A Kino Listicle Part Deux
Pop quiz, hot shot
This is Part Deux. Read Part the First here.
And I’m back! Very exciting things happening over here, and I hope you will be excited as well when the time of revelations comes. Moving on, let us return to The JD Sauvage Kino List. The Forty Best Moomies that live forever in my head. In chronological order:
11. Dune (1984)
David Lynch considers this moomie his greatest failure. Rather, I think Producer Dino de Laurentis (of Conan fame) saved us from a 14 hour long slog of navel gazing and monologues. Dino does what Lynch and Villeneuve can't or won't. Edit a mass of footage into story with beginning, middle, and end in one normal-length sitting, without wasting the audience's time. I do enjoy all versions of this sumptuous visual feast for the eyes, but the theatrical cut is in fact the best.
Together with Excalibur I consider this moomie to be the height of pre-CGI real Gesamtkunstwerk cinema. A totalizing vision the sweeps the audience into a dream of pure artifice. In fact, where this moomie contradicts the text, I prefer the film. Weirding module sonic guns are fun AF fam, I don't care.
More importantly, Dino recognizes that this is drug-fueled baroque Planetary Romance, not a nuts and bolts slide-rule scientifiction, or god-forbid, a meditation on deep ecology, and proceeds accordingly. The reign of witches is overthrown and male kingship restored. How is this possible? He is the kwisatz haderach!
12. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
Technically, when I first saw it, it was the strangely edited and over-dubbed (not quite Robotech levels of haha, but still) and re-titled for a US straight-to-VHS release, as "Warriors of the Wind" (1985).
But even so, young me was blown away by what I still regard as Hayao Miyazaki's best film (and comic too). Still, YOU should get the 2005 Disney re-release of the original 1984 theatrical version, with actual actors as Dub VAs - Sir Patrick Stewart as Lord Yupa! Not that I support dubs, but if you must, this one is actually good. This is the animu for people who don't like animu.
I should note that older me dislikes that Nausicaa seemingly forswears vengeance for her father. And that we really only see the tomboy, daddy only had me, warrior-princess Nausicaa from the manga that one time. Still, she wrecks a squad by herself, showing the difference between aristocratic breeding, diet, training, and… not.
But keep in mind, this is in the context of choosing instead to save the lives and livelihoods of her people from the machinations of two mutually hostile powers bickering over the super-weapon in her father's basement. Duty to the people over filial piety.
13. Red Dawn (1984)
Speaking of filial piety, "avenge me!" This Soviet invasion of America and partisan warfare moomie was the anthem of the better-dead-than-red JBS set in the 80s.
If your childhood was anything like mine, you grew up expecting to live this IRL. Written and directed by the legendary John Milius (too many to list, all certified bangers). One wonders how this moomie even got made. Pinkos hated it, and accused it of being fascist warmongering.
Milius defends himself by claiming it is anti-war. This is patently false, despite Milius being a certified California surf anarchist. There's nothing anti-war about the film, even if the kids develop hard-cases of combat fatigue quick fast and in a hurry. None of them, not even the grils, hesitate to pull the trigger or even to booby trap their own bodies when mortally wounded to take one more with them. Wolverines!
14. Ran (1985)
Akira Kurasawa and filial piety (or the lack thereof) once again. This time it is Elder Kurosawa at the summit of his directorial and cinematic powers. Ran, like Throne of Blood (Japanese Macbeth) before it, translates Shakespeare to warring states Japan. This time adapting King Lear.
Now in amazing and even overblown, psychedelic color. Every frame of this moomie is a painting. No, seriously, every shot was storyboarded in advance by Kurasawa in water-color. It simply must be seen to be believed. Bro, they built real castles to use as sets and then burned them down. How fucking cool is that? What else can one say? Even if you aren't sold by "samurai King Lear," you need to see this moomie any way. It is that good.
15. Aliens (1986)
A moomie that almost didn't happen and prima facie evidence that Hollywood studio execs are bean-counting embezzling shitbags who have literally no idea what works and what does not in moomies. Aliens (together with a little moomie called The Terminator, maybe u watch?) made the reputation of James Cameron. Member when James Cameron made fun moomies? Pepperidge Farm members.
This moomie is an example of what I call story logic over riding progress logic. Cameron and Weaver wanted to show proper progressive values. But in the end, the logic of the story demanded Weaver's Ripley adopt the orphan and fill the motherly role, while the space-nam grunts protect them.
Sure, Weaver gets an 80s action moomie sequence where she descends into the dragon's den by herself to rescue her adopted daughter, but only after all but one of the Colonial Marines has bought the farm the last one is wounded and out of action and the replicant bioroid needs to fly the dropship for their escape. This is a desperation move, not a good idea. Show up for USCMC grunt life. Stay for undoing the pregnancy as body horror and abortion allegory of the first moomie with the power of mommy-bear space-fork-lift certification.
16. Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
The premier American Kung-Fooie moomie, accept no substitutions. And I am an aficionado of kung-fooie. This flick somehow takes the mysticism something like Chinese Ghost Story (1987) (which you should also see, btw. Ah yes, a Chinaman with a beard. Obviously esoteric wizardry) and mixes it with the buddy cowboy feels of something like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) yet irreverent and played for laughs. Basically it's Shanghai Noon (2000) but good.
It was originally written as a kung-fooie weird western, but the studio balked at the combo of flavors. A studio fixer re-wrote the thing to modern day china-town and the studio nabbed John Carpenter with the pitch of giving him an Indiana Jones style kung-fu adventure. Punch! Kick! Sorcery! Bride-theft! Throwing Knives! Tec-9s! Six-demon bag! Black-blood of the Earth! God I love Victor Wong's Egg Shen. And Kurt Russel's Jack Burton ditches Kim Cattrall’s Gracie Law and drives off into the sunset like Shane. Proving himself wiser than Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins.
17. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
A faithful and loving adaption of Gustav Hasford's Short-Timers. A work so searingly unblinking in its brutal depiction of the carnality of the doomed US intervention of Vietnam, yet so unapologetic of that brutal carnality that it is nearly unobtanium in print today. Subject to that form of censorship that They call "dynamic silence." Like that other outsider classic, Camp of the Saints, used copies go for hundreds of dollars.
Speaking as someone who has been shot at and shot back, if very little, there it is. They think it don't be like that, but it do. I aspire to be Animal Mother. In reality, I am Rafterman. Well, not in the book.
The story behind the story is something else, too. Gustav Hasford was hired by Kubrik to advise during production. By all accounts he was hell to work with. But then Kubrick also refused to credit Hasford for the vast majority of the dialogue in the film, word for word. Including Gunny Hartman's (R Lee Ermy) supposedly ad-libbed tirades (read the book if you don't believe me). Still, this moomie IS war. Go and see.
18. Predator (1987)
Maximum 80s Americana. Everything you thought was cool when you were 12 is what is actually cool. Arnold, war, metal, muscles, steroids, giant robots, swords, massive fake tits, explosions, fast cars, booze, cigars, chewing tobacco, old painless; all of it.
This moomie is better than marriage. If it bleeds, we can kill it. Important life lesson. 10/10, pure distilled kino. Should be adapted as a rock opera ala Streets of Fire. If you could bottle it, drinking it would turn 60 year old men into horny 18 year old versions of themselves. If you don't like this moomie you are literally gay. Perfection.
19. Point Break (1991)
The original surf the Kali Yuga moomie. Literally. Rob banks, smoke dope, and surf. Because that which is falling should also be pushed. I shouldn't? Why? Keanu Reeves' character, Ohio State quarterback and all American suburban square FBI agent Johnny Utah is completely unable to muster a single solitary counter argument.
He throws away his badge in the end. That's it really, lots of surfing, bank robbing, and skydiving otherwise, with a bit of procedural on top to move things along. None of this matters. Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves really surfed and parachuted for this, which is pretty neat.
20. Hard Boiled (1992)
Yeah, I know, everyone says to start with A Better Tomorrow or The Killer. They're all wrong. IF you only see one John Woo flick, I mean a real Hong Kong John Woo flick, one staring Chow Yun-Fat, with Chinese dialogue and English subtitles and all, it has to be this one.
Conceived as director John Woo's tribute to Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry and Steve McQueen's Bullitt and his final HK based film before he and star Chow traded their souls for big money in LA (call it Kalifornication), this is quite simply John Woo's masterpiece of violence and the crowning example of that HK genre that crosses Kung-Fu opera with action movies that I like to gun-fooie. Slick, stylish, and two fisted guns blazing akimbo. Enjoy.
Part 2 of 4.
To be continued…
Inspired us to watch Naussica for family movie night yesterday.