Only now does it occur to me... VIRTUOSITY (1995)

Only now does it occur to me... that VIRTUOSITY (1995) is perhaps Ridley Scott's favorite movie.

What––you don't believe me? That a film directed by Brett Leonard (THE LAWNMOWER MAN, SIEGFRIED AND ROY: THE MAGIC BOX, Billy Idol's "Shock to the System" music video) would be Ridley's fave? I promise I'll convince you. But first, some background.

Penned by underrated genre scribe Eric Bernt (SURVIVING THE GAME, ROMEO IS BLEEDING), it's a post-DEMOLITION MAN/GHOST IN THE MACHINE cyberpunk fable of a murderous A.I.––in this case, a virtual "serial killer" training program (Russell Crowe)––who escapes into the real world to battle his nemesis, a jailed and hardboiled cop (Denzel Washington). I'd say that it draws some tonal inspiration from Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER and BLACK RAIN––for instance, there's a scene where Crowe's A.I. come-to-life encounters an older, bartender-model robot (Kevin Loreque, in a great, butoh-adjacent performance),

 and is made so existentially uncomfortable that he "retires" him, á la BLADE RUNNER:

In general, I must note that this movie is majestically entertaining. Allow me to submit, for your consideration, a scene where Russell Crowe jaunts down the street in a '90s zoot suit while homaging SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and receives his very first high-five––a moment which calls for serious and immediate contemplation.

 

Or this scene, where Russell Crowe rocks out, in concert, with some theremin-style 1990s musical accoutrement.

The film features John Waters'-own Traci Lords as a cyberpunk nightclub singer, 

and even brings us the mind-boggling occurrence of a Debbie Harry/non-David Byrne Talking Heads song called "No Talking Just Head" which, I guess, attempts to subtly satirize the Talking Heads' existence while mostly sounding like an ersatz Nine Inch Nails banger. This plays over the end credits and just feels like the perfect capper for the madness we've just witnessed.

But I don't want to stray too far from my main point, which is that "VIRTUOSITY is Ridley Scott's favorite movie." Now, I may have amply demonstrated the "whys" and "hows" of VIRTUOSITY becoming someone's favorite movie, but I haven't fully illustrated the Scott connection.

You're probably thinking: Oh, yeah, you're going to remind us that Ridley Scott is a maniac for Russell Crowe and casts him in all of his movies. He even cast Crowe and Denzel Washington in AMERICAN GANGSTER (2007), and reversed their roles, with Crowe as the cop pursuing Washington's criminal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you're absolutely right, I think that's a point worth discussing. But I sense you pushing back already. 

Well, that's not enough to prove your hypothesis, buddy––you're making a serious claim about Sir Ridley Scott's rarefied tastes, and you don't have the receipts!

I hear your skepticism. I hear it loud and clear. But what if I told you that most of the supporting roles also had a latter-day Scott connection? Stephen Spinella ended up in the Scott-produced NUMB3ERS... and Junta Juleil Hall-O-Famer William Forsythe (THE ROCK, EXTREME PREJUDICE)

appeared in the Scott-produced MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE... the great William Fichtner (GO, HEAT, DRIVE ANGRY, THE DARK KNIGHT) 

was also later cast by Scott in BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001). (Oh yeah, and in this screencap, Fichtner appears next to none other than Louise "Nurse Ratched" Fletcher.) Who's to say that he didn't bring these folks into the Scott fold because he was such a VIRTUOSITY fanatic?

I am. These are all working actors, bub––having them pop up in a subsequent Scott project doesn't prove diddly.

Okay, I can accept that. But how about a canister of primordial, life-giving goo which lends Russell Crowe's A.I. a corporeal form:

 

isn't that exactly like the "concept of Alien life" promulgated by the Engineers in Scott's PROMETHEUS (2012)?

Maybe, but it's not terribly original here, nor in PROMETHEUS. You gotta give me something more substantial.

Alright, here it is: Russell Crowe bursts into an ultimate fighting championship––a modern gladiatorial game, if you will, not unlike Scott's GLADIATOR (2000)––and backflops (that's correct, it's more of a backflop than a backflip) into the ring, and offers not one, but two General Maximus-meets-Vince McMahon"Are you entertained?" gestures to the crowd.

Roll the tape:

Well, that's pretty spot-on, actually, you might be saying. Say, this is all pretty weird. Is it possible that Ridley Scott really does love VIRTUOSITY above all other films?

To which, I say––well, 1995 was a good year. Not "a good year" like Ridley Scott's 2006 Russell Crowe-vehicle wine-country drama "A GOOD YEAR," but a good year nonetheless:

Book 'em, Danno. I says: case closed.

Theater Review: JIM STEINMAN'S BAT OUT OF HELL––THE MUSICAL (2019, New York City Centre)

Bats: 5 of 5.

Running Time: 165 minutes, including intermission and curtain call.

I don't usually write theater reviews, but I think you'll see why I made an exception for BAT OUT OF HELL––THE MUSICAL.

Sure, there might not actually be bats in this show. Hell, there might not even be Hell. I guess we do get to see a projection of flames after a certain character dies, but I hardly think that counts. Consider this: all I wanted out of this show was to see a motorcycle being swarmed by bats as it was launched out of Satan's lava-spewin' jaws. Remarkably, the show does not deliver on this tableau, and yet it still stirred the depths of my soul. That probably had something to do with it being, essentially, as if Ken Russell and David Lynch had co-directed Samuel Beckett's porn parody adaptation of the "Dancing With Myself" music video. If I didn't know better, I'd think that somebody had been reading my 1990: BRONX WARRIORS / RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 / ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK fan-fiction.
 
Courtesy of Specular

I don't understand why there haven't been more musicals inspired by Cannon Films' CYBORG (right on down to characters being named for famous guitars). Or why the visual vocabulary of early '80s local access cable, abandoned Eastern Bloc discotheques, cyberpunk rec rooms, and Jersey biker bar parking lots are so rarely combined. Or why more characters named Jaguar don't spell it like "Jagwire." I don't understand critics who are unsatisfied with the answer to every dramaturgical question being: "cocaine... and fever dreams."

Courtesy of Little Fang Photo

Don't walk––hell, don't even run––glide on a slow-moving motorcycle across a fog bank straight to this show. A good drinking game might be every time there is a Peter Pan reference. Or each time someone "offers their throat to the wolf with red roses." Or whenever someone collapses completely, limp in a melodramatic frenzy.

A part of me will be at this show forever. To paraphrase THE GRAPES OF WRATH: "I'll be in the dark. Wherever you look. Wherever there's a futuristic riot cop beatin' up a post-apocalyptic street urchin, I'll be there. I'll be in the way undead (?) kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready at the weird sewer dive bar they hang out at. An' when folks are doing open mic poetry night in the skyscrapers they build––why, I'll be there, too. Wherever there's a plutocrat-with-a-heart-of-gold struggling against the tide to name what part of his body hurts the most, I'll be there. I'll be there during the power ballads, and, um, I guess during the regular ballads, too. Wherever there's a Bridge n' Tunneler in the audience fondly mumbling along to 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light,' I'll be there. And whenever a kid gets so frustrated by their parents' adolescent sexual fumblings that they rip the engine block out of a car and hurl it into the orchestra pit... I will definitely, definitely be there."

Only now does it occur to me... KAMIKAZE 1989 (1982)

Only now does it occur to me... that I would ever see German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder (BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN) running around in a leopard-print suit (well, lurching around, rather) and solving crimes as a hardboiled detective in somebody else's (Wolf Gremm's) queer cyberpunk thriller.

It bears mentioning that Fassbinder died at 37 of a drug overdose, little more than a month before this film was released (and at Wolf Gremm's apartment). One can tell watching this film that he is near death; he stumbles around in a daze, punctuated by episodes of rage and childlike impotence; generally, he's as corpulent and unhealthy-looking as Orson Welles in TOUCH OF EVIL.

It's been years since he could pull off the mesh-shirt/kimono combo

I have a lot of personally complicated feelings about Fassbinder and his death––in the sanitized, arthouse-fan-service version, he's a mad genius/enfant terrible who worked himself to death by making three to four feature films a year and who picked up a drug habit because it allowed him to make even more films. In this narrative, he's the living embodiment of the Lao Tzu quote about "the flame that burns twice as bright" burning half as long. In the version supported by those who knew him personally, he was more like something between a schoolyard bully, an angry toddler, and a cult leader, abusing the actors in his troupe and the people close to him with sadistic abandon. For me, this does not diminish the quality of his incredible films, but forces me to reckon with his personality whenever I engage with those films. It also makes me wonder if, here, at the end, his character invades the personal space of everyone around him because he is directed to, or if he is just being a dick.

Does he throw tantrums––like smashing the buttons on apartment buzzers––because it is a character trait of "Polizeileutnant Jansen," or a character trait of Fassbinder himself?


Seriously, like 10% of this movie is him furiously smashing buttons:

There's a rogue's gallery of Fassbinder regulars throughout, including Günther Kaufmann (WHITY, IN A YEAR WITH THIRTEEN MOONS) and Brigitte Mira (ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL, MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN):

and the whole thing functions mostly as an insane New-Wave fashion show (which is something I would never complain about):


Just another day at the office



Yep, that's Franco Nero 



Yep, that's a Superman phone



Yep, that's a modified football jersey on a futuristic housewife wearing New Wave swimwear


Yep, that guy is just carrying around a broken toilet

On the whole, it's as if BLADE RUNNER were a queer German art film channeling THE APPLE:

I'm pretty sure the nurse behind this man is wearing a giant BIM mark

except with a dreamy electronic score by Tangerine Dream's own Edgar Froese instead of sci-fi disco, but that's neither here nor there. Perhaps appropriately, the film ends with Fassbinder humping an image of Neil Armstrong and touching himself while listening to the audio of Nixon debriefing Armstrong after the moon landing.

This is literally how the movie ends, and it's Fassbinder's (unknowing?) ultimate farewell to the world of film.

Somehow, it seems appropriate: masturbatory, strange, histrionic, and sad.

Film Review: CYBER BANDITS (1995, Erik Fleming)

Stars: 2.5 of 5.

Running Time: 86 minutes.

Notable Cast or Crew: Martin Kemp (WAXWORK II, THE KRAYS, of "Spandau Ballet" fame), Alexandra Paul (CHRISTINE, BAYWATCH), Adam Ant (of "Adam and the Ants," NOMADS, JUBILEE), Grace Jones (A VIEW TO A KILL, CONAN THE DESTROYER), Henry Gibson (NASHVILLE, THE 'BURBS, THE BLUES BROTHERS), James Hong (BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, BLADE RUNNER), Nils Allen Stewart (BLOODSPORT 2, FIREPOWER), Robert Hays (AIRPLANE!, CAT'S EYE, TV's STARMAN). Written by James Dale Robinson (THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN) and James Goldman (William Goldman's brother, the playwright who wrote THE LION IN WINTER, FOLLIES, and THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS––here he is credited as "Winston Beard").

Tag-line: "Welcome to cyberspace. Where danger is a virtual reality."

Best one-liner: "Strap him down, boys!" (said by Grace Jones)

In a familiar, darkened alleyway:

"What are we watching tonight?"
–"Tonight, we're going to catch a glimpse the future."
"Oh yeah?"
–"Well, take a peek, kiddo––if you can handle it. It's called CYBER BANDITS:"

Cool Cyber Dudes




Life-Size Cyber Strippers


Pocket-Size Cyber Strippers


Read-only Optical Memory

 "The future kinda looks like 1995."
–"The hell it does!"
"Is that a CD-ROM?"
–"Maybe. But what if in the future they have experimental hard drives that hold millions of terabytes of data and they happen to look like CD-ROMs?"
"Oookay. If it's gonna be watered-down cyberpunk, can we just watch BRAINSCAN instead?"
–"No. Trust me, you're gonna like CYBER BANDITS. For starters, its cast is comprised almost entirely of famous musicians and John Carpenter actors."
"Hmm. Go on."
–"Almost everyone in this film has razor-sharp cheekbones and ice-blue eyes, and it's all accompanied by aggressive house music and fusion jazz noodling. Look at this, it's just three, nearly identical, cheek-bony men staring at each other's cheekbones. It's like being held captive in a hall-of-mirrors at a German discotheque."

"Okay. Is that, um, Adam Ant?"
–"Maybe."
"Does this movie have a plot?"
"Of course it does. So there's an evil millionaire, played by Robert Hays (who played STARMAN on TV, albeit not directed by John Carpenter), who is financing a device capable of erasing your mind and trapping you in your own catatonic body in a mental hell of your own making. Essentially, it's a jumbo-sized and more malicious version of the neuralyzer from MEN IN BLACK.

He's got Joe Dante and Robert Altman-standby Henry Gibson as his top scientist on the project, too."

"So it's more of a 'Henry Gibson picture' than a 'William Gibson picture,' eh?"
–"Oh, stop. Though, I must give a special shout-out to Gibson, who simpers and leers his way through the picture with sinister refinement, like he's a 1990s Claude Rains."

Hand over the CD-ROMs if you know what's good for you

 "I do appreciate a solid Henry Gibson performance."
–"Me too, brother. Anyway, our hero is Martin Kemp (the bassist from Spandau Ballet), who's, um, a sailor on the evil millionaire's yacht."

"I feel like this character should be played by Jean-Claude Van Damme. Or at least Jean-Faux Van Bernhardt."
–"Oh, hush. So, after a torrid affair with the millionaire's girlfriend (Alexandra Paul, from John Carpenter's CHRISTINE),

Pictured: a torrid affair from the future, and not, in fact, a torrid affair from 1995.

and against the advice of his buddy, rocker Adam Ant,

You'll note that those are the Frank Lloyd Wright tiles from BLADE RUNNER in the background!

the sailor and the girlfriend decide to steal the plans to the millionaire's neural-cyber-weapon-thing and have them laser-tattooed on Kemp's back with a bunch of little 1's and 0's. (The original title of this picture was A SAILOR'S TATTOO.)

Incidentally, this is the first (but far from the last) time Martin Kemp will be strapped down to various surfaces throughout this movie.

Also, it's worth mentioning that the man doing the tattooing is James Hong (from John Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA)

Note his excellent fake mustache.

who, pre-tattoo, offers them a masked, flamboyant Chinese opera performance.

He was clearly having so much fun with it, that they bring him back for a post-credits scene where he performs even more Chinese opera. Take that, Marvel movies!"
"I must say, as far as MacGuffins go, a coded tattoo is not the worst idea."
–"Of course it isn't!  Didn't I tell you who wrote this thing?"
"No."
–"Two men. One is the guy who adapted THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN..."
"Ugh."
–"...and the other is the playwright who wrote THE LION IN WINTER."
"Er, what?"
–"Who incidentally is William Goldman's brother, James. However, he chose to be credited as 'Winston Beard.' Also, don't be so hard on THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN."
"I'll be as hard on it as I want. Think about it: Sean Connery had such a bad experience working on it that he retired from acting. Therefore, if not for GENTLEMEN, we may have had Connery in INDIANA JONES AND THE CRYSTAL SKULL which fundamentally would have altered its fabric, which means it might not have had Tarzan vine-swinging and CG aliens. The pity is that we'll never know."
–"Okay, that's enough out of you. I'm about to get to the best part: the millionaire has a foil––a woman who leads a rag-tag band of cyber-resistance fighters and plans to bring him down for good: ladies and gentlemen, may I present... Grace muthahfuckin' Jones."

"That's a lot of crazy-eye."
–"It's one of her specialties, as you well know. You can also see her in Christopher Lee's Cher wig from THE WICKER MAN,

shouting things like "Strap him down, boys," feeding her pet mouse to her pet snake (with an extra side of crazy-eye),

setting up a nice cyber-office on the beach (uh... what?)

and wearing really outré outfits that I guess are supposed to be camouflage,

but read more as "Cousin It at Milan fashion week."

SURPRISE––Grace Jones!

"I'm intrigued."
–"It's a lot better than it should be. I mean, Grace Jones alone––despite less than 20 minutes of screen-time––is essentially worth the price of admission. It's like a low-rent BLADE RUNNER/NEUROMANCER with big ideas, game actors, silly costumes, and an A-list soundtrack featuring songs like 'Sploosh' by Ozric Tentacles."
"Wow. I kinda miss the '90s."
–"I think you mean, 'the future'... don't you?"