Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of crap. In fact, most of the films were completely forgettable horror and action programmers that had no redeeming value, even to someone like myself who adores B-movies. More than once I walked out and ended up killing the day buried in comics at a used bookstore. But every once in a while, the first feature would be an older film, something that had been popular just a few years earlier. And this is where I fell in love with Bruce Lee, George Romero, Leatherface, Shaft, Superfly, and Coffy.

I had never even heard of Pam Grier before, but within five minutes she was added to my short list of those who reflect all that is ideal in womanhood — strong, smart, independent, sexy, womanly, a lady, a sense of humor — a list that to this days includes Raquel Welch and Angie Dickinson. Ten years later I would add a fourth and final name to that list, and a few years after that she actually married me.

Yes, Pam Grier is stunning to look at, but beautiful women are really a dime a dozen in Hollywood. What Grier really is is pure, 100%, undiluted movie star — and that is about as rare of a human species as you will ever find (especially today). Whether it was a small role in Andrew Davis’ “The Package” or her unforgettable turn as a junkie prostitute in “Fort Apache The Bronx,” you can’t take your eyes off her. And God bless Quentin Tarantino for seeing that, as well.

And you, my fellow conservatives should start with this. Because, believe it or not, these films reflect our values in many ways. They’re about justice, standing up for what’s right, the poison of drugs, the importance of the individual, and the questioning and fighting of authority. The power of these films helped to shape my values as a kid, and if you think about it, the themes aren’t all that different than those found in John Wayne’s movies — The Man is The Man is The Man after all. These films are also outstanding examples of crowd-pleasing entertainment and perfect time capsules of an era that might not have been better but was at least more colorful and interesting.

A couple of years ago at a screening to celebrate “Foxy,” her terrific autobiography, I met Grier and naturally made a starstruck fool of myself. But she signed my book and later that night I experienced “Foxy Brown” on the big screen again, but this time with Foxy herself sitting right there in the theatre. And now she’s following me on Twitter (like you wouldn’t tell the world).

So this might be my last post on Big Hollywood, because I can die now.

Man, I love the movies.

As the co-creator and producer with Christopher Lloyd Bratten of the “For The Record” series of live events held at the Barre VT bar in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, he has paid tribute to the films of the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. The series features performers re-enacting the most iconic dialogue exchanges of those filmmakers’ features, as well as singing and dancing their way through the greatest tunes of their oeuvre.

But Scheel has topped himself big-time with his current show, “John Hughes: Holiday Road,” which plays Wednesday through Sunday nights before closing Dec. 30.

The two-hour extravaganza features an amazingly talented six-person cast and a five-piece rock band bringing the best of Hughes’ scenes and songs to life from his ‘80s films through “Home Alone.” Whether you’re a fan of Hughes’ high school movies (“Pretty in Pink” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) or the “Vacation” series and “Planes Trains and Automobiles,” the interactive cabaret-style show is one of the most entertaining nights of music and comedy you’ll ever experience.

Scheel spoke with Big Hollywood recently about how the “For The Record” series – which next takes on Baz Luhrmann’s films including “Moulin Rouge” – came about, and why he thinks Hughes’ films continue to resonate with American film fans.

“I had been working in LA for a few years and my partner, who’s music director for the shows, had been looking for a project to do,” explains Scheel, who ironically grew up in the small town of Buhler, Kansas. “We started by taking complete soundtracks, knew a lot of really great singers and actors and decided to pull the best ones together and started these as concerts. We later decided to add quotable lines.”

The producing duo started with the films of Tarantino because his soundtracks actually included the most memorable lines from his films. As they refined their hybrid concept, they tried to create shows so strong that they would help define Los Angeles entertainment, creating a scene unique to the city.

Yet they also learned from a viewing of the failed “Sister Act: The Musical” that the balance of music and dialogue had to be just right if the shows were going to work.

“I was in London a year ago and went to see ‘Sister Act: The Musical,’” Scheel says. “As an audience member I was expecting to hear some of the songs that made the movie what it  was, redone in a very fun fresh way. When I got there it was an original score with none of the original songs from the movie, which was a little disappointing. Soundtracks are under-appreciated, but music helps tell these stories and in particular John Hughes helped launch a lot of British bands in the ‘80s through his movies.”

Scheel feels that Hughes’ enduring appeal lies in the fact that “we were all teenagers once,” yet Scheel was careful to make sure that the show was evenly divided between the high school era of Hughes’ work and the films set outside the academic scene.

“I’ve read a number of times that he gave teenagers a very clear, fresh, unapologetic voice, as real people with real problems and a real clear voice for that time period as well,” he says. “He had such great archetypes through the geek, rebel, princess, basket case and jock. We all identify with one of those and that’s where the universality of his material came from. I watched my dad with the ‘Vacation’ movies laughing and laughing, and kids have a classic in ‘Home Alone.’”

“There are universal truths in all his movies, I think we can all identify with different portions of his career,” he adds.

The show ends with a rousing, gospel-style romp through “Joy to the World,” which Hughes used in at least one of his many Christmas-set movies. Having built a long-running career in production management for many touring musicals, Scheel knew that sending people out with a burst of extra-spiritual uplift was a winning proposition and underscored the broad appeal of the show.

“I grew up in the church and know a ton of gospel songs, plus a number of our actors have strong ties to that music and one of our performers is married to a minister,” Scheel says. “Just like in Hughes’ movies, there are a couple of words you might want to tune out, but this is a show I can bring my church to.”

Scheel hopes to bring “John Hughes: Holiday Road” to Chicago and New York in the future, but for now, it can be seen at Barre VT bar, located at 1714 N. Vermont Ave, Los Angeles.

The actor’s post-Oscar career remains a head scratcher. Yes, it’s too soon to label his career a letdown, but often the best scripts actors ever see come after they’ve grabbed that gleaming statuette.

—–

Waltz’s first gig after “Basterds” came via “The Green Hornet,” an awkward superhero comedy from director Michel Gondry. Waltz played the film’s arch villain, an unremarkable baddie with an inferiority complex. Mediocre movie, less than flattering role for someone of Waltz’s abilities.

But “The Green Hornet” was practically “Citizen  Kane” compared to “The Three Musketeers,” the recent mega-bomb casting Waltz as the evil Cardinal with designs on the kingdom. It’s the kind of work an actor grabs when there’s little else around, or they’ve got a serious case of swashbuckle envy.

What possessed Waltz to team up with B-movie director Paul W.S. Anderson (“Death Race,” “Alien vs. Predator”) and a gaggle of foppish actors attempting to revive a dormant franchise?

Waltz’s best post-Oscar future remains “Water for Elephants,” an engaging circus drama which cast the actor as the complicated third wheel in a tortured love triangle. The film, just released on Blu-ray and DVD, also marks co-star Robert Pattinson’s best work outside the “Twilight” franchise. Or inside, to be precise.

Waltz brings a dash of ambivalence to an otherwise mustache-twirling role, precisely the elements that helped make his turn in “Basterds” so memorable. “Elephant’s” lethargic love story, alas, devalued his performance.

This fall, Waltz looks to re-set his career with “Carnage,” a dark comedy co-starring Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly. It’s got that heady whiff of Oscar potential, especially since Roman Polanski is behind the camera.

If that fails, Waltz could simple wait until his new project with “Basterds” director Quentin Tarantino hits theaters. The actor will reteam with Tarantino for the upcoming western “Django Unchained.”

But by then, the glow of his Oscar victor could have long since faded.

Great soundtrack? Yup. Aging actors rescued from obscurity? Yes, indeed. Dialogue so quotable you could print bumper stickers from every other line in the script? Oh, yeah.

But back in 1994, when the film first rocked movie houses, ‘Pulp Fiction’ was simply Tarantino’s entrance into the upper echelon of movie makers. The film hasn’t lost its zip in its new Blu-ray incarnation. If anything, the giddiness Tarantino fuses to the action genre is more appealing in an era of shaky cams and uncertain plot twists.

‘Pulp Fiction’ defies knee-jerk categorization. It’s a series of interlocking stories with a chronological hiccup or two to keep us guessing.

The main story involves a pair of chatty thugs doing the bidding of the mysterious Marsellus (Ving Rhames). Vincent and Jules (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson) crack wise in between blood-thirsty assignments. Vincent seems more interested in cultural differences across the pond than doing Marsellus’ dirty work, while Jules has a speech for nearly any occasion.

But Vincent gets more than he bargained for when Marsellus asks him to escort his lovely wife (Uma Thurman) on a platonic date.

Travolta brought his career back from the ‘Look Who’s Talking’ abyss with ‘Fiction.’ Whether it’s acting unsure of his desires around Thurman’s character or tearing up the dance floor with moves inspired by Adam West, Travolta reaffirms his movie star status in spades. His scenes with Thurman crackle with temptation, as Thurman twists Vincent around her manicured finger just for the thrill of it.

Yes, their ensuing dance sequence is worth rewinding, but it’s how their conversations evolve that cements their bond.

Jackson, arguably the best conduit for Tarantino’s rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, makes Jules a fearsome presence no matter how wide the actor’s grin grows.

The second half of ‘Pulp Fiction’ cannot measure up to the first. Bruce Willis’ turn as an aging boxer who refuses to throw a fight is a hoot, but it lacks the panache of those early Travolta sequences. Even when the story heads back to the diner where it all began the film can’t quite recapture that fizzy sense of the unknown.

One can quibble that Tarantino is being too precious with some of the film’s now-iconic moments, like the retro diner where Elvis impersonators mingle with wannabe Jayne Mansfields. But Tarantino’s control of the material is masterful – there’s not a wasted gesture or syllable.

The Blu-ray edition comes packed with six-plus hours of extras, including cast interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, a Tarantino interview on ‘The Charlie Rose Show,’ still galleries and a retrospective on the director’s career featuring Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.

It’s one reason why his third directorial effort, the slow and soulful “Jackie Brown,” was met with indifference in some quarters.

The 1997 film, out this week on Blu-ray, deserves a second, longer look. Tarantino had more up his sleeve than simply reviving the stalled careers of Pam Grier and Robert Forster. ‘Jackie Brown’ is a tribute to patient, clear-eyed storytelling as much as it is a wet kiss to the blaxploitation era.

The luminous Pam Grier stars as Jackie Brown, a blue-collar flight attendant who makes extra cash by smuggling money for an arms dealer named Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson). When Jackie runs into ATF officials trying to bring Ordell down, she decides to cooperate with the law. But she also lets Ordell know precisely what the agents want her to do. And, if that weren’t enough to juggle, she’s gotten a weary bondsman (Forster) to do her bidding.

Based on Elmore Leonard’s novel ‘Rum Punch,’ ‘Jackie Brown’ purrs with a slow and steady engine built for distance. We get to know each of Tarantino’s characters without the director’s signature flourishes to distract us. That means spending down time Ordell’s stoner girlfriend  (an uber-sexy Bridget Fonda) as well as his partner in crime (Robert De Niro in one of the quietest performances in his career).

Tarantino tends to let his gift for gab drain the tension from otherwise grand movie moments.  Here, the dialogue serves the characters, the characters, in turn, serve the story at large. It’s a near perfect balance, and a sign that the still-young director possessed a serenity beyond his years. Then again, it’s easy to be at peace when you’ve got Jackson vibrating danger as the film’s villain.

Ordell might be the savviest crook in the director’s rogues gallery. You can practically hear his mind calculating a half-dozen angles before letting that slow, sly grin creep back onto his face.

Grier, strutting through the film as if her character had already read the next three pages of the script, stands toe to toe with Ordell. Her sexy sneer puts even the ATF agents (Michael Keaton, Michael Bowen) back on their heels no matter how much evidence they’ve stacked against her. Jackie’s relationship with the bondsman provides even more friction, a middle-aged flirtation between souls sick of their ordinary lives.

No Tarantino discussion is complete without addressing his musical selections. For ‘Jackie Brown,’ the director dips into his oldies songbook anew for tracks from The Delfonics, The Grass Roots and Bloodstone, among others. The choices aren’t obvious – Tarantino the DJ never goes that route – but they add to the sensual vibe behind Jackie’s master plan.

Tarantino films like ‘Kill Bill’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’ deliver far more razzle dazzle than anything found in ‘Jackie Brown,’ and the film lacks the kind of instant pop culture gold he mines almost without effort. But age has been more than kind to Tarantino’s third film. And seeing it today, when most movies bombard us with shaky cams and byzantine plot twists, makes its casual charms all the more rewarding.

The packed Blu-ray edition includes deleted and alternate scenes plus a collection of older material including an interview with Tarantino, the ‘Siskel & Ebert’ review of the film circa 1997, the ‘Chicks with Guns’ video featured in the film and movie trailers featuring both Grier and Forster.

Dead Alive comes to Blu-ray this week, and I can say without a doubt that it’s the most fun I’ve had watching a zombie movie, ever.  Zombies flicks are huge right now, yet most of them owe everything to George A. Romero’s films.  Dead Alive, on the other hand, has more in common with Dan O’Bannon’s hilarious post-modern zom-com Return of the Living Dead in terms of tone and overall content.  For a low-budget horror flick, this film is incredibly ambitious, in terms of special effects, and pulls off its aims beautifully.  I ask indie horror filmmakers everywhere:  Why imitate Romero when you can build on Jackson and O’Bannon?  This movie has vengeful entrails giving off stinky flatulence, mischievous zombie babies, butt-kicking priests, and the best use of a lawnmower ever in a film.  What else do you want?

Dead Alive is a movie I love showing to people who have never seen it.  Just this past weekend, I watched it with a living room full of friends who had never had the pleasure. It was a gory good time for all.  The movie may be a bit much for the squeamish, but the film’s spirit is so lighthearted it’s hard to imagine anyone getting offended by the content.  It’s October, so if you’re loading up on horror movies and have never seen this one, get on the stick.

Available on Blu-ray

For some reason, Quentin Tarantino’s older movies take forever to hop onto new formats when they’re released.  This week, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown grace us on Blu-ray, and given my DVD copies of both have mysteriously disappeared, I’m thrilled this is finally happening.

People often accuse Tarantino of being a guy who simply steals from other movies. That is an assessment made by people who simply aren’t paying attention.  Tarantino is like a DJ, sampling and mixing bits from other movies and turning those used bits into a slick new car.  Tarantino’s recent films like Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds have felt like essays in film criticism put into narrative films, not unlike the early work of Jean-Luc Godard.  Like Tarantino, Godard isn’t a filmmaker, so much as a film critic who expresses himself through cinema rather than written essays. This explains why Tarantino’s recent films haven’t been met with as much mainstream adoration as his earlier works.  This isn’t a huge leap, given Tarantino’s production company’s name is a play on the title of the Godard film Bande à part.

However, before his movie mix-tapes actually critiqued the movies his films were about, Tarantino was more of a hipster filmmaker grease-monkey, creating killer movies out of pop-culture parts.  Pulp Fiction represents the best this period had to offer. It was before he went way off the deep end with the overcooked Kill Bill films, his final exploitation freakout before he became a critic and professor of genre movies, as opposed to a student of them.  However, his third movie, Jackie Brown, may be Tarantino’s most impressive film in terms of actual storytelling.  Based on the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch, the film takes some mild cues from seventies blaxploitation films on the soundtrack, but Tarantino manages to reigns in his inner-geek in favor of focusing on the story at hand, which features Oscar-worthy performances from Pam Grier, Robert Forester, and Michael Keaton.  And let’s not forget Samuel L. Jackson, who is even more menacing than usual.

If you already own these two on DVD, I don’t see any real reason to upgrade unless you’re such a super-fan that watching them in high-definition is an absolute must.  But if not, now’s a perfect time to snag-’em, as they’re both perfect, exciting flicks that are must-haves for any movie fan’s collection.

Pulp Fiction is available on Blu-ray
Jackie Brown is available on Blu-ray

Other Noteworthy Releases:

The Lion King: The re-release of this movie has been burning up the box office, so it’s perfect timing for Disney to roll this one out of the vault again, and strike while the iron is hot.  It’s getting a release on Blu-ray, as well as on 3D in case you decide you want this great movie to suck when you watch it.  The two worthless direct-to-video sequels are available if you buy the premium box set.  Thank goodness John Lasseter killed the production of those things.

Available on Blu-ray/DVD combo, 3D Blu-ray and a special edition box set

Beauty and The Beast: In case you secretly hate this movie as much as Disney seems to, you can now make it worse by watching it in 3D at home.  When I saw this movie for the first time, I thought, “boy…this would be so much better if the pictures were, like, popping out at me.”  Please Disney, stop it.

Available on 3D Blu-ray

Fast Five: This entry in the ongoing franchise received high praise from critics.  John Nolte has always been a big fan of these flicks, and this one is supposedly the best yet.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Scream 4: It’s better than the other two sequels, but that’s not saying a whole heckuva lot.  It was fun to at least get the gang back together, but let’s not have a Scream 5 (or heaven forbid…5cream) okay?

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Prohibition: This is Ken Burns’s latest documentary chronicling a period of serious stupidity in this country.  Gotta love the progressive nanny state that knows what’s best for us, right fellas?  An America with no beer is not an America I wish to know.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure: “I’m a loner, Dottie.  A rebel.”

Available on Blu-ray

Cinema Paradiso: This Italian classic captures a love of cinema so beautifully in a way that few filmmakers are able to do.

Available on Blu-ray

Life is Beautiful: Roberto Benigni’s film is a bit of a love-it-or-hate-it affair, but regardless, it struck a major chord when it was released.

Available on Blu-ray

The Undefeated: The Sarah Palin doc by Steve Bannon gets a DVD release.

Available on DVD

Friday the 13th Ultimate Collection: This collection includes the first eight movies.  You know if you want these or not.  The third was one of the first full-on movies I saw, and it scared my young self to death.  Now I wonder why I was such a little wuss.

Available on DVD

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom: This is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s heartwarming adaptation of the Marquis De Sade’s unfinished monument to depravity.  The notorious reputation of this movie is firmly in place.  Pasolini was a filmmaker known for his life-affirming narratives such as The Gospel According to Matthew. However, his final film before his mysterious death is a black, hellish void that lacks anything resembling goodness and humanity. Criterion is upgrading this one to Blu-ray, their rare original release of the DVD is a major collector’s item, though their subsequent re-release cause its value to drop significantly.  It once went for $999.99 new from independent traders on Amazon.

Available on Blu-ray

Harakiri: Criterion is updating their edition of this Masaki Kobayashi film for a Blu-ray release.

Available on Blu-ray

Be sure to go check out the latest episode of the HomeVideodrome podcast!  This week Jim and I talk about Queensrÿche vocalist Geoff Tate’s weird facial hair, Ken Burns documentaries, the poo-poo platter in Salo, and how people who claim to hate Sarah Palin can’t stop obsessing over her.  So head over, tune in and leave some feedback!

A new kind of film emerged in the late ‘80s and first half of the 1990s to as an alternative to the mind-numbing noise of the Boomer Blockbusters. Smaller studios like Miramax rose to champion independent films. Generation X auteurs shaped by obsessive home video viewing – Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Darren Aronofsky – passed on the Hollywood path and instead built careers through low budget, DIY productions. “Reservoir Dogs,” “Sydney,” “El Mariachi,” “Clerks,” and “Pi” launched careers that would lead to Academy Awards and some of the most exciting films of the 1990s and 2000s.

These filmmakers’ origins are true to the generational temperament of their peers.

Children born in the ‘60s and ‘70s did not grow up in the affluence and tranquility of the 1950s consensus. Instead they took a backseat as the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s raged. It was now when the younger Silent and Boomer Generations rose up to challenge the cultural institutions built and maintained by the GI Generation who fought World War II.

The children of this era were forced to become independent, entrepreneurial, and innovative early on. Unlike the Boomers growing up in the ‘50s and the Millennials in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Gen-Xers were not protected. The adults were too busy with the cultural chaos of the ‘60s and ‘70s to be the parents they should have been. Thus, Gen X knew that they had no one to rely on except for themselves. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe in their histories of American generations, this is standard for “Reactive” generations – and equips them for crises come middle-age. George Washington, John Adams, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Harry Truman were all part of “Reactive” generations too.

We can see how this mentality applied itself to Gen-X filmmakers. When these future auteurs wanted to make a film they maxed out their credit cards (Smith,) or volunteered for medical experiments (Rodriguez) and shot with the cheapest supplies available.

For Andrew Breitbart the path tread has been comparable. How can one reform a corrupt media complex that’s in the Democrats’ back pocket? Become the Media. Control of NBC is not necessary to launch stories that result in the defunding of ACORN or a congressman’s resignation.

Breitbart was born in 1969 – almost the middle of Generation X. The first 100 pages of Righteous Indignation, his hybrid memoir-manifesto, trace a trajectory not uncommon to others now in their mid ‘30s to late ‘40s. Breitbart’s college years were a time of high grade slack, irresponsible gambling, chemical self-destruction, and Marxist indoctrination. Emerging out of the haze with a worthless degree Breitbart set about rising from the bottom of the Hollywood pecking order.

His job as a script deliverer meant shuttling packages around town while listening to the radio. This drew Breitbart into politics and the media, with the first blow to his anti-intellectual Hollywood leftism dealt during the Clarence Thomas hearings. The coup de grace came in the subsequent search for alternative answers when Breitbart dared tune his radio dial to someone he thought was a “Nazi,” Rush Limbaugh.

Then began a media voyage through the late ‘90s and first half of the ‘00s including apprenticeship with Matt Drudge during the Clinton years and constructing The Huffington Post while George W. Bush was in office. Righteous Indignation then shifts into manifesto form with two chapters that should be released as stand-alone pamphlets. Chapter 6 is “Breakthrough,” an accessible summary of the Left from Rousseau through Marx to the Frankfurt School and Saul Alinsky. In chapter 5 Breitbart lays out his rules of political warfare in his “Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries.”

The remaining chapters tell Breitbart’s narrative putting the Rules and the Breakthrough knowledge into practice to fight ACORN and defend the Tea Party.

What won’t you find in Righteous Indignation? Some manifesto of Breitbart’s political beliefs.

Breitbart is not driven by creating some “right-wing” utopia. He’s not obsessed with Liberalism vs. Conservatism as David Mamet is. He’s focused on disrupting and exposing the practical and concrete effects of the Left.

The takeaway from Righteous Indignation is that citizen journalists now have all the tools needed to bring down corrupt politicians, bad laws, and destructive organizations. Breitbart has bypassed the mainstream media gatekeepers just as his Gen-X cinema peers overcame the boomer blockbuster mentality.

The endowment of Generation X Hollywood Apostates is pragmatic independence: Ideology is not important. Dealing with the problems themselves in an effective way is what matters. Results matter. New institutions can and should be built.

In Part 5 of the Hollywood Revolt, we’ll conclude with a look at the future of both film and politics as a new generation rises and an old one is reincarnated.

On Wednesday night, Quentin Tarantino was roasted at the New York Friars’ Club. Some of Hollywood’s most famous and talented stars were on hand, many of who did the actual roasting. Among them Samuel L. Jackson, Jerry Lewis, Sarah Silverman, Rob Schneider, Eli Roth, and Neve Campbell. One shameless roaster named Whitney Cummings, often seen on Chelsea Lately, delivered the most buzz-worthy/cringe-worthy line of the night:

[Tarantino has] produced more retarded things than Sarah Palin’s vagina.

Somewhere out there, Andrew Dice Clay is blushing. Not because the joke is off-color, he doesn’t care about that. He’s flushed because it’s unfunny, stolen hackery.

Let’s deal with the unfunny part first: Who is the butt of this joke? A toddler who suffers from down-syndrome and the mother that chose not to destroy him while he was in the womb. Yikes. Regarding Trig: Lay. Off. The. Kids. Okay? Regarding Mama Palin: Is it possible to write a more obvious joke on a more obvious target? I’m sure Ms. Cummings fancies herself irreverent; what would be truly irreverent is if she would harness a little of that hate that dwells in her dreary heart and direct it toward someone who is actually in power. Here are some possible targets she may want to consider: Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, or Joe Biden (notice how I’m not mentioning Obama’s children?). If she insists on resorting to humor that’s main attribute is shock-value, why not try a target that might actually shock someone?

Now let’s deal with the hackery part. It’s one thing that Whitney Cummings is mean-spirited, vulgar, and boring, but it’s quite another that she stole this joke. Here’s a super-NSFW clip of Louis CK on Opie and Anthony going on a jag against Sarah Palin that ends with him referring to her vagina as a “retard-making cunt.”

You mean Whitney Cummings isn’t the first to make a “Sarah Palin’s vagina produces retarded things” joke?!? Waaahhhh?? Actually, she’s not even the second. Here’s a joke from the popular comedy site eBaum’s world:

What is the difference between Sarah Palin’s mouth and her vagina?

Not everything that comes out of her vagina is retarded.

John Nolte has thoroughly detailed that the depraved Louis CK took the gold at the Degenerate Olympics for his attempt to induce vomiting with a single phrase, but I think Cummings did him one better. At least when CK savaged Trig Palin and Sarah’s birth canal, his idea was probably original.

Meet Whitney Cummings: the up-and-coming comic who rips-off other people’s jokes about handicapped babies and the moms who choose not to abort them. The University of Pennsylvania must be proud of their alumnus.

I reached out to a stand-up comedian friend to verify my observation that this might not have been her joke, and he confirmed “it’s a steal.” Apparently this isn’t the first time either: “She’s stolen more jokes than Rickey Henderson stole bases,” he said. “She’s Carlos Mencia with a penis.”

Furthermore, telling a joke that isn’t your own at this particular venue is incredibly stupid. This isn’t the junior high school cafeteria and she’s not getting yucks from the cool kids by regurgitating Deep Thoughts she’s memorized. Cummings shared the stage with some of Hollywood’s biggest names, only to tell and take credit for a joke that’s shamelessly derivative at best and plagiarism at worst. The depravity of the joke is only surpassed by the arrogance of it.

But unfortunately, this is likely the last you’ll hear on this topic—NOW will be AWOL and we all know that hate and bullying directed toward Sarah Palin and her family isn’t the type of hate and bullying the NO H8/anti-bullying crowd cares to fight. (This is particularly telling of how backwards the Left’s priorities are, because unlike helpless Trig Palin, gay teens and adults are fully capable of defending themselves against bullies.)

So the Left’s obsession with Sarah Palin’s vagina and uterus continues and classless comedians still single out Trig as the only mentally challenged baby in America that’s fair game for public ridicule. While the smiley-faced Palins soldier-on, fending off horrendous indignity after horrendous indignity, joyless, joke-stealing scolds like Whitney Cummings continue to speak truth to out-of-power in the cheapest, laziest, and ugliest ways possible.

But the joke has soured. In this film, white America is the enemy and the United States is an oppressive force. It gets so extreme that in one scene a pair of white men shoot to death a pregnant Mexican woman merely so that her baby won’t be born in the USA. The pair then cruelly say, “Welcome to America,” to the dead woman’s Mexican husband. From the Hollywood Reporter:

Among “Machete’s” more provocative elements are border vigilantes led by Don Johnson as a kind of avatar for Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio and fake political ads for an incumbent senator whose platform is built on his “hard line against wetbacks” and a description of them as “parasites.” That the two characters murder a pregnant Mexican woman to prevent her baby from being born in America and then shoot her distraught husband while uttering the line, “Welcome to America,” underlines the point.

That is some pretty harsh stuff.

Sometimes Hollywood doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. As a two-minute fake trailer in context with the Grindhouse experience it was funny. I attended the full Grindhosue movie experience and had a great, laugh-a-minute time. Unfortunately, Machete is now a full movie of its own, one that is polarizing people instead of entertaining them like the original, fake trailer was able to do.

The timing of this film couldn’t be worse. Machete arrives in theaters just as tensions between Americans and the illegal aliens, most from Mexico, are at their highest. Apparently, this film depicts Mexicans as militant, self-righteous, hateful, anti-Americans out to selfishly grab whatever it is they think they deserve from those evil, white, Americans they hate so much. This movie is made to attack whites, undermine American laws and sovereignty, and push Mexican nationals to an obdurate disdain for America.

Some may scoff at this claim saying that it is all supposed to be funny, a paean to the Blacksploitation movies of the 70s that played to black pride and sticking it to “the man” — meaning whites. Lighten up, they’ll say.

But there is a major difference between the Blaxsploitation movies of the 70s and Machete. Those horribly acted, badly produced films of the 70s that Machete is trying to spoof (just with a Latin flair) were not released with million dollar ad campaigns supporting them. Nor did they ever appear in all that many theaters at any given time, quite unlike what will happen with Machete. Blaxsploitation movies were never as culturally explosive as this film could be. In fact, those 70s films weren’t expecting ever to get such a wide release that real race troubles could result.

It is patently obvious that director Robert Rodriguez intends this film to give succor to militant Mexican nationalism to the denigration of the USA, too. Proof of that is in the introduction he hastily added to his trailer just prior to Cinco de Mayo this year. At the beginning of his ad for the film, Rodriquez added a segment from the star of the film, Danny Trejo, depicting the lead character menacingly giving Arizona a message.

“This is Machete with a special Cinco de Mayo message…” the gravely voiced character actor begins. “To Arizona!,” he says ending with a grimace. Clearly the message is that “Machete” is coming for Arizona and is out to start a race war.

The film’s star, though, counters the anti-whites message in his pre-release comments. He says that Mexicans themselves come in for ribbing right along side the white folks, so the film offers a tit for tat that shouldn’t make anyone mad. As The Hollywood Reporter writes:

“I think Arizona is going to like this movie,” said the man who is Machete. “It doesn’t just deal with the guy who comes over the border to support his family; it deals with the corruption on both sides — the drug dealers, the guys who are getting paid to bring people here and the politicians who, any time they need a good platform, choose immigration. So the feds may now really do something.”

In an effort to support the actor’s assessment, the Hollywood Reporter goes on…

At the same time, the movie has fun with cultural cliches attached to Chicano culture. Characters make verbal references to pinatas, cucarachas, papers, deportation and burritos. A fight played for laughs includes Machete wielding a weedwhacker, hedge clippers and other gardening tools. An underground network for illegal immigrants is headquartered in a taco truck.

This is thin gruel as an excuse, though. While the Mexicans in this film are lambasted with the hi-jinx of jokes about taco trucks and lawn care tools, whites are given no such lighthearted treatment. In this film whites are murderers, rapists, exploiters, oppressors, and politically corrupt. If only they were having fun with lawn tools!

This hatred for whites also rings quite hollow in this day and age. As director Rodriquez tries to paint all whites as evil wrongdoers, real Mexican citizens in Mexico itself are being murdered by the score by real-life drug cartel kingpins. Also immigrants from further south are being kidnapped, held for ransom, raped, and murdered by the thousands by Mexican nationals eager to exploit them for quick cash and cruel fun. Yet as these truly evil things are being done on a daily basis by Mexicans to Mexicans and to other Hispanics, Rodriguez tries to paint white people as the monsters.

Any clear thinking person can understand that holding a Tea Party sign that might seem unwelcoming to illegal immigrants is hardly in the same class as the kidnapping, rape, and murders that are being perpetrated against Hispanics in Mexico every single day.

It is a cynical game Rodriquez plays, and he may well be awarded taxpayer money for doing so.

In any other era we might be more disposed to taking the buckets-o-blood, Mexpolitation nature of this film as just good, over the top, fun. But in this racial and historical climate, the film is bound to bring despair and division instead of enjoyment.

Part of Woo’s problem was the advent of American special effects capable of mimicking, with a few mouse clicks, the previously unique style he pioneered via endlessly inventive cinematography and editing. Soon anyone could make what at least superficially looked like a John Woo movie, and they saturated the market with mediocre simulacra of his imagery until it felt old and tired. This is what I suspect Werner Herzog once meant when he condemned the “worn-out images” which imperil our civilization’s collective imagination “because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

Then there was Woo’s catastrophic loss of creative control, resulting from his move to Hollywood soon after he finished Hard Boiled. He once wearily explained his momentous decision to abandon his homeland in this way:

I had been working in Hong Kong so many years, and creatively I felt limited and needed to grow and change. It was an extremely commercial place. All the movies were commercial and entertaining. Action movies and comedies were mainstream, and it was hard to do anything else. Artistic films did not have an audience, and political topics you could not touch.

Given his affinity for American movies and Western sensibilities, Woo found much to like in his newly adopted home. “I felt comfortable right away. When we came to Hollywood I found the people in this country were very kind, polite and respectful. It is a very open country. They are all reaching out their hands to the new talent no matter where you are from. They wanted me to bring my style to their Western movies.” Woo loved the Hollywood crew on his first movie here, Hard Target, and they returned his admiration. However, the demands of both the studio and that lord among thespians, Jean-Claude Van Damme, drove him to despair:

I never knew that the star had so much control over the script, over the co-star. . . Sam [Raimi] and Jim [Jacks] wanted me to make the film in my style, but somebody else wanted me to make Hard Target an action movie, and somebody else wanted me to tone down the violence. People told me than an American hero is not supposed to have flaws and he never cries in a film. He’s a perfect guy. And I thought, wow, that’s kind of boring.

With Hard Boiled in Hong Kong, Woo had crowned his reputation with a movie that, to this very day, remains arguably the most blistering action movie of all time. But with Hard Target in the States — made only a year later! — the MPAA’s passel of clueless, tin-pot bureaucrats forced him to cut his picture seven times just to get an R rating. Chow Yun-fat remembers Woo’s frustration: “They told him that, if he shoots five people in this scene, then he can only shoot two people in the next scene. He cannot kill seven people in one scene and then another seven people right afterward!”

In other words, the American studios courted the singular talent of John Woo — and then refused to allow him to make a John Woo movie.

Fools.

It’s not that he hasn’t been successful in Hollywood. Hard Target made $33 million, Broken Arrow $70 million, and Face/Off — where he finally had director’s cut — earned an impressive $112 million at the domestic box office. But the growing artistic malaise was palpable. By the time his Mission: Impossible 2 raked in $215 million in 2000, Woo’s films had become, to my mind at least, virtually indistinguishable from the work of the average American music-video director. The world-weary gravitas of Chow Yun-fat had been replaced by the empty-headed pseudo-machismo of pampered and coiffed metro-sexual pretty boys like Christian Slater, John Travolta, and (most egregious of all) Tom Cruise, while Woo’s ever-present themes — familial, moral, spiritual — faded under the glare of the Tinseltown klieg lights until they shrunk down to mere stylistic affectations, as moving and genuine as, say, Madonna sporting a crucifix with her concert dominatrix outfits. Most of his later output — a list that includes Windtalkers (2002), Paycheck (2003), and some TV stuff — is a pale shadow of the things that brought me to Woo in the first place.

Thankfully, we live at a time when foreign films are more accessible than ever before, giving us ample opportunity to look at old movies and remind ourselves how brightly those old Hong Kong gems still glow. “If some people see only the action,” Woo once said about his Heroic Bloodshed movies, “I say, fine. But I think if they look, they’ll see more. . . it’s also about me, about what I believe.” There was a time — as an ideologically lonely student in an intellectually stimulating but virulently leftist film school — when I cared deeply about what exactly a movie like Hard Boiled revealed John Woo to believe. It was the kind of movie that I could sense was buttressing my own worldview, even if I didn’t have the words to express why or how.

So what does Woo truly believe, anyway? In his interview with Woo that closes Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo, author Michael Bliss leads us to an answer:

Do you think that the traditional values that you cherish — such as honor, devotion, religion, family — aren’t very popular anymore?

“Yes. It seems that many people have lost them. I think it is my duty to bring all of these things back, these things that people have lost.”

With that in mind, would it be fair to say that more than anything else, you’re a religious director?

“Yes. I’d agree with that.”

The traditional values championed so energetically by John Woo should be of intense interest to conservative film lovers. Hard Boiled and its brethren stand virtually alone in modern times as cinematic defenders of what might loosely be described as Christian warriors — flawed heroes (and, in many cases, villains) who eschew cynicism and nihilism for moral codes based on ancient Bible-derived notions of righteousness and chivalry. Michael Bliss makes a wonderfully perceptive remark about Hard Boiled in his book when he mentions Woo’s cameo in the film (italics mine): “Woo plays a former cop, Mr. Woo, who runs the jazz bar, which functions as a haven of aesthetics in the midst of this brutal cops and criminals universe. In this church-like sanctuary, Woo acts as a secular priest.” That’s a revelation that hit me right between the eyes, and something that even Woo himself probably didn’t realize he was doing.

“I’m most influenced by the values of Jesus Christ,” Woo maintains in interviews. “Loving one’s neighbor, forgiveness, patience, kindness, charity.” That statement might seem laughable in light of the incredible amount of raw mayhem that drenches pictures like Hard Boiled blood-red, but Woo is adamant: “I am a Christian. I am strongly influenced by my religion. The church really means a lot to me.” In this Tarantino/Rodriguez-dominated age of treating every symbol and idea as just more grist for their pop-culture mishmash films, it’s refreshing to see Woo daring us to take his explosive action movies seriously. He’s unabashedly inviting a rigorous analysis of the Christian ethics on display in his pictures.

Consider what a film like Hard Boiled asks the viewer. What happens to those peaceful Christian values when they come face-to-face with a thoroughly evil, heartless, murderous, and implacable enemy? What part of that noble and beautiful moral structure gives way, and what replaces it? Is the result still Christian, or only a perilously perverted doppelganger? These are the kinds of questions that continually arise in thoughtful conservative minds whenever one watches A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled.

“I believe the good people always win,” says Woo. “At the same time, we have to understand each other and know the good and bad in all of us. I think that came from my Christian education.” Woo forces his protagonists to navigate their way through spiritual minefields, in a quest to achieve some semblance of morality in a world seemingly bereft of it. “In my movies,” explains Woo, “the hero must conquer his own inner battle between good and evil before he can win the outward battle with the ‘real’ enemy.” That he manages to bring brutal gangsters, self-assured assassins, and trigger-happy rogue cops (each with prodigious amounts of blood on their hands) through hails of bullets and piles of corpses to that spiritual place (and in stories filled with such mesmerizing imagery and visual poetry) is remarkable.

Hard Boiled has more death and destruction in it than any number of American action films, but strangely enough it manages to remain far more morally defensible and intriguing. The issues it raises aren’t just cheap plot points — Woo’s unflinching depiction of the eternal battle between good and evil gives his spiritual themes real teeth. For example, Hard Boiled sports a triad godfather who can’t bring himself to keep up with the demented younger generation of crooks, most of whom long ago abandoned the old code of mafia ethics he grew up with — and he pays for his conscience with his life.

Woo allows another likable villain — the crowd favorite, no less, the cool-as-hell Boba Fett of the movie — to come to an abrupt end at the hands of his merciless boss after refusing to gun down a crowd of innocents. And not only does this deliciously audience-pleasing character die, so do the innocents. On the surface, this seems quite cruel of Woo, almost an expression of anti-heroism: the deaths of the defenseless bystanders seem to render the villain’s noble sacrifice meaningless. We lament that Woo doesn’t even leave anyone behind to respect or memorialize the heroic action we witnessed, until we realize that it is we who are meant to know and remember what happened, that it is our own sense of decency and values that’s been awakened along with the martyred villain’s.

Like I said, Woo delivers spiritual themes with real teeth.

Meanwhile, both heroes in the film are faced with their own demons, accidentally killing people on their own side and realistically dealing with the mental consequences. “Sometimes,” says Woo, “when you feel a person is bad, there is good in there as well. This is a truth about human beings and a theme in all of my movies. I have always believed that good and evil are not black and white. They co-exist in people.” All of the thrills in Hard Boiled are over the top, of course — in real life any one of the action scenes would have resulted in the army being brought in to quell matters. But it’s meaningful, carrying powerful consequences both in the character’s lives and in the audience’s psyche.

“John Woo is a man of contradictions,” concludes Michael Bliss. “He’s a romantic Christian idealist who loves guns and explosions, he’s a man of peace who choreographs death and destruction better than anyone working in movies today. . . Woo is a difficult fit because he blends Western humanism with Asian attitudes. And like Kurosawa, he’s a man that knows that often, violence and justice cannot be separated.” Judging from the state of the world, our inner war between Old Testament justice and New Testament forgiveness and redemption aren’t going away anytime soon. Which makes me all the more thankful that, over two decades ago, a devout Christian director named John Woo chose for a few short years to explore those themes in such a startling and heartfelt fashion. The Hollywood technicians can mimic the camerawork and the style, sure. But for this bedrock faith in Christianity as a powerful, elevating and ennobling force, you still have to go back to the original.

This concludes our analysis of the potent, Christian-laced action extravaganza Hard Boiled. Come back next Saturday for the beginning of an all-new For Conservative Movie Lovers series, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

There have been more than a few versions of Hard Boiled available on DVD over the years, and which one is best remains a debatable matter. The best image by far can be found in the French edition (but alas, no English subtitles). The sound is fairly comparable across all editions (some have a 5:1 DTS remix, but many claim the original mono mix sounds better). Most of the editions use bastardized subtitles that fail to capture the nuances of the original Cantonese dialogue. There’s even a Taiwanese “uncut” version available that adds about five minutes to the final hospital shootout, but the original Cantonese dialogue is dubbed in Mandarin and there’s a different musical score.

For Americans, your best bet is probably the $11.49 Dragon Dynasty edition, which has decent picture, very good sound, and a host of supplements (including a full commentary by Bey Logan, one of the authors used to research this FCML series). UK readers might try the Region 2 disc available from Tartan Asia Extreme, which purportedly has the nicest image transfer aside from the French version.

If you’re one of those people who has never tried a Hong Kong movie, and who isn’t keen on spending an evening watching a twenty-year-old foreign film with subtitles, I’m hoping you reconsider, especially if you are an action movie fan. Every die-hard fan of Hong Kong movies started out as a wary newbie dragged by their friends to see something that they thought would be boring or hard to understand. It’s only after giving it a try that they realized just how much fresh energy, passion, color, and humor is to be found in those pictures. And if you’re the type of person who just can’t abide listening to a foreign language for that long while looking down to read the subtitled translations, you can always click over to the English-dubbed audio track and turn the subtitles off. That’s a purist’s nightmare, but in my opinion a far better option than not seeing Hard Boiled at all.

Part of a good film education is selectively trying out new genres you’ve always avoided. In some cases, the viewing will simply confirm your long-held suspicions, and that’s fair enough. But often you’ll end up discovering some thoroughly entertaining corner of cinema that you’ll wish you had found long before. Hard Boiled is revered as a great gateway drug into the world of Hong Kong movies, a hard-hitting action picture in the Rambo/Dirty Harry/Die Hard mold. If you like those sorts of films, do give it a try.