Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 19. Hyperbolea!

Theme: Lady of Winter - Crimson Glory

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Band Wagon!

The best musical you'll ever see contains the best noir you'll ever see.

The notes from Fred Astaire's first screen test famously pronounced "can't sing, can't act, can dance a little". By 1953, Astaire's status as cinéma's great song-and-dance man was so thoroughly established that you could open a movie by riffing on his trademark top-hat-and-tails motif as easily as you could Boris Karloff's neck bolts or Béla Lugosi's cape. So starts The Band Wagon, in which Astaire sends up his role as elder statesman of the movie musical with the well-judged light touch that characterised everything he did. The opening scene has a hapless auctioneer attempt to sell those top hats, canes and tailcoats to an indifferent assembly of bidders. Fred has fallen on hard times and needs a new angle to revive his once-illustrious career. But before the plot kicks into high gear he has time to pick himself up with a routine about the apparently delirious joys of a shoe-shine. I guess people were easier to please back then.

Not exactly beating those light-in-the-loafers allegations with a sign declaring your routine "the gayest music" right behind you. Everyone's a critic.

"But Pat", you rumble in confused effrontery, "what need have I of such a rec? Musicals are for women and their cooties!" Right attitude, wrong conclusion. The Band Wagon is a compelling thesis film, boldly championing art for entertainment's sake. The plot involves a ham-and-cheese actor-producer commandeering Astaire's comeback piece as a vector for his Very Important Social Message, to the inevitable detriment of the production. But because this is no heavy-handed diatribe, it's played wisely for laughs, and The Band Wagon leads by example by giving over more and more of its runtime to setpieces of defiantly little consequence.

The movie's thesis song and breakaway hit is literally called "That's Entertainment". Strangely none of the verses list smarmy bathetic interruptions or delusional rants about "cat calling".

By way of an example so self-consciously trite that YouTube video essayists could stain their pants over the meta-non-metaness of it all, the Pride & Prejudice-esque rom-com antagonism between Astaire and co-star Cyd Charisse kicks off over his age (162) and her smoking (cigarettes), in an exchange so petty and childish it almost qualifies as parody. It's like the writers are telling you "this formula works even when it's telegraphed and played for laughs", and when you doubt them, they show you.

Dancing partners squaring up must be like Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef squinting at each other for homosexuals.

Many of the best movies wind their way up to a grand setpiece: the climbing of the department store in Safety Last!, the tanker chase in The Road Warrior, the star gate in 2001. The Band Wagon pays off in an extended sequence more-or-less alluded to in prior dialogue but almost out-of-left-field in its content. The "Girl Hunt Ballet" is a roughly 12-minute movie-within-a-movie so surreal, that so encapsulates the knife-edge balance of the sublime and the ridiculous that is the heart of great kino, and so completely gratuitous to such petty nonsense as the "plot", it might just make you want to take up torch and pitchfork against what the movies have become (in Minecraft).

This sequence hits like the Dalí-art-directed dream sequence in Spellbound. Audacious.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Manhunter!

The true test of a movie is how cool it can make looking out a window.

Much as Dark City was the superior film overshadowed by the midwit-friendly Matrix blockbuster, so too Manhunter was doomed to obscurity by the runaway success of Soylent of the Lambs, a made-for-TV-looking movie in which convicted murderer Hannibal Lecter takes pains to stress that blatantly transsexual killer Buffalo Bill isn't a "real" transsexual, because it's very important to tiptoe around GLAAD's sensibilities in between murdering and eating people.

Go on, clap for your safe-edgy antiheroes signed off by the rapists in Hollywood.

So popular was Soylent in its day that it was not until Ridley Scott's embarrassing followup Hannibal, more than a decade later, that people started to catch on that le heckin wholesome serial killer was little more than a fedora lib, so when the series petered out in disgrace with prequel Hannibal Rising, in which the titular protagonist literally wears a fedora and dispatches mean bullies with a fucking katana for disrespecting his Azn waifu, it wasn't so much a case of artistic decline as the emperor doing a twirl to confirm that, no, your eyes did not deceive you, he really wasn't wearing any clothes.

Fortunately one kino did emerge from the unpromising Thomas Harris source material. Michael Mann is hit-and-miss, but here his signature style, honed on Thief and Miami Vice, is put to its best use. Mann matter-of-factly guts the source novel (the ending is completely different and much better for it) to deliver a bleary, oneiric experience shot through with cool 80s synths, hypnotically understated performances and a heightened visual sense that puts Soylent's drab palette to shame.

Find me a shot as good as the worst of these in Soylent. That's right, you can't, because there isn't one.

William Petersen stars as Will Graham, FBI agent with a PhD in staring hauntedly. He used to hunt serial killers, but he's out of that life, dammit, until his old pal pulls him out of retirement for one last job. While this has since become a dead-horse cliché, I think it was still relatively uncommon when Manhunter dropped. The feds need Graham back, because there's a new killer in town: Literally Me, played by 6'5" Tom Noonan. Literally Me is a socially awkward sperg with a cleft palate scar and the tard strength of ten men, who knocks off families for bullshit psychobabble reasons expounded in the b**k but wisely glossed over in the kino. To catch Me, Agent Graham must turn to an unlikely source of insight...Hannibal Lecktor!

In a based display of contempt for the source novel reminiscent of Kubrick's mockery of Stephen King in The Shining, Mann changed the spelling of the name from Lecter to Lecktor. He then gave Harris a wedgie.

While Anthony Hopkins has a lot of infectious fun with the character in Soylent, Brian Cox's portrayal is much creepier. He lets his mouth hang open like a shark or a ravenous pitbull, giving a base, animalistic counterpoint to his polite erudition. Cox has little screentime, but he elevates the character. Nonetheless, this is Noonan's picture, and his Literally Me is perhaps the greatest onscreen serial killer, quietly diffident in his everyday dealings with others, breathlessly grandiose in his presentation to a captive journo, effortlessly sympathetic as he finds love with a blind woman who can accept him both for the ripped giant and the troubled introvert he is.

Literally Me > The Joker (2019) > Travis Bickle > Patrick Bateman > Drive (2012).

In the first half-to-two-thirds of the movie he may fill the shoes of the antagonist, but somewhere in the second act our POV shifts seamlessly to match his, and we root for him at least as hard as for Graham. Pseudo-moralists might fret at this, but this is a deeply Jungian film and we sense in Me the shadow archetype, both boogeyman and whipping boy, that we must recognise and integrate into ourselves to fully realise our humanity. It's important not to sanitise our antiheroes in the manner of Lecter in all those lesser iterations for precisely this reason: the PC-compliant monster still affords us the safe distancing of denial.

/ourboi/ literally lurking in the background like an actual shadow. You think any aspect of the composition in this movie is an accident?

And this theme is developed subtly, unobtrusively, visually throughout the picture, as Graham increasingly becomes Me by retracing his steps, learning to think as he does. Parallels between the characters are suggested by devices as simple as Graham staring at his reflection in the glass before uttering his vow to find Me, or as slyly subliminal as this:

The low angle on the ascending floors of the structure suggest a ribcage or the wings of the Red Dragon painting. "Oh, surely that's but a coincidence!" No. There's no way this just happened to be the most convenient building to shoot in. You have to look pretty hard and sign a lot of paperwork to film a real movie somewhere like this. It's not even a plot-important scene.

Manhunter would be redundantly remade (or, rather, Red Dragon readapted) and the only conceivable reason to watch that version is to compare the style and flare of the 80s classic with the later flick's prosaic plodding. 80s reviewers whined that Manhunter was too stylish, while some later bitched that it had become "dated". A cursory comparison with the later Red Dragon totally vindicates Manhunter's coolmaxxing approach. It also boasts the best soundtrack of the 80s:

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dhoom!

A perfect movie for a rainy day.

In the 2000s, which I remember because I'm the oldest man alive, I recall having the observation that the 2000s, unlike previous decades, had no aesthetic of their own. That they were somehow simply an outgrowth of the 90s. Much later, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, I came to find this was a discount-Lindyman opinion that cropped up almost weekly on the internet, like that anime-food-looks-good tweet or the rest stop with the fast food outlets. Yet, were this observation true, Dhoom, and its sequel Dhoom 2, couldn't very well embody the precise aesthetic "2000s MTV", which they do.

Screens 2 & 3 show the same thing with like a half-second delay. Pointless, yet stylish (which is a point in itself).

The movie begins with a 24esque split-screen sequence in which cool-guy motorcycle bandits knock off an armoured cash transport. 24 premiered in 1999, but so did The Sopranos, and noone questions the 2000sness of that. As though the opening were a dream, we then cut to our straight-man hero, Jai Dixit (Abishek Bachchan) waking up to find his hot ass wife (Rimi Sen) performing 2000s MTV antics that remind 35-y/o boomers of a time when MTV was basically softcore with 10s, instead of now, when it's hardcore with 3s.

There was a decade of Midriffcore called the 2000s... Here in this pretty world Heterosexuality took its last bow... Here was the last ever to be seen of Hotties and their Midriffs Fair, of Low Rise Jeans and Stripper Heels... Look for it only in VEVO channels, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind...

Officer Dixit, whose name, to the delight of Anglophone viewers, sounds like "dick shit", is called to Marine Drive to investigate the bike gang's bullshit and ends up running with goofball petty thief Ali (Uday Chopra), who admittedly is more like a comic-relief sidekick from a 90s flick, but perhaps time works differently in India. I'm not sure if the 80s-style buddy-cop formula was popular in India before this, but it's fun to imagine Bollywood repurposed it long after its remarkably undistinguished heyday in the west and casually turned it into kino. I think Jai is supposed to be a Hindu and Ali a Muslim, but my knowledge of Indian social dynamics is extremely limited, so I can happily ignore any s*cial c*mmentary that may be intended. Suffice it to say you have an Abbottesque straight man and a Costelloish goofball, and together they ride motorcycles, get in fistfights with street toughs, and bicker with each other entertainingly.

Exciting chase scene from Dhoom or average day in London? You decide!

One thing that makes Dhoom so endearing is its unselfconsciousness. There's great wisdom and modesty in filling your movie full of cool, fun things because they're cool and fun, from fast cars and motorcycles to MTVesque jump cuts and slo-mo to full music videos playing throughout the end credits. Compare and contrast buck-toothed Hollywood productions neurotically, apologetically commenting on every genre convention they employ.

>mfw disney's marvel's captain iron man turns to the camera and says "um, so i guess that's a thing now"

The success of Dhoom would spawn a sequel every bit as entertaining, with more stunts, more banter, more midriffs and locations on three continents. Sadly, a belated third entry (Dhoom 3, 2013) would fail to hit the right notes, borrowing more from the srs bsns angst of Christopher Nolan pictures than the colourful flair of 2000s MTV. With few exceptions, the 2000s were the last decade to produce worthwhile movies, many of which don't feel "2000s" because they're set in past eras (Pirates of the Caribbean 1, Lord of the Rings) or strange dream worlds of their own (South of Heaven). For the extremely small niche audience that wants time capsule kino for this half-forgotten decade, Dhoom will tick that box.

Christina Aguilera would be proud.