Mish Mash 28 (Flying Down to Rio, Movie Body Counts, K-9, Goodbye Hooper?)

Flying Down to Rio

This picture’s famous for showcasing the first pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  They play supporting characters though and are bandmates/friends meant for comic relief.  Of course the one big number they have is a showstopper revolving around a Brazilian dance called the carioca.

Putting all that aside the real reason I’m bringing the movie up is because of the finale.  Don’t worry about spoilers, they show what happens on the damn poster.  Anyway, the whole thing involves tying a bunch of dancers to the wings of planes and having them do a choreographed routine in the sky.  They didn’t actually do this by the way.  It’s movie magic.  Unsurprisingly they look pretty awkward trying to swing their arms or kick their legs while someone off camera blows wind in their faces and jostles the fake plane around.  Some are dressed in silly looking costumes too with propellers on their heads or airplane wings jutting out of their necks.

I’m fine with all this.  The part that’s kinda dumb in my opinion is that the entire sequence is meant to wow the tourists staying at Rio’s fancy hotels but it’s like really obvious the people on the ground can’t see any of this shit.  And these ladies are risking their lives by agreeing to tether themselves to bi-planes that were hastily and spontaneously outfitted with hooks, ropes and screws just moments before.  There’s even a part where a woman falls from one of the wings and miraculously lands on another plane below her.  This wasn’t planned.  The filmmakers wanted you to think for a moment this broad was going to plunge to her death.  I guess within the film the grounded audience does see the dazzling air show so it was probably all worth it.  The scene’s still fuckin’ odd man.

 

Movie Body Counts

Ok, we’re definitely gonna be in spoiler territory this time.  So I was watching Alien vs. Predator: Requiem and towards the end the military drops a nuclear bomb on the town that gets taken over by the battling creatures and that particular move probably ticks this guy way up the list in terms of body count.  Again, a whole regular ass town gets obliterated with the people still living there.  No evac.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is often cited as having either the highest or nearly the highest body count in a single installment…on screen.  That caveat’s tricky and AVP: Requiem got me thinking.  What about The Day After Tomorrow?  With all the global shenanigans of devastating monster storms covering every inch of Erath’s surface billions had to have died during that.  There’s a lot of flooding and stuff but since it’s all shot from very wide angles showing more the destruction of cities, famous landmarks and landscapes as opposed to focusing in on millions and millions of individuals being decimated.

The Day After Tomorrow's storms are the size
of continents

And what about Star Wars: A New Hope?  The evil empire blows up an entire planet of innocent people in that.  Maybe that one gets a pass because technically they’re all aliens and not human beings?  Even though we all think of them as human beings?  I guess similar to The Day After Tomorrow since we only see the planet burst into bits from a distance and don’t see the suffering up close it doesn’t register nearly as much as say Halloween Kills where you witness the innocents die up close and in particularly gruesome ways.

K-9

Pairing up a human cop with a dog cop is fine.  No problem there.  Anthropomorphizing the dog, eeh, always kinda bizarre but ok.  In typical fashion the two don’t get along at first because they cramp each other’s style but learn to love and respect one another through harrowing escapades on the job.  All acceptable.  The part I’m not on board with is how much of a goddamn psycho Jim Belushi’s (K-911, K-9: P.I.) character is.

Normally in an action cop movie the protagonist is a hard boiled sonuvabitch who plays by his own rules.  He’s constantly in hot water with his boss and doesn’t want a partner because all the other cops are too by the book and/or inexperienced.  That’s all here except Belushi’s Michael Dooley pushes these tropes to the limit.  Here’s one example of how crazy he is.  In order to secure a drug sniffing German Shepard named Jerry Lee Lewis (“the killer”) to help take down the villain he makes a deal with the man in charge of such decisions (not his captain by the way, some other random cop played by Ed O’Neill (Blue Chips)).  If Dooley can resolve the current shootout at an apartment building teeming with bad guys then the dog is his.  Yes, this arrangement makes absolutely no sense.  Anyhow, Dooley proceeds to go to the car rental place next door, get a convertible (the only kind he drives), max out the insurance, drive over to where the standoff is and then rams that sucker right through the fuckin’ wall.  He pops out from the car with his gun completely unscathed and saves the day.  And of course, he gets his dog.

I mean that’s pretty over the top.  But that’s just one incident.  Dooley also tortures suspects, raids a bustling warehouse in broad daylight without a warrant or backup where he suspects the drugs are being held, disrespects his superior, disobeys orders, destroys private property, bursts into the villain’s dinner party waving a gun around scaring the shit out of the innocent guests, sexually assaults a woman, mistreats the dog all throughout the film including wrestling with him, leaving him in a closet overnight, running him through a car wash fully exposed to bathe him and encourages him to have sex with a stranger’s dog without anyone’s consent.  And that’s not to mention he takes on a police dog solo when he has no training in that area or has ever worked with one before.  Aside from something like the Bad Lieutenants this asshole is in the mix for most reckless cop I’ve ever seen on film.

Look, I understand this is supposed to be a comedy but fuck, this guy’s a lunatic.  And not a fun lunatic.  The whole movie’s weird bad.

 

Goodbye Hooper?

So I’m checking out The Goodbye Girl starring Richard Dreyfuss (What About Bob?) and Marsha Mason (Nick of Time) which is just ok.  It’s a meet cute love story with a mildly wacky premise and snappy dialogue.  You know, something that would’ve been made in like the 50’s or earlier but they’re doing it in the mid 70’s and it doesn’t exactly translate in my opinion, at least the way they did it here.  The leads don’t have any chemistry which is the whole enchilada.  Dreyfuss’ energetic, screwball, extremely idiosyncratic character is pretty damn annoying too (he beat out John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever for the Oscar!).

Well, in one very quick scene Dreyfuss looks exactly like he did in Jaws.  He’s got the jean jacket, some gray/tan shirt underneath, the black beanie, the glasses, the beard, it’s all there.  He never dresses like this again at any other point in the film either.  Actually, in a separate scene earlier Dreyfuss is wearing a solid gray sweater that also resembles the one he wears throughout Jaws, except now it’s splattered with white paint or something.

I know this is stupidly nerdy shit to point out but I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.  Girl was only two years after Jaws so it’s possible he really did recycle some of the same wardrobe.  It’s a similar situation with Bruce Willis’ brown jacket in Pulp Fiction and Color of Night except those movies came out the same year.

The Goodbye Girl

Jaws

The Goodbye Girl

Jaws

Holy Spider

Damn Holy Spider is great.  Based on true events it’s about a serial killer in Iran in the early 2000’s and the female journalist, Arezoo (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), who tries to hunt him down.  He targets sex workers because he believes God has put him on a mission to rid the world of “corrupt” women.

This case doesn’t seem to be a high priority for the police so they’re portrayed as somewhat inept or at the very least lazy.  Arezoo knows how dire and important the situation is so she takes it upon herself to investigate which isn’t easy.  She’s constantly faced with roadblocks from society who don’t take her seriously at best and treat her as sub-human at worst.  When she tries to check into a hotel she’s denied because she’s an unmarried woman and it’s against the moral code for her to have a room by herself.  Or later the chief of police thinks she’s taking her sleuthing too far, backs her into a corner, calls her worthless and all but threatens to rape and/or beat her.  Arezoo pushes on though and in her own way fights against the strict guidelines the government and society have put on her.  She’s a hard hitting tenacious journalist, she smokes when she’s not supposed to, she goes around town unaccompanied at night when she’s not supposed to, she insists on following through with procedure when others want to sidestep, she’s a warrior.

However, that’s only half the story.  The other half is about the killer, Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani).  This is hands down one of the best portrayals of a serial murderer I’ve ever seen because it’s realistic.  Look, Se7en is one of my favorite films and John Doe is a fantastic character but the super villain approach that most pictures take is cartoonish.  Sure, there are some that have existed in the world but the vast majority are not like that.  Saeed isn’t some brooding, plotting, ten-steps-ahead-of-the-cops evil genius.  Yes, he’s an extremely disturbed individual who has an urge to kill but he’s also a family man with an average day job as a builder.  In other words he’s a boring middle-aged dude ninety percent of the time.  He goes to work and has dinner with his wife and kids in the evening and discusses visiting the in-laws and plays soccer with his son and goes on picnics and all the other everyday shit that most folks do.  This throughline extends into his homicides too because they don’t always go as planned and he needs to improvise sometimes causing injury to himself accidentally.  And his wife barely buys his lame made up excuses he employs to cover his tracks.  To feed his narcissistic side though he calls the local newspaper after each attack because he wants the credit and wants the world to understand what he’s doing and gets upset when they don’t carry a cover story about him.  Saeed is a complicated individual who is exceedingly dangerous but also tremendously mundane.  His actions are born out of mediocrity.  He believes he was meant for a greater purpose than to merely work construction and raise a family.  It’s incredible how well the filmmakers get this asshole down.

And if that wasn’t enough the setting the story takes place in is totally unique.  Showing Iran having sex workers and drug addicts (particularly female drug addicts) and a serial killer is something I’ve never thought about or seen before.  Of course it makes perfect sense that these things would exist there because they exist absolutely everywhere but to see it portrayed so matter-of-factly on film is an eye opener.  I’m sure we don’t hear about this stuff in the west because not only are we simply not reporting on it but also because Iran tightly controls the image and information that’s transmitted to the rest of the world.  In many ways we’re all the same and deal with a lot of the same issues and that was fascinating, comforting and depressing all at once to encounter.

Speaking of the government, as I was watching I was thinking “there’s no way they actually filmed this in Iran, they wouldn’t allow their country to be portrayed in such a nuanced and controversial light” and sure enough yea, they filmed in Jordan.  In my opinion the movie does point out how cruel and stubbornly single-minded Iran’s society can be at times but it also humanizes the people.  The filmmakers show a spectrum of citizens who don’t all feel the same way about the morals imposed on them and are just as devastated as anyone else when they learn their child has been horribly murdered.

So you definitely gotta check this one out.  It’s wonderfully made and probably one of the best thrillers ever.  Holy Spider?  Holy shit!  (I have to be the first person who came up with that)