Hard-Boiled Hot Fuzz
HONG KONG RISING
John Woo’s 1992 Hard Boiled opens with a determined fist brutally slamming a drink-tumbler onto dark table-top and thus mixing a carbonated sluice of hard liquor, foisted by famed Hong Kong star Chow Yun-Fat and then thrown back furiously with a gutsy grimace before he exhales cigarette smoke and starts in on the clarinet -- with some lite tune like “A Few of My Favorite Things” -- at a smoky jazz-bar spot.
The image of delicate, melodic chops lapped up with high-proof alcohol and blown out in eighth notes and second-hand smoke nicely sets up John Woo’s morality tale of good-guy/bad-guy indistinction, like so many fast-cutting shots in his movies of birds launched into flight with bullets exploding in every feather-dusted fire-grazed direction.
Later, at an all-nite neon-cloaked dim-sum joint, Tequila (Yun-Fat) and his partner chat over pot-stickers in the wee hours about how great the food in Hong Kong is, like you can’t get it anywhere else in the world. (The shadow of Hong Kong handed back to China is the subtext for this conversation, suggesting that these characters must soon decide to stay under China or break west.)
But the calming dim sum is just a front: Tequila eyeballs the action lining up at tea tables in the periphery, as patrons bring pet birds in cages and chat over food while handing each other tawdry manila envelopes bulging with paper.
Then, suddenly, the pot-stickers fly with caroming tea-kettles, and birds broken out of cages flap a hundred pairs of wings with ripped feathers and blasted cooking flour launched into a maelstrom of gunplay. The whole joint is crawling with undercover narcs and heavily armed bad guys. Super-stylized hell-on-earth rips open, with random homicide recouped for aesthetic brilliance like a ballistics waterfall, and bullet-holes rip the room in a cascade of bodies in explosively balletic melee. Tequila’s guns -- discharged sideways, crossways, and from every other cool angle -- never seem to empty, even when he hurdles booths and navigates stairwells like a Cirque de Soleil acrobat, sliding into impossible crossfire to rain down death and dismay on the enemy.
And, it turns out, the enemy was just another undercover, whom Tequila dispatches with a spat-out toothpick and bloody backblast into his ghostly, flour-caked face. How he keeps the toothpick in his mouth through the entire fight, who can tell? But the police action has been in vain, as Tequila loses good cops and good friends only to take out one of their own posing as a bad guy.
“Tequila” is a stand-in for “Tango” or “Cash,” for IceMan, McBain, and Callahan, all the hyper-cool, super-tough action stars of exploitative American cinema. But Hard Boiled ends up a subtle critique of the American action movie, even as a tsunami of explosions and gun blasts blow the viewer’s eyes wide open in rhythmic regularity. This is the sheer genius of John Woo, to make a movie originally titled “Hot-Handed God of Cops,” with a body count of 307 (according to Wikipedia), and turn his bad-ass action-movie sources inside-out, to do American action one better while commenting on how futile and silly the scenarios can be.
From this, moments of transcendent madness way beyond Woo’s American production Face/Off (1997), where a kid listens to “Over the Rainbow” on earphones while mommy and daddy blow away feds with shotties and grenade launchers.
Truly, when I saw Hard Boiled years ago at the Film Center Hong Kong Festival and then at a midnight Village showing, it blew my mind with the possibilities, with the kind of bad action crap I grew up watching but now re-mixed through a suave Asian playboy sensibility replete with jazz, hard drinking, and fashion anachronisms a’plenty.
Oh, and of course, a great knack for the comic homicidal one-liner, the spasmodic death throes, the last-stand speeches, the stray “COVER ME” that bespeaks homo-filial violence. And such a comfort to know that, while I wasted my time with video games and bad movies at the mall as a teenager, someone across the globe was watching too, and taking notes to turn the action movie right on its head while multiplying “bad-ass” by a factor of 100.
And, later still, others watched Woo to re-make and re-mix, to feed Hong Kong action back to America as our latest pulp fiction, lifted from others who lifted from us.
ET TU, BRITAIN?
The recent release of Dragon Dynasty’s two-disc “ultimate” Hard Boiled had me hit the Uptown Border’s bookstore for that, plus the DVD premiere of England’s Hot Fuzz (2007). A reminder in Austria some weeks ago, the bar postcard emblazoned in German:
“Zwei Bad Boys räumen auf!” (My trans. -- “Two Bad Boys go-off/throw-down!”)
And the poster-image has stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost flying into nowhere from out of nowhere, sui generis, in a fiery haze, complete with mirror-plated shades and unbreakable toothpicks jutting from the maw.
Of course, the reference here is to the Bad Boys franchise (1995/2003), with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. But the United Kingdom re-casts an American action “classic” with all bobbies blasting, as the impeccably mannered British get in on the typically American dirty-work of good-old-fashioned ass-kicking.
The scenario is standard: Fish Out of Water, a staple of comedy. Here, a good, smart London cop gets re-assigned because he’s simply too good, ending up in a country village that prides itself on winning prizes for being such a gem of pastoral Britain seemingly frozen in time.
Once Nicholas Angel (Pegg) arrives in the idyllic township of Sandford, Gloucestershire, the movie plays out a bit like The Odd Couple. Officer Angel is a by-the-books super-pro (both at the gritty stuff and the paper work incurred by field action), trained in urban pacification and riot control. He finds himself paired up with one of various village drunks, an oafish-lout wannabe whom he busts on his first night in town for public inebriation.
But partner Danny Butterman (Frost) is the police chief’s son, and his co-workers are an odd, sleepy, lackadaisical, slack-jawed lot who break at 11 a.m. for pints at the pub, all to Angel’s chagrin.
Even so, Angel goes about his job with a stiff upper lip. And when dead bodies start piling up in innocent little Sandford, he uncovers the dark secret behind the town’s paradisical cover-story.
Which of course all leads to an apocalyptic gun-battle finale, and a DAMN GOOD one like out of Sam Peckinpah, in which Angel and Butterman strap on an arsenal and unload crates of buckshot in the town plaza. And never-ending gunfights of course lead to even longer end-game fist-fights when the ammo runs out, so Angel wrestles his nemesis in a miniature outdoor model of Sandford, visually tearing apart the fantasy of small-town England as un-touched Eden.
At one point in the film, Angel and Butterman stop at a smallish grocery store, and Danny amuses himself by reading off the videos for sale, vintage American and Hong Kong action flicks. Later, he asks Angel many juvenile, show-and-tell questions about being a cop, like “You ever fired two guns whilst flying through the air? … Is it true that there is a place in a man’s head, that if you shoot it, it will blow up?” He can’t believe it when Angel admits to never having seen Bad Boys II or Point Break. But eventually, Butterman and Angel fulfill the phallic, homo-erotic goal of the action/buddy flick: "Aufräumen," as the German-language ads put it. To get off by going off.
And Edenic England -- like the hinterlands of Illinois or China -- surely has been touched by globalization, by the preponderance of American action movies and real-life weaponry circulating the Earth. In fact, with Hot Fuzz, they’ve even re-mixed triumphal American visual narratives of violence and gunplay, like a full-bodied ale that sends you under the pub counter as a delicious one-too-many shot.
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas Review
I moved to the Bay Area in 1992 for grad school with the idea of becoming a professor, but instead I wandered down the wrong path with the criminal element on campus – petty thieves, small-time hustlers, gangbangers, and drug fiends – always on the verge of dropping out, on the same turf where Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters first dropped acid with the Grateful Dead.
My reading list became whatever would transport me from lecture-hall boredom: Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night (1968), Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). For some reason, I gravitated toward '60s New Journalism that put me in a world of dropouts and freaks, maybe because those were the only people I felt comfortable around on the campus that would soon welcome Chelsea Clinton.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas spoke to me most closely, since its characters (Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo) were not only chemically-fused maniacs but also socially committed products of '60s failed hopes. They went to Las Vegas not to escape but to drive straight into the belly of the beast – the American nexus of all things ignorant and malicious – to push the boundaries of perceived freedom with a politics of confrontation they'd used in their activism.
It was 1971, and Vegas was the perfect oasis of greedy flash, whose excess and materialism went hand in hand with extreme drug laws based in countercultural fear. Where else could one see a bloated Elvis perform, before he went to D.C. and begged President Nixon to become a narcotics agent?
The Bay Area punk band The Dead Kennedys would pick up on this irony years later in their angry cover of "Viva Las Vegas." And now, after 27 years of Thompson's "Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," director Terry Gilliam brings the book to life.
Art Linson's film Where the Buffalo Roam (1979) attempted a mesh of Thompson's life and times, with Bill Murray as Thompson and Peter Boyle as the attorney. But this ended up a scattered, gag-dependent work, with Dr. Gonzo (based on Chicano Movement attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta) turning into a Hungarian drug lawyer named Lazlo. A Chicano actors' group protested the film, by the way, since it completely missed the mark on Acosta.
But Gilliam seems the perfect choice for the expressionistic, visual romp that the new adaptation becomes. As well, his other films (Brazil, 12 Monkeys) tend to play out the same basic romanticism advanced by Fear and Loathing: that the only solution to the madness of an oppressive and malignant world is insanity.
By 1971, Thompson and Acosta both sensed a conservative backlash. Joplin, Hendrix, and Morrison had proven the futility of living fast and dying young, while Manson's peculiar take on flower power gave the establishment more ammunition, above and beyond the bullets used by the National Guard to kill four students at Kent State. The Pentagon Papers would soon unravel Nixon's foreign and domestic misdeeds, and L.A. journalist Ruben Salazar had been murdered by police during a massive Chicano protest, proving that this, too, can happen in our country.
But their realization came from years of social commitment. Acosta got his legal training in the Bay Area birthplace of the Black Panthers, moving to East L.A. to defend Corky Gonzalez and other Chicano activists. Thompson was pushing where journalists should go, getting jumped by Hell's Angels and Chicago police at the '68 Democratic Convention.
All points led to Vegas in April 1971, and so the two loaded up a briefcase full of drugs, scammed a convertible, and drove off, with a sports magazine assignment to cover a desert road race. Thompson described their trip in his book as "a gross physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country."
The book was serialized in Rolling Stone months later, and Acosta felt that Thompson had ripped him off by transcribing their conversations. This claim was taken seriously by the publisher, who cut a deal with Actosta to publish his memoirs, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), in return for waiving any possible legal action.
While the movie expertly merges biography and fantasy into a surreal, hellish vision, Gilliam depends on the two central actors' interpretation of their real-life counterparts. Johnny Depp creates a manneristic composite of Thompson and Raoul Duke, much like Bill Lee is based on William Burroughs in David Cronenberg's version of Naked Lunch. Depp picks up Thompson's personal quirks and the more difficult task of the author's frenetic thought process, this from having shaved his head and spent time with Thompson in Colorado.
Puerto Rico-born actor Benicio Del Toro gained 40 pounds to inhabit the explosive corpulence of Dr. Gonzo, and he exhaustively interprets the full-body freakout-deathwish mindset of Acosta, right down to his ulcerous vomiting and subtle markers of racial difference. Acosta's son Marco also consulted on his father's portrayal.
But without these characters' context of political engagement, their nihilistic search for answers is drowned by the Vegas spectacle. The film relies on stock footage to imply history in much the same style as Oliver Stone's chaotic newsreel panoramas.
Regardless, the era's hopelessness and characters' self-destructive salvation are epitomized in Gilliam's grotesque, claustrophobic filming, especially when the two snort ether from Old Glory and stumble through a 35-foot devilishly horrific clown head into a coliseum of bizarre trapeze acts, apes in Klan hoods, and Nazi rednecks shooting at duck-targets in Viet Cong hats. There's even an Apocalypse Now nod when they run into renegade dune-buggy warriors playing "The Flight of the Valkyries."
Acosta disappeared without a trace in 1974, and Thompson has since shot his journalistic wad. But I'm reminded of an intoxicated conversation with a speed freak at grad school:
"We're the fuck-ups of this community," I said.
He answered: "We're the leaders of tomorrow!"
—by Benjamin Ortiz
San Antonio Current 28 May 1998
Bring Me the Head of Antonio Banderas
The Marketing of Zorro Masks History
By Benjamin Ortiz
With the North American Free Trade Agreement in high gear, the most recent Zorro adaptation seems oddly relevant. Not that the filmmakers wanted audiences to draw comparisons between an imaginary 19th century crusader and a band of contemporary masked guerrillas in Mexico (Los Zapatistas) who share the same initial.
In a telling displacement, the film's villain, Don Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson), proclaims "Welcome to the future of California," when he returns from exile in Spain and takes over a gold mine through kidnapped slave labor, with plans to buy the state from Mexico's Gen. Santa Anna. The movie was filmed entirely in Mexico - this scene, in particular, at a former cement quarry that aptly reminds us of exploited labor - with lots of Mexican extras standing in as the workers who Montero plans on sealing in the mines after securing his profit.
In effect, the film revisits the Spanish colonial system of indigenous peonage, the underpinnings of why the Zapatistas find themselves fighting against the gold mines of the 20th century - the foreign-owned factories, or maquiladoras, along the U.S.-Mexico border - and against continued indigenous genocide.
But The Mask of Zorro cloaks these resonances in romantic nostalgia and noble Spanish panache, set on the eve of the biggest act of banditry in the region: the violent acquisition by the U.S. of the entire Southwest from Mexico between 1846 and 1848.
At least this time the masked avenger is not the Lone Ranger, that perverse embodiment of frontier justice in the wake of Indian and Mexican uprisings. Instead, the audience can feast its eyes on the more hygenically pleasing Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, instead of the Zapatistas' Subcomandantes Marcos and Ramona.
The movie itself is caught between the fictive license of historical romance and the demands of historical realism, and as a period-placed adaptation of an originally serialized novel, it does justice to neither realm.
Starting in 1821, the movie flashes forward 20 years to the main action, though it is derived from events that happened afterward, when the Gold Rush began in earnest and the Foreign Miner Tax of 1850 was enacted to discourage poor Mexicans and Chinese from making a living.
As a result, bandits began rustling livestock and sometimes robbing or even killing miners. In California, five renowned bandits allegedly shared the name JoaquÌn, though accounts seized on the surname Murieta as a composite character. Whether or not JoaquÌn Murieta really existed, he was rumored to run with such infamous companions as Three-Fingered Jack.
On May 11, 1853, the California State Legislature authorized a special ranger force under the leadership of one Capt. Harrison Love to capture the five JoaquÌns, with $1000 offered as reward for Murieta. Love brought back a head and pieces of a hand, claiming them to be the appendages of Murieta and Jack. Though no positive ID was established, Love earned the $1000 reward (with a $5,000 bonus granted by the Legislature), and the preserved body parts became lucrative trophies for a travelling show.
The Mask of Zorro gets its updated bite from incorporating Joaquin Murieta (Victor Rivers) and Three-Fingered Jack (L.Q. Jones), with Banderas playing Joaquin's brother Alejandro and Matt Letscher standing in as their nemesis, Love.
From a tradition of dime novels popularizing legends based loosely on historical figures, a half-white half-Cherokee San Francisco journalist named John Rollin Ridge (aka Yellow Bird) immortalized Murieta in 1854 with his account titled The Life and Adventures of JoaquÌn Murieta. Mixing obvious racial resentment with coin-turning sensationalism, the book fulfilled the essentially commercial mission of novels as they originated.
With Indian resistance long demolished and Texas-Mexican uprisings recently destroyed, it was safe enough in 1919 for a police reporter named Johnston McCulley to create a Spanish hero named Zorro, which was based on Murieta and other Robin Hood-type characters. McCulley probably didn't know he'd inspire at least 50 feature films and various TV shows, stage productions, cartoons, theme park spectacles, and bedroom fetishes.
Aside from one female and one gay Zorro, most adaptations have stayed true to the formula - as The Mask of Zorro does, though with recognition of growing U.S. Latino population and moviegoers. Where Douglas Fairbanks Sr. played the first filmed Zorro (1920), this movie was originally slated to have a Mexican American director (Robert Rodriguez) to mold the Latinoid lead.
Regardless, Latino-audience marketing - aggressive in some cases (per profit potential), and indifferent in others (per ignorance) - means that film companies will do their best to take our money but won't necessarily give back better representations of Latinos in the medium.
Robert Rodriguez, by the way, left after demanding more than the $44 million budgeted for the overall production. When Martin Campbell (GoldenEye) came on, the budget eventually reached $65 million.
The San Antonio Current, July 1998