Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: John Carter!

An entire book and countless forum posts have been written about why 2012's John Carter, the last good blockbuster ever made, bombed faster than an IDF thug catching the scent of a child. Some pointed fingers at the title, fabled to have omitted "Of Mars" due to a self-fulfilling superstition among suits than Mars flicks tend to flop, with the result that noone knew who the fuck John Carter was or why they should care. Others blamed the perception that it was too similar to James C*meron's execrable Avatar, based in popular ignorance of exactly who plagiarised whom. Still others blamed poor word-of-mouth resulting from confusing plot elements (presumably the same people who found Inception 2deep4them). But no matter whose fault it was, noone went to see it except me, leaving the remainder of the 2010s a wasteland of sovlless variations on Iron Man punching CGI robots and saying "um, awkward".

Simp: giving m'lady your seat on the bus.
Pimp: man spreading on an eight-legged Mars beast while she jogs to keep up.

The plot will be familiar to early-20th-Century pulp afficionados or anyone who's watched anything ever, because A Princess of Mars was the OG isekai, the template for Superman, and the wellspring of a slew of kino fantasy artwork by Frazetta and others. Chad Confederate civil war veteran Carter (Taylor Kitsch, who is not a merch store for Swifties) is magically transported to Mars where he finds the gravity gap enables his Earth-adapted body to leap hundreds of feet, romances a naked hottie and defeats a succession of enemies to become John Carter of Mars (2012). Sadly the movie at least aimed for general audiences so Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) is way overdressed and undertanned for the bright red nude Edgar Rice Burroughs described (given the shitty box office returns, they might as well have committed to the bit).

This is as slutty as she ever gets, which still makes this the most heterosexual movie of the 2010s by about a Martian mile.

In fact the whole look of the movie is overdesigned, perhaps because so many artists had already given their interpretations and the filmmakers felt they had to add a bit of their own signature on top, with the result that the aesthetic of Helium is an odd mix of Greco-Roman, Indian and other influences that seems somehow familiar yet nonspecific. Many might read this as criticism but it's always interesting to look at, and we should not meanly overlook an earnest cinematic effortpoast.

These transports that look like a cross between a flying fish and dragonfly are wonderfully creative.

It would be easy to overlook amid the spectacle, but there's a strong and sophisticated balance of tone achieved throughout the picture as well. The bookends convey a wide-eyed fanboy wonder alien to the post-Carter blockbuster, the buddyship between Carter and his green, four-armed ally Tars is laced with the sort of humour that makes complete sense for the scenario, and there's some audacious cross-cutting during the Thark fight that rounds out our hero's past without the need for reams of exposition. While this seems like praising the filmmakers for not drooling on themselves, that was to prove a high bar in the decade-plus to come.

>mrw filmmakers don't literally eat paint (i'm actually incredibly easy to please)

Would anything have changed had Carter been a smash hit? There are telltale signs of the directions things would take: out-of-place crash zooms and artificial lens flares make an appearance that might pass unnoticed had they not become a punchline in the hands of morons like Abrams and Snyder, and the Thern subplot sticks out as sequel-bait for a follow-up that would never come. Perhaps we'd now be rolling our eyes through a heckin universerino starring Carter alongside Tarzan, Conan, the Shadow and other pulp characters saying "so that happened" while "Back In Black" plays on the soundtrack because you've heard it. When you look at it that way, an honourable flop isn't so bad, is it?

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Vlad Țepeș!

Who would win: the mightiest superpower of the pre-modern world, or some Hammer horror extras led by the edgiest boi you know? The answer might surprise you.

Vlad III of Wallachia may be the single most mischaracterised figure in history. Everyone has heard of Bram Stoker's excellent but obviously ahistorical Dracula, which portrayed the auspicious Voivode as a becaped vampire, but few realise that horror fiction about him started in his own lifetime, during his twelve-year imprisonment courtesy of his erstwhile ally, Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. The real Vlad was one of the first victims of the ugliest evil in history: mass media. The burgeoning success of the newly minted printing press allowed for the mass production and dissemination of slanderous texts depicting Vlad as a cartoonishly cruel monster who did things like impale pregnant women on spikes, when in reality he impaled violent criminal psychopaths and bloodthirsty, rapacious Ottoman invaders.

In a particularly kino moment, Mehmet's troops advance through this array of skeletal remains to find a vacant stake left waiting for him.

In learning this, your bias will still prompt you to fall back on "but, but, but impaling aaanyone is wrong!" but this ignores the obvious point that in the 15th Century, everyone everywhere used torture and execution of one sort or another, and that Vlad learned his signature moves from the Ottoman Turks themselves during the period in his life in which he served as a janissary in their army because the Ottoman Empire liked to take children in tribute from the peoples it invaded and oppressed. Because in point of fact, the Ottoman Empire was cartoonishly, monstrously evil, but you have never once seen it depicted as such, or learned anything about it at all, because western """"education"""" curricula aren't fit for purpose. In a just world, Vlad would be celebrated as the hero he was, and Mehmet the Conquerer, whom he pushed back against impossible odds, would be reviled the villain.

Yes, this is the same asshole who conquered Constantinople. However, the movie actually massively scaled down the ridiculous ostentatiousness of his turban by about half its size.

"But Pat", you groan oafishly, migraine overtaking you at the prospect of learning any real history, "how should I know such things? Read a whole book? I am an idiot and can't possibly stretch to such a feat". Fear not, dumbass! For there exists a top-10-worthy kinographeme on precisely this subject to both entertain and enlighten you. 1979's Vlad Țepeș, also released in shorter form in the Anglosphere as Vlad the Impaler: The True Life of Dracula, is both the most intelligent historical film ever made, and yet the most exciting, accessible work of entertainment you could ever ask for. You won't need to know thing one about Romania or 15th Century geopolitics to understand this kino, which is far more accurately researched than anything made by H*llywood. Ștefan Sileanu and his moustache excel in the titular role, for this is a Romanian production, set in the authentic vistas of that fabled land.

The scene where Vlad, backed by the sun, looks out approvingly over the peasants working the fields is amusingly reminiscent of 20th Century c*mmunist kitsch, perhaps because it flattered Ceaușescu to pretend Vlad's necessary policies served as a precedent and justification for his goofy dictatorship. Fittingly enough Ceaușescu would be executed at Târgoviște, the 15th Century capital of Wallachia where Vlad fought his decisive action against Mehmet.

It's revealing that this movie based in real history manages to juggle realpolitikal intrigue with rousing battle setpieces better than any made-up fantasy capeshit like Star Wars, Game of Thrones or Gladiator, all of which had far more leeway since their respective writers could make up any scenario they chose. Vlad's effort to unite his people in defence of their homeland is frought with the threat of corrupt, treacherous boyars, who will do anything to prevent Vlad from cleaning house and bringing their gravy train to an end, even if it means selling out to the Ottoman behemoth at their border. The conclusion is bittersweet, as Vlad achieves his goals at the cost of inevitable betrayal and ignominy, but the movie grants him the dignity of self-awareness in the knowledge of the terrible cost his victory incurs.

The pathos of this scene in which the Voivode contemplates the glorious place in history forever denied him because he made the hard choices that no one else would is incredibly hard to overstate. Per Cicero, unpopularity gained by right action is not unpopularity at all, but glory.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Hot Spot!

Spoilers throughout:

Mid population of a small town in the 90s (colourised).

Different plots have different stakes. In Dennis Hopper's greatest film as a director, The Hot Spot, our hero (Don Johnson, Miami Vice) faces a troubling predicament: if he achieves his win condition, he gets to go to the Bahamas and live out his days banging prime Jennifer Connelly. If he loses, he has to live on a small fortune in a big house banging prime Virginia Madsen. This rarely happens to me.

Nooo not sex with Virginia Madsen nooo pleeease anything but that

Johnson's Harry Madox drives into town like a man-with-no-name archetype out of the endless desert of the cinéma only to find himself consistently outwitted and outmatched by Madsen's superlative femme fatale, for he is in the wrong genre, and his efforts at antihero antics - robbing the bank, sweeping Connelly's naïve young hottie off her feet, and disappearing into the sunset - are thwarted by a run of "bad" luck reminiscent of the Kafkaesque determinism of 1945's fateful Detour, all capped off by the malign machinations of Madsen's scenery-chewing nympho villainess. Johnson is willing to go as far as rob a bank, but feels compelled to save a man trapped in a burning building, while Madsen tells him point-blank she's not above child murder to get her way. Like every man first entering into a relationship with a woman, he finds, to his dismay, he's brought a knife to a gunfight; a self-help pamphlet to a Machiavelli book club.

Born to lose: Madox's shirt is striped like an old-timey prison outfit. But will he end up trapped behind bars or in another type of prison?

The early-90s cycle of "erotic thriller/neo-noir" films is a curious case of reviving a genre in an era permissive of more lurid and explicit exploration of a subject matter formerly rendered mysterious by the strictures of the Hayes code. While many like to simperingly praise the old noirs for their enforced restraint, most of them now just play as shy and awkward about sex, not really coy and knowing as their hipster fanbase would prefer you to believe.

These expressions alone would have incurred the banhammer in the 40s.

Noir is largely the flipside of horror in that horror enables women to vicariously experience their fantasies of being pursued obsessively by aggressive men without shame or taboo, while noir allows men to indulge the side of them that wants to be tied down by a sexually uninhibited woman who never "has a headache". Sure, a man's first choice might be globetrotting adventure with wide-eyed Connelly on his arm, but if domestic purgatory comes attached to insatiable Madsen, we can think of worse ways to repay our sins.

(Extremely French existentialist voice) we must imagine ze guy banging Virginia Madsen...happy.

Top 10 Accidentally Rìght Wìng Movies

As a man almost as egregiously verbose as I am will remind you, Hollywood was always pozzed. Nonetheless, since reality leans way to the right of your wine aunt's MSNBC-fueled fever dreams of Drumpf nuking Wakanda, some of our beloved movies can't help but veer into based territory against all intentions.

12 Angry Men

The reproachful glare of two guys whose entire worldview was the opposite five minutes ago when the Overton window in the room was different.

In this 1930s exercise in winning arguments in your head in the shower, Henry Fonda plays the one upstanding citizen who talks a jury of lazy bums, reticent old farts and evil strawmen out of convicting a boy accused of stabbing his father. A rousing morality tale for pompous libs everywhere, until you realise the kid is almost certainly guilty anyway and is going to stab again, all because a bunch of comically impressionable normoids followed the emotional manipulation of a clever psychopath. As Fonda walks them through absurd reach after implausible stretch, they take to sharing in the delusion by making up stories about reading glasses so they can convince themselves post-facto that their acrobatic U-turns were their own ideas. In one bleakly hilarious scene, they all harden their resolve to let the killer walk free because one of the jurors is raaaycist. Realise Fonda plays the devil, and suddenly the movie works!

Starship Troopers

One of these is a horrifying future we must do everything to avoid, but opinions are divided as to which.

Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers follows in the storied tradition of properties like Judge Dredd that attempt to tediously and redundantly satirise rw authoritarianism but instead make it look both necessary and cool. The dystopian future envisioned in the movie is impossibly clean and advanced, everyone is beautiful and healthy, and the prevailing values are camaraderie, excellence and cinematically eugenic sex. Meanwhile, in the enlightened rainbow flag utopia of the 21st Century, priorities are normalising obesity, decriminalising intentional AIDS transmission, and cuckholdry. Sequels attempted to make the satire even more safely in lockstep with the remit of any milquetoast talk show host by bashing Christianity too - which they also made look cool.

X Men

Bryan Sìnger has been called many things: homosexual pedophile, boy toucher, diddler, nonce, creep, pervert, groomer, bacha bazi enthusiast, man-boy love participant, bum bandit, ass pirate, average Hollywood director, and all of the above. Yet in his efforts to subvert and degrade the cultural values of America he accidentally made a 2000 classic that says all the opposite things to what he clearly intended.

Homo superior: cranking one out or taking a dump? You decide!

X Men is clearly meant as a left-liberal fable about how such minorities as the gays and the of colour are people too and should be embraced unconditionally, but accidentally makes the opposite point. Senator Robert Kelly is the strawman foaming-at-the-mouth biggot who wants to enact legislation to publicly identify mutants because they can do things like mind control people and blow up buildings with a glance, which is so obviously reasonable and necessary that he instantly becomes the hero of the movie in the eyes of the entire audience. In actual dialogue he asks what exactly is supposed to stop a woman with the power to become incorporeal and walk through walls from walking into bank vaults and missile silos. Our supposed heroes have no answer for this.

Left of frame, wearing the devil's colours: our heroine. Right of frame, backed by a halo effect, our hateful reactionary. Was the DP secretly based? You decide!

Kelly is further proven right about everything as we are introduced to Magneto (Gandalf), a former concentration camp inmate who now wants to exterminate the human race in a Dave Chappelle bit called "Space Jews". Soyoids seethed over Chappelle's joke - and then Isr*el started giving a million children the Biafra treatment. Didn't really think that one through, huh?

SubUrbia

Is this the shittiest VHS cover ever? Yes.

Slacker director Richard Linklater attempted to tell off white youth by having them hang out outside a convenience store, make fun of its Indian owner, be unlucky in love and in life, and learn Important Lessons too late to be of any use. The whole movie is clearly intended to bluepill the unsuspecting viewer from start to finish: protagonist Giovanni Ribisi is understandably bummed by his bubblegum feminist gf's trendy male-bashing but later learns that what he really wants is to treat her to a nice trip, only to find that it's too late, and she's now a helplessly enamoured groupie for the local rock star. A young PTSD army vet rags on the rock star's manager for her sheltered naïveté, but the joke's on him: erectile dysfunction! And the Indian storeowner dunks on our rabble of youths epic style when he tells them they're wasting their lives while he's studying for a diploma and they'll one day clean his pool. On closer inspection, each of these bluepills is a redpill, except the erectile dysfunction one, which is more of a non-sequitur. In a world where whites had the in-group preference of a normal racial group, they'd show this movie as a warning to their kids to get them to play 20 hours of violin a day or whatever it is Azns do.

The Professionals

Most westerns fall into two unsatisfactory categories: pre-60s boomercon fantasies shot like sitcoms and post-60s visually striking anti-westerns pushing fashionable nihilism. The Professionals is in the latter camp. Characters wonder in loaded dialogue whether global proto-commie revolutions are Good Actually, because in the 60s revolution was a cool buzzword for upper middle class hippy kids sheltered from the reality that revolutions involve murdering a lot of people.

You could have stopped there buddy.

Jack Palance plays the tragically-cool revolutionary antagonist who on the point of death gives a poignant speech comparing the revolution to a great love affair, exciting to get into, but declining inevitably into bitterness and misery. This is supposed to make him sympathetic, but instead it's accidentally a solid warning not to get involved in lw violence because you will inevitably lose control of it and wind up in a mass grave. "What a retard", we think.

Blue Velvet

A challenger appears!

While David Lunch himself is famous for refusing to explain his often cryptic films, critics have typically viewed Blue Velvet as a satirical attack on Norman Rockwell suburbia for some imagined hypocrisy. The only problem is that it makes small town Americana look unironically good and the forces that assail it from the bad side of town unambiguously bad. 60s hippy icon Dennis Hopper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) is significantly cast as the disruptive element and getting drawn into Hopper's world, far from his leafy street, is what starts to corrupt Kyle McLachlan's Jeffrey's soul. A similar misreading of Twin Peaks would later compound critics' uniform worthlessness.

Scream

Imagine designing a mask this cool only for soyjaks to drop decades later and completely ruin it.

While its popularisation of reddit deconstructionism and surface level girl power themes skew soyward, Scream is today a reactionary classic since (spoilers) the plot hinges on Sidney misidentifying her mom's killer because hash tag believe womxn. Without our heroine's misguided determination to believe her mom was rayped by an evil cispig, the real killer might have been apprehended long ago. Things get still more unintentionally keyed and redpilled in the third instalment which anticipated hash tag me too by the best part of two decades. You remember hash tag me too - that was when multimillionaire AWFLs in Hollywood launched their hostile takeover against the equally left-liberal but male establishment of Tinseltown on the basis that they were all rapists, which raged across the headlines until they realised the rìght wìng wants the evil of that California cesspool exposed as mercilessly as possible, at which point they became embarrassed and it trailed off. Chuds stay winning!

The Leopard

"OK Claudia, for the next take I want you to give me your absolute least DTF look. You know what, good enough" - Visconti

Neorealism-transcender Luchino Visconti overcompensated for his aristocratic wealth and bougie homosexuality by fronting as a c*mmunist, which was the hip thing to be in Italian cinema until they discovered the reactionary joys of making hilarious gay-bashing Mad Max ripoffs in the 80s. Fortunately he retained enough atavistic vestiges of humanity to make The Leopard, an undisputed masterwork that reads as a lament for the passing of aristocratic grandeur in the face of the ugly, prosaic politics of modernity. I might do a whole piece on it some other time, but if I don't, watch it anyway.

Leslie: My Name Is Evil

This is supposed to be a salacious headline but the only thing misleading here is the emphasis on Charlie himself.

Another unintended satire of itself, Leslie (also released as Manson Girl or Manson: My Name Is Evil because everyone knows Charlie is the real draw) tells the story of how Leslie Van Houten became involved with the Family and stabbed a woman who was probably already dead, before being convicted in one of the most famous trials of the 20th Century. The director would later try to backpedal on a scene in the movie that shows Leslie's mother pressuring her to kill her unborn child by saying that the message was supposed to be that telling someone abortion is homicide would somehow legitimise future killing in that young person's mind, as opposed to the less come-on-now reading that enabling someone to kill would degrade the value of human life in her reckoning.

Me making the libtards' movies make sense (2024, colourised).

The movie then goes on to make the case, completely straight-facedly, that murdering randos is OK because the US military killed more people in Vietnam, blatantly ignoring that the anti-colonialist c*mmie faction started the war (every Nam flick does this). This whataboutery is so comically weak that, far from strengthening Leslie's standing with the audience, it drains all sympathy for her and makes what is supposed to be a bitter ending, with the troubled juror swayed by her hippyish charms resolving to convict her instead being satisfying. Despite its intentions, well worth pirating for the performances. The guy who plays Manson is gr8.

The Joker

The struggle is real.

In 2019, the journos of the world decided it would be fun to try to encourage a mass shooting at a cinema by creating from whole cloth a narrative that perennial safe punching bags "incels" would commit just such a heinous crime on the movie's release. The fact The Joker went out of its way to avoid taking a political stance (the title character literally states he's not political) didn't stop the mass media machine from delivering their hated foes a gift by making it political. For them, any movie showing a sympathetic portrayal of an economically disadvantaged, socially awkward whiteboi was unacceptable. Fortunately, the crowd they tried so hard to provoke weren't taking the bait, and no shooting occurred - but a contemporaneous screening of Frozen 2 featured a machete fight, go figure. Expect the unwanted upcoming Joker 2 to try way too hard to placate lib sensibilities in penance for the unintended thoughtcrimes of the first.

For the sake of balance I'll do a top ten accidentally lw movies too as soon as ten movies trying to be rw have been made. Until next time!

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tilly and Gus!

Would you buy a boat from this man?

As movie genres go, comedy is deader than the western. I couldn't even name a comedy movie released this decade, much less one worth watching. Perhaps Judd Apatow killed it with his sub-Paranormal Activity levels of effort in sitting SNL also-rans in a room and having them exchange improv not funny enough to get laughs and blow the take, then calling it a movie. An ignominious end to a genre that was at the forefront of innovation back in the silent age. The action genre never got close to producing anything as good as Girl Shy's chase scene until 1980, and Keaton and Lloyd pioneered test screening to fine-tune their routines for maximum laughs in what was then an admirably humble act of deference to populist taste, not the pantomime of corporate greed and soulless incloosion we think of now.

Test audiences now: omg this is giving me anxiety, change everything at once!
Test audiences then: throw a real baby in the ocean bitch, i dare you

While the dawn of the talkies at least temporarily (I'm being kind) retarded the artform in general, comedy stayed strong into the 1930s thanks to a small number of vaudeville veterans stepping up to the plate. The Marx Brothers took full advantage of sound technology to engage in rapid-fire wordplay, but W.C. Fields best kept the torch of silent-era setpiece shenanigans held high. To the extent that he indulges in verbosity, it often sounds like he's just mumbling to himself, and he was often known to show up drunk on set and wing it.

His movies often drop a fully-formed routine into the mix with the bare minimum of plot relevancy because it's funny, sort of like a vignette in a Godard flick except the audience enjoys it too.

While Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo had fixed personas, Fields's character lurched arbitrarily from hapless sitcom dad to slick trickster archetype to slovenly funny drunk to sharp-tongued cynic from one film to the next and sometimes in the course of a single vehicle. His charismatic comic DNA can be found in iterations from Homer Simpson to Basil Fawlty to Tony Soprano, making him somehow the Ghengis Khan of iconic characters. Against all probability, yet forged inevitably through his rigorous tours of duty on the vaudeville circuit, it all worked and gelled into a sort of avatar of entertainment itself, a carnival barker at the gates of cinéma.

Pls make like a duck and wipe your feet on entry.

To be honest, most Fieldskinos could qualify for Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week, but there's not much you can write about a comedy except to give away the jokes, so we may choose to let this stand in for the ouevre as a whole. At a 55 minute runtime as slim as its star is not, Tilly and Gus might be the most concentrated distillation of the Fields picture. There's no time for the charming musical detours that give that variety-show flavour to other entries, just an amble through comic scenarios that culminates in a high-stakes steam boat race. Watch Tilly and Gus today.