Tagged: Ric Meyers

“Sht runs dwnhill.” Those words of wisdom/warning were first spoken to me back in the mid-1980s, at lunch on the first day I started consulting for CBS-TV in California. The statement came back to me several times while watching this week’s offerings (as well as many, many times over the decades as I watched businesses run by productive people flourish, and companies run by “flawed” folk perish). 

In order of release, there’s Triad Election, which arrived in stores last Tuesday. It’s directed and co-produced by Johnnie To, today’s greatest Hong Kong filmmaker, whose eclectic, exceptional ability at a variety of genres has given the international film community some of the greatest movies of the last two decades, including Heroic Trio (superheroes), Lifeline (firefighters), Running Out of Time (cops ‘n’ robbers), The Mission (bodyguards), Fulltime Killer (assassins), Love on a Diet (romantic comedy), Running on Karma (existential mystery), Breaking News (media wars) and Throwdown (judo comedy/drama).

The last few years he’s joined the ranks of Coppola, Scorcese, and Chase (sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it?) by filling cinemas with multiple award-winning Chinese gangster sagas. Election (2005) played like a Hong Kong big-screen version of The Sopranos minus the final scene black-out. Election 2: Harmony is a Virtue (2006) was something else again. To paraphrase To (sic) from “The Making Of” doc: Election was the set-up. Election 2 is the pay-off.

So Tartan Asia Extreme Video made a tough decision. Many people who liked Election might see Election 2. But everybody who loved Election 2 would definitely go back to check out Election. So rather than release the two movies in order, they decided to retitle Election 2 “Triad Election,” release it first, and then label Election its “prequel.”* For what it’s worth, I, personally, think they made the right call … although I might have gone a step or two forward in clarifying the issue.

The movie is great – not just for its stylish violence, psychological insight, and filmmaking prowess, but because of the aforementioned pay-off, which seems to be: China’s impersonal desire for order might be more cruel than Triad carnage. This was a bold, brave statement for To to (sic) make, but, as he also says during “The Making Of” featurette, he wanted to acknowledge the dismissive changes made since China’s takeover of Hong Kong’s lease. The city was like a seduced beauty that the government seemed to forget about as soon as its seduction was complete. All signs point to Shanghai now becoming the favored mistress, with Hong Kong the forgotten wife. (more…)

Way back in the late 1980s, a few film producers thought it was interesting that “comedians,” like the late Andy Kaufman, amused themselves rather than entertained their audiences. After all, if people would pay actual money to be goaded and/or irritated, that might create a much simpler genre of filmmaking. This sentiment set the stage for 1991’s The Dark Backward, a cult curiosity (rather than a cult classic) that a small percentage of viewers who prize the bizarre clutch to their breasts.

This week, in “celebration” of its fifteenth anniversary screening last year, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released a Special Edition DVD, perhaps hoping that the Shakespearean quote that serves as its title, or its muttered reputation of being in the same general category as Tim Burton, David Lynch, or Terry Gilliam movies, will entice a new generation to give it a try.

To his credit, writer/director Adam Rifkin would probably be extremely flattered that this dismal little film is mentioned within the same stratosphere as even the worst of the aforementioned directors’ efforts. On the DVD’s special features, he repeatedly contends that the film was only financed because then-hot Judd Nelson was attached and the budget was so small. He figures that the production company probably didn’t even read the script.

Upon consideration, he’s probably right, because if they had, they would have joined the dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of others who eschewed it. The truly amazing thing about its creation is that Rifkin had the innocence of the naïve, and managed to get backing for a film he was allowed to both write and direct, yet this is what he chose to do with that freedom.

It’s not surprising that Nelson would latch onto the leading role of miserable, geeky, garbage man Marty Malt as a way of breaking his identification as a “brat packer,” but it’s wondrous that his participation lured the likes of Bill Paxton (energetically/hysterically playing what the director termed a “human cockroach”), Lara Flynn Boyle, Wayne Newton, Rob Lowe, and James Caan to also pitch in intemperate performances.

The plot is simplicity itself: a socially-inept idiot’s dreams of becoming a stand-up comic are given hope when a third arm grows out of his back — allowing his strident, insane, compost-chewing, corpse-molesting, fellow trashman to put together a joke/accordion nightclub act. Sadly, the film cannot even claim to be “original.” How to Get Ahead in Advertising took on the same sort of alienation (this time with a separate cranium growing out of the protagonist’s shoulder) to much better effect a full two years earlier.

Staggeringly, the extras on this “challenging” DVD are quirky, to say the most, and amateurish, to say the least. The cast and crew make excuses or rationalizations on the audio commentary, a 15th anniversary Q&A reveals that Judd Nelson doesn’t seem to understand what a microphone does, and the deleted scenes add garish insult to self-indulgent injury. The outtakes are interesting, however, because, like the film, they are diametrically opposed to most other movies. The latter usually contain much mirth as the actors laugh over screwed-up lines and unscripted behavior. The Dark Backward “bloopers” are largely indistinguishable from the rest of the film, with hardly a chuckle. (more…)