches as one man (William Fichtner) seemingly hypnotises passersby with single words or simple phrases to infiltrate the bank. But what he wants to steal is just a safety deposit box containing a picture of Rourke's daughter.

The ensuing plot will remind the viewer of Videodrome, Total Recall, and Inception, all of which are better films. Rodriguez competently strings action scenes together but the movie lacks a sense of personality. Casting someone with more eccentric mannerisms than Affleck would've helped. All of Rodriguez's best movies have featured heroes who are intriguing or charismatic in their own rights--Affleck just isn't that here. Again, it's too bad, because I very much like what turns out to be a concept of a man's apparent pursuit for something being a subconsciously calculated veneer designed to hide something. I can see how this movie could have been great. As it is, it's just okay. Alice Braga is good as the love interest.

X Sonnet #1729

The solar panels gulped the yellow paste.
Abundant joy has burdened bulky goats.
"Return to bed," accountants cry for waste.
But vodka vapour numbs the lizard throats.
The capybara's teeth were jammed with cake.
Ascending steps were wrought of mossy stone.
Approaching storms derail the rusty brake.
Remember trees the next you see a bone.
At nine again, the choking choc'late came.
But butchers wait for empty days to cut.
It gets so gummy cakes won't bear a name.
And frosting breaks the shelves for useless glut.
The man of yarn again attempts to walk.
The dame of dreams approached a door to knock.

From Cash to Damnation

Two brothers flee from their bank robbery south across Texas, into Mexico and into Hell in 1996's From Dusk till Dawn. What a wonderfully fucked up movie. Screenwriter Quentin Tarantino again shows his unparalleled talent for writing bastards, so much so that the criminal world implied by the film feels at least as scary as the Satanic, supernatural world. And director Robert Rodriguez shows why he's one of the best action directors of the past thirty years.

I was really in the mood to watch this movie in October but couldn't afford to rent it at the time. But I noticed a couple weeks ago it's on HBOMax, which I temporarily subscribed to again to watch Peacemaker, so I finally had my fix. I hadn't seen From Dusk till Dawn since the '90s. Probably on VHS. It's a lot better than I remembered.

A lot of the criticism about this movie has to do with its combination of genres. The first half of the film is a fugitive/hostage film, the second half is a zombie apocalypse film--I say zombies despite the fact that they're vampires because they function more like zombies traditionally do than vampires. A lot of critics say the two parts of the movie don't really coexist harmoniously and that used to be my feeling, too. You get invested in the tension between the two criminals and the people they kidnap. Seth (George Clooney) sees himself as a professional thief while his brother, Richie (Quentin Tarantino), is a slave to his perversion. The family they kidnap is headed by patriarch Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel), a pastor who hasn't lost his belief in God but has lost his love for God. It's an interesting distinction.

The underlying tension revolves around Richie, established as a rapist and ultra-violent killer, like Jack the Ripper, potentially assaulting Jacob's daughter, Kate, played by Juliette Lewis. It's kind of interesting seeing her back in an innocent lamb role after Natural Born Killers.

There's an evident internal conflict for Seth. He doesn't like to hurt people needlessly but he also doesn't seem to feel especially bad about the people he does kill. Jacob clearly senses Seth's conflict and you can sense him trying to figure out a way to use it. In the second half of the film, when the group are fighting for their lives against the sudden appearance of vampires, the tension from he first half of the film kind of disappears, not the least because Richie gets killed. That's how I used to feel about it but I feel differently now. I find the vampires much more effective now, especially as I think about their presence in terms of the characters' self-perceptions. Seth is a guy who works completely without a net, morally speaking. He doesn't like to kill but he also has no compunctions about it. Jacob, by believing in God and rejecting Him, lives in a potent state of sin, despite being the film's moral centre. So basically, no-one has any reason to believe they're protected from damnation.

One of the main differences between Rodriguez and Tarantino is that Rodriguez tends to lean more into fantasy. Don't believe for a second Rodriguez doesn't know how absurd the crotch pistol from Desperado is--and it turns up again here, now wielded/worn by Tom Savini. From Dusk till Dawn very nicely blurs the line between the fantasy world of Rodriguez and the more realistic crime world of Tarantino.

The film begins with this gaudy "World of Liquor" shop. It's believably over-the-top, I've seen plenty of places of similar decorative flamboyance in California. But the Titty Twister bar in Mexico seems like something from another world.

Yet it's close enough to World of Liquor that I'm drawn into believing it.

I love how inconsistent the vampire designs are in the film. They're influenced, like every other vampire film since, by Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. But like that film, you can never quite predict the form he vampire's going to take. And it's startling when there's some exaggerated facial feature, like a malevolent parody of the human body.

And Salma Hayek as Santanico is a worthy successor to Dracula's Brides.

If you ever wonder why Hayek is a movie star, watch this movie or Desperado. She really hasn't done anything as amazing since, usually just turning up to help fill out an all star cast. She is a demon goddess in front of Robert Rodriguez's camera, though. When you consider this scene along with Jessica Alba in Sin City and Rose McGowan in Planet Terror, it's clear Rodriguez is genius at this stuff. Three times he's presented actresses in solo dance sequences that have been the high points of their careers. I see now that he directed a a Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande video two years ago. They sure chose wisely.

I love how the film ends, too, with Seth negotiating a percentage of the loot with the local gang lord. The encounter with the supernatural just turns out to be another step in his descent into a bigger Hell, and his conflict comes back just so he can show a moment of kindness to Kate. Of course, that probably is how it would go. Usually in vampire movies, if a vampire shows up, it dominates the lives of the characters. In From Dusk till Dawn, it's just another gruesome permutation of this living perdition. What a terrific film.

The Book of Rodriguez

I was enthralled by last night's finale of Book of Boba Fett. It's been pretty cold around here lately and I have a little heater next to my computer. I was two thirds of the way through the episode before I realised I'd forgotten to turn the heater on. That's definitely the mark of a good TV show or movie--it quite takes you out of your life. The writing was decent but the lion's share of the credit goes to Robert Rodriguez who, despite the grudge many people in the industry and netizens have against him, is undeniably talented at putting together action sequences and evocatively framing characters.

A lot of people might be tempted to call this The Book of Grogu. The little tyke formerly known as Baby Yoda certainly stole more than one scene, first just by showing up in Luke's X-Wing, then by lending a hand in the decadent melee at Mos Espa. So we still haven't had a Disney+ Star Wars series that can show it can stand on its own without the tiny superstar. Oh, well. I didn't like Grogu in season one of The Mandalorian but I'd warmed to him in season two. In this episode, I liked the scene where he soothed the rancor and the scene where he showed up with Amy Sedaris whose comedic timing perfectly punctuated her "Mando, have I got a surprise for you!" line.

As for Boba (Temuerra Morrison) himself, his best scene was his showdown with Cad Bane (Corey Burton). I'm conflicted on whether or not I want Bane to be actually dead from that scene. On the one hand, it makes for a satisfying conclusion to Boba Fett's story that was developed on The Clone Wars. On the other, Cad Bane turned out so well in live action it seems a shame to only have him around for two episodes of one series.

Did you hear the rumour that Han Solo was supposed to show up in this episode? From what I read and heard, a lot of people were dead certain it was going to happen. So much so I wonder if it was a false rumour planted to sew seeds of disappointment as part of the campaign against Rodriguez. I suspect this grudge is a leftover from the Me Too movement as a lot of people feel Rodriguez must be guilty of something for his former association with Harvey Weinstein. The same people probably feel the same way about Tarantino but Tarantino proved much too big to take down. Rose McGowan also made vague, bitter statements about Rodriguez, her former boyfriend of several years. It wouldn't surprise me if many of the netizens spreading random, inexplicable bad comments about Rodriguez are former members of the "army" she tried to build online. It's pretty sad--I saw Rodriguez and McGowan in person at Comic Con when they were promoting Grindhouse and it was clear that she absolutely adored him. Now she seems to have a career driven by bitterness.

I'm glad Han Solo didn't show up if it was going to be like Luke last week. It's since been revealed that Mark Hamill wasn't at all involved with that episode, that his voice was digitally created. At the time, I'd thought he sounded a little flat but I thought it was just because he was in a recording studio. Sometimes actors forget to change their voices when doing voiceovers to match an outdoor scene. Is the irony lost on Lucasfilm that Luke has become more machine now than man? Sadly, I think it is, especially since they can't seem to write Jedi in a positive manner at all anymore.

The Book of Boba Fett is available on Disney+.

The Wonderfully Crooked Streets of Mos Espa

It was a short but satisfying new episode of The Book of Boba Fett last night. The second of three directed by Robert Rodriguez, this episode made me realise The Book of Boba Fett is the most Disney Star Wars has come to feeling like George Lucas and like the old adventure serials he sought to emulate.

Spoilers after the screenshot

It's hard to imagine anyone will complain nothing happened in this episode because nearly every scene featured a dramatic turn of events. When a water broker asks Boba to take out a biker gang raiding his stock, Boba hires the gang instead. Last week I said I was hoping to get more insight into how things worked in Jabba's dominion, this episode delivered, giving me a fairly good idea. It was also interesting hearing about how moisture farmers, like Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, take their harvests to a city distributor.

Boba's strategy of ruling with respect continues to pay off as it's the biker gang who saves his ass when that big black wookiee gets the drop on him.

Apparently this is a character from the comics. The few Star Wars comics I've read since Disney took over where astonishingly bad and I've heard nothing but bad things about them since. But this guy was certainly a big hairy nightmare on the screen from the moment he yanked Boba out of the bacta tank. His name is Black Krrsantan, by the way, which I keep hearing as "Black Chrysanthemum", which I'm not sure is a good or bad thing.

The flashback was much shorter this time but came with the massacre of Boba's adopted family, the Tusken tribe. I knew this was coming--why else would Boba be wandering alone when he appeared on The Mandalorian?--but I was surprised it was so soon. So it took me a little off guard, which helped give me an impression of Boba's own sense of devastation. I hope Disney will allow him to get bloody revenge.

However, it's notable the badass female Tusken who trained him doesn't seem to be among the remains. Did the gang take her captive? That would imply a fate I know Disney would very much prefer not to suggest.

Back in the present day, Boba gets himself a new rancor as a gift from a surprisingly apologetic pair of hutts. Though it sounds to me like they're hoping Boba will defeat or at least weaken the Pykes so that the hutts can more easily take over the territory. I was surprised Boba let Krrsantan go, I was kind of hoping he'd make the wookiee into the replacement rancor.

But it was nice getting that sure trademark of a Rodriguez production when Danny Trejo appeared as the keeper of the new rancor.

So let's just tally it up here--things that happened in this episode. Boba hires the biker gang, the sand people are massacred in flashback, the wookiee tries to kill him and is thwarted by the combined efforts of Boba's whole crew, the Twins make peace, and Boba gets a new rancor that imprints on him. All that, and the episode wasn't even done yet.

A trip to the mayor's reveals the man had scarpered and his weaselly major-domo attempts to do the same. If I have one complaint about the episode it's that the speeder chase through the streets of Mos Espa felt too slow. But I do love this teen biker gang with their brightly coloured bikes. What else were they up to besides stealing water? Think about it--they said they didn't have any money. How did they get those bikes and cybernetic implants? These kids are crooked. And that makes me happy.

The Book of Boba Fett is available on Disney+.

Thinking of Boba

Disney's announced so many new Star Wars and Marvel shows for Disney+, it seems like I hear about a new one every week. So far, though, I'm more eager to see The Book of Boba Fett than any of the others. It's almost entirely due to the presence of Robert Rodriguez as co-showrunner though I think I'm also interested in Boba's continued story, especially since I've been watching his story arc on Clone Wars lately. Although the mystery surrounding him was one of the coolest things about Boba Fett when he was first introduced in the original trilogy and animated short, I like the story George Lucas wove around him in Attack of the Clones and Clone Wars--Though the ordinary man just trying to make his way in the galaxy retains some mystery for how, in fact, extraordinary his life is.

In any case, I doubt anyone would argue the Robert Rodrguez episode was the best episode of The Mandalorian. And yet, Rodriguez was a last minute replacement, which might seem astonishing to many people. Aside from Jon Favreau and Taika Waititi, he's the only director who worked on the series who'd established a name for himself as a director prior to working on the series, and his credentials for action filmmaking far exceed Favreau's and Waititi's. El Mariachi and Desperado are classics while From Dusk Til Dawn, Sin City, Machete, and Planet Terror all have strong followings. Rodriguez should have been the elusive luxury, not the last minute replacement. Few directors alive are more perfectly suited to take the reins of Star Wars. Why doesn't Disney act like it?

There are a lot of reasons. There's reason to play your cards close to your chest when you're negotiating as we saw when it looked like Sony was going to take Spider-Man away from the MCU. So Disney might not want to look desperate and be forced into giving Rodriguez a bigger paycheck. But there are more issues than that. There are the political issues--and I don't mean Rodriguez being a potential target of his MeToo icon ex-girlfriend, Rose McGowan. I mean the politics that forced Disney to hire so many untalented directors in the first place, like Bryce Dallas Howard, who seems to be payback for her father coming in to take over directing Solo. The relationship there is obvious, but how many relationships do you suppose aren't obvious? How many people are hired as a result of negotiations for seemingly completely unrelated matters?

Some people would be inclined to cast everything in the light of Disney pandering to SJWs or conservatives, and I do think there is a little of that happening, on both sides, but less than the politically rabid may think. Some creative choices will be forced based on a conception of an overall Disney vision unique to the company. Some choice are about guessing and second guessing just what people want. Really, it's a miracle any lucrative material ever gets matched up with the optimal artist.

I hope Robert Rodriguez directs most if not all of the episodes.

All the Cyborgs of Heaven and Hell

An angel falls from Heaven and is reborn in Hell in 2019's Alita: Battle Angel. What a nice surprise to find Milton references in this movie which I was already eager to see because I like Robert Rodriguez and anime. There are some superficial problems I had with the screenplay but for the most part I was delighted to experience this film; for its intriguing thematic layering, the beauty of its effects and design, its perfect casting, and its action sequences. Gods, it was so nice to see a new movie that knew how to do action sequences.

With a movie so dominated by cgi, it's easy for the action sequences to lose a sense of reality to the point of getting an intangible feeling. Computer generated action sequences can become something like watching clouds float into each other. One of the ways to counteract this, which Rodriguez does very well, is to create a good narrative through visuals. Good storyboarding is important for this--you need to take the audience from one clear visual idea to another without letting things turn into a mess of moving shapes. So it's very effective to have a moment like the one where Alita (Rosa Salazar), racing down a track with the camera following her, abruptly stops to grab a horizontal pole--the camera also stops--and uses her momentum to swing around into a kick. The crucial part of this is the camera moving and stopping with her--it keeps us in her perspective and helps us to stay emotionally connected to what she's doing.

A more controversial decision that also assists in this vein is her huge eyes. Your mileage may vary but I found them captivating. Everything she did and said was weirdly interesting because I was drawn in by those eyes. She has amnesia so she's in a sense a newborn, the eyes contributing to this childlike quality--we're supposed to be instinctively drawn to large eyes because it helps us feel more protective of human babies and damned if it didn't work like gangbusters here. Rodriguez and screenwriter James Cameron definitely seem to be tapping into their paternal instincts and Christoph Waltz as Dyson Ido is excellent as Alita's surrogate father. Unlike Planet Terror, there's little or no conscious emphasis on the sexuality of the female protagonist--judging from what we can see of the two bodies she has during the film, her sex and gender are determined entirely by her brain. Her body even changes shape to adjust to her "sub-conscious self-image" at one point. To quote from Paradise Lost:

For Spirits, when they please,
Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure,
Not tried or manacled with joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but, in what shape they choose,
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their airy purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfil.

The movie has one direct reference to John Milton's famous 1667 poem--one of the villains, Vector (Mahershala Ali), has the famous line, saying he'd rather, "reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." There's some irony in this as he's clearly not reigning but acting merely as a puppet for the God-like character Nova (an uncredited Edward Norton). Just as arguably Satan is in Paradise Lost, though Satan seems a little more aware of it, even if his efforts to fight this state of affairs are met with negligible success.

If then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil;
Which ofttimes may succeed so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from their destined aim.

Alita herself becomes a more accurate analogy for Satan, being explicitly referred to as an Angel who fell from Heaven after an epic battle with Heaven's supreme powers and who now fights against its institutions. She's also, of course, analogous to Eve in Paradise Lost (the same Eve from the bible) and it's telling one of the first things Dyson does when she awakens in his home is to offer her fruit. As she tells one big ugly cyborg brute (Jackie Earle Haley), she refuses to ignore the presence of evil and pledges to fight it, which implies a knowledge of good and evil, the ability to discern and enforce moral truth, a right Satan rebukes god for reserving to himself.

Can it be sin to know?
Can it be death? And do they only stand
By ignorance? Is that their happy state,
The proof of their obedience and their faith?
O fair foundation laid whereon to build
Their ruin! hence I will excite their minds
With more desire to know, and to reject
Envious commands, invented with design
To keep them low, whom knowledge might exalt
Equal with Gods

I haven't read Gunnm, the manga on which this film is based, and it's been a long time since I watched the anime, but the concept of a floating technological heaven where the wealthy dwell over a slum-like Hell, in which the labour and even flesh of common people is exploited, is a premise found in a lot of anime and manga--some might remember it from Final Fantasy VII, one might even trace it to Kurosawa's 1963 film High and Low. As is often the case, there's a paradox inherent in the philosophy behind the story as one might argue there is in Paradise Lost--Milton's intentions on the matter having been a famous topic of debate for centuries. Alita fights against a system where the powerful exploit the less powerful but in order to assert herself and her will she must make use of her own surpassing power. Every step she takes to fight against a hierarchy proves the fundamental need for hierarchy.

There's also the subject of vanity--Alita mocks a rival Hunter Warrior--bounty hunters in the slum undercity--for spending all his money on his beautiful face and yet throughout the film Alita's own beauty, intentionally crafted by cgi, is an undeniably essential aspect of the film. In at least one action sequence, there's a moment of tension where it looks like Alita's face might be scratched off. Maybe one of the virtues of Alita's childlike personality is that she lacks the ability to see these contradictions in her own nature, otherwise they might be psychologically debilitating. And that may be part of the film's point.

It's too bad the disarray at Fox and the petty political situation in Hollywood may have undercut this film's success, but it's worth noting that in spite of these things it's still been a financial success, especially overseas. The end of the film teases a sequel which I'm not sure it really needs. But I'd certainly be happy to see it.