I Can 39;t Think Straight Fmovies
Florentina Holcombe
All I can tell you about Clint Eastwood in "Joe Kidd" is that he plays a ruthless gunman of few words. This isn't exactly a surprise; Eastwood almost always plays a ruthless gunman, etc. The funny thing about "Joe Kidd," though, is that we can't keep straight whose side he's on, or why.
Let's see. The movie opens with Eastwood in jail. He's sprung by a wealthy landowner who needs a hired killer. The landowner wants to go after Luis Chama (John Saxon), charismatic revolutionary leader of the Mexicans (who claim the land is really theirs). Eastwood won't go. But then Chama ties one of Eastwood's men to a fence with barbed wire. I think Eastwood said it was one of his men. But men of what? Does Eastwood own a ranch? Run an army? His occupation is never made clear. Must be something you need men for, anyway.
Why Chama tied the guy with the barbed wire is also not made very clear, but I have a theory. It was to keep Eastwood in the movie. See, Eastwood had already refused to join the posse and had gone back to jail. So unless Chama did something, the movie would have continued without Eastwood, and there is not a big market these days for John Saxon Westerns, especially when Saxon doesn't even play a cowboy.
Anyway, they go out on the manhunt. But then the landowner turns out to be so evil that barbed wire is a positive blessing compared to him. He decides to shoot five villagers every six hours until Chama surrenders. Meanwhile, he fires Eastwood (I'm not sure why) and locks him in the church with the villagers. Then there are some neat scenes where Eastwood bushwhacks a couple of the landowner's boys. And there are plenty of gunfights all the way through, of course.
The director is John Sturges, who has made infinitely better films than this one ("The Great Escape," "Bad Day at Black Rock"). He seems to have bogged down. The photography is undeniably beautiful, but there comes a point when we've had too many mountains and too little plot. All that holds the movie together is the screen persona of Eastwood, who is so convincingly tight-lipped that sometimes you have the feeling he knows what's going on and just won't tell.
One of the puzzling aspects of "Joe Kidd" is the buried political content. The Mexican revolutionary leader seems to have been modeled on Castro and Che, and he has a couple of speeches like: "It doesn't matter if the people die; they will die anyway unless our revolution succeeds." Then, at the end, he actually allows himself to be talked into turning himself in and counting on a fair trial! Maybe this is the first revolutionary Western made for a special screening at the White House.
"It's like a dream," my friend from Hollywood was explaining. "It doesn't make any sense, and the special effects are straight from the dime store but if you give up trying to understand it, and just sit back and let it wash around in your mind, it's not bad." That was not exactly a rave review for a movie that someone paid $40 million to make, but it put me into a receptive frame of mind for "Dune," the epic based on the novels by Frank Herbert. I was even willing to forgive the special effects for not being great; after all, in an era when George Lucas' "Star Wars" has turned movies into high tech, why not a film that looks like a throwback to Flash Gordon. It might be kind of fun.
It took "Dune" about nine minutes to completely strip me of my anticipation. This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time. Even the color is no good; everything is seen through a sort of dusty yellow filter, as if the film was left out in the sun too long. Yes, you might say, but the action is, after all, on a desert planet where there isn't a drop of water, and there's sand everywhere. David Lean solved that problem in "Lawrence of Arabia," where he made the desert look beautiful and mysterious, not shabby and drab.
The movie's plot will no doubt mean more to people who've read Herbert than to those who are walking in cold. It has to do with a young hero's personal quest. He leads his people against an evil baron and tries to destroy a galaxy-wide trade in spice, a drug produced on the desert planet. Spice allows you to live indefinitely while you discover you have less and less to think about. There are various theological overtones, which are best left unexplored.
The movie has so many characters, so many unexplained or incomplete relationships, and so many parallel courses of action that it's sometimes a toss-up whether we're watching a story, or just an assembly of meditations on themes introduced by the novels (the movie is like a dream).
Occasionally a striking image will swim into view: The alien brain floating in brine, for example, or our first glimpse of the giant sand worms plowing through the desert. If the first look is striking, however, the movie's special effects don't stand up to scrutiny. The heads of the sand worms begin to look more and more as if they came out of the same factory that produced Kermit the Frog (they have the same mouths). An evil baron floats through the air on trajectories all too obviously controlled by wires. The spaceships in the movie are so shabby, so lacking in detail or dimension, that they look almost like those student films where plastic models are shot against a tablecloth.
Nobody looks very happy in this movie. Actors stand around in ridiculous costumes, mouthing dialogue that has little or no context. They're not even given scenes that work on a self-contained basis; portentious lines of pop profundity are allowed to hang in the air unanswered, while additional characters arrive or leave on unexplained errands. "Dune" looks like a project that was seriously out of control from the start. Sets were constructed, actors were hired; no usable screenplay was ever written; everybody faked it as long as they could. Some shabby special effects were thrown into the pot, and the producers crossed their fingers and hoped that everybody who has read the books will want to see the movie. Not if the word gets out, they won't.
While the lesbian community is no doubt under-served when it comes to films, that's no excuse for sub-standard, hokey filmmaking to get the green light - frankly, thinking straight is the very least of this film's problems.
If the plot is cheese, it never rises above the level of a Dairylea triangle, as upper-class Jordanian Tala - currently inching towards her fourth attempt at getting wed, after calling off three previous engagements - falls for her best mate Ali's girlfriend Leyla, who comes from a middle-class Indian clan. Not content with examining the rigours of coming out to your parents if you are from a strongly religious family - which might have made quite an interesting film had it been handled with a lot less cliche and a lot more finesse - writer/director Shamim Sarif also makes a clumsy attempt to address everything from cross-cultural Muslim/Christian romance to the state of Palestine/Israel relations in the Middle East.
This is intercut with scenes involving Tala and her parents, which could for all the world have been snipped out of a very bad soap opera. Her mother's maid continually spits in her mistress's tea which - oh, the hilarity! - she never actually gets round to drinking, while her sister schemes in a way that really should require her to mutter the words "Mwu-ha-ha-ha-ha" into a cape every five minutes. And, despite the melodramatics, there is still time to crowbar in some politics.
Then there is the romance itself, which has all the subtlety of a Wile E Coyote rock to the head. After "an amazing" game of tennis (by this time, the only "amazing" thing on display is the fortitude of those still awake in the cinema) romance is in the air. One minute Tala is all over Leyla like a rash, coming on stronger than a rugby player's jockstrap, the next, she can't cope with the idea of coming out, while Leyla, it seems, just can't wait to get her new-found feelings out in the open.
As for the 'sex scenes', they, like much of the rest of the film, suffer from dreadful direction and editing. Less steamy than a bowl of cold cabbage, they are a dreadful mishmash of intercut body close-ups - a chaste shoulder here, a stroked arm there - ridiculously prudish considering that this is presumably aimed at an adult audience, with even basic continuity seeming beyond the reach of Sarif.
On the day of his scheduled execution, a convicted serial killer gets a psychiatric evaluation during which he claims he is a demon, and further claims that before their time is over, the psychiatrist will commit three murders of his own.
And, boy, do they talk. Nefarious (Sean Patrick Flanery) is a demon who inhabits the body of Edward, whom he has forced to commit 11 murders. Dr. James Martin (Jordan Belfi) is, according to Deace "a left-wing, atheist psychiatrist, because other than Jordan Peterson, there are no other kinds of those, apparently." The two meet in prison on Edward's execution day for Martin to determine if Edward is mentally competent to be executed, and they talk for about 40-plus minutes straight, though it's mainly Nefarious talking and a doubting Martin asking questions.
Then, there's this dialogue that gets in a culture war dig. Martin makes an idealistic statement that no one I know would ever make in real life: "We've never been freer," he says. "Literacy is at an all-time high. We're working to eliminate racism, intolerance, gender inequality. People can love who they want, be who they want, do what they want. Diversity is no longer a dream, hate speech is no longer tolerated, and politically, we're reclaiming the moral high ground."
Nefarious' rebuttal is weak, directly addressing only literacy before segueing into a disdainful rant that seeks to communicate the screenwriter's opinion instead of addressing Martin's points: "James, the average high school graduate reads at a sixth-grade level. Your basketball players making 30 million a year decrying racism all while wearing sneakers made from slave labor. Here's something for you. Right now. Your world currently has 40 million slaves, more than the Romans had at the height of their empire. Want to know the best part though? Half of those, half, are sex slaves. As for hate speech, you want to hear some irony? We didn't even come up with that one. You did it all by yourself. Sometimes you amaze even us."