KUNG FU PANDA 3 (2016)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Not surprisingly, the simple PANDA formula began to show some cracks in its facade by the third film. No #3 is still a reasonably entertaining variation on that simple theme, but it helps not to look too hard at some things.

This time the main villain is tied not to Po or to Shifu but the turtle Oogwai, who in the first film named Po as the Dragon Warrior and then ascended to another spiritual plane. In PANDA 3 we learn that all is not peaceful on that higher plane, for Oogwai encounters an old enemy, General Kai (a yak), whom Oogwai consigned to the spirit world for his crimes. (I guess for small tyke-viewers, "sent to the spirit world" sounds less grievous than "killed.") Kai was exiled because he'd learned the technique of stealing "chi" from other masters. But living in the spirit-world has done nothing to cool Kai's conquering temperament, and he's already stolen a lot of chi from other ascended masters when he crosses paths with Oogwai. Kai defeats Oogwai and steals enough chi to re-enter the mortal world-- though Oogwai predicts that the Dragon Warrior shall defeat Kai's evil.

By total coincidence, Shifu decides to retire from teaching martial arts, and he appoints Po as the new teacher to students who know more than Po does. Hijinks ensue, and for good measure Shifu also informs the panda that having achieved inner peace (in the second film) is not enough; that his next step must be mastering the power of chi-manipulation. 

On top of that, Po finally meets Li, the birth-father he never knew, and Ping, who regards himself as Po's real father, seethes with jealousy of Po's new dad. Po also has an excuse to hang out with Li in that Li claims that he and his panda-tribe are masters of chi, so they can complete the next stage of Po's training. However, Li actually doesn't possess the skill, and his excuse for lying stands as one of the most cockamamie in cinematic history-- not least because he knows that General Kai will eventually cross chi-swords with Po, which could result in the death of Li's cherished son.

Perhaps worse than all this plotting-by-convenience is that none of the pandas Po meets are slightly memorable as characters, including Li. The pandas were all tiresome and made me wish for more scenes devoted to the Furious Five, who were simple comedy-types that still had some individuality. The evil Kai is the least interesting villain of the first three movies, and even his primary gimmick-- being able to change his enemies into obedient "jade zombies"-- adds no luster to the film. The climactic face-off between Kai and Po is decently staged, but getting there is not half the fun one might expect it to be.

             

KUNG FU PANDA 2 (2011)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Once the first PANDA hit big, the filmmakers stuck close to what worked for both the second and third films: raucous cartoon chopsocky violence with a side-dish of Eastern wisdom. 

In the first film, the story arc of Po the Panda (Jack Black) concerned his efforts to become a kung-fu fighter, though fate-- and the will of the turtle-oracle Oogwai-- threw Po into the deep end of the pool, by promoting him as the destined "Dragon Warrior." In choosing this destiny, Po forswears dedicating himself to the noodle-shop run by his adoptive father Ping (a goose who never informs Po as to his non-goose heritage). But Ping is not the source of conflict: the "heavy father" figure is supplied by Shifu, who puts Po through many rigors before finally conceding that Po deserves his status. Shifu is also, like Ping, an adoptive father, but his "son" became a menace, whom Po must defeat. In essence the first film completes Shifu's arc and he's only of modest importance in the second and third films.

The good news re: No #2 is that while the writers might have chosen to make Po's second "big bad" another kung-fu bully-boy, they crafted a much more ingenious villain this time, one linked to the circumstances that orphaned Po. Having the villain of an anthropomorphic kung-fu flick be a peacock, a delicate-looking bird, might seem counter-intuitive. But the writers shift the conflict to one of weaponry rather than hand-to-hand conflict. Villainous Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) seeks power by weaponizing his clan's discovery of gunpowder into destructive cannons, with which he plans to conquer all of Cartoon-China. But a prophecy about his being defeated by "black and white" leads him to massacre a tribe of black-and-white pandas, leading to the circumstance wherein Baby Po is adopted by Ping the Goose. As it happens, Po and his fellow martial-arts cops encounter Shen's threat at precisely the same time Po experiences existential doubts about his being the only black-and-white panda that anyone's seen in his neck of the woods.

Despite all these doubts, Po's teacher has informed him that the solution is "inner peace"-- and this is what eventually gives the warrior-panda the moxie he needs to defeat the seemingly-unbeatable cannons. The film frames the idea of spiritual transcendence as something as simple as a fortune-cookie maxim, but the movie delivers what the viewer wants: a hissable villain, who relies not on brute force but upon skills with knives (hidden within Shen's wings) and an inventive conclusion in which martial arts trumps, at least in cartoons, martial arms.

A coda establishes that Po's father is still alive after all, setting up the events of the third film.                  

ARROW: SEASON TWO (2013-14)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

It's been some time since I visited the ARROW series, possibly because I still remember how terrible the later seasons became. However, on re-watching Season Two, I think this season, more than Season One, earned the show the reputation on which those terrible late seasons coasted.

Admittedly one thing never changed about ARROW in any season: the melodramatic characterization was always cranked up to eleven. One big plotline continued from One was that Oliver Queen's mother Moira was tried for her complicity in Malcolm Merlyn's scheme to destroy an entire neighborhood. This caused erratic mood swings in both her adult children, Oliver and Thea, who varied between adoring and despising Moira, though never both in one mood at the same time. Naturally, whereas such a major trial would have taken a year or more in the real world, in the Arrow-verse it's wrapped in a few weeks, Moira is exonerated and even runs for mayor of Starling City.

A somewhat more consequential subplot involves the revelation that Thea unlike Oliver was not the natural daughter of Moira's husband but rather was conceived between Moira and Malcolm Merlyn. In the latter half of the season, Malcolm returns and successfully claims Thea as her true father, even though her initial reaction is to shoot him. The writers also devote a fair amount of time into developing a romantic arc between Oliver and his slightly wacky assistant Felicity.  But though the soap operatics are generally entertaining in the first few seasons, I'd have to say that they never got quite as good as producer Berlanti's debut superhero series, SMALLVILLE. That show also may have had more low points in its first few seasons, but I tend to prefer a show that has a greater variety of the high and low, as opposed to playing things straight down the middle.

Another positive development is that Season Two wraps up many, though maybe not all, of the "island-adventure" plotlines. These flashbacks consumed much time in Season One, showing how Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) got stuck on a not-so-deserted island, dealing with madmen in search of a scientific weapon and other castaways seeking to avoid being victimized. However, as a result of those struggles, Oliver incurs the enmity of former ally Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett), who trained the playboy in archery. Wilson, aka "Deathstroke," returns to Starling City with vengeance in mind, monomaniacally fixated on destroying everything his former pupil loves. That includes the new addition to the cast, Sara Lance (Caity Lotz), who survived her apparent death at sea to become one of the League of Assassins. She incidentally becomes the program's incarnation of the comics' Black Canary, albeit called only "the Canary," and the actress is decent in the role, in marked contrast to her later acting-history.

The various shout-outs to DC characters proves at least as attractive as the well-done action-scenes. There might not be total agreement between the original characters and ARROW's reworked versions of Professor Ivo, Cyrus Gold, William Tockman and Sebastian Blood. But the reworked characters here are generally efficient at putting across good superhero melodrama. (An additional note is that Barry Allen, prior to undergoing his flashy transformation in his own show, appears in a couple of Season Two episodes, as do two of the support-characters from the proposed program.) But Manu Bennett's formidable performance as Deathstroke is Season Two's greatest asset, as is his plan to use the aforementioned super-weapon-- a drug that can make humans into super-soldiers, roughly on the Captain America level-- to make vicious killers into his shock troops against Starling City.  Given TV's budgetary limits, the showrunners made this scenario far more bracing than many higher-budgeted feature films.

My memory is that Season Three still remains decent entertainment, particularly when the Flash starts interacting with the Arrow-verse. I hope to verify that within at least the next year.            

THE TOUCHABLES (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Though THE TOUCHABLES contains no explicit Fellini quotes, I feel that his shadow looms large over this movie and similar surrealistic takes on "swinging London," not least the contemporaneous quasi-giallo DEADLY SWEET. Fellini showed aspiring cinema-craftsmen that they could shoot a lot of footage in which actors could reel off reams of pretentious dialogue, and some viewers out there would take meretriciousness as a commentary on meretriciousness.

That seems to be all director Robert Freeman (best known for photographing the Beatles for their album-covers) and his writers have on their minds. Film a lot of wild scenes in exotic locales and feature a lot of gorgeous actors reciting blather about Aristotle moments before they start singing TV jingles for breakfast cereal. Our four guides to this trippy world are all upper-class Brit women: Sadie, Melanie, Samson and Busbee (Judy Huxtable, Esther Anderson, Kathy Simmons, and Marilyn Rickard-- of whom only the first two made much of a career in acting). The audience never knows any of them as individuals with specific backgrounds: from the first they're just seen hanging out at trendy clubs, watching the British version of TV wrestling (which reminded me of American wrestling of the eighties). They break into a wax museum and steal a statue of Michael Caine, but the owner reclaims it. Nothing daunted, the girls decide they'll abduct popular rock star Christian (David Anthony). The take him to an odd hideout; a geodesic dome which, in real life, a famous architect constructed in the Surrey countryside.

At the time all this transpires, Christian has become totally bored with the rigors of being a famous rock star, so at first, he's only bemused at having been kidnapped for four leggy beauties. Early on, he breaks free of his bonds and overpowers one of the girls. A jump-cut later, he's joining in all of their goofy games, clearly regarding his kidnapping as a fun vacation. He implicitly sleeps with most or all of them, though there were no sex-scenes in the version I saw. Eventually Christian chafes at captivity and tries to flee via a stolen motorboat. However, one of his captors has access to a rifle, and she shoots him. Incredibly, she only grazes his temple, and the ladies are able to haul the singer out of the water and nurse him back to health, so that he's no worse for wear.

The film easily could have ended with Christian's death (which might have lent some symbolic resonance to the singer's given name). Instead, some London criminals learn that a valuable celebrity is being held in durance-not-too-vile, so they congregate at the dome and take everyone prisoners. The crooks can't convince Christian's manager to believe their ransom demands on the phone, so they send Samson to convince the manager, with warnings not to contact the cops. No cops intervene, but the gangsters are defeated because Samson does come back with the manager and a couple of the wrestlers in her circle, and the wrestlers stomp the heck out of the criminals (and manage to destroy the stately pleasure-dome too). Christian doesn't bid his cute kidnappers farewell but simply leaves with his manager to go back to the lesser travails of being a big star. The ending implies that nothing will happen to the wacky girls, perhaps because they're upper class, though nothing is said of specific connections.

Putting aside the maybe-Felliniesque playfulness, TOUCHABLES bears a loose relation to the sort of "femme formidable" movies being made at the time. Still, in terms of content, Freeman's flick is pretty vapid next to even lightweight fare like Losey's MODESTY BLAISE, to say nothing of FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! Before TOUCHABLES, the only non-marvelous film that involved "feminine rapine" might be the Ed Wood-scripted VIOLENT YEARS, but the four "good time girls" aren't very representative even of negative feminism. Aside from the incident where Christian gets shot-- where it's not clear how much skill the rifle-girl has-- only two other scenes suggest formidability. The kidnap-scene at the opening shows two of the ladies (dressed as nuns!) overpowering Christian with the help of chloroform, and in the concluding fight, Samson repels an attacker by jamming him in the ribs with her elbow. But the fact that the ladies need big strong men to rescue them reduces most if not all of the movie's potential claims to feminine empowerment.                   

KUNG FU PANDA (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

It's entirely appropriate that Dreamworks landed Jackie Chan to essay one of the voices in KUNG FU PANDA. The core idea of this comic kung-fu cartoon is that the heroic panda Xiao Po can only bumble his way through the rigid disciplines of kung fu until he finds his own unique (and funny) way to kick booty. Chan made this sort of comedy-fu his specialty, but even if a viewer never saw a Chan movie, he will probably be able to guess the way Panda Po will succeed not in spite of his faults, but because of them. 

In this case, though, predictability isn't all bad. The script's simple structure makes it possible to keep feeding the audience with a steady stream of slapstick gags, balanced by a healthy sense of respect for the imagined traditions of fantasy kung-fu-- a discipline practiced in a China populated entirely by anthropomorphic animals. Po (Jack Black), a panda adopted in infancy by a goose who runs a noodle shop, conceives a passion for kung fu. He wishes he could fight with the elect masters, the Furious Five (voiced by Chan and a host of other celebrities), and to be trained by the great master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman). To his surprise, Po is selected to become the Dragon Warrior, the supreme warrior who will protect China from all threats-- even though the panda can barely muster the most basic fighting-skill.

One of the film's best conceits is its villain, the snow leopard Tai Lung, because Tai, like Po, was adopted by a parent of a different species. But Po's adoptive father tried to get him to be devoted to noodle-making, he accepted the panda's decision to choose his own path. Tai was raised the red panda Shifu to inherit the Dragon Warrior status, and to judge by the crap Shifu dumps on Po, Shifu was probably a very demanding parental figure, which results in Tai becoming a dangerous criminal. The film's best scene is not one of Po's many goofups, but a climactic battle between Tai and Shifu, in which Shifu is defeated but feels more pain for having been a bad dad.    

Naturally the drama doesn't last too long, and Po cobbles together an eleventh-hour mastery of his own unique discipline so as to defeat Tai Lung. I have not seen the other movies in the series, but the initial outing shows more promise than most cartoon franchises.  

        

TYRANT OF LYDIA AGAINST THE SON OF HERCULES (1963)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

TYRANT OF LYDIA, a TV-title, was actually the third peplum-film centered upon a hero named "Goliath," though none of the films were related to one another. But while it's true that there's no Hercules, or any son thereof, in this mundane historical flick, the Italian title isn't much better. First, not all markets kept the name "Goliath," since some christened Gordon Scott's hero with the name "Gordian," as in "the Gordian knot" solved by Alexander in a famous story. Second, it's not clear who "the rebel slave" is. One or two reviews thought it was female lead Princess Cori (Ombretta Colli). However, as her name indicates Cori is royalty, and though she's sometimes treated as a bone over which two national "dogs" are fighting, there's only a small part of the movie during which Cori is captured and sold in a slave market-- none of which action is important to the main plot.

The aforementioned "dogs" are Greece and Persia, who are at odds under the respective commands of Alexander and Darius. Both nations impinge upon the smaller kingdom of Lydia, typically an ally to Greece. The heroic Lydian soldier Gordian favors Greece, but Lydia's tyrant king (Massimo Serato) and his queen Zoe (Gloria Milland) plan to hand over the kingdom to the Persians for profit.

The setup could have made for some decent political intrigue, but TYRANT is slackly written, with lots of talking-heads who don't say much of anything, with occasional bouts of action whenever Gordian gets into a fight for some reason. There are no metaphenomenal elements, and even Gordian seems just slightly stronger than average, despite all his associations with myth-figures. There's a slightly interesting bit of stunt-casting in that Gordian receives a little aid from a Black muscleman, played by Serge Nubret, a bodybuilding competitor of some note in the day. Ombrella Colli holds up her end by looking stunning all the time, but the villains don't do anything all that dastardly. Really, Milland's Zoe doesn't do anything more than listen to the evil king's plots, so it's a bit surprising near the end when she's gratuitously speared to death during a battle-scene. TYRANT is a pretty ordinary peplum in every way, and only worth seeing for completists.

Incidentally, my dubbed copy came with a German title, "Goliath vs Hercules," but if Gordian was Goliath, I have no idea who some marketer thought Hercules might have been.       

HARD ROCK ZOMBIES (1984)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS 

I don't know how I never stumbled across HARD ROCK ZOMBIES. I certainly didn't avoid it because it had a bad rep; I've seen many worse flicks, including those in the "heavy metal horror" subgenre. I only sought it out now when I noted that it had "monster mash" elements, but I still wasn't expecting much. To my (mild) surprise, ZOMBIES-- directed and co-written by one Krishna Shah-- is one of those oddball movies that deserves the label "so bad it's good." That's not to endow it with any sort of profundity, for it's still a stupid movie that appears made up on the fly. But it's never dull, like a lot of lesser dreck. 

Shah does at least set up some of his horror with an attention to detail. Before we meet the rockers who will be our viewpoint characters, sexy blonde hitchhiker Elsa (Lisa Toothman) cadges a ride from a couple of young males on a country highway. She guides them to a pond and persuades the guys to do some skinny-dipping. However, in the nearby bushes are a tuxedo-clad guy with a camera, along with two dwarves, one of whom wears a gargoyle mask. The full-size fellow takes photos while Elsa drowns both guys by holding them under the waters, apparently by main strength. Then Elsa and her buddy cut a hand off one of the victims.

After that, we meet the four rockers, but no one should worry about their names, since only the leader Jessie (E.J. Cursio) is more than a placeholder. From the band's conversation with their manager, we learn that the musicians are due to play in some California town at a rock concert named Grand Guignol, and that they hope to impress some record-company bigwig who's supposed to attend. The manager then gets some publicity photos as a bunch of fan-girls fawn over the players-- all except for Jessie, who excuses himself. Stepping outside, he runs into a lone fangirl, Cassie (Jennifer Coe). She tells Jessie not to attend the concert, because certain elements in town don't want the band there, including Cassie's father. All of which sounds a little like the previous year's hit FLASHDANCE, except that in FLASHDANCE, the local girl who warned away the musicians was not fourteen-year-old jailbait. Also, Cassie's warning begs the question: if powerful elements didn't want a rock concert in town, how did anyone get the permits required to stage one? 

En route to the concert in a van, Jessie experiments, riffing on a tune he found in an "old book." No one in the band notices that every time Jessie plays the tune, a fly, despite having been squashed by the manager, keeps coming back to life. Then the van stops for a hitchhiker-- guess who-- and the toothsome blonde invites the guys to reside at her family's mansion. We see again the photographer, the two dwarves, a wheelchair-bound granny and a grandfather who-- okay, I'm just gonna say it. Grandpa is a ninety-something Adolf Hitler in disguise, while Grandma is Eva Braun. Oh, and Grandma turns into a werewolf at one point, so I guess she was one of those "werewolf commandos" one hears about.

The film takes a break from THE OLD DARK HOUSE to dispose of its FLASHDANCE emulation in a town council meeting that shows the locals to be both petty and perverse, though it's not clear if most of the townfolk know that the occupants of the mansion are Nazi maniacs. But soon enough, we're back to Fuhrer-fear. While the band's rehearsing on their electric guitars, Elsa or someone nearly electrocutes them all, but they survive to perish individually. 

Jessie doesn't twig to the band's peril, but he does figure out that his new musical riff can bring dead things back to life. He suspects bad things on the rise, so he records his ditty on a cassette for insurance. Sure enough, one rocker's killed by Elsa in a shower (with copious PSYCHO references), and another by Were-Granny. But before Jessie's meets a humiliating death by a weed-whacker, he passes his cassette to Cassie. After the rockers are dead and buried in a local grave, Cassie plays the song-- and the rockers arise to take vengeance on the Nazi maniacs. However, for some reason I didn't follow, the power of the resurrection music spreads and brings the Nazis back to life too, even though I don't believe anyone's continuously playing the music at the time. The undead rockers don't hang around town after killing the Nazis but drive their van to the not-yet-opened concert site. No one's there except the record-company rep and Cassie, the latter having followed the rockers, and the two of them give ear to a song Jessie wrote for Cassie with the significant line, "For you it's new; there's so much that I've been through." Director Shah even provides a romantic slo-mo video showing Jessie and Cassie together-- their only clinch-scene in the movie, which may or may not be something imagined by undead Jessie.   

The imperiled townfolk are played for laughs. One guy gets the idea that because zombies (he calls them "ghouls") are anti-intellectual, they'll be repelled if faced with the images of heads. So the citizens try to drive off the zombies with big pictures of celebrities-- which seem to work, until they don't. Then another fellow gets the idea that they can drive the zombies back to the graves by setting out a virgin for the zombies to both defile and devour-- and to her misfortune, Cassie flees the concert and runs back to town, just in time to find herself elected for the position. By this time, the undead rockers, having finished the set they wanted to play in life, have gone back to the graves. However, the band's manager passionately exhorts the musicians to arise and play their resurrection-song, which diverts the Nazi zombies from Cassie, allowing the manager to save her.

And the big conclusion? Well, before Hitler gets killed, he explains to a flunky his plan to take over the US using gas-weapons that he stores in a cave outside town. By the way, said gasses are stored in "ovens," sort of a belated acknowledgement of the Holocaust in a junk-flick about undead Nazi freaks. The band's music forces the evil zombies into the cave, where the gas destroys them. Why? Well, it's not just because of poetic justice, because the four rockers join the Nazis in the gas chamber, thus rendering all the undead dead again. However, a coda suggests that death itself may not impede the Cassie-Jessie romance.

Since there was no substantive reason in the script that Cassie could not have been a totally legal romantic interest, either Shah went in a forbidden direction because (a) he was indulging a private fetish, or because (b) he was making some point, however badly. The script of ZOMBIES does not offer firm support for either position, but I could argue a bit more for the latter just because all the ZOMBIES characters are pretty perverse. Had the Jessie-Cassie romance been more normative age-wise, they would have been the only normal characters in a morass of weirdness. As it is, no character condemns the relationship-- even Cassie's father only objects to all the musicians because they're rock-and-rollers-- so *possibly* Shah is counting on the audience to see the irony implicit in playing the romance straight. All that said, the movie's biggest source of perversity is certainly the Nazi maniacs, so they get the nod as being the "starring monsters" of the story.