Escape From L.A.

At some point during the film, one character says to another, "this is insane!" To which the former replies, "that's the point." That brief exchange is a pretty good summation of John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. (1996), which is far more of an exercise in ridiculosity than its predecessor, the slick, moody urban action thriller Escape From New York. Kurt Russell returns as Carpenter's most memorable anti-hero, the eye-patch wearing, John Wayne-esque Snake Plissken.

Escape From New York was set in 1997. L.A. is set in 2013, and the U.S. is now ruled by the religious right to the point that the president, a fundamentalist Christian, has been allowed to alter the Constitution so that he can be President for life. His daughter, in a quasi-Patty Hearst move, rebels against him by stealing a device that could shut down all power sources across the globe. Then she trots over to L.A., which, after a massive earthquake separates it from the contiguous United States, has become the new dumping ground for America's undesirables (atheists, Muslims, criminals, people who cuss, etc.). There she meets up with the gangster who runs L.A., a former Peruvian terrorist named Cuervo Jones (Georges Corraface).

Did I mention that the president's daughter is named Utopia? Did I mention that Snake Plissken rides a tsunami into the streets of L.A. along with an aging surfer who's played by Peter Fonda? (Perhaps being really laid-back is a moral crime bad enough to warrant exile in Los Angeles.) Did I mention that Escape From L.A. is just about the craziest movie in the history of cinema? Or at least of the 90s.

You really can't do anything but cheer for a movie that so proudly pursues insanity as the order of the day. You get the sense that this is not simply John Carpenter cutting loose. This may be the official moment when Carpenter just stopped giving a shit. (Although some of his previous work might suggest otherwise.) But despite that decidedly double-edged compliment, I'm actually trying to laud the man for showing us such a hacky, cheesy, singularly wacked-out good time. Carpenter, who wrote the script with Kurt Russell and Debra Hill (both of whom produced the film), has always had this kind of B-movie sensibility. But his B movies (aside from the 1974 Dark Star) had a sort of polish to them, mostly due to the fact that Dean Cundey was his DP from Halloween to The Thing. L.A. eschews that polished look, whether accidentally or on purpose, and we get something altogether different. (The special effects are laughable, but somehow mesmerizing.)

I did wish that the female characters were more interesting. Utopia is kind of strong, and there's a girl with some pluck who tries to help Snake early in the film, but she's dispatched rather quickly. You long for Adrienne Barbeau to show up and show 'em how it's done. Pam Grier does make a flashy appearance as a transvestite. (Her voice has been altered, but it comes off as a stupid machination. Grier's real voice is commanding, and it's a shame we don't get to hear it as it is.) There's also a pretty colorful role for Steve Buscemi as a weaselly "agent" who still tries to get work in the new, disheveled, post-Hollywood L.A.

With Stacy Keach, Cliff Robertson, Valeria Golimo, Bruce Campbell (in a funny turn as the Surgeon General of Hollywood, who removes attractive features from people and transplants them onto the freakish faces of patients who've already had too much plastic surgery), Michelle Forbes, A.J. Langer, Paul Bartel, and Robert Carradine. ★★½

Jackie Brown

Pam Grier's belated tour de force. The tall, ravishingly beautiful Grier was the Queen of Blaxploitation in the 70s, appearing in such films as Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1975), the latter of which I recently reviewed. Grier's acting has only gotten better over the years. She seemed wasted in Foxy Brown. Her acting wasn't forceful enough to grab the movie and take charge, but by 1997, and perhaps with the help of a director who respected her as an actress (Quentin Tarantino), she was ready to make her career performance.

As the title character in Jackie Brown, Grier is confident, strong, vulnerable, and always in control. Her character, Jackie, is an airline stewardess who works on the side for an illegal arms dealer named Ordell Robbie (played with relish by Samuel L. Jackson). Once she's pressed by the police to rat on Ordell, he decides it's time to silence her for good. But Jackie manages to take control of the police and Ordell with a "sting" operation she masterminds, somehow convincing both sides that she's working for them.

Jackie Brown is usually not the first movie people mention when citing their favorite Quentin Tarantino film. It's not as flashy as Pulp Fiction or as offbeat as Kill Bill. But in its controlled, sustained mission to tell a good story, Jackie Brown is a success. The characters who populate this movie's world are delightfully good at being bad. Jackie may be the least guilty, but her calculated mastery of circumstances seemingly designed to squash her, indicates a strong will and a genius for working situations to her advantage--it's something she's bottled up inside all her life, waiting to be let loose. The director sets all this into motion--these unstable characters and their greedy motivations--and we get to watch it unravel.

The reason people enjoy Tarantino's movies is that he enjoys ripping off the gritty, low-budget crime and action flicks that he grew up on. But because Tarantino seemingly started off as a filmmaking rock star, he's been able to get big money productions made (or at least, modestly big productions compared to the slapped-together-with-spit B-movies of the 1970s), with popular actors. Hollywood likes to think of him as their part of the effort to acknowledge low culture. But Tarantino improves on much of the material he seems to have canonized in his own mind. If you go back and watch Foxy Brown, you'll see a movie that's not very exciting for all its action: the fight scenes are staged ineptly, the acting is unimaginative (even Grier seemed like she couldn't find her footing), and it all boils down to a strangely unappealing revenge fantasy. Jackie Brown isn't really out to get even. She's just sick of being kicked around by a system that has nothing for her but condescension. (One of the cops implies that she ought to be grateful for her measly 16,000 dollar-a-year job).

Somehow, Tarantino takes the material he fell in love with and transcends it. His movies are a glossy imitation of something cheap and poorly done and generally available only in bootlegged form. There were movies like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. and the blaxploitation movies like Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones and Shaft, and car-chase movies like the energetic Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (which we see on a television in Jackie). All of this has been internalized by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, and the tropes of those genres have resurfaced in his movies and the movies of directors like him (such as Robert Rodriguez), and audiences are either re-experiencing something to which they attach a great deal of nostalgic value, or are simply getting a kick out of these "low" movies. (Jackie Brown cost 12 million dollars but made 72 million at the box office).

Jackie Brown emerges as Quentin Tarantino's best movie, I think, because of Pam Grier and what she brings to the film. Her performance is controlled but not robotic, and she knows how to be funny, and how to lubricate her sentences with profanity (and Tarantino the writer knows how to write juicy dialogue). Grier and Jackson make for a wonderful anti-duo. Jackson slips into his role with such ease. He's dangerous but appealing at the same time.

The supporting cast of Jackie Brown includes Robert De Niro, as a junkie who becomes Ordell's right-hand-man; Michael Keaton and Michael Bowen as two cops who are trying to nail Ordell; Robert Forster as a bail bondsman who becomes Jackie's partner and possible love interest, and Bridget Fonda, as Ordell's blonde live-in junky girlfriend, who revels in challenging his self-proclaimed authority.

Foxy Brown

Foxy Brown (1974) was part of the blaxploitation genre, a movement that was always morally ambiguous. The genre glorifies revenge, but it also portrays strong, fearless black role models who aren't addicted to drugs. One of the few redeeming qualities of this genre is that it exhibited the destruction the drug culture heaped on black families (not to mention the patronizing, dehumanizing treatment by white figureheads).   

As a piece of narrative, Foxy Brown is surprisingly dull. It's full of badly staged fight scenes that elicit tepid laughter if anything. Even the motivations of the characters seem watered down, because the actors don't appear to believe any of the lines they're saying. The director is Jack Hill, who obviously slapped this movie together as quickly as possible to turn a buck. It lacks the storytelling power that made Pam Grier such a force to be reckoned with in Jackie Brown, which, more than 20 years after she acquired a sort of cult status for her revenge pictures, elicited more fire and power from her than just about anything she'd done before that.

Grier is undeniably beautiful and strong, and an appealing lead. But the director would rather show off her body than her bravery most of the time, and because the fight scenes are poorly done, you never really believe she's as tough as she's supposed to be. She bungles things, and seems too single-minded to be a truly remarkable heroine. And the violence is so inhuman--on both sides--that it's hard to root for anyone. It's sordid and sleazy, and it brings us all down without even the satisfaction of having a good time.

The villain is played without much finesse by Kathryn Loder, and her sleazy accomplice is played by Peter Brown. She screams at the end, "Go ahead! Shoot! I don't wanna live anymore!" Foxy replies, "Death is too easy for you, bitch. I want you to suffer." Hilariously bad dialogue permeates the movie. And these strong words are delivered with precious little conviction from a woman who has suffered, presumably a lot. And yet, she never shows it. She loses the love of her life (Terry Carter) and her two-timing brother (Antonio Fargas), and doesn't seem to feel anything. The movie confuses coldness with strength. Or perhaps she's taken it on the chin so much she bottles up her emotions. Maybe it's her only option. If the movie were made with any feeling or care or cleverness, perhaps that might have gotten through. All that is there onscreen is dumb, thoughtless revenge.