Ten Statements About....SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS (2001)

This woman has just shot a man to death...and she's your hero.

"These cats don't have nine lives."

1) Even though it doesn't fully fit into the purview of 'found footage,' this is one of the most effective examples of that subgenre.  It tells a compelling story, it justifies why we're getting all the footage that we might not otherwise expect to see, and it hints at a larger tapestry that shores up the world the film is set in.

2) ....and that might be the most intriguing thing about the film--the fact that the story, ostensively episodes from the seventh season of this demented reality show, takes place in this weird alternative nightmare universe that implies our society has gone down a very dark, very unpleasant path.  And yet nowhere does writer/director David Minaham spell it all out for you.  We know that the government has a hand in this reality show, we know that they manipulate the results, and we know there's a darker purpose behind all this--but we never learn the truths behind these circumstances.

3) Of course, this film would not work without strong performances, and the strongest performance is by Brooke Smith as our central character Dawn.  We see Dawn do some truly brutal things--there's a brief sequence where Minaham contrasts Dawn's interview with footage of many of her previous kills that is ruthless in its violence--and yet she manages to get a great deal of humanity and sympathy at points, particularly when she takes a moment to comfort the wife of a just-murdered contestant.

Don't pity this woman despite her deer-in-the-headlights
expression...because she won't pity you....

4) ....and on the other end of the spectrum we have Marylouise Burke as Connie, who is a horrific monster of a character--and yet believes one hundred percent that she is not evil, that she is motivated by her Christian values.  And Minaham never presents Connie as anything other than a ruthless killer, right from her first interview where she admits to 'helping' people who suffer pass on to the next world ('This happens more often than you think,' she adds after this confession!).

5) This is a violent film that comes by its R rating thoroughly honestly, and yet the violence onscreen is relatively restrained.  That being said, the brutality and intensity in the way Minaham presents this violence throughout makes some of it rough to watch, particular the film's biggest setpiece set at a suburban mall.

6) The film is hard to categorize.  Even though it doesn't have any gruesome elements, I'd almost categorize it as a horror film for the pitch black view of society it has....but the film is also richly and darkly comic.  Minaham knows he has to give us a release valve and peppers the film with some moment of genuine, twisted humor.  Even the narration--ably provided by Will Arnett, of all people!--gives us some lines that allow us to laugh nervously between the horrific elements.

And what would a reality show be without a car chase?

7) I do like how Minaham does play with our expectations when it comes to the reality show 'script.'  The person we expect to be the first to be picked off is the one who commits the most henious act of violence; the person who we expect to be the mildest is the one who is the most venomous contender.  And since Minaham worked as a story editor for newsmagazine shows prior to directing this film, he's managed to perfectly recreate the way these shows can deceive the public and bend the narrative.

8) ...and that might be why the film didn't do well in its theatrical run.  Minaham is too precise in his recreation of The Contenders TV show, resulting in us not having that slight distance that satire sometimes need.  Even though we're given absurd moments (Dawn being unable to register a kill because a cameraman gets in the way; hostages cheering when a character announces 'people will die'--not realizing that the people that are being referred to are themselves; etc.), they don't feel like commentary; they feel like an example of the thing Minaham is commenting on.  And as such, sometimes the comments don't through to the viewer.

9) ....although I will admit that the 'recreation' of the film's denoument is wonderfully lame, featuring actors who look uncannily like Smith and Glenn Fitzgerald, who plays Jeff....if you looked at them sideways.  As with the rest of the film, the recreation of reality show tropes is uncanny, but unlike elsewhere, Minaham manages to create that little separation so we can appreciate the half-assedness spin control the producers of the show try to achieve.

10) Can I say I love Girls Vs. Boys' soundtrack, which mananges to subsume their noise rock qualities when they need to to recreate cheesy reality show muzak muck, and are able to take a back seat to other composers when they have to (like that hilarious usage of Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' when it comes to delineating Dawn's backstory).

Overall...even though it may fail as a pure satire, this film excels as a really frightening extrapolation of what our present society's obsession with reality TV can result in.  Held together by a magnificent and ruthless performance at its center, it also serves as a great example of how you can use 'found footage' tropes to tell a really great story.

Ten Statements About....ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Yep...most naturalistic finishing blow eeeeever....

"Remember, once you're inside you're on your own."
"Oh, you mean I can't count on you?"
"No."
"Good!

1) Boy, is this script lean. The only guy who's really verbose is Lee Van Cleef's Hauk, and even he's terse and to the point. Carpenter apparently knows we're not here to watch exposition, so he's more than happy to move along and get us to the fights, the car chases and the nastiness.

2) Even for Carpenter, who's noteworthy for populating his films with characters that break away from being stereotypes, this is a film full of vivid characters. Even those characters with scant face time, like Frank Doubleday's sawtoothed Romero, or Charles Cyphers' Secretary of State, have their moments in the sun. As such, it's very hard to choose stand outs....

3) ...however, I will cite a couple, beginning with Van Cleef's Hauk. I particularly like how Hauk has a weird sort of respect that he never out and out admits to Russell's Plissken. He seems to admit it to others--defending his choice, running interference for him and continuing to buy him time--but the closest he comes to admitting how much he values Snake is when he offers him a job at the end. Van Cleef's confidence and body language says more than enough about his thoughts.

4) And then there's the tag team of Harry Dean Stanton's Brain and Adrienne Barbeau's Maggie. I love how we're never quite sure where these two are standing in regards to Snake and the situation with the President. Even though we only get their backstory in a line or two of dialogue, Stanton and Russell makes this relationship's veracity through their physicality toward each other. And the beauty of this is how these two do unpleasant things, but in no way become evil in our eyes because this is the world they've been living in for the last nine years and duplicity is the only way they can survive.

5) I can overlook that the majority of this film is shot not in New York, but in East St. Louis---if the script didn't have such a cavalier attitude towards New York City's geography, starting with their stubborn insistence that there is a '69th Street Bridge.' There is literally no way that Snake's progress through this city makes any sort of sense. It's as if the entire lower half of Manhattan was squooshed together into one square mile. I know this prolly wouldn't bother most people, but for me it nags and nags...

"Of course you should let me in...I'm the most New York thing
in this film!"

6) You'll notice I haven't mentioned much about Russell's Snake Plissken at all...and that's because the genius of Russell's performance is how the film doesn't so much happen because of him but in spite of him. The majority of Plissken's success is due to luck and circumstance--he only directly affects the story a scant handful of time. But because the character Russell creates is so well-structured and charismatic, we continue to assume he is the hero and not just our P.O.V. It's a trick Russell and Carpenter pull off again in Big Trouble In Little China, and it's a thing of beauty.

7) The reason I like Ernest Borgnine's Cabbie isn't because he provides comic relief in this film. It's because he makes it very clear early on that he's been driving a cab for thirty years...which means he chose to stay in New York when it was converted to a prison. In a film filled with things pretending to be New York, Cabbie is the most authentically New York thing in the place!

"Either I shoot you, or the viewers learn we're in St. Louis...
no one wins, Harry!"

8) I know Donald Pleasance worried about being a U.S. President with a British accent....but I didn't find him out of place. I assumed he was a Bostonian Brahmin--and given his role is smallish, it doesn't detract much at all. Pleasance does manage to walk that fine line of making him callous, maybe even dismissive without being a monster (unlike what we got in the sequel in Cliff Robertson).

9) And I appreciate that this is a political satire where the script doesn't spell everything out for you. We know just enough from the opening crawl to know that this is a country in decline, that things are going to fall apart a lot faster in the future, and that this is where we may be going. And I equally appreciate the fact that pay off of this film utilizes a musical, subliminal call for looking to the past to erase the disasters that could be forthcoming.

10) I gotta be honest...for a film that's supposedly action oriented, there's a lot of clunky action. The whole fight scene with Ox Baker's Slag is particularly awkwardly staged, as is the 'firefight' on the World Trade Center and, well, pretty much every fight in here. If it wasn't for the physicality of Russell, I suspect we'd look on these set pieces a lot less kindly.

Overall...a film that is pretty ungainly, but is well-redeemed by a whole raft of great characterization and a subtle script that spreads its satire lightly and not with great nasty gobs of stuff falling all over itself (unlike the sequel, which maybe I'll get to one day).