What’s it about?
When Frenchy Hercules disappears through a door in her family home’s basement into the freakish Sixth Dimension, her young brother (played by an old vaudeville comedian) enlists their grandfather (a retired Jewish wrestler) to enter the portal and get her back. Meanwhile, Frenchy finds love with the King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension (played by Herve Villechaize).
But trouble arises when the jealous Queen Doris (played by Susan Tyrrell) gets word of her husband’s “peccadilloes”. Others soon find their way into the Sixth Dimension, and they encounter weirdos like a frog-headed butler, a constantly topless princess, and Satan himself (played by Danny Elfman). Numerous musical numbers featuring vintage big band recordings interrupt the proceedings with additional craziness.
Is it any good?
Heck if I know. I first saw this movie as an impressionable youngster while at a weeklong art camp at Miami University in Ohio. I was probably fifteen at the time, and I wandered over during a movie night to see what the college-aged camp counselors were watching. They had rented FORBIDDEN ZONE (and not for the first time, it seems). The movie left me confused, excited, and disturbed in equal measure -- but I admit primarily I was mesmerized by the constantly topless princess.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973), this movie has continued to exist in my memory as a collage of strange, unconnected images. (Is it coincidence that they both prominently feature toplessness? Who can say?) Even though it’s practically impossible to defend it as science fiction (the journey to the Sixth Dimension is more THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS or THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE than it is, say, A WRINKLE IN TIME), I knew I would have to watch it again anyway just to see what it is really about. But even though I am less distracted now by naked breasts than I was as a teenager, I am still not sure I understand what it is really about.
A brief aside here. I watched this with my girlfriend, and we both agreed that the naked breasts in FORBIDDEN ZONE are incredibly distracting. It is impossible not to be entranced when they are onscreen -- the main difference between now and 1995 is that I didn’t spend the scenes without the breasts impatiently waiting for them to come back. But whenever they were there, it became very difficult to focus on anything else. In fact, the girlfriend believes that the quality of the breasts in the movie exceeds the quality of anything else it has to offer.
Something I didn’t know until after I watched FORBIDDEN ZONE again recently is that the movie was created primarily to capture on film some of the stage show of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. This is the band that evolved into Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s, but FORBIDDEN ZONE was a record of an earlier incarnation when they were a quasi-theatrical troupe obsessed with old songs and vaudeville acts. In some ways, it is exactly what I had hoped SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974) might be -- a document of an offbeat musical group. But Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist cosmic jazz is explicitly sci-fi in some ways, whereas The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo recontextualized historical curiosities into even weirder packages.
But like SPACE IS THE PLACE, the non-musical portions of FORBIDDEN ZONE dominate the movie, and that’s too bad. Some of the performers in the movie are members of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and their imagination shines brightest when they are choreographing weird accompaniments to weird old songs. My favorite is a scene of absurd factory work set to “Pico and Sepulveda”. (Look up that song if you can -- it totally rules.) The scene includes a catchy curiosity from the 1940s, an amusing dance number, elements of both the distinctive production design and animation that pepper the movie, and an imaginative (and funny) interpretation of the song. It’s delightfully weird, but (unlike much of the movie) it doesn’t feel like it’s designed to be off-putting or bizarre for its own sake.
There are a few more moments like this in the movie, and it’s occasionally a trippy good time as a result of it. For example, there’s an otherwise totally unnecessary alphabet song inspired by the Three Stooges that still manages to incorporate some pretty cool early breakdancing. But too often, it’s more like weirdness without a point or weirdness that’s designed to offend. (There are some extremely uncomfortable blackface moments in FORBIDDEN ZONE, as well as several other ethnic caricatures, for instance.) It is clear that this movie is the product of a few imaginative folks who had nobody to tell them “no” -- and that is always kind of appealing, at least in theory. If I knew more about the kinds of things The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo were into in the late 1970s (like big band music, Max Fleischer cartoons, and vaudeville comedians), I would probably understand more of what they were trying to do. As it is, I can only make guesses -- and unless I want to do a lot of research, there’s no way for me to really find out whether their references are witty and well-informed, or if they are simply unnecessarily bizarre and occasionally offensive.
FORBIDDEN ZONE is also the kind of movie that couldn't exist without pop culture. It references almost entirely pop culture from the 1950s and earlier, but its still nonetheless very much what you might call a postmodern pastiche. A little bit of cabaret singing, a little bit of the Three Stooges, a little bit of greaser movies, a little bit of minstrel shows, a little bit of German expressionistic set design, and so on -- all mixed together in a chaotic stew.
Beyond the weirdness of the thing, FORBIDDEN ZONE is pretty impenetrable -- and I’m not even totally sure there is much to penetrate in the end. There is a plot of sort, but it’s not a very interesting one. (See the description above.) There are no actual characters -- just caricatures and stereotypes. Originally, the intention of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo was to present lost entertainments that were no longer being performed live -- in other words, to bring vaudeville and the cabarets to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience them in a live setting. (And then to add a unique Oingo Boingo flair of weirdness.) FORBIDDEN ZONE isn’t a live performance, so it’s a valid question exactly what is the point of the movie. Why watch a recording of Danny Elfman singing a modified version of “Minnie the Moocher” when you could listen to a recording of Cab Calloway himself? If the references and songs were better curated -- if they were identified or explained in some way -- there might be a case for FORBIDDEN ZONE as an educational movie. But as it is, it’s a catalog of weird things that you will enjoy only so much as your sensibility is aligned with those of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.
Ultimately, FORBIDDEN ZONE is 73 minutes of your life that you will never get back. So whether it’s worth your time or not probably depends on how much you value 73 minutes of your life. It seems unlikely that most people would enjoy the entire movie -- though I have no doubt that those folks are out there. For me, I’d say there are ten or fifteen minutes of the movie that are a good time. Much of the rest is mostly just waiting for a funny joke, a neat bit of animation, a cool dance, or a catchy song, but there are also times when I got uncomfortable or annoyed. The movie’s too weird and unpredictable to ever be boring, but it’s also definitely not trying to be your friend. Look -- if you want to watch it, go ahead and watch it. If you’re not sure, skip it.
Showing posts with label musical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label musical. Show all posts
Monday, March 8, 2010
Thursday, September 24, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1974: PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
What’s it about?
A devilish record producer named Swan (played by hobbit-sized songwriter Paul Williams) steals the music to a rock opera version of the Faust legend for the opening of his new club, the Paradise. After infiltrating Swan’s mansion in an attempt to get his music back, the opera’s geeky composer is beaten up and thrown in prison, where a sadistic warden pulls all of his teeth and replaces them with metal prosthetics. (Not sure why.) After hearing that one of Swan’s no-talent pre-fabricated bands will be performing his rock opera at the Paradise’s opening, the composer escapes from prison and is hideously disfigured by a record press while trying to destroy all the 45s of the singles bastardized from his music.
As the opening of the Paradise draws nearer, the composer (now presumed dead) lurks about the club and starts killing those who sing his music. Sensing an opportunity, Swan strikes a deal with the composer to rewrite the rock opera and then have it performed on his terms. But no sooner is the rewrite finished, then Swan attempts to go back on his word. The composer, meanwhile, sets out on a new round of revenge that only brings more ghoulish publicity to the Paradise.
Is it any good?
After doing THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, I swore to myself that I would stick with straight up science fiction for a while. After all, straight up science fiction still covers a very wide range of stories -- everything from ant invasions to giant robot monsters to expressionistic allegories about shirtless Sean Conneries to Mel Brooks parodies to Afrofuturistic musical manifestos. In fact, I really should be writing about SPACE IS THE PLACE right now, since Afrofuturism is an influential but under-represented branch of science fiction.
The problem is that Afrofuturism is so little regarded by most sci-fi fans that I know practically nothing about it myself. Neither do I know anything about the music of Sun Ra (or even George Clinton, to name another more prominent Afrofuturist). The other problem is that I didn’t enjoy SPACE IS THE PLACE all that much. I’m sure part of it is that I don’t have any of the cultural context needed to appreciate a story about a jazz musician leading an exodus of the black people of Earth to a planet where there are no white people. But it’s also, in a lot of ways, not that good of a movie and not even that good of a document of Sun Ra’s music.
Anyway, since I can’t tell you anything at all about Afrofuturism, I’ll just recommend that everybody go look it up on Wikipedia. (That’s what I did after watching SPACE IS THE PLACE.) It seems interesting, and I’m going to try and learn some more about it. But in the meantime, I am going to talk about PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE instead, since it would be a travesty if we made it all the way through the seventies without mentioning any rock operas. And I am probably going to skip THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), since there is a whole phenomenon around that movie that I have only experienced a little bit.
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not, strictly speaking, a rock opera itself. It’s about the production of a rock opera, and there are many songs in the movie -- many from the Faust show, but others not. Paul Williams is credited as the songwriter for all of the movie’s music. I’m not sure if you guys know much about Paul Williams, but he wrote easy-going seventies hits for groups like The Carpenters and Barbra Streisand and Three Dog Night. (“Just an Old Fashioned Love Song” and “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays” are all his work, for example.) He’s also a friend of the Muppets and wrote “The Rainbow Connection”, which is featured in THE MUPPET MOVIE. And, incidentally, he acted in a few movies -- including a role as an orangutang know-it-all in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973).
The music in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not much like any of those things I just listed. The songs are more prog-rock ballads (it is a rock opera, after all), and as Swan makes changes to the show they get heavier and more menacing. By the end of the movie, a mincing Transylvanian rocker named Beef is screaming the lyrics over grinding electric guitars while gyrating on the stage in full-body Frankenstein’s monster make-up as his bandmates pretend to dismember people in the audience. (By the way, one of the few unfortunate things about the movie is the stereotypically “gay” way that Beef acts. It’s too bad, since he’s otherwise a pretty great character.)
The movie’s story is obviously an update of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA with a heavy dose of FAUST, but it also weaves in bits of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and FRANKENSTEIN. The plot is pretty complicated, and Swan does a lot of back-stabbing and double-crossing. The music is almost all integrated into the story as performances or rehearsals, and there is usually something else going on to forward the plot while the songs are being sung. (For instance, the composer/phantom puts many of his plans into motion while his intended victims are on stage, singing.) One of my biggest complaints about musicals is that the plot usually stops when people start singing, so I was happy to see that wasn’t much of an issue here. There’s one amazing sequence in particular that features two long simultaneous tracking shots in split screen that plays out like a surf rock version of the opening of Orson Welles’s TOUCH OF EVIL.
Now, what about the science fiction? When Swan and the composer make their deal, part of it is that Swan will restore the composer’s voice, which had been destroyed in the same accident that disfigured him. This involves some shenanigans with a giant synthesizer that probably qualify as science fictional. But, yet again, this movie is probably more fantasy than sci-fi -- especially towards the end when the devil becomes an increasingly literal presence.
On the other hand, the look and sound of the movie is far more sci-fi than fantasy. The Paradise is a high-tech place, fitted for pyrotechnics and neon lights and all sorts of modern showiness. The Faust rock opera seems to have sci-fi elements as well -- I mentioned earlier that one of the characters is assembled in the style of Frankenstein’s monster. The composer’s phantom mask is also more like a space helmet or robot faceplate than any traditional kind of mask. And the movie is full of video cameras and synthesizers and all kinds of electronic doodads. It may be fantasy, but it’s not the old-fashioned unplugged kind.
A devilish record producer named Swan (played by hobbit-sized songwriter Paul Williams) steals the music to a rock opera version of the Faust legend for the opening of his new club, the Paradise. After infiltrating Swan’s mansion in an attempt to get his music back, the opera’s geeky composer is beaten up and thrown in prison, where a sadistic warden pulls all of his teeth and replaces them with metal prosthetics. (Not sure why.) After hearing that one of Swan’s no-talent pre-fabricated bands will be performing his rock opera at the Paradise’s opening, the composer escapes from prison and is hideously disfigured by a record press while trying to destroy all the 45s of the singles bastardized from his music.
As the opening of the Paradise draws nearer, the composer (now presumed dead) lurks about the club and starts killing those who sing his music. Sensing an opportunity, Swan strikes a deal with the composer to rewrite the rock opera and then have it performed on his terms. But no sooner is the rewrite finished, then Swan attempts to go back on his word. The composer, meanwhile, sets out on a new round of revenge that only brings more ghoulish publicity to the Paradise.
Is it any good?
After doing THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, I swore to myself that I would stick with straight up science fiction for a while. After all, straight up science fiction still covers a very wide range of stories -- everything from ant invasions to giant robot monsters to expressionistic allegories about shirtless Sean Conneries to Mel Brooks parodies to Afrofuturistic musical manifestos. In fact, I really should be writing about SPACE IS THE PLACE right now, since Afrofuturism is an influential but under-represented branch of science fiction.
The problem is that Afrofuturism is so little regarded by most sci-fi fans that I know practically nothing about it myself. Neither do I know anything about the music of Sun Ra (or even George Clinton, to name another more prominent Afrofuturist). The other problem is that I didn’t enjoy SPACE IS THE PLACE all that much. I’m sure part of it is that I don’t have any of the cultural context needed to appreciate a story about a jazz musician leading an exodus of the black people of Earth to a planet where there are no white people. But it’s also, in a lot of ways, not that good of a movie and not even that good of a document of Sun Ra’s music.
Anyway, since I can’t tell you anything at all about Afrofuturism, I’ll just recommend that everybody go look it up on Wikipedia. (That’s what I did after watching SPACE IS THE PLACE.) It seems interesting, and I’m going to try and learn some more about it. But in the meantime, I am going to talk about PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE instead, since it would be a travesty if we made it all the way through the seventies without mentioning any rock operas. And I am probably going to skip THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), since there is a whole phenomenon around that movie that I have only experienced a little bit.
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not, strictly speaking, a rock opera itself. It’s about the production of a rock opera, and there are many songs in the movie -- many from the Faust show, but others not. Paul Williams is credited as the songwriter for all of the movie’s music. I’m not sure if you guys know much about Paul Williams, but he wrote easy-going seventies hits for groups like The Carpenters and Barbra Streisand and Three Dog Night. (“Just an Old Fashioned Love Song” and “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays” are all his work, for example.) He’s also a friend of the Muppets and wrote “The Rainbow Connection”, which is featured in THE MUPPET MOVIE. And, incidentally, he acted in a few movies -- including a role as an orangutang know-it-all in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973).
The music in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not much like any of those things I just listed. The songs are more prog-rock ballads (it is a rock opera, after all), and as Swan makes changes to the show they get heavier and more menacing. By the end of the movie, a mincing Transylvanian rocker named Beef is screaming the lyrics over grinding electric guitars while gyrating on the stage in full-body Frankenstein’s monster make-up as his bandmates pretend to dismember people in the audience. (By the way, one of the few unfortunate things about the movie is the stereotypically “gay” way that Beef acts. It’s too bad, since he’s otherwise a pretty great character.)
The movie’s story is obviously an update of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA with a heavy dose of FAUST, but it also weaves in bits of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and FRANKENSTEIN. The plot is pretty complicated, and Swan does a lot of back-stabbing and double-crossing. The music is almost all integrated into the story as performances or rehearsals, and there is usually something else going on to forward the plot while the songs are being sung. (For instance, the composer/phantom puts many of his plans into motion while his intended victims are on stage, singing.) One of my biggest complaints about musicals is that the plot usually stops when people start singing, so I was happy to see that wasn’t much of an issue here. There’s one amazing sequence in particular that features two long simultaneous tracking shots in split screen that plays out like a surf rock version of the opening of Orson Welles’s TOUCH OF EVIL.
Now, what about the science fiction? When Swan and the composer make their deal, part of it is that Swan will restore the composer’s voice, which had been destroyed in the same accident that disfigured him. This involves some shenanigans with a giant synthesizer that probably qualify as science fictional. But, yet again, this movie is probably more fantasy than sci-fi -- especially towards the end when the devil becomes an increasingly literal presence.
On the other hand, the look and sound of the movie is far more sci-fi than fantasy. The Paradise is a high-tech place, fitted for pyrotechnics and neon lights and all sorts of modern showiness. The Faust rock opera seems to have sci-fi elements as well -- I mentioned earlier that one of the characters is assembled in the style of Frankenstein’s monster. The composer’s phantom mask is also more like a space helmet or robot faceplate than any traditional kind of mask. And the movie is full of video cameras and synthesizers and all kinds of electronic doodads. It may be fantasy, but it’s not the old-fashioned unplugged kind.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1968: WILD IN THE STREETS
What’s it about?
California senatorial candidate Hal Holbrook hatches a plan to pad his support in the electorate by getting the voting age lowered from 21 to 18. In order to get the measure passed before the election, he enlists the help of a major pop star named Max Frost -- a young runaway who commands Beatle-like adoration from millions of American teenagers. But the plan gets out of hand when Max Frost uses the occasion to start a grass roots movement to drop the voting age down to 14 instead.
With mobilized teenagers threatening violence across the country, a compromise is struck to give the vote to fifteen year-olds. But the compromise only further encourages the newly enfranchised youth of America, as they now also demand the right to run for political office -- not excluding the presidency. To pass the amendment, they spike the Washington water supply with gallons of LSD and cajole a two-thirds majority out of a turned-on, mind-blown, psyched-out Congress. The next order of business, of course, is to install Max Frost as president -- and soon he is shipping everyone over 35 to be neutralized at LSD therapy camps.
Is it any good?
I watched this flick on YouTube, so the bad news I don’t have any screen captures. But the good news is that you can watch it too if you want to! And although this is not exactly the greatest movie in the world, it is pretty interesting as a cultural artifact of the 1960s.
Old as I am, I wasn’t around for the sixties, so I have no idea how accurate WILD IN THE STREETS is about the culture and counterculture of the times. My guess is that it’s not very accurate at all since it paints with pretty broad strokes. (Max Frost’s mother -- a stand-in for the older generation as a whole -- is played with very little subtlety by Shelley Winters, if that tells you anything.) But parts of it ring true. For one thing, it’s hard to deny that the laws at the time which allowed 18 year-olds to be drafted to fight in Vietnam but not to vote were certainly unfair. And it’s this unfairness coupled with the rapidly expanding population of young people (who purportedly outnumbered adults at the time) that gives the movie the grain of reality under its layers of escalating silliness.
The cast is also pretty impressive for a relatively low budget picture. Besides Hal Holbrook and Shelley Winters, it features Ed Begley, a young Richard Pryor, a young Larry Bishop, and a handful of media types like Dick Clark in cameos. It was eventually nominated for an Academy Award for film editing -- presumably thanks to a few flashy split-screen montages with bright color washes and that kind of thing. (They really are pretty neat.) And the soundtrack produced a bona fide hit record called “The Shape of Things to Come”, though I’m not sure if the song was written for the movie specifically or if they just recorded a cover of it. The movie, by the way, is not exactly a musical, but there are several full songs since the main character is supposed to be a rock star. In any event, there’s a lot of neat stuff going on in the movie, even apart from the characters and story.
About that story -- it’s not terribly believable. It is a little terrifying to imagine what would have happened if the Beatles had started inciting young people to demonstrate en masse for some cause, but regardless of the numbers involved I cannot imagine any politician actually agreeing to lower the voting age to 15. The bit where the kids use LSD-spiked water to get amendments passed so they can run for office is even more off-the-wall. But the movie obviously needs to get to that point somehow, or else it wouldn’t have a reason for existence. So, implausible as it all is, it’s for a good cause.
Most of the movie could be taken as straight-up wish fulfillment for disillusioned young people. The kids steamroll the adults at every turn simply thanks to their superior numbers and grooviness. But one disappointing thing is that the teenagers don’t seem to have any objective except a pure power grab. Other than not wanting old people to run the show anymore, they don’t really have any clear platform -- yet dumping the old regime seems to be by itself a good enough reason for all the young people in the country to vote as a massive single-minded bloc. As president, Max Frost is most concerned with neutralizing the old people -- that is, anyone over 30 -- so that they’ll never gain power again. The main gear in this machine is to ship anybody over 35 off to a camp where they are forced to drink LSD-laced water so they do nothing all day except wander around in blue robes. Besides this, the only other goal of the government seems to be to establish a hedonist paradise for young people and to get rid of anything that is ungroovy (like a foreign policy).
That’s one half of the story anyway -- the half you might see if you were a young person sufficiently disgusted with the reigning establishment. The other half is a kind of indictment of the hypocrisy of old folks who worship some aspects of youth (like beauty and vitality) but who simultaneously don’t take young people themselves seriously. WILD IN THE STREETS is not really a cautionary tale since the events it depicts are so extreme and unlikely. But it does have a sort of cautionary message about attitudes towards youth. At its not-so-hidden center, the movie advocates a very traditional kind of society -- one where experienced adults are in charge and where young people pass through a kind of regulated wild period on the way to maturity. Permissive adults and adults who inappropriately seek to prolong their youth are the real bad guys here since they are the adults who allow the situation to get out of hand.
But, to be honest, it takes some digging to get down to that message. Rather than clearly impart any single message, WILD IN THE STREETS seems as though it would much rather have its cake (indulge in rabble-rousing youthful rebellion) and eat it too (condemn the people who allow such things to happen). Ultimately I’d say this one is more “interesting” than “good”, but it’s far from a bad movie. If it has any flaws, it’s probably that it cares too much about the mechanics of how this might actually happen and not enough about its characters.
California senatorial candidate Hal Holbrook hatches a plan to pad his support in the electorate by getting the voting age lowered from 21 to 18. In order to get the measure passed before the election, he enlists the help of a major pop star named Max Frost -- a young runaway who commands Beatle-like adoration from millions of American teenagers. But the plan gets out of hand when Max Frost uses the occasion to start a grass roots movement to drop the voting age down to 14 instead.
With mobilized teenagers threatening violence across the country, a compromise is struck to give the vote to fifteen year-olds. But the compromise only further encourages the newly enfranchised youth of America, as they now also demand the right to run for political office -- not excluding the presidency. To pass the amendment, they spike the Washington water supply with gallons of LSD and cajole a two-thirds majority out of a turned-on, mind-blown, psyched-out Congress. The next order of business, of course, is to install Max Frost as president -- and soon he is shipping everyone over 35 to be neutralized at LSD therapy camps.
Is it any good?
I watched this flick on YouTube, so the bad news I don’t have any screen captures. But the good news is that you can watch it too if you want to! And although this is not exactly the greatest movie in the world, it is pretty interesting as a cultural artifact of the 1960s.
Old as I am, I wasn’t around for the sixties, so I have no idea how accurate WILD IN THE STREETS is about the culture and counterculture of the times. My guess is that it’s not very accurate at all since it paints with pretty broad strokes. (Max Frost’s mother -- a stand-in for the older generation as a whole -- is played with very little subtlety by Shelley Winters, if that tells you anything.) But parts of it ring true. For one thing, it’s hard to deny that the laws at the time which allowed 18 year-olds to be drafted to fight in Vietnam but not to vote were certainly unfair. And it’s this unfairness coupled with the rapidly expanding population of young people (who purportedly outnumbered adults at the time) that gives the movie the grain of reality under its layers of escalating silliness.
The cast is also pretty impressive for a relatively low budget picture. Besides Hal Holbrook and Shelley Winters, it features Ed Begley, a young Richard Pryor, a young Larry Bishop, and a handful of media types like Dick Clark in cameos. It was eventually nominated for an Academy Award for film editing -- presumably thanks to a few flashy split-screen montages with bright color washes and that kind of thing. (They really are pretty neat.) And the soundtrack produced a bona fide hit record called “The Shape of Things to Come”, though I’m not sure if the song was written for the movie specifically or if they just recorded a cover of it. The movie, by the way, is not exactly a musical, but there are several full songs since the main character is supposed to be a rock star. In any event, there’s a lot of neat stuff going on in the movie, even apart from the characters and story.
About that story -- it’s not terribly believable. It is a little terrifying to imagine what would have happened if the Beatles had started inciting young people to demonstrate en masse for some cause, but regardless of the numbers involved I cannot imagine any politician actually agreeing to lower the voting age to 15. The bit where the kids use LSD-spiked water to get amendments passed so they can run for office is even more off-the-wall. But the movie obviously needs to get to that point somehow, or else it wouldn’t have a reason for existence. So, implausible as it all is, it’s for a good cause.
Most of the movie could be taken as straight-up wish fulfillment for disillusioned young people. The kids steamroll the adults at every turn simply thanks to their superior numbers and grooviness. But one disappointing thing is that the teenagers don’t seem to have any objective except a pure power grab. Other than not wanting old people to run the show anymore, they don’t really have any clear platform -- yet dumping the old regime seems to be by itself a good enough reason for all the young people in the country to vote as a massive single-minded bloc. As president, Max Frost is most concerned with neutralizing the old people -- that is, anyone over 30 -- so that they’ll never gain power again. The main gear in this machine is to ship anybody over 35 off to a camp where they are forced to drink LSD-laced water so they do nothing all day except wander around in blue robes. Besides this, the only other goal of the government seems to be to establish a hedonist paradise for young people and to get rid of anything that is ungroovy (like a foreign policy).
That’s one half of the story anyway -- the half you might see if you were a young person sufficiently disgusted with the reigning establishment. The other half is a kind of indictment of the hypocrisy of old folks who worship some aspects of youth (like beauty and vitality) but who simultaneously don’t take young people themselves seriously. WILD IN THE STREETS is not really a cautionary tale since the events it depicts are so extreme and unlikely. But it does have a sort of cautionary message about attitudes towards youth. At its not-so-hidden center, the movie advocates a very traditional kind of society -- one where experienced adults are in charge and where young people pass through a kind of regulated wild period on the way to maturity. Permissive adults and adults who inappropriately seek to prolong their youth are the real bad guys here since they are the adults who allow the situation to get out of hand.
But, to be honest, it takes some digging to get down to that message. Rather than clearly impart any single message, WILD IN THE STREETS seems as though it would much rather have its cake (indulge in rabble-rousing youthful rebellion) and eat it too (condemn the people who allow such things to happen). Ultimately I’d say this one is more “interesting” than “good”, but it’s far from a bad movie. If it has any flaws, it’s probably that it cares too much about the mechanics of how this might actually happen and not enough about its characters.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1965: SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH
What’s it about?
An unemployed ne’er-do-well nicknamed Shreeman Funtoosh goes out looking for a job with a friend. But before they get too far they literally bump into two beautiful women while stopping to pray for good fortune at a temple. The job interview goes badly, and so does the wooing -- at first anyway. But persistence soon pays off with the ladies, which earns the boys the wrath of the powerful family of one of their intended husbands.
The wrath takes the form of a complicated frame-up for theft that involves too many moving parts to mention here. But the nefarious schemes gang agley (as aft happens) when Shreeman Funtoosh evades the hoodlums sent to waylay him, and instead gets zapped by malfunctioning lab equipment. As a result, he is turned into an indestructible iron man, with disastrous consequences for everybody he comes into contact with. An interrupted attempt to restore him to his normal state simply makes things worse by shrinking him to a tiny size. Meanwhile, the woman that Shreeman Funtoosh loves is being forced into a marriage with a real jerk, and it looks pretty hopeless that he’ll be able to stop things.
Is it any good?
Apart from a few movies by Satyajit Ray, I know practically nothing about Indian cinema, so I was pretty interested to see what this flick would be like. It’s a Hindi language movie that was filmed in Mumbai (or Bombay, if you prefer), so based on my limited understanding of such things it seems that it would qualify as an honest-to-gosh Bollywood movie. But since I’ve never seen a Bollywood movie before, I have no idea if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is typical or not.
The first surprise was when I checked out the movie’s running time and discovered that it was two and a half hours long. There’s nothing in the story that requires the movie to be that long, but it seems content to take its time and stroll along leisurely from start to finish. The cast of characters isn’t especially big, but the main players are all tightly bound together by a series of coincidences so the outcome of the love story bears directly on the experiments that provide the sci-fi bits and also the fates of three families. (For example, the man that Shreeman Funtoosh tries to get a job from in the beginning is BOTH the guy who is bankrolling the scientist whose lab equipment malfunctions AND the guy who ends up trying to force the heroine into a loveless marriage with his jerky son. The other character relations are all just about as involved as that.)
The second surprise was that the movie is pretty funny. I’m never sure if I’m grading comedies from other countries on a curve -- at the very least, with foreign movies it’s less likely that I’ll recognize if all the jokes are stolen. So I don’t know if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is funny compared to other Bollywood movies, but the lead actors are all pretty likeable and amusing. I did end up watching the movie over the course of two days, so it’s not as though I was transfixed from start to finish. But it was much easier going than I expected from a two and a half hour Hindi-language musical. And speaking of the musical elements, the third surprise was that there were only six songs in the whole movie. I’m no fan of movie musicals, so I wasn’t too disappointed that there weren’t more songs. Though I will say that a couple of the songs were good enough that I went back and watched them again -- not for the lyrics (which were pretty trite) but for the dancing and costumes and humor, which all had a different flavor than in western musicals.
Several of the songs are integrated into the story fairly naturally as performances that the characters are staging that just happen to mimic their emotions. (Only two of the songs are really people spontaneously breaking out into song.) This one is pretty typical -- in it, Shreeman Funtoosh has tied up his jerky rival so he can take his part in a song-and-dance number with the heroine, thus wooing her more effectively with his moves.
But my favorite song is a much more restrained one that takes place when Shreeman Funtoosh has just found out that the girl he loves (and who he thought loved him) has been engaged to this same jerky guy. I just really like the way the heartbroken Shreeman Funtoosh floats around over the shoulders of the two other characters while simultaneously expressing his woes and providing the music for them to dance to.
So, uh, I guess I should talk about the sci-fi parts. They are mostly just kind of funny, but barely even serve any purpose in the story. I mean, the fact that Shreeman Funtoosh is first indestructible and then tiny creates some small obstacles to the love story. But really the sci-fi bits are an afterthought and could be completely dropped with barely any change to the main plot. (I guess the only thing that would have to change is there would need to be a different reason for Shreeman Funtoosh to be delayed showing up at the climactic wedding besides “being restored to normal height by a shower of rays scratched onto the film with a paperclip”.) For the most part, the iron man segment seemed to be an excuse to make some jokes about what it would be like if Superman were clumsy. I’m not sure why exactly the Shrunken Funtoosh bits are there, but it’s as good a reason as any for him to be late to breaking up the wedding.
Anyway, I have no idea if this is a good Bollywood movie, or just an okay one. But it’s the only Indian sci-fi flick I could find, so if you are (like me) watching a lot of science fiction movies all in a row then it’s not a bad diversion.
An unemployed ne’er-do-well nicknamed Shreeman Funtoosh goes out looking for a job with a friend. But before they get too far they literally bump into two beautiful women while stopping to pray for good fortune at a temple. The job interview goes badly, and so does the wooing -- at first anyway. But persistence soon pays off with the ladies, which earns the boys the wrath of the powerful family of one of their intended husbands.
The wrath takes the form of a complicated frame-up for theft that involves too many moving parts to mention here. But the nefarious schemes gang agley (as aft happens) when Shreeman Funtoosh evades the hoodlums sent to waylay him, and instead gets zapped by malfunctioning lab equipment. As a result, he is turned into an indestructible iron man, with disastrous consequences for everybody he comes into contact with. An interrupted attempt to restore him to his normal state simply makes things worse by shrinking him to a tiny size. Meanwhile, the woman that Shreeman Funtoosh loves is being forced into a marriage with a real jerk, and it looks pretty hopeless that he’ll be able to stop things.
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Is it any good?
Apart from a few movies by Satyajit Ray, I know practically nothing about Indian cinema, so I was pretty interested to see what this flick would be like. It’s a Hindi language movie that was filmed in Mumbai (or Bombay, if you prefer), so based on my limited understanding of such things it seems that it would qualify as an honest-to-gosh Bollywood movie. But since I’ve never seen a Bollywood movie before, I have no idea if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is typical or not.
The first surprise was when I checked out the movie’s running time and discovered that it was two and a half hours long. There’s nothing in the story that requires the movie to be that long, but it seems content to take its time and stroll along leisurely from start to finish. The cast of characters isn’t especially big, but the main players are all tightly bound together by a series of coincidences so the outcome of the love story bears directly on the experiments that provide the sci-fi bits and also the fates of three families. (For example, the man that Shreeman Funtoosh tries to get a job from in the beginning is BOTH the guy who is bankrolling the scientist whose lab equipment malfunctions AND the guy who ends up trying to force the heroine into a loveless marriage with his jerky son. The other character relations are all just about as involved as that.)
 |  |
The second surprise was that the movie is pretty funny. I’m never sure if I’m grading comedies from other countries on a curve -- at the very least, with foreign movies it’s less likely that I’ll recognize if all the jokes are stolen. So I don’t know if SHREEMAN FUNTOOSH is funny compared to other Bollywood movies, but the lead actors are all pretty likeable and amusing. I did end up watching the movie over the course of two days, so it’s not as though I was transfixed from start to finish. But it was much easier going than I expected from a two and a half hour Hindi-language musical. And speaking of the musical elements, the third surprise was that there were only six songs in the whole movie. I’m no fan of movie musicals, so I wasn’t too disappointed that there weren’t more songs. Though I will say that a couple of the songs were good enough that I went back and watched them again -- not for the lyrics (which were pretty trite) but for the dancing and costumes and humor, which all had a different flavor than in western musicals.
Several of the songs are integrated into the story fairly naturally as performances that the characters are staging that just happen to mimic their emotions. (Only two of the songs are really people spontaneously breaking out into song.) This one is pretty typical -- in it, Shreeman Funtoosh has tied up his jerky rival so he can take his part in a song-and-dance number with the heroine, thus wooing her more effectively with his moves.
But my favorite song is a much more restrained one that takes place when Shreeman Funtoosh has just found out that the girl he loves (and who he thought loved him) has been engaged to this same jerky guy. I just really like the way the heartbroken Shreeman Funtoosh floats around over the shoulders of the two other characters while simultaneously expressing his woes and providing the music for them to dance to.
So, uh, I guess I should talk about the sci-fi parts. They are mostly just kind of funny, but barely even serve any purpose in the story. I mean, the fact that Shreeman Funtoosh is first indestructible and then tiny creates some small obstacles to the love story. But really the sci-fi bits are an afterthought and could be completely dropped with barely any change to the main plot. (I guess the only thing that would have to change is there would need to be a different reason for Shreeman Funtoosh to be delayed showing up at the climactic wedding besides “being restored to normal height by a shower of rays scratched onto the film with a paperclip”.) For the most part, the iron man segment seemed to be an excuse to make some jokes about what it would be like if Superman were clumsy. I’m not sure why exactly the Shrunken Funtoosh bits are there, but it’s as good a reason as any for him to be late to breaking up the wedding.
Anyway, I have no idea if this is a good Bollywood movie, or just an okay one. But it’s the only Indian sci-fi flick I could find, so if you are (like me) watching a lot of science fiction movies all in a row then it’s not a bad diversion.
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