Why I have been away...

My full apologies to everyone!  I recently lost someone very close to me and needed to go away for awhile.  I just came back tonight and will start work tomorrow morning.  I am a very private person and I usually keep things to myself.  And after all, this blog is for Sharon's memory.  If not for her I would not have ever started one.  So please be patient and I will be back online soon.  Sorry to have worried many of you.  I will get back to many of you by email shortly.  Thanks for all the kind emails and everything!

Yours Sincerely, Mike Sanchez

Shadows and Dust: Robin Hood

In the foreground, French soldiers unload from boats onto the white sand beaches of England. In the distance, beyond the sheer cliff faces, at least a hundred Saxons ride hard to meet them, a torrent of thundering hooves pouring over the lush green grass. Ridley Scott captures all of this in a single majestic shot that is at least the most breathtaking image in Robin Hood and that might also be one of the most fantastic wide shots in the director’s entire career. It’s the kind of shot David Lean would have envied, the kind of shot that a back-in-the-day Werner Herzog would have harassed hundreds of extras in order to capture, the kind of shot that would be iconic if only the film were worthy of being iconized. Alas, it lasts all of three seconds. Blink and you might miss it. Scott’s Robin Hood is a film that’s overlong and underwhelming, that has romance but lacks heart and that exhaustively details the origins of its titular hero without ever giving him, you know, character. Yet the film’s biggest blunder might be that all-too-brief panorama, because without it we could have pretended that mediocrity was the movie’s only option.

Instead, mediocrity is what Robin Hood settles for. The film is too darn competent to be considered awful. There are scattered moments of catastrophe offset by moments worth cherishing, like that coastline shot described above, or the almost equally striking shot of King Richard the Lionheart’s boat heading up the Thames with a supportive flotilla of smaller boats scattered around it and a magnificent castle looming ahead (achieved with CGI, of course). Robin Hood is one of those movies that fills you with the sense that something truly worthwhile might be waiting right around the corner, and yet it’s uninspiring enough to keep you from being too disappointed when that tantalizing promise never arrives. A decade after Gladiator and five years removed from Kingdom of Heaven, this is Scott’s third sword-and-shield historical epic of his last nine feature films (and I use “epic” as loosely as I use “historical” in that description), and if he isn’t tired of this genre he at least seems uninspired by it. Robin Hood suggests a director who feels boxed in, perhaps by Gladiator’s critical acclaim and box office success, or maybe just by a limited imagination.

That said, moviegoers who appreciate the way Scott cooks are likely to enjoy what the director serves up here, even working from a lesser recipe, the same way so many Martin Scorsese fans gobble up The Departed like it’s soul food. Fair enough. Fact is, most directors have go-to styles, techniques and themes. So maybe it’s silly to wonder why Scott allows Robin Hood to feel so much like Gladiator, from its massive opening battle scene, to its desaturated color palette, to its power-to-the-people hero (Crowe, again), to its sniveling insecure heir to the throne (this time Oscar Isaac modeling his Prince John after Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus), and so on. Maybe it’s unfair to wish that Scott would stop using the high-shutter-speed technique in an effort to add adrenaline to his fight scenes. Maybe, along the lines of Matt Zoller Seitz’s “friendship theory,” I should accept Scott for what he is and accept Robin Hood in the same light. Then again, how many times can I watch a Crowe hero grabbing a weapon thrown to him by one of his flunkies as he gallops by on horseback, which happens at least once in Gladiator and twice more in Robin Hood, without feeling like Scott is simply going through the motions?

Upon further reflection, it makes perfect sense that Crowe’s Robin Hood doesn’t have a distinctive personality, because Robin Hood doesn’t either. Crowe, easily one of the most talented A-listers in the business, frequently looks lost here – less like a man struggling with his own feelings than like an actor searching for his character’s motivation. At least three times in Robin Hood, Crowe wrinkles his forehead while shifting is eyes side-to-side in an effort to suggest deep thought, but all I saw was a man wondering, “Who am I?” It’s fitting that, according to the designs of the narrative, Crowe’s Robin has forgotten where he came from, because the character is indeed written as if he has no history. What moves him? We don’t know. Who is he close to? We don’t know. What shapes him? Again, we don’t know. Is he skilled with a bow and arrow? No doubt. But he’s also good with a sword and a hammer, and frankly seems to prefer them. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland has morphed Robin into a generic sword-and-shield badass, with nothing to make him unique or memorable. Our only window to the character’s soul is his obsession with the phrase “Rise and rise again until lambs become lions,” which Robin finds printed on the handle of a sword. Yet just when we decide that Robin identifies with those words as a rallying cry for the oppressed to stand up to tyranny, Helgeland mistakenly allows him to translate the phrase as “Never give up.” How reductive! It’s like learning that The Beatles think “Let it be” means “Don’t worry, be happy.”

If only the relationship between Robin and Marion possessed some genuine spark. Perhaps then I could convince myself that Robin is moved by the love of a beautiful woman. That would be something. Alas, the romance here is flat to nonexistent, and thus the bond between the characters is never convincing. Cate Blanchett as Marion is given a character arc as implausible as her cheekbones: she’s introduced as the devoted wife only to be almost immediately transformed as the love-struck widow. During the oh-so-brief gap in between, Helgeland inserts some bickering-as-sexual-tension, but it’s perfunctory more than playful. As uncool as it is to sing the praises of 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner and one of his many horrific accents, at least that movie, with an assist from Bryan Adams, makes us feel as if everything Robin Hood does, he does for Marion, and vice versa. I know who that Robin is. This one? I only know what he isn’t: very interesting.

Excitingly Unoriginal: The Good, The Bad, The Weird

Though its MacGuffin-esque treasure quest creates mystery as to where Kim Ji-woon’s film is heading, there’s never any doubt about where this madcap western comes from. The influence of Sergio Leone is everywhere in The Good, The Bad, The Weird. From the film’s title, to its outlaw characters, to its inevitable eye-squinting three-man shootout, Kim announces his reverence for Leone’s spaghetti westerns with all the subtlety of an extreme close-up – which, of course, would be another Leone trademark. And yet while structurally Kim follows the Leone blueprint, spiritually he seems inspired by another filmmaker with a fondness for Leone: Quentin Tarantino. Until now, we’ve thought of Tarantino emulators as screenwriters or directors who try to mimic the writer/director’s much celebrated brand of pop-culture-obsessed dialogue. The Good, The Bad, The Weird reminds us that what really defines a Tarantino picture is its zestful affection for cinema itself.

Kim's film, like so much of Tarantino’s oeuvre, is an uninhibited celebration of the awesomeness of movies. It has spectacular shootouts, high-speed chases, thunderous explosions, galloping horses, a rumbling train, thrilling stunts, an energetic soundtrack, a ruthless baddy, a noble goody and a charismatic blundering goofball. All of that and more. But unlike so many modern American blockbusters, which are lazily assembled according to formula and yet have the balls to pretend they’re somehow original, Kim’s film unashamedly embraces all the ways it is a retread. If Iron Man 2 is akin to an American Idol contestant trying to create a “new” cool identity out of recycled music and lyrics, The Good, The Bad, The Weird is like a KISS tribute band, inviting the audience to rock in the here-and-now while simultaneously triggering memories of what it was like to experience this stuff for the first time. The key difference between a tired American blockbuster and this imitative Korean film isn’t a matter of authenticity or even self-awareness, it’s that Kim actually wants his film to serve as a conduit for our nostalgic flashback. To call The Good, The Bad, The Weird an imposter is to pay it a compliment.

So it is that The Good, The Bad, The Weird is filled with a spirit of childlike wonderment and enthusiasm for cinema that reminds of the fight sequences in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, the car chase in Death Proof and pretty much the totality of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even if the viewer is too inexperienced to spot Leone’s genes within this film’s DNA, no one should be able to mistake Kim’s passion for the material. The Good, The Bad, The Weird can’t be called a personal film in the sense of sprouting solely out of its director’s imagination, and yet at the same time it’s as personal a film as one can ever hope to find, as it reveals Kim’s deep, abiding love of cinema. One could bet that this is the very kind of film Kim initially dreamed about making, and thus it’s heavily influenced by the kind of movies that inspired him to want to make movies in the first place. There’s something poignant about seeing a filmmaker get to fulfill that dream, like watching an actor finally get to play Hamlet. To the person doing it, that it’s all been done before is beside the point.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird is largely a collection of rowdy action set pieces, none of them more exceptional than its first. After a swooping, bird’s-eye view of a train chugging through the desert – a shot that suggests an upcoming onslaught of CGI that blessedly never arrives – Kim gets things off to a frenetic start with an appropriately locomotive shootout that introduces us to the film’s trio of main characters. Lee Byung-hun is Chang-yi, “The Bad,” who, thanks to a brief prologue that establishes a treasure map as the ultimate object of desire, we already know is the most dangerous man in 1930s Manchuria, and who quickly reestablishes his ruthlessness by killing a woman on the train just to put an end to her irritating screaming. Song Kang-ho is Tae-goo, “The Weird,” who is plenty dangerous himself, as established by a fun follow-shot through the train that ends in an eruption of gunfire, but who is also somewhat of a dimwit. And, finally, Jung Woo-sung is Do-won, “The Good,” a stoic bounty hunter who is the last to arrive and who introduces himself with some perfectly aimed rifle blasts that immediately cement his reputation as an expert marksman. As this initial shootout unfolds, including some goons from Chang-yi’s gang and amidst some startled passengers and oblivious waterfowl, the proximity of the gunmen to one another becomes somewhat murky, but not at the expense of the cinematography, which includes some retro-cool shots of gunmen hanging out of train windows while blasting away at one another. If this sequence can’t get your heart pumping, you should see a doctor.

What Kim’s film is in the beginning, it is throughout. There’s no deep philosophical message. There’s no witty banter. There’s not much character development beyond what I’ve already described. But there is a lot of throwback action, most of it seemingly executed with minimal CGI. Indeed, at times The Good, The Bad, The Weird feels like one of those stunt shows at Universal Studios – an acrobatics revue in which no tall structure exists unless someone is to fall from it and no rope exists unless someone is to swing on it. So be it. Sure, more ammunition flies in any one shootout than these men seem capable of carrying on their bodies, but this is never meant to reflect realism. It’s meant to exhibit the extraordinary nature of cinema. And so, late in the film, when Tae-goo (“The Weird”) goes leaping from a motorcycle to a jeep driven by one of the guys chasing him, you just know that one way or another he’s going to end up being dragged along behind it. And, of course, he does. These are cheap thrills, I suppose, but at least they are also visually convincing ones.

If The Good, The Bad, The Weird has a crucial flaw, it’s providing too much of a good thing. The action goes and goes and goes, and eventually, in another Tarantino-esque flourish, Santa Esmeralda’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” kicks in just when the frenzy is in danger of becoming stale. Yet rather than allowing the action to peak right there, the gunshots and explosions carry on until we really are ready for something else. That’s the price of being so reliant on action, epic though that action is in this picture. Of the three main characters, the only one who entertains in his own right is Song in the Eli Wallach role. The other two are merely archetypes. Replace these actors with three American stars, say even Samuel L. Jackson as “The Good,” Mickey Rourke as “The Bad” and Robert Downey Jr. as “The Weird,” just to name three guys currently appearing in another (lesser) action film, and Kim’s film would be the summertime box office smash it deserves to be – not just because it would have more marketable leads, but also because the star power of those leads would give these thin characters some default heft. Still, The Good, The Bad, The Weird is quite rousing as-is. And in an era when so many Hollywood movies seem to be most concerned with selling their sequels for the promise of future thrills (and dollars), it’s refreshing to come across a film so happy to be in the here and now, even if that here and now looks a lot like movies of yesterday.

The Conversations: "Minor" Hitchcock

Just in time for some weekend reading, the latest edition of The Conversations is live at The House Next Door. The title of this installment is “Minor Hitchcock,” and with Alfred Hitchcock “minor” is a very relative term. Though Ed Howard and I could have explored some of Hitchcock’s least-known works, instead we chose to focus on To Catch a Thief and Rope, two films that include enough of Hitchcock’s signature flourishes and themes to seem part of his celebrated oeuvre, yet two films that rarely get mentioned when folks provide a short list of Hitchcock’s classics. With good reason? You’ll have to read to find out, and then jump into the comments section to keep the discussion going. Our previous Easter edition of The Conversations received a tremendous response of thoughtful dialogue, and I’m hopeful we might see more of the same here, even if the topic might not be so controversial. So when you have time, please head on over to The House Next Door and join the conversation!

Previous Editions of The Conversations:

David Fincher (January 2009)
Mulholland Dr. (February 2009)
Overlooked - Part I: Undertow (March 2009)
Overlooked - Part II: Solaris (March 2009)
Star Trek (May 2009)
Werner Herzog (May 2009)
Errol Morris (July 2009)
Michael Mann (August 2009)
Quentin Tarantino - Part I (August 2009)
Quentin Tarantino - Part II (September 2009)
Pixar (WALL-E) (October 2009)
Trouble Every Day (October 2009)
Lawrence of Arabia (December 2009)
Crash (1996) (January 2010)
Nashville (1975) (February 2010)
Easter Double Feature: The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion (April 2010)

Raiders and Rap: Straight Outta L.A.

Twenty-two years ago, a fledgling hip-hop group from a Los Angeles suburb synonymous with gang violence preceded the title track of its second album with a declaration: “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” These words – part promise, part threat – defined not only “Straight Outta Compton,” and the album of same name, but the entire angle of approach for N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitudes), the self-described lyric-spitting “gang” whose insuppressible hits, also including “Fuck the Police” and “Gangsta Gangsta,” helped shape the genre we now call “gangsta rap.” Lyrically, Straight Outta Compton was defined by its glorification of gun-toting violence and its eye-for-an-eye rallying cry against police brutality. Visually, though, the album was branded by the rap group’s signature style: black men clad in nearly all-black attire that was nondescript save for headwear that often bore the emblem of the hometown NFL franchise with a conveniently complementary color scheme. So it was that the Los Angeles Raiders became married to a music revolution, until their logo came to stand for a cultural identity as much as an athletic team.

Straight Outta L.A. is a documentary that looks back on the ways the Raiders both shaped and were shaped by the gangsta rap movement. The film is directed by Ice Cube, who as a founding member of N.W.A. and a long-time Raiders fan is something of an authority on both subjects. In this, the 14th release of ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, sports and culture get equal time. Ice Cube’s contribution to the series is a personal film, part The Band That Wouldn’t Die, in which Barry Levinson explores the relationship between an NFL team and its fanbase, and part The U, in which Billy Corben details how the University of Miami and rap group 2 Live Crew symbiotically developed their hard-core reputations. It’s always a bit surprising to encounter 52 minutes of ESPN programming with scant athletic highlights – Rod Martin’s fourth-down tackle of John Riggins and Marcus Allen’s subsequent 74-yard touchdown run in Super Bowl XVIII are the only times the documentary pauses long enough to enjoy football as football – but that’s what makes the “30 for 30” series so frequently compelling. Ice Cube takes the Raiders’ come-and-go relationship with Los Angeles, a series of events now remembered almost exclusively as an example of team owner Al Davis’ curious handling of the franchise, and he flips it over, revealing a much more compelling story underneath.

Unless you’re from Los Angeles, or, more specifically, unless you’re from one of L.A.’s more impoverished neighborhoods, home to the people who truly identified with – not just enjoyed – the lyrics of N.W.A., Straight Outta L.A. might not be history as you remember it. And that’s what’s so invigorating about it. Watching the documentary, I found myself thinking of the woman interviewed in Steve James’ No Crossover who expressed reluctance about sitting down with the white filmmaker to talk about Allen Iverson’s troubled background because she felt that only black people should be chronicling black history. As an objection it was narrow-minded, but as an ideal it was commendable. In that spirit, Straight Outta L.A. tells a history that, despite the widespread popularity of the NFL and rap, we can feel comfortable guessing that most white storytellers (reporters, filmmakers, whatevers) would have overlooked. Indeed, Ice Cube’s film might as well come packaged with the same stamp of authority as the rap album that inspired its name: “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” Amen!

Yet for as personal as Straight Outta L.A. feels in terms of its narrative, cinematically it’s a collective achievement. Cinematographer Alex Van Wagner fills the film with vivid HD images of everything from the majestic L.A. Coliseum to the glittering L.A. skyline to the yellow-toothed grin of octogenarian Al Davis. Meanwhile, editor Dan Marks revives archival still photographs with flashy Ken Burns-esque zooms and pans performed at record-scratching speed. Not to be overlooked, No Mas and James Blagden, who animated the Internet hit “Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No,” deliver about four minutes of expressive black-and-white cartooning that dramatizes N.W.A.’s formation. Throughout its regrettably brief running time, Straight Outta L.A. feels impressively in-the-moment and reflective, with N.W.A. hits and the Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited” effortlessly transporting us back to the 1980s. The film is a mishmash of cultures and authority figures: John Madden and Chuck D, Bill Plaschke and Ice-T, Howie Long and Snoop Dogg. Somehow it all works. The sports guys talk sports, the hip-hop guys talk hip-hop and Ice Cube unites these seemingly disparate elements as a director, as a music artist and as a football fan.

Ice Cube makes for a compelling host in this historical examination, but it’s Plaschke, the talented Los Angeles Times columnist with a well earned reputation for buffoonery, who delivers this film’s most crucial observation: Speaking of the way the Raiders were adopted by L.A.’s blue collar working class made up of African-Americans, Hispanics and Latinos and Asian-Americans, Plaschke notes that these minority groups “had a home in the Raiders.” And of course the reverse was true, too: the Raiders had a home with these often-overlooked fans. And yet no matter how many hats, jackets or tickets these relatively lower-class NFL fans bought, it wasn’t enough for Davis to keep the Raiders in L.A. In 1995, the Raiders went back to Oakland after Davis failed to get a new stadium built – the kind lined with lucrative suites and expensive seats that more than likely would have priced out the team’s most ardent fans. This latter bitter reality is the elephant in the room that no one discusses in Straight Outta L.A. And even though Ice Cube says the Raiders will always belong to L.A., it’s tempting to wonder how much he believes it. After all, it must mean something that when he sits down to interview Al Davis, Ice Cube wears not vintage Raiders gear but a modern Dodgers hat. Black, of course.


Straight Outta L.A. premieres tonight on ESPN at 8 pm ET, and will rerun frequently thereafter. The Cooler will be reviewing each film in the “30 for 30” series upon its release.

Seeing is Believing: The 16th Man

Toward the goal posts the oblong ball flies, turning end over end. Hanging in the balance of the drop kick is a rugby match, a World Cup title and maybe, just maybe, the ability for whites and blacks to coexist peacefully in South Africa. The year is 1995. The location is Johannesburg. The venue is Ellis Park. In attendance is Nelson Mandela, who in his second year as South Africa’s first black president seeks to unite his divided country through sport. Does the ball go through the goal posts? Almost 15 years later, Desmond Tutu closes his eyes, imagines the ball in flight and exclaims “Yeah!” As he does so, an expression of profound satisfaction washes over his face. Is Tutu, the 1984 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, rejoicing over the massive social and political impact of that game-winning kick? Or is he simply celebrating the goal itself, as great moment in sport? There’s no way of knowing. That’s what makes Tutu’s reaction, captured in the documentary The 16th Man, so poignant.

The 16th Man is the latest release in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, and it has the blessing and the curse of chronicling the same story of nation-healing through rugby that was recently dramatized in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus. On the positive side, our familiarity with Mandela’s politically risky endorsement of the Springboks rugby team, and their subsequent World Cup title run, allows us to have an immediate emotional bond with the documentary’s principal players, enabling the film to affect more deeply than it might have otherwise. On the negative side, however, the still fresh memory of Morgan Freeman’s Oscar nominated performance as Nelson Mandela casts a shadow over The 16th Man that it never escapes. Director Clifford Bestall utilizes archival footage of Mandela wherever possible, but there’s not enough of it to erase the nagging feeling that the documentary is sorely lacking the personality of the one person most central to its story. Whereas Invictus thrives by making Mandela accessible through Freeman’s performance, The 16th Man winds up treating Mandela like a distant, mostly inaccessible historical figure. It’s not an improvement.

To be fair, in this respect there was only so much Bestall could do. Mandela has retired from public life and is reportedly in poor health. Thus, Mandela couldn’t join Tutu or Springbok captain Francois Pienaar (portrayed by Matt Damon in Invictus) or any of the other players in reflecting back on the 1995 World Cup. Still, the decision to use Freeman (who produced the documentary) as the film’s highly-involved narrator comes off like a misguided attempt to replace Mandela’s genuine magnanimity with the Hollywood version. No disrespect to Freeman intended, but it isn’t the same thing. Freeman, or the other talking heads, can talk all they want about what the World Cup meant to Mandela, but it isn’t the same thing has experiencing those feelings with Mandela, the way we experience Tutu’s joy over that kick or James Small’s tight-throated emotion over his memories of touring Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island. Furthermore, Freeman’s narration often has the dry tone of a History Channel examination of battlefield tactics, which can make The 16th Man feel closer to a middle school social studies lesson than to great cinema.

That said, let there be no question, The 16th Man is much less problematic than Invictus, the film in which Eastwood reduced the racial tensions of apartheid into the stuff of a cheesy after-school special, with an ungodly amount of repetitive crowd shots on the side. In less than 52 minutes, Bestall sets his stage expertly, putting the 1995 World Cup in proper context – apartheid, Robben Island, racism, bitterness, apprehension, etc – while still leaving ample time to experience the thrills of the sporting event itself. To see highlights of the Springboks’ unlikely title run in Bestall’s film is to appreciate the faithfulness with which Eastwood recreated these same scenes in Invictus. And yet there’s a purity, not to mention an efficiency, to these genuine highlights that gives the images some added weight. Just when you come across a story that seems too good to be true, Bestall almost always delivers the visual evidence necessary to erase your cynicism, forcing you to accept the possibility of the seemingly impossible – an all too appropriate feat considering that Mandela did the same when he conceived of uniting blacks and whites in South Africa through the support of a rugby team once thought to be a symbol of white power. The gravity and foresight of that decision is almost impossible to appreciate, even in retrospect.

All these years later, even Tutu marvels that the poetry and the history of the 1995 World Cup can be one and the same. “Who would have ever imagined that people would be dancing in the streets in Soweto for a rugby victory of a Springbok side?” he asks rhetorically. “But they did!” Indeed, the events detailed here are so spectacular, so dramatic, so, well, Hollywoodish that perhaps only the journalistic tone of a documentary can do them justice. How else can one really believe in Mandela’s helicopter visit during a Springboks practice, or in the theatrics of the double-overtime final match, or in the way the mostly white crowd in Ellis Park chanted Mandela’s name? The 16th Man doesn’t provide what Werner Herzog would term “an accountant’s truth” of events, but it makes the legend especially difficult to disbelieve, fantastic though it is.

And whereas Invictus tries to evoke post-apartheid racial tensions through an insultingly on-the-nose subplot involving white and black members of Mandela’s security detail repeatedly looking at one another suspiciously and then bonding over rugby themselves, The 16th Man provides dynamic characters like Bekebeke, a black man who killed a white policeman and openly rooted for the Springboks to lose because of his hatred of whites, and like Koos Botha, a former conservative leader in South Africa who bombed an integrated school and once longed to see Mandela hanged. The 1995 World Cup unfolded in genuinely turbulent times, after all, and instead of shying away from that The 16th Man gives us a better feel for the ferocity of the scrum. Bestall’s documentary misses the first-person memories of Mandela, sure, but it doesn’t miss the point. It might not always provide awesome filmmaking, but it never ceases to deliver an awesome story.

The 16th Man premieres tonight on ESPN at 8 pm ET, and will rerun frequently thereafter. The Cooler will be reviewing each film in the “30 for 30” series upon its release.