Last Days Here, A Woman is a Woman, Hot Rod

Last Days Here, by Don Argott and Demian Fenton, 2011


So Pentagram was apparently an underground heavy metal band formed in the early 1970's. They were never signed on a major label, and mainly found an audience through bootleg recordings. I don't know a thing about heavy metal, really, but that these guys influenced an entire genre without releasing anything is pretty amazing. They never really went away, either. For the past 40 years, they sporadically reformed under numerous different lineups, always led by frontman Bobby Liebling.

Liebling is not just the glue that binds Pentagram together, however. It's safe to say he's also the reason they never stay together. In his 50's, addicted to crack (among other drugs), emotionally immature, and still living in his parents' basement, the guy is a mess. Last Days Here is a documentary about Liebling, in which his manager, Sean Pelletier, tries to get Bobby cleaned up and reunite the original members of Pentagram.

Last Days Here is pretty sad, but entertaining, too. We learn that Pentagram couldn't even get themselves together in the 70's, when members of Kiss came to their place to check them out. It could have been their big break, but it didn't work out. Liebling does give an honest go at quitting the drugs cold turkey, and even gets a girlfriend and moves out of his parents' house, but things go south when he freaks her out and she dumps him. He relapses and winds up getting a restraining order put on him.

Pelletier persists, though. He really wants this reunion to work out, and there is a kind of triumph when Pentagram is up on stage together at the end. There's even some hope for Bobby Liebling. It was nice to see this kind of documentary actually be pretty upbeat at the end. I hope the guy is still doing alright.

A Woman is a Woman (Une Femme est une Femme), by Jean-Luc Godard, 1961


Not that long ago, I watched Godard's debut film, Breathless. I can totally see why it's so highly praised, it's a great movie, and groundbreaking, to boot. And as much as I liked Breathless, I liked his next film, A Woman is a Woman even more. It may not be the superior film of the two (who am I to say?), but it's much more my kind of thing.

A Woman is a Woman is a comedy about relationships and sex, starring Anna Karina as Angela, a strip-tease artist who suddenly decides she wants a baby. When her boyfriend Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) balks at this, they engage in a battle of wills, until his best friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo of Breathless) offers to impregnate her in his stead.

Why do I like it better? I just liked the way it feels. It's wacky and sexy and colorful. Godard shows off his playful side much more in this than the other two of his films I've seen, though there are certainly playful moments in both Breathless and Alphaville. Godard continues his experimentation with editing and sound design here, too. I loved the way the score would abruptly stop to make room for a line of dialogue or a sound effect, only to start right back up again. And it's even self-referential. The characters often look directly at the camera and smile knowingly at the end of a shot. At one point, a character says something like "I have to go, Breathless is on TV", and they also joke about Francois Truffaut's films Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim.

A Woman is a Woman is my favorite Godard film yet. I hope he has other films along these lines. You should probably watch Breathless because it's great and important and it's a fun movie, too, but A Woman is a Woman is just pure smiles.

Hot Rod, by Akiva Schaffer, 2007


OK, while Hot Rod is no Jean-Luc Godard film, I found myself pleasantly surprised by it. It's just a dumb little comedy that seems pretty heavily inspired by those first couple Adam Sandler movies I used to watch over and over again when I was 14. But that works for me. I laughed a bit, and mostly chuckled, and I enjoyed it from beginning to end.

Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg plays "Hot" Rod Kimble, a hopeless young wannabe daredevil, who must raise $50,000 to get a heart replacement for his step-father (Ian McShane). He decides to jump 15 buses, one more than the record set by his hero, Evel Knievel. That's it. Simple plot. Lots of silly jokes. It's made by The Lonely Island, the guys who did all the SNL Digital Shorts like Lazy Sunday and D*ck in a Box.

The supporting cast is pretty good here, though some of the talent is underutilized. Samberg's SNL costar Bill Hader, along with Danny McBride stole the show for me as Rod's "crew". Co-writer, MacGruber director, and fellow The Lonely Island guy Jorma Taccone is funny too as Rod's dim half-brother. Chris Parnell has a hilarious bit part, full of funny one liners. Isla Fisher does that thing I usually don't like in guy driven comedies, where she isn't very funny, and pretty much just serves the role of being a girl. But she does it a little differently. Usually in these movies, the girl acts shocked or appalled at the hero's weird, outlandish behavior, but in Hot Rod, she actually seems amused by him from the get-go, and even a little drawn to him. I liked that. Will Arnett has a couple good moments as her jerk boyfriend.

Anyway, Hot Rod is decently funny, and might grow funnier in repeat viewings, or if I had watched it with other people. Watching comedies alone is never as much fun. It seems like the kind of movie I would have gone crazy for in my early teens. It would have fit perfectly in my VHS collection alongside Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, and Tommy Boy.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky and Breathless: There Are Lots of Different Ways to Be Great

Wow, everybody, I'm not going to make a big deal of it, but Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is the 300th movie I've reviewed on I Probably Liked It. That's a lot of movies for someone to probably like in only 20 months! I haven't slowed down at all since watching it either. I still have almost 30 movies to review. I'm really wanting to be caught up by the end of this month, but writing takes a lot of time that I don't necessarily have, so we'll see.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, by Lam Nai-Choi, 1991


I've been hearing about this movie since I was in 9th grade. Back in the early, pre-Stewart days of The Daily Show, they always used to show a clip of a guy smashing another man's head with his fists like Ghallagher smashes a watermelon with a sledgehammer. The older geeks who were more in the know than I told me about The Story of Ricky, and thus a legend was born.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, set in a hellish not-too-distant future of 2001, is about a good guy who is imprisoned for killing a crime boss. The prison is just as corrupt as the outside world, as Ricky soon learns when he comes to the defense of a poor old man who is just shy of parole. In doing this, he makes enemies of not only the worst of the prisoners, but also the evil warden and his lackies. Now Ricky must fight his way through these guys and out of the jail that would rather see him dead.

This movie is nuts! I don't know why it took me so long to see it. I guess because it was never sitting directly in front of me, until it popped up on Netflix. The violence is super over-the-top and hilariously fake looking. It's like if Evil Dead 2-era Sam Raimi made a science fiction kung fu prison drama/comedy. We're in a world where pretty much anything can happen. We see Ricky smash his fists through heads and torsos, and one of his foes tries to choke Ricky with his intestines at one point. Ricky has superpowers and is basically indestructible, unfortunately for these bad guys. You never feel like the odds are overwhelming for the hero, you just watch to see how he's going to eviscerate one boss after another.

I'm guessing my description isn't really selling Riki-Oh. You're probably wondering what's so appealing about it. It's hard to do this movie justice with words. Let me just say that it's weird and funny and culty and great to watch with a group of friends (inebriation optional). Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is off its rocker, and totally awesome for it.

Breathless, by Jean-Luc Godard, 1960


While I think you could say the Story of Ricky achieves a kind of greatness, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless is the real deal. Sure, it doesn't have a scene where the hero shoves a bad guy into a meat grinder, but it has its own non-meat-grinder related merits. There's a reason this film is frequently voted by critics as one of the best ever made.

One of the films that kick started the French New Wave, Breathless is the story of Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a guy who steals a car and shoots a cop and now needs money to get out of the way. He goes into the city to find someone to give him a loan. While he's there, he also tracks down Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American girl he's slept with a few times, and wants to come with him. Much of the movie is set in her apartment, as they smoke cigarettes like they're in a French movie and discuss their situation and she tries to determine whether she loves him or not, while the cops are out there tracking him down.

It says something about a movie when it is the source of all the stereotypes of what a certain kind of movie is. Breathless is like that. Every American parody of an "artsy" French film on TV, in cartoons, and in movies, is just doing its own version of Breathless. This is that movie. The philosophical voice-over narration of the hero, the frequent use of jump-cuts. Not only often parodied, but often used for serious. The way Godard used jump-cuts in his editing was a brand new thing at the time, though it's become recognizable and commonplace over the last 50 years.

I had seen Godard's Alphaville before this, and I liked it, but now that I've seen Breathless, Godard seems much easier to get into. It's bold, groundbreaking, and personal and it still feels that way half a century later. This would have been a much better film for me to start off with.

Alphaville

Hello, everyone! I'm back. I know I haven't written much in the last few weeks. I needed to recharge my reviewing batteries, so I was on a self-imposed hiatus. I wasn't even planning on coming back so soon, but then TotalFilm.com included a link to my page in their weekly Email newsletter. I'm not sure if I was chosen randomly, or if somebody there actually liked what they saw, but this little piece of positive reinforcement gave me some much needed motivation, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. Thanks, Total Film!

I've actually been meaning to watch Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film, Alphaville for a few years now. I hadn't seen any of Godard's other films yet, but I've seen a few other French New Wave classics, and the thought of a French New Wave science fiction film noir was too cool to ignore.

Alphaville is the story of Lemmy Caution, played by American actor Eddie Constantine, a spy sent into the titular city undercover as a journalist. His mission is to find and destroy Alpha 60, the malevolent artificial intelligence that controls the thoughts and hearts of all of the city's residents.

Lemmy Caution is the embodiment of the American film noir detective, rumpled trench coat and fedora and all, displaced into a dystopian near future. It's pretty cool that Godard got an actual American to play the role, I can't imagine there were a ton of American actors fluent in French at the time (or now, for that matter).

I found the computer, Alpha 60, to be an interesting character. Cold and logical, it rules the city with a iron (silicon?) thumb. If anybody shows any outward signs of irrationality, AKA emotions of any kind, it calls you to a room, interrogates you, and if it deems you irrational, executes you. I read that Alpha 60 was voiced by a man with one of those tracheotomy rings that smokers who got throat cancer use. It gives it a much more unsettling feeling than most other monotonous computer voices from the 1960's.

The city of Alphaville is pretty much just modern Paris. There's not much in the design that makes it very science fiction, it was mostly very modern for the time. Many of the settings in the film were the newer buildings that were built in Paris, presumably after World War II, which looked quite different, colder, and more futuristic than the city's older buildings, and that is actually enough to give Alphaville the space age feel it needs.

Alphaville may have been the first movie to cross science fiction with film noir. I'm not 100% on this, but if that is the case, then other great films such as Blade Runner and Dark City may owe a debt to Godard's film. It's definitely a must watch for any lover of science fiction and/or French movies of the 60's.