All posts by Rod Lott

Documentary

Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters (2011)

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I spend very little time with video games, but when I do, it’s Tetris. The play gets so ferocious that I later have stressful dreams about maneuvering its falling pieces. Turns out, this is perfectly natural — a problem shared by many of the Tetris-obsessed gamers profiled in the documentary Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters.

As a narrator informs us, two out of three Americans have played the game. This causes Portland resident Robin Mihara to wonder why the world’s arguably most-played game doesn’t have a world champion? Director Adam Cornelius’ camera follows Mihara as he locates and assembles the best blockers for a proper Tetris championship event.

The contestants include a woman who wears a Mercedes hood ornament around her neck, a guy whose strategy entails making his eyes veer in separate directions and, most notably, the enigmatic Thor Aackerlund, who won a national Nintendo championship at the age of 14 and since claims to have cracked the game’s fabled level 30, yet has offered no photographic proof. Watching them square off against one another raised my pulse.

The obvious comparison to Ecstasy of Order is 2007’s The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, the documentary about dueling Donkey Kong champs — so obvious, in fact, that it’s name-dropped by one of the players. But Ecstasy lacks that work’s Billy Mitchell, an arrogant bully to keep conflict and drama at a breathless high. In this doc, there are no villains; everyone’s a Steve Wiebe. That keeps Ecstasy from being as delirious entertaining as King of Kong, but makes it a natural for a second half of a double feature … because if you run it first, you’re just going to want to play Tetris, guaranteed. —Rod Lott

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Action

A View to a Kill (1985)

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Roger Moore’s seventh go-round as James Bond doubled as his last, and proof that it was time for him to go occurs almost immediately in A View to a Kill. During the otherwise fine ski-and-snowmobile-chase prologue, Agent 007 knocks out a couple of Russian goons by snowboarding into their faces, at which point the soundtrack blasts a soundalike version of The Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” Never mind this scene takes place half a world away from the Golden State — it’s that anyone thought that joke was a good idea is what we should be worried about.

One Duran Duran title sequence later, the real story begins, with blimp-loving French industrialist Max Zorin (Christopher Walken, awesome as ever) plotting a microchip monopoly by striking Silicon Valley. 007 poses as a reporter to get close to Zorin and his mannish henchwoman, May Day (pop singer Grace Kelly, frightening as ever) — one of Bond’s four sexual conquests within a tedious two hours and 11 minutes, including a hot-tubbing Alison Doody (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and Virginia Slims-voiced blank slate Tanya Roberts (The Beastmaster).

Every time Bond is called upon to do more than throw a punch, workmanlike director John Glen (Octopussy) uses an obvious stunt double for Moore, then nearly 60, and the hair color doesn’t even match. Still, this does not keep the action set pieces from impressing — from a foot pursuit up the Eiffel Tower that becomes a car chase on the ground, to 007 swinging from an errant fire engine ladder through heavy traffic. The climactic Golden Gate Bridge finale is less notable, due to dated effects.

And speaking of dated, that Communism and the KGB loom over the film as big baddies is almost charming in a post-Cold War era. Moore’s inability to even try, however, is not. Look for Maud Adams and Dolph Lundgren in blink-and-miss-’em cameos; I missed ’em. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Do the Movies Have a Future?

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Asks venerated critic David Denby in the ’78 Superman-styled title of his new book, Do the Movies Have a Future? (Spoiler alert: Yes. Yes, they certainly do.)

Don’t be misled by the title, as this is not a near-400-page examination of the arguably rhetorical question. He deals with cinema’s place — and the criticism of cinema — in the Internet age only in his introduction and first few chapters, which then give way to an unthemed collection of essays and reviews, most previously published in the pages of The New Yorker. Whether you’re new to Denby or not, it’s a pleasurable, first-rate read of film criticism.

Among the features and profiles on stars, directors and genres, he delivers the single-best summations of “mumblecore” and “chick flicks” I’ve ever read. He’s sharp in both brain and barbs, able to break apart a genre with wit without being entirely dismissive — for example, “In romantic comedies as well as in chick flicks, Hollywood has been throwing women against the wall of Matthew McConaughey’s stupidity to see what sticks (the answer: Kate Hudson).”

In another piece, he gives director Victor Fleming his due and wonders, as I have, how the man responsible for helming two bona fide classics in The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind — both from the same year, mind you — isn’t often top-of-mind among discussions of finest filmmakers. He even examines two film critics, notably Pauline Kael, which backs up the entirety of Brian Kellow’s recommended bio, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark: namely, that friendship with her was often one-sided and doomed to be temporary, and that she could be quite the rhymes-with-stunt.

Now, Denby is not the type of film critic who second-guesses his use of a word like “exegesis.” If you don’t know what it means and don’t bother to look it up, that’s your loss. The man definitely has his own language, which I’d argue is part of why he’s been able to carve a career out of talking about the language of movies themselves. Phrases like “a bounder” and “learned boobies” abound — and with the latter, he’s not talking about the breasts of a hot teacher.

Speaking of the body, I was amused at how often Denby describes his subjects in physical terms, and in the inimitable way he does it. For example, he notes Julia Roberts “for her big easy carriage” and “with her loose, shambling, cowhand’s walk”; Seth Rogen, meanwhile, sports “the round face and sottish grin of a Jewish Bacchus.” Whereas some may find these observations off-putting, I chalk them up to part of the book’s overall wide appeal.

Show me one online-only, fanboy “critic” who can turn such a phrase. You can’t; it’s as futile as viewing a film on a iPod screen — the subject of an early chapter. Do the Movies Have a Future? is a strong antidote to the ill-informed, online fanboy poison that sadly passes for film criticism these days. —Rod Lott

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Martial Arts

Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976)

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Jimmy Wang Yu’s Master of the Flying Guillotine begins with a monkey-owning blind old man learning that his two disciples have been killed by the One-Armed Boxer. This makes him mad, so he jumps out of his house — through the roof, mind you — burns it to the ground and grabs his flying guillotine, that blasted basket-and-blades contraption that tears heads clean from their bodies.

The blind man goes in search of each and every one-armed man he comes across, and then promptly beheads them. As a result, there’s an absurd amount of three-limbed fellas in this epic, which is simply one of the best martial-arts films ever.

Wang Yu, however, is the one the blind guy is, um, looking for. He’s a kung fu teacher who can walk on walls and ceilings. They almost meet up at a kung fu tournament where all sorts of miscreants battle each other to the death, including an Indian man with long, retractable arms like Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four!

When Wang Yu and the blind man do meet, it’s one helluva finale in a booby-trapped coffin shop. But the action is good ‘n’ plenty throughout all of Guillotine, including a fight on a flame-broiled floor where one poor sap is barefoot. There’s no shortage of flying fists, drunken monkey antics or rolling noggins in this killer flick — and with a Krautrock theme song, no less! —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Paper Man (1971)

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In Paper Man, a fat, suspenders-wearing college nerd who looks like the spawn of John Denver and Munchie accidentally receives a credit card sent to his address to someone named Henry Norman. With the help of four computer lab buddies — including a foxy Stefanie Powers — they create a whole identity for this Norman character, thus enabling them to use the credit card for a spending spree.

After getting Henry a driver’s license, a Social Security number and even a birth certificate, “Henry” starts to become all too real. After the gnome boy dies from an insulin overdose and the token Asian is cut in half by an elevator — the result of computer errors both — the survivors get their computer theory pal, Avery (a sleepy Dean Stockwell), to erase Henry from the computer, which is as outdated as Ms. Powers’ hairstyle. It’s one of those big honkin’ mainframes with lotsa blinking lights, spinning tape reels and a court-stenographer interface.

But Avery’s efforts fail and Henry keeps on killin’, with fingers pointing to Avery himself. Says the computer lab technician to the sheriff, “He’s a brilliant student, but he’s abnormally shy.” Replies the sheriff, “Y’know, if there’s one thing I don’t look forward to, it’s spending time with a brilliant student who’s abnormally shy.” Huh?

The entire story is built upon incredible gaps of logic, but for a ’70s CBS made-for-TV movie, that’s expected and welcome. It doesn’t live up to the promise set forth in the first half, but the time mostly flies. I recall seeing a Married … with Children episode that was just like this mistaken-credit-card madness — just minus the murder. —Rod Lott

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