Don't waste time investigating Billy Jack

Because a collection was at Walmart featuring the character's entire legacy, I finally had a look at Billy Jack (1971), a movie I first heard about when investigating historic box office results.  Until then I had no clue it existed, which is incredibly rare for a large box office hit, which is a phenomenon that happens because a movie makes a significant impact on the pop culture and will be referenced one way or another for years to come.  The Oscars are a completely different matter.  Most nominations are minor films featuring performances or production work Academy voters are keen for one reason or another to recognize, and it's always been that way.

Actually watching Billy Jack explained why this happened to it pretty quickly.  It's a terrible movie.  Its predecessor, The Born Losers (1967) is terrible.  Its sequels, The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) and Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977; which doesn't fail because it's an almost complete reshoot of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but because it retains the same hairbrained production values as the rest of the series, which has as its dubious legacy forcing the blockbuster concept on the wide release schedule movies have been following ever since), are terrible.

I mean terrible.  The title character (which is itself terrible) is a macho hippy.  But a hippy all the same.  All his supporters are hippies.  The real hippies, not the ones the media has tried for decades to sell on a gullible public in the post-hippy era.  Basically the ones Quentin Tarantino features in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, only the Billy Jack hippies are presented as the counterculture heroes of legend, a huge emphasis on "heroes."

The most offensive part, for me, is that these hippies believe they make good music, but they seem fundamentally incapable of any such thing.  The whole series features, proudly, the anthem "One Tin Soldier" which, if you're keeping up with me, is terrible.  Just so completely convoluted it's difficult to understand how even one film, much less any audience member (it's described elsewhere online as iconic) could believe for a hot minute it isn't complete garbage.

Billy Jack himself is pretty awesome.  He's a dude who can't help but get into fights, and he pioneered martial arts as a cinematic way to do so.  He's worth rooting for, but nothing around him really justifies his actions except in the most cardboard way.  It's like the charisma of Steve McQueen without the cool.  Basically every successful Steve McQueen flick was all about selling the cool image.  It was the whole point.  McQueen went well out of his way to make sure he looked cool.  He had an ego.  In the right context, that's exactly all you really need.

Billy Jack desperately needed anything, anything at all to work.  The success of the films, such as it was, owed everything to guerilla marketing.  It worked.  For that time.  But no one in the Hollywood establishment respected the results.  You don't need that.  But you do need good filmmaking.  

So do yourself a favor, and don't waste time investigating Billy Jack.  It's not worth your time.  Unless you have morbid curiosity.

Always adding physical media into the collection…

I never stopped buying DVDs to my collection. I only started buying Blu-rays a few years ago, when I finally got a player upgrade. Yesterday (and today!) was pretty lucky. I always like to check out thrift stores to see what they’ve got. A local community college had apparently purged its collection (because, y’know, streaming platforms fall all over themselves promoting classic film…), had even tried giving their stock away for free, and, well…I ended up getting to benefit. I certainly don’t mind!

Here’s what I picked up:

-As You Like It, one of Kenneth Branagh’s later Shakespeare adaptations. Haven’t seen it yet.

-Blow Out, a Brian De Palma/John Travolta classic I also haven’t seen yet, in a Criterion Collection edition, no less.

-Cloud Atlas, one of those supremely ambitious novels/movies with an all star cast headed by Tom Hanks in probably (several) of his most interesting performances, which I’ve been wanting to revisit for a few years.

-Dog Day Afternoon, an Al Pacino classic I’ve never seen.

-Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary on Banksy. Back in yon Borders days, I learned about the graffiti genius through a number of books we always had stocked. A few years back I saw a different Banksy doc on a plane ride.

-Frost/Nixon, which is another movie I’ve long wanted to see.

-A doc on Hemingway.

-The Madness of King George, a ‘90s movie that I’ve also been interested in seeing for years.

-The Man Who Would Be King, which I’ve been wanting to add to my collection for years. Great movie.

-Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a BBC production starring Gemma Arterton I’ve had in my collection before and am glad to add back in, also so I can watch it again.

-Whale Rider, which I’ll be very happy to see again.

-White Christmas, which is a big family favorite I haven’t owned until now.

-Leading Men/Leading Ladies, one of those collections of material that would probably have not sold much individually. By far the production I’m most interested in, here, is The Night America Trembled, concerning Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.

Dollar Tree is a surprisingly good place to find interesting things, including books and, yes, DVDs (and Blu-rays!). Today I found:

-Good Kill, a movie starring Ethan Hawks and Zoe Kravitz (which will probably be the first time I see her in something other than a genre performance).

-The Sun Is Also a Star/Everything, Everything, two adaptation of Nicola Yoon books.

-Killing Eve Season Two, a BBC series (Dollar Tree often has BBC programming, including generous helpings of Doctor Who) starring Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer (who stole The Last Duel from Adam Driver and Matt Damon). Haven’t seen the show yet, so this will be interesting.

-Spectacle: Elvis Costello with…, a TV series featuring interviews with and performances from a variety of interesting folks.

-Best of British, a box set of various documentaries and several facsimiles of historical documents, which was indeed an awesome find.

Oppenheimer (2023) Review

rating: *****

the story: The director of the Manhattan Project discovers great achievements don't always have happy endings.

the review: Most of the time, when you see what's going to be your favorite movie of the year, there ought to be no doubt.  Christopher Nolan has been one of my favorite directors since 2001, when Memento was released, and for a few years held the slot of my favorite movie, and in the two decades or so since, he's continued to make movies that I have very enthusiastically received, The Dark Knight, Inception, and Interstellar being my favorites from their release years (2008, 2010, 2014).  Although it received a considerable amount of pre-release buzz, in part because it was scheduled to hit theaters the same weekend as Barbie, I had no idea what to expect from Oppenheimer.  I loved his previous attempt at historical, WWII drama, Dunkirk, but it didn't feel like an achievement so much as an experience.  Nolan is very good at experiences, and has at times been on the verge of letting his talents rest of that level alone (here I certainly think of Tenet, which is its own kind of great filmmaking, but not as clear a statement).  Oppenheimer is a complete package.  As social media personality Logan Paul famously lamented, it's pretty much nothing but talking, but it's a tonal masterpiece.  The score certainly helps, but three hours of a perfect score is something even Terrence Malick can't necessarily reliably pull off.  Eventually there needs to be some concrete substance, and that can be found in spades throughout Oppenheimer.

It certainly doesn't hurt the sheer embarrassment of talent, and this is something even I can sometimes get carried away being dazzled by, but Oppenheimer's cast is stuffed to the rafters, and most of its actors are in relatively small roles while the bulk of the film rests on Cillian Murphy (long looking for that one great role, which this is) and a little on Robert Downey Jr. finally proving, once again, he's not just a superhero great at making quips, very deliberately changing his look and most of the time sounding nothing at all like Tony Stark (though happily our Iron Man comes out of his shell now and then), and Emily Blunt resting comfortably in the background until she commands the screen, and Rami Malik echoing that, and Matt Damon playing first supporting role (the man is as near a genius at selecting material as modern cinema has ever found, so often willing to play whatever role he wants it's astonishing that he's also remained a reliable leading actor the whole time), and then there's also Casey Affleck, Gary Oldman and Kenneth Branagh, Jason Clarke...A pair of would-be next generation lead actors, Dane DeHaan and Josh Hartnett, they're here.

Tom Conti, a respected actor from a previous generation, turns in a chameleon role as Einstein, a pivotal if minor one in the movie.  Einstein's role itself in the movie is genius, stepping away from the theatrics of The Prestige's Tesla though hinging on the same basic story structure, of a crucial moment between two characters that must be examined either by the audience or by the story itself to be understood as so crucial, the kind of storytelling Nolan employed in his first movie, Following, that had one of those twist endings that originally made Nolan himself seem as if he might after all be dismissed as a gimmick, as M. Night Shyamalan was for so long (and so many still believe so today), a fad.  

Oppenheimer is the definitive proof that Christopher Nolan is no such thing.  When Spielberg delivered Schindler's List and then Saving Private Ryan, his own one-two WWII punch, it opened new avenues of appreciation for his talent, and depth of talent.  Nolan, even in his superhero movies, never went broad.  He sought audience approval in scale of spectacle, the way Spielberg did it in the '70s, and never in mere thrills or childlike awe.  For too long Nolan was easy to dismiss because he didn't pursue the "truly adult," the straightforward drama.  Even Dunkirk relies on a series of timelines that robs it of a center beyond the central event.  Oppenheimer is classic Hollywood, a biopic.  Except no one's done it like this before.  

In most of his films, Nolan studied the concept of not just identity but self-identity, and while his characters often find themselves misunderstood, he's never really allowed them to suffer for it, never quite left the impression of an unhappy ending, and yet that's exactly what he does with Oppenheimer, and is thus the answer to why Einstein's brief role in the film is so crucial, why the story keeps circling back to it.  In criticizing the past, Nolan is of course giving us a damning metaphor about the present, since sometimes when you can't state things outright, you have to elucidate another way.  

I've long since stopped worrying about what Christopher Nolan can possibly do next.  Anything he wants.  It's all possible.  Of course he could never make another film, and his work will have already towered over his contemporaries, and the whole history of the medium.