On Guilty Pleasures
The New York Times' Elvis
Mitchell, in writing about the ascendance of DVD recently, claimed that DVD has made all
of us into film buffs. To some extent I think that's true; many home-theater buffs can now
debate subjects such as aspect ratio, deleted scenes, and the integrity of the auteur's
vision. On the other hand, all it takes is a trip to your local video rental store to
dispel any doubt that it's still video eye-candy that really drives the industry.
I don't know about you, but I'm cool with that. The whole
point of a home theater is that it's a personal pleasure. Unless you live in an
apartment with paper-thin walls and crank your subwoofer to 11, it ain't nobody's business
what you watch.
Many cultural critics credit the rapid growth of the porn
industry to the advent of the videocassette player. The VCR's real societal impact, these
folks argue, was that respectable people no longer needed to go to the sleazy part of town
to see films that showed all the naughty bits. Maybe so, but that's a subject for another
day (or maybe another writer, like Eric Schlosser, who discusses it in some detail in his
fascinating book on the underground economy, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap
Labor in the American Black Market). No, I'm talking about a less controversial form
of guilty pleasure: the really good bad movie.
I don't mean junk movies. There is no end to those.
What I'm referring to is the increasingly rare, carefully crafted piece of fluff.
Hollywood used to make hundreds of 'em. These days, you probably feel less ashamed to be
seen coming out of one of those sleazy X-rated theaters than to be seen returning some of
the empty big-budget videos on offer.
Which, I suppose, is why we cherish the rare exceptions all
the more.
I recently saw two movies that illustrate the vast gulf in
ambition between cynical exploitation and genuine respect for a throwaway genre: Shanghai
Knights and XXX.
I had really enjoyed Shanghai Noon, so I looked
forward to seeing the sequel. Not enough to go see it in the theater, but I figured it
would be a perfect "rental-only" flick. Shanghai Noon was slight, but it
had charm. It made gentle fun of western/buddy-movie conventions. The title pretty much
told the story -- it simultaneously sent up and paid homage to the conventions of the
Western genre.
 Shanghai Knights' title also pretty much tells the story. Without knowing
that it sends the two protagonists of the first film to the UK, how could you possibly get
the joke -- such as it is? Indeed, the general level of the film's humor is on that level.
Was that a joke? Ho-ho.
Indeed, there's not a single joke in the film that isn't
driven into the ground. Chan's character, as established in the first film, is named Chon
Wang, which is naturally mangled to "John Wayne" by all the round-eyes
surrounding him. This was worth a mild chuckle, as was Chan's perfect evocation of Wayne's
fluid walk, but the sequel turns every scene into a game of "guess who this is going
to be?"
A police detective named Artie Doyle, who harbors dreams of
becoming a writer, isn't funny (especially if you happen to know that Arthur Conan Doyle
was a doctor, not a cop). Nether is a bowler-wearing street urchin named Chaplin who
admires Chon Wang's athletic and amusing stunts, nor a chance encounter with a certain
Whitechapel mass-murderer. Well, actually, that one was worth a mild chuckle in its own
anticlimactic way.
But mostly, the dialogue was predictable, the fight scenes
interminable, and the humor was, well, dumb. How could I respect myself for watching the
whole thing when the people that made it obviously thought I was too stupid to notice how
shoddy it all was?
XXX, on the other hand, was a film that I was
convinced would be mind-numbing, loud, and obvious. It turned out to be delightful.
This startled me, since every review I had read of the film
focused on its crudity and lack of originality.
What gives?
Well, first, it does have a certain crudeness, but most of
that is a deliberate comment on the overly complex nature of the spy-movie genre (not that
XXX doesn't err pretty egregiously on that side). James Bond or Derek Flint may be
subtle guys, but Xander Cage's first impulse is to blow stuff up. Guess what? It works.
The film actually respects the conventions of its genre --
and the expectations of the genre's fans. The opening sequence shows a Bond-like operative
highjacking a computer chip. He unzips his black flightsuit to reveal a tux and, when he
flees the pursuing bad guys, he runs into a Prague nightclub where he stands out like a
zebra in a pride of lions, because it’s a sweaty hole filled with leather-clad
death-metal fans. He's history.
 Time for a new kind of secret agent.
Enter Xander Cage, shaved-headed, leather-clad, and surly.
Later, when he enters a Prague nightclub, it isn't
Rammstein playing, but a zither -- and it's playing the theme from The Third Man.
The film is filled with witty little touches like that.
It's true that Diesel is no Derek Jacobi, but I thought he
came off well in the film -- and I loved Asia Argento and Samuel L. Jackson in supporting
roles. It's also true that the film is perhaps too slavish to its genre roots, especially
in the complexity of the villain's plan for world domination. Roger Ebert pointed out that
constructing a hideously expensive rocket-firing superboat in the bowels of a mountain
located in landlocked Czechoslovakia seems pretty inefficient, considering the costs of
shipping by FedEx, but hey, you've got to respect the conventions.
In fact, I got the impression that everyone involved in XXX
had a blast -- while I felt that everyone involved in Shanghai Knights was simply
going through the motions. Maybe that's the real difference.
Or maybe I'm just trying to justify what I was doing over
in the sleazy part of town in the middle of the afternoon. After all, they are called guilty
pleasures.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
|
