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He Came, He Saw, He Porked

Coming Soon: Punksploitation

The second issue of Burning Ambulance is coming out soon, and it includes my longish essay on punk rock movies of the late '70s and '80s. There's a sneak preview available at the B.A. blog.

Apparently, I Watched This, #2: "Vigilante Force" (1976)

The 1970s, a time when the Western was officially declared dead and absolute distrust of official representatives of the law was fashionable, either because they were seen as fascistic bullies or quivering wimps hamstrung by rules safeguarding the rights of criminals, marked the emergence of the vigilante as the most ubiquitous kind of action hero in movies. The first sign that this unsung little exploitation item from our bicentennial year might be a bit different comes with its use of the "v" word in its very title, a touch that would have struck the makers of Dirty Harry or Death Wish as being just a tad on the nose. The second sign comes in the opening scenes, set in a sleepy little California town that is experiencing the sleepy little town's equivalent of the night sweats. In the first few minutes, the local bar, which, at midday, is packed to the rafters with rowdy drunks, is the scene of a murder; some guy pulls a gun and blows a hole in some other guy's midsection, and instead of this having the effect you might expect--i.e., of emptying the place out pronto, the shooting seems to excite all the bystanders so much that they all start brawling.

It turns out that Squaresville, or Snoozeburg, or whatever the place is supposed to be called, has become the home away from home for a small army of white trash outsiders who have converged there to work on some offscreen oil drilling project. The local burghers talk about these honest American laboring men the way Daniel Day-Lewis talked about the Irish in Gangs of New York, and express contempt for their local chief of police, a pudgy, watery old dude whose preferred method of dealing with the rising crime rate is standing outside some establishment where the oil workers are staging a reenactment of the sack of Rome, wringing his hands and whining about how having actual lawbreakers around makes his job too hard. (The character is called "Harry Lee", a small detail that, for viewers of the movie who once lived in Louisiana, will constitute a major bonus.) A recall election would seem to be in order, but Jan-Michael Vincent, the wiry, snub-nosed star of White Line Fever and the "Danger Island" segments of The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, has another idea. Vincent's ne'er-do-well brother, Kris Kristofferson, is back from Vietnam, and at Vincent's urging, the town fathers agree to hire him and a bunch of his ne'er-do-well buddies to serve as a head-cracking auxiliary force to the regular police. At first, it seems as if Kris and his boys will supply just what's needed to restore order to the town, but Kris, who was made to feel most unwelcome back in the town's quieter days, has a chip on his shoulder and a sneaky gleam in his eye. Once he gets his hands on some official requisition forms, it isn't long before the hapless police chief is answering his office phone and telling someone, "No, I'm not doing anything with an M-16 anti-tank weapon. Why?"





Is Vigilante Force a good movie? Well, Brad Dexter turns up in it as the town mayor, and Ethan Mordden once wrote that any movie in which Brad Dexter has more than three lines is immediately disqualified from consideration as a good movie, so I guess that settles that. It's too bad that Kristofferson turns out to be plotting a heist; the movie would have more kick if he and his band intended to take the town over and stick around, especially if they got it in their heads that they were doing everyone a favor by taking the place over and ruling it as less-than-benign dictators, the only way to keep the peace in a world gone nuts. It's diverting and weird, though, and the dialogue is frequently choice. Bernadette Peters shows up, singing, off-key, in the local gin joint, with a black feather boa draped listlessly around her shoulders and the lyric sheet in her hand. (Accompanying her at the piano is Dick Miller, who, when she asks him, "What the hell key are you playin' in?", snaps back, "All the keys you were singin' in.") When Peters meets Kristofferson, she smiles at him dreamily and says, "I remember you. Texaco station, ladies' room, Texarcana, 1969." Kristofferson smiles back and drawls, "All of '69, I was in the Orry-ent." Circumstances eventually force Kristofferson to lean on his brother, burning down his business--as they gaze at the flaming wreck together, Kristofferson mutters, "Ya shoulda hired some vigilante firemen"--and wasting Vincent's girlfriend, Victoria Principal. "I'm gonna kill you," he advises her as he takes out his gun. She asks him why. "I don't wanna talk about it," he grunts. "I don't wanna hear about it. I have seen and heard it all." At moments like that, you have to wonder if you're watching a movie made by an unusually blunt hack or a parodist on the make. It could be the work of an unusually blunt parodist.

Vigilante Force was written and directed by George Armitage, whose early credits, all products off the Roger Corman assembly line, included writing the script for Gas! (1970), which Corman directed, and Night Call Nurses (1972), for director Jonthan Kaplan; writing and directing Private Duty Nurses (1971); and a small acting role in Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat. He also wrote the deranged blacksploitation movie Darktown Strutters (1975) and the Leno-vs.-Letterman HBO film The Late Shift (1996) and directed the superior network TV movie Hot Rod (1979), Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), and the dud Elmore Leonard adaptation The Big Bounce (2004). Demme stepped in to help produce his best movie, Miami Blues (1990), starring Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Fred Ward as Charles Willeford's Hoke Moseley. That was a modern underground classic, but for the most part, Armitage has spent the bulk of his career seeming less like a director than a professional smart ass--or, to put it more prissily, a "gadfly"--who likes to mess around with the ingredients and conventions of genre movies.

Except when Jonathan Demme is looking over his shoulder, he's not especially good at building the kind of motor that a good genre movie needs, and he usually fails to push his offbeat ideas far enough to turn the conventions fully inside out and create a new kind of movie, or one that transcends genre. When he's cooking, though, he can be counted on to at least give you something to hoot at. In the big climax, Vincent goes head to head with Kristofferson and his crew, who are garishly costumed in what look like red lion tamers' outfits so as to blend in on the day of the town's big patriotic parade and celebration. They run around shooting at each other in tall grass and while sloshing through the water, and it's obvious that it's meant to look as if they're refighting the Vietnam War on native ground. The political metaphor doesn't really take, because Armitage hasn't done enough to clarify what Vietnam means to the characters (and what it did to them) to make it organic. But you do get to see Kristofferson firing off rounds and lobbing grenades, and ultimately doing a reprise variation on James Cagney's explosive death scene in White Heat, while dressed as if he were playing Professor Henry Hill leading the marching band in The Music Man.

Brown with Envy

Does Keith Olbermann ever get tired of the sound of his own voice? Does he never get the feeling that he's become so adept at inflicting on others, that his ego is sitting on his head and crushing his brain? A few weeks ago, CNN anchor Campbell Brown, whose show shared a time slot with Olbermann's MSNBC series and Bill O'Reilly's Fox News bile-a-thon, announced on the air that she was stepping down from her broadcast perch. "I could have said that I am stepping down to spend more time with my children (which I truly want to do)," Brown said. "Or that I am leaving to pursue other opportunities (which I also truly want to do). But I have never had much tolerance for others' spin, so I can't imagine trying to stomach my own. The simple fact is that not enough people watch my program." These comments inspired a lot of public praise for Brown's candor, and a lot of sympathy for her as a conventional newsreader who couldn't compete in the marketplace with "opinion journalists" like Olbermann and O'Reilly. It was a position that Olbermann, the guy who quit his first MSNBC show back in the '90s rather than be forced to participate in the all-Monicagate-all-the-time trend in TV news, might once have appreciated, even respected.

Olbermann's inclusion of Brown in his nightly "Worst Person in the World" feature is the crowning proof that he's lost all perspective on his profession, and that it is possible to be a master of snark without having any kind of handle on irony, After Brown spoke to the Los Angeles Times, Olbermann sniped at Brown for tacking on a "pity me interview" to her "martyr to real news tour." He summed up her approach as the kind of TV journalism "where you just read what's handed to you and you pretend that both sides — correct and wrong — merit equal consideration and you believe that you, and you alone in the world, are objective", as opposed to his own method, "where you stick your neck out and tell the echo chamber it's wrong, and you try to get people thinking, and you get the death threats in the mail and the dirty looks in the hallway." If Olbermann really gets the stink eye from people skulking around the corridors of MSMBC, at least he's getting well compensated for it. But they aren't as big a threat to him as whoever failed to point out to him that he shouldn't have clipped that particular passage from his prepared text before accusing Brown of posing as a "martyr."

I used to watch Olbermann religiously, several years ago, before he started posing as Edward R. Murrow in a toga and his show became so rigid in its ideological correctness that it became boringly predictable. Olbermann was predictably outraged that Brown seemed to lump him in with O'Reilly, and they sure are different: O'Reilly invites people who disagree with him on his show so he can shout over them and order that their mikes be switched off, while Olbermann's guests tend to consist of the same dependable pack of talking heads he can count on to agree with him. That may be the defining difference between right-wing and left-wing cookie cutter "opinion news", but Olbermann's only seems less obnoxious before you get your fill of it, and you're guaranteed to learn nothing you didn't already "know" from either. I never watched Brown religiously, but that's because I don't generally watch cable news religiously at all, but I saw enough of her to know that she did real, probing interviews and made news with them, most famously the time during the 2008 campaign when she eviscerated McCain flak Tucker Bounds. That interview was a classic example of a smart TV journalist destroying a ridiculous target without adopting a pre-selected ideological position, and it's exactly the sort of thing that could never happen on Olbermann's show, partly because Bounds wouldn't have gone anywhere near Olbermann to begin with, and partly because, even if he had, his attempts to fight back by accusing his tormentor of picking sides would have stuck, instead of making him look desperate and whining.

Olbermann has to know, on some level, that Brown isn't Ted Baxter, and that his characterization of her as someone who "just read[s]" what's "handed" to her won't wash. Is he really saying what he seems to be saying here, that partisan "opinion journalism", taking what's in the news and arranging it on the line to show how it backs up what you, and the viewers who take you for Gandolf, already think, is such an advance over conventional news reporting, that it's rendered the Walter Cronkite style of broadcast news old hat and unnecessary? It's true that just about any kind of news reporting has some kind of "bias" underneath it, even if it's something like the assumption that everyone agrees that racism is an undesirable quality in a politician or that hunger blows, and it's a good thing to have people like Jon Stewart around to point this out. But people like Olbermann and O'Reilly haven't reinvented TV news; they stand in relation to people like Brown the way that Johnny Carson used to stand in relation to Cronkite: they riff on the body of conventional shared knowledge that mainstream news outlets provide. Olbermann used to riff on it entertainingly, but his attack on Brown just points up how much his show has become a nightly tribute to the lonely beacon of courageous truth-telling that is Keith Olbermann. He seems to have gone completely off his trolley because of something that fills him with the same kind of disgusted moral outrage that he once experienced over the Iraq War and Aby Ghraib and Katrina: namely, a cable TV news anchor who isn't him getting some flattering press coverage.

It's Complicated

I don't guess it's a big thing, but watching The Special Relationship, the latest torn-from-the-pages-of-a-CSPAN-transcript docudrama from the pen of Peter Morgan on HBO, it was a great relief to see Hope Davis show that it's possible to give a convincing, un-cartoonish performance as Hillary Clinton. Although she did look a little older at the end than she did at the beginning, Davis didn't seem to be wearing any prosthetic makeup, and that made it possible for her to etch in the qualities of an intelligent, slightly embattled character with a few subtle shifts of expression and her customary expert vocal control. It may have helped that, for all Bill's harping on how important her opinions were to his political decisions, she was pointedly seen as a background player to much of the action. There was a poignancy to her being forced to keep her intellectual gifts closer to the vest than the "official" government players around her, which, in the scene when Bill wakes her up to come clean with her about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky (some twelve hours before he'll be coming clean about it with the rest of the world on live TV) fanned out into something close to heartbreaking. The movie strove admirably to give a sympathetic, nonjudgmental picture of the marriage, but the image of Bill, soon to be an ex-player on the world stage, looking at his wife, now the junior Senator for New York, with a trace of sad envy carried just the right small suggestion of revenge, or at least karmic justice.

In contrast to Davis, Dennis Quaid, as Bill, seemed to have trouble pushing some of his lines past the exterior sinus buildup of his putty nose. He didn't entirely leave his game in the makeup chair, though I was surprised that his most effective moments came not when he was being charming but when his Clinton was angry, glaring silently at a TV screen or messing with Tony Blair's head when he felt that he'd been betrayed. As for Michael Sheen's third time out as Blair, he did fine, though it can't be easy for even him to stay interested in spending so much time in the skin of a man who always looked as if he himself desperately wished that he were playing someone else. It may be both a criticism and a compliment that, for me, the main effect of seeing him take his Blair impression around the block one more time was to make me want to revisit the episodes of 30 Rock where he played Liz Lemon's unwanted, charmless British suitor, Wesley Snipes.



Compared to Morgan's scripts for The Deal and The Queen, most of The Special Relationship, which spans the period from 1994 (when Blair emerged as the leader of New Labour) to Clinton's leaving the White House in 2001, Relationship felt scattered for much of its running time, and I began to wonder why Morgan, with his affinity for this sort of thing, didn't try to wring a whole film out of the Lewinsky scandal and another out of the geopolitical maneuvering over Kosovo. It wasn't until near the end that I recognized that Morgan's big idea was that, after feeling a personal and political kinship with Clinton and then feeling disillusioned by the President's personal morality after he'd lied to him about Lewinsky, Blair felt that he'd moved past his "big brother" by taking a stronger public stand over the horrors of Kosovo, and that this left him ready to be impressed by George Bush, Jr.'s idiotic cowboy act--and impressed with himself for his being able to connect with (i.e., suck up to and serve as an oratorical mouthpiece for) a figure with whom he had nothing in common. Those inclined to blame Bill Clinton for everything wrong with the world could thus bask in the irony that he may have even been to blame for Blair's decision that he'd most like to be remembered by history as the international enabler of a man who represented most of what he'd spent most of his political life claiming to oppose.

The sliest touch in the whole movie was saved for the end. Quaid's Clinton, having warned Sheen's Blair not to mistake Bush for anything other than a menace, tries to feel him out about how he plans to handle the new head monkey, and, frustrated, says, "I guess I'll have to be like everybody else, just watching the press conferences on TV, scrutinizing the body language for tell-tale signs." Then the filmmakers splice in actual TV footage of Bush and Blair's first joint press conference, with Bush, all smirking, imbecile arrogance, muttering that Blair had tried to "put the charm offensive on me" at their meeting, and responding to a reporter's question about whether the two have anything in common by grunting that they both used Colgate toothpaste. Cut to Blair, at his podium, looking like Carrie White after the handsomest, most popular boy in school has asked her to the prom: He likes me, he really likes me!