The World Warrior
I'm at a loss as to how to introduce, explain or comment on this particular video. It's from Jackie Chan's 1993 film City Hunter. That's all I've got:
Child
Last night I went to see Winter's Bone, Debra Granik's second feature and adapted from a “country noir” novel by Daniel Woodrell. The plot is simple enough: lifelong Ozark meth cook Jessup Dolly put the family home up on bond and then jumped bail. Now it's up to his seventeen-year-old daughter Ree – the sole caretaker of her young siblings and their near-catatonic mother – to track him down; or, as she puts it: “I'm huntin' for Jessup.” The film is set in the impoverished and crystal meth-diseased Missouri backwoods. The cars are ancient, food comes from the land, everyone's takes care of at least a family of animals, and a miasma of sheer violence hangs in the air whenever a conversation starts. Considering that crank is as established in the culture as hunting, that's no surprise. The only genuinely sympathetic adult character in the film is Ree's uncle Teardrop (Deadwood's John Hawkes,) who snorts a key on-screen at least three separate times. Meanwhile, consider, for a moment, how hard a man must be to go around calling himself “Teardrop” in such a male-oriented culture that Ree gets asked if there's no man in her life who could do for her what she's set out to do on her own.

Co. the official movie site
The film follows the standard routine of a noir: a steely character goes about meeting shady – and occasionally, ruthlessly important – individuals, stirring up what shouldn't be stirred by asking all the wrong questions, getting beat up, all while trying to a very certain and very foul endgame. The only difference is that instead of an introspective middle-aged drunk like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, it's Ree Dolly, who despite her age and experience could probably stare down a black bear if things came down to it. Her entire attitude toward her unimaginable situation is summed up in a single scene where, beaten within an inch of her life, she's dragged into a barn full of the cold-eyed, lip-licking, decaying high rollers of the local meth trade. Ordering them to kill her, if they're gonna, she learns her death has “already been set,” and if there's anything else she wants. Replying in the most indignant and impatient tone a battered teenager can muster, she spits out “well, you can help me. Anyone thought of that?”

Co. the official movie site
Having grown up a city-boy, I can't think of any other film I've seen that creates a world so utterly strange as Ree Dolly's Missouri. Everything about the film just stinks of real, even though the characters, with a few exceptions, are static and the pacing is deliberate. The social culture, where one hand bloodies your nose while the other holds your hand on the way toward salvation, is foreign and yet so fully developed that suspension of disbelief was barely even necessary. Check out the trailer below, and see the film if you can.
Regression Analysis
Dashiell Hammett wrote two seminal hardboiled detective fiction novels: Red Harvest and The Glass Key. The Glass Key was later made into two films; one in 1935 and another much more popular version in in 1942. The noir stylings of the 1942 version were used as the visual/thematic basis for the 1946 Bogart classic The Big Sleep, based on the Raymond Chandler novel.
The Big Sleep was then used as the framework for the Coen Brothers' film The Big Lebowski. That's not all for the Coen Brothers, however. A line of dialogue in Red Harvest was used as the title for their film Blood Simple and The Glass Key was used as the plot source for Miller's Crossing.
Akira Kurosawa's classic ronin film Yojimbo had two big influences. The plot clearly came from either The Glass Key or Red Harvest, depending on who you ask. The visual styling came from classic American Western films. The favor would be returned when Sergio Leone remade it as the Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars. Yojimbo would later be taken back to its Prohibition-era roots when remade again as the Bruce Willis action-noir Last Man Standing.
Remains Of The Day Lunchbox
Obsessed with trivia as I am, I like to think that I have a keen eye for certain off-hand references in films. Christopher Guest's 1996 mockumentary Waiting for Guffman has two little background details that I find very amusing, for no reason in particular. I think it is the fact that just as there are no extra words in a poem, there are no extra set pieces on a film. So the decision to insert these aspects was a conscious choice on behalf of Guest (or whoever does his sets.)

The first is an OK Soda machine in the school gym the cast is using for rehearsal. OK Soda was Coca Cola's abortive early-90s attempt to capture the hearts of Generation X and engineered by the same brilliant minds responsible for the New Coke fiasco. OK Soda attempted to play to their disaffection with an disaffected but anti-bleak ad campaign (“OK Soda does not subscribe to any religion, or endorse any political party, or do anything other than feel OK.”) and featured a self-consciously minimalist design; it resembled a cross between pop art and the Brand-X “BEER” cans in Repo Man.

The second is the copy of Waiting for Godot, in reference to the film's title, under Corky's drink on the lefthand side. Incidentally, the only reason I recognized it is because it is the same printing as the one I found in my grandmother's house when I was fifteen. I've yet to see that cover appear anywhere else but that bookshelf and this film.
Oh, and the post title comes from one of my favorite visual gags of all time:

Chick Chicky Boom
If you were a kid around 1994, you probably saw The Mask. For me, it was one of the few films I saw with my mom in a theater, so I remember it pretty well. I had always been a big fan of Tex Avery and his very particular style in Looney Tunes and MGM cartoons. The film was like one of Tex's shorts brought to life, full of wacky nobody-really-gets-hurt violence and innocuous lechery. Which made the comic that inspired it surprise me all the more.

Click to enlarge
Mayhem #2, Dark Horse Comics, June 1989
I've been reading the old Mask comics recently, and the fact that they inspired what is, for all intents and purposes, a kids' movie is staggering. Instead of the film's wacky, mischievous, the comic's Big Head (as the papers covering his murders call him) is a serial killer with a twisted sense of humor, more akin to the Joker than anything from a cartoon. The big change for the film was that, as Wikipedia states, while they “had problems coming up with a script that could show violence that was comical, but had more success with a story that had comedy that was violent.” As a genuine fan of cinematic violence, I never thought this would be a good thing
Honestly? From what I've read of the comic so far, it turns me off. The 80s were a period faulted by dark-for-the-sake-of-dark. The Mask comes off as indulgence with nothing to hold it up. As far as the IP goes, I'll stick with this:
Anticipate the Explosion
Bananas wasn't the only Woody Allen film to feature an actor we would only grow to love later in his career. 1977's Annie Hall features a young Christopher Walken. In this film he plays Annie's somewhat off brother, Duane Hall. You can very well see how he develops into an actor whose every word triggers the human fight-or-flight reflex.
Frosty!
The heat wave continues, with temperatures reaching a record 102F today. Here's some stuff to cool you down for the night:
I Will Better The Instruction
Last night, I finally knocked off the Spring semester. Due to Circumstances, I was forced to take an Incomplete in an English course – the dreaded and eldritch Overview of Literature Part I – and didn't complete the term paper until around 11 PM last night. So, considering that I had to spend the better part of yesterday pontificating on The Merchant of Venice, I figured there may as well be some overlap here. Here are both Orson Welles and Al Pacino reciting Shylock's monologue:

