THX 1138

THX?  Isn't that the annoying noise that tells you that the audience is listening?  Well, yes.  The THX company is actually a splinter company that branched off of Lucasfilms, which is of course run by George "I love prequels" Lucas.  THX 1138 is Lucas' first feature film, a science fiction movie set in a dystopian future; and if you know anything about Lucas' work, you know that he didn't try for a low-key character-driven work for his first film.

In an underground future city, where drug use is mandatory (for general compliance as well as for better job performance), sex is illegal, and everything is monitored, THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) is just another worker drone, going through the motions of what the future calls "life."  He works long hours with radioactive materials, maintains minimally interesting conversations with others, confesses his problems to a picture of Jesus with an automated voice, and then goes home and watches the government-owned holographic television channels with his assigned opposite gender roommate, LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie).  Good times, right?  Apparently, not so much.  THX (or "thux," as "luh" sometimes calls him) is having problems.  His medication doesn't seem as effective, and he's getting headaches and is being bothered by things that he usually ignores.  Well, that's because his roomie has been slipping him placebos, illegally forcing him off his medications without his knowledge.  But, once the drugs have left his system, THX experiences emotions for the first time, including his lust for LUH.  Breaking the law in sci-fi movies rarely comes cheap, so THX and LUH have to do what they can to fight The Man, before it's too late.

C3-PDestro?

The most impressive aspect to THX 1138 is the production values.  For having such a small budget, this future looks pretty cool.  I liked the appearance of the underground city and the cars, but the minimalist design for the costumes and many of the sets was really clever.  After all, what better way for a totalitarian government to fight individuality than by making absolutely everything bland?  Everyone wears only white, everyone is clean-shaven and has a shaved head, the furniture is functional and monochrome --- even the jail cell where they spend some time is just a pure white limbo.  The robotic police, with their almost-but-not-quite C3P0 faces, were a neat idea, as was the inclusion of budgetary concerns in a huge government-run complex.  And I liked the government-sponsored TV channels: one features a dancing naked woman, another has a dancing naked man, another has police beating a man (the sound of which is sampled at the start of "Mr. Self Destruct" by Nine Inch Nails --- and yes, I'm proud of myself for catching that all by myself), and the last channel has news; sex, violence, and knowledge, all in a government-sponsored box.

The acting is pretty decent, but it's a little hard to gauge in a movie where emotions are a foreign concept.  Robert Duvall is fine, but I expected more from someone as talented as him; don't ask me what else he could have done, given the script, but I was just a little disappointed.  Donald Pleasence was pretty good as a mildly sinister sociopath and Maggie McOmie was okay as the Eve to Duvall's boring Adam.  I think my favorite supporting performance came from Don Pedro Colley, and only because his cheerful ignorance kept the movie from being a total downer.  I also noticed Sid Haig in a bit part, but he didn't get to do much of anything.

Now, you might have noticed the similarities between THX 1138 and other, more famous, examples of dystopian futures.  That is because this movie borrows heavily from George Orwell's 1984, with a dash of Brave New World added in for spice.  That's not a bad thing, mind you; the concept of "Big Brother," the omnipresent monitoring of citizens by the government, is now widespread in our culture.  George Lucas (who co-wrote the film, in addition to directing it) has never been one for truly original ideas --- watch Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress and compare it to the first Star Wars if you doubt me --- but I wish he had been a little less obvious this time.  Sure, it's his first movie, but it has the feel of something written by a child.  One time, when I was little, I wrote a story about dinosaur friends on a journey that was NOTHING LIKE The Land Before Time, which I had recently enjoyed, because my story included the power of rock 'n' roll and a magical bone that turned things into butter.  I'm not implying that George Lucas was as obviously not influenced by Orwell as I was not influenced by singing animated dinosaurs, I'm outright stating it.

Wearing your influences on your sleeve doesn't make a movie bad, though.  Where THX 1138 fails is in the area of storytelling.  This is a movie about the future more than it is about the adventures of THX; if they wanted it to be about THX, we would have had more insight into his character.  So, that makes this a story about the future we could all find ourselves in.  But there is no drama to that story.  There is no horrible truth at the core of this future society, like Soylent Green being made of people.  So that brings us back to the movie theoretically being about THX again...but his character arc peaks in the first third of the movie!  This story is just an awkward mess.  It's not told clearly, either.  I was always able to get the gist of what was going on, but could never be completely sure.  And riddle me this, Batman: if THX is arrested for going off his medication and having sex, why is he allowed to stay off his medication in prison and even have sex with LUH?  I don't get it.  And the ending is pretty terrible, too.

Visually, this is a pretty impressive movie.  Too bad the story isn't there to support it.

Colors

"In the heart of the city, people die for wearing the wrong colors."  Well, so do nighttime joggers who don't wear reflective gear, but nobody makes a movie about them.  The year was 1988 and inner-city gang warfare was in the news.  In the 2000s, thanks to Michael Jordan's retirement, shoe-related murder has gone down significantly gang violence is not the epidemic it once was, especially in California, but it was a huge issue in the late 80s and early 90s, one that cried out for a voice to speak about it in popular culture.  Who can speak to both the adults trying to deal with the issue and the teens tangled in the problem?  Dennis Hopper?  Really?  Interesting choice.  Hot on the heels of a career revival, helped by his performances in Blue Velvet and Hoosiers (and not at all helped by Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), Hopper jumped back in the director's chair for the first time in eight years for Colors.  Let's see...a movie about the police and gang members in Los Angeles, around 1990...I wonder if racism will play a part...?

Danny McGavin (Sean Penn), a member of the LAPD's elite C.R.A.S.H. (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit, has a smart mouth and an attitude that requires him to lash out at the slightest sign of disrespect.  After he makes a joke about tampons during a C.R.A.S.H. meeting, McGavin is assigned to a new partner, the about-ready-to-retire Bob Hodges (Robert Duvall).  Hodges knows that you cannot police an area without the aid of its citizens.  Well, not easily, anyway.  His methods include politeness and courtesy to suspected gang members, and he usually doesn't arrest for minor infractions; he wants to build up enough trust that the people on the streets will alert him if something big or dangerous is going to happen.  McGavin doesn't do things like that.  If he's not in a car chase, he's in a foot race.  If he's he sees a suspect, he rushes in head down.  McGavin earns the nickname Pac-Man on the streets because he drives a bright yellow car and is known to eat scumbags for breakfast.  Probably not literally.  So, this is a good (easy-going) cop, bad (-ass) cop story, with Hodges at his wits end and McGavin completely baffled as to why he irritates his partner.

Meanwhile, a gang war is heating up between the local Crips, Bloods, and a few other gangs.  Lead by the deadly serious Roccet (Don Cheadle) and accompanied by the perpetually high (and possibly mentally retarded) T-Bone (Damon Wayans), the Crips have some big plans to shoot up some Bloods.  However, their plan will take them through the turf of a few other gangs, including a small but tough gang of mostly Hispanics (including a young and thankfully dialogue-free Mario Lopez).  This is the sort of big, dangerous thing that Hodges needs gang members to alert him to.  Will his methods carry the day, or will Pac-Man's?  Or maybe neither?

Robert Duvall is a very talented actor, and he plays his part of the wise veteran pretty well.  He might spend a suspicious amount of time fixing up his hair for someone who has been bald since 1960, and he might actually say "I'm too old for this shit" at one point in this film, but he plays his part and does it well.  Sean Penn also turns in a good performance, even if his acting during a mourning scene is reminiscent of I am Sam.  The rest of the cast is just bit players.  Maria Conchita Alonso has the thankless task of playing both McGavin's love interest and reality check, but she did a decent job with what she was given.  I was surprised to see Don Cheadle playing a street thug, but I'm not going to criticize the role choices for a struggling young black actor; in retrospect, it's impressive just how many complex and non-stereotypical roles Cheadle has played in his career.  It was nice to see Tony Todd pop up as an angry citizen, but it was only a cameo.  Dennis Hopper does a pretty good job directing.  I liked that there was a lot of overlapping dialogue with both the police and the gang members.  I don't know how good Hopper's instincts for storytelling were, but he was definitely able to capture realism in most scenes.

The dialogue is one of the age markers for this film.  If I had a dollar for every time someone used the word "homes" or "hommie," I would have enough to have Hopper's corpse stuffed and mounted in my apartment, probably posed with a Pabst Blue Ribbon in his hand.  Trust me, I've done the research, and there are very reasonable taxidermists in the area.  It's not that the dialogue feels strained or awkward, but a lot of it was probably going out of style when the film was released.  The music stands up pretty well, despite being clearly from 1988, with a Herbie Hancock score and Ice-T rapping the title track.  Neither are particularly memorable or relevant today, but they're pretty good for the late 80s.

I'm still not sure how much I like this movie.  It's not a lot, mind you, but I'm not quite sure what side of decently mediocre it falls on.  On the one hand, I'm glad that this movie doesn't wrap everything up with a nice bow and say, "And THAT is how to end gang violence --- introduce free ice cream Wednesdays!"  I understand that "issue" movies aren't trying to solve a problem as much as they are bringing attention to it.  I just feel like Dennis Hopper was a little too pleased with himself at the end.  The goal of this film is to follow McGavin's progression as a member of C.R.A.S.H., from a hot-head to something else.  His is the only character that has a dramatic arc, so his must be the key story, right?  Well, changing his attitude in the very last scene isn't enough.  And if McGavin is the key to the narrative, then the film should have placed more importance on his work and how Hodges influenced him, for better or for worse.  In other words, I think this would have been more effective if, instead of being about "the gang problem," it was a movie about a young police officer and his work with and against gang members.  And while I think Penn and Duvall were fine actors in this movie, they did not share much chemistry; in a surprising choice, the script doesn't require them to.  As it is, though, gangs take center stage here and the police are simply reacting to them.  If the focus is on an issue, then I feel that the audience deserves a solution to that issue, naive or stupid as that solution may be.  Without that, the film ends with no real sense of accomplishment.

True Grit (1969)

There are times where a role seems so perfectly suited for an actor that it feels like they were just born to play that role.  Jack Black's character in High Fidelity is a recent example, but John Wayne's performance as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit is one for the ages.  This is, of course, the film which won Wayne his only Oscar, and it is sometimes seen as an example of the Academy's tendency to award an actor/director's later work as a way of acknowledging their complete body of work.  There might be something to that; John Wayne has 170 movie credits on IMDB, and he played John Wayne in every single one of those films.  The man's acting range can be fairly compared to that of Michelangelo's David.  And yet, here it is pitch perfect.

One of the reason for this is a pretty good script.  While I won't say that the lines are razor sharp, they play to Wayne's strengths and are made more enjoyable by his bizarre drawl.  Rooster Cogburn gets most of the good lines in the film, but the dramatic weight of the film is carried by Kim Darby (who later played John Cusack's mom in Better Off Dead).  This shocked me the first time I watched this movie; who would have believed that a teenage girl in a John Wayne western would be anything but annoying?  As a rule, westerns don't have much of a strong female presence; having Darby's character drive the plot shows how many opportunities westerns have missed.  The other supporting characters don't get a whole lot to work with, in terms of script, but they rarely seem shallow, which probably has more to do with acting and directing than writing.

The film is about Mattie Ross (Darby) and her drive to bring her father's killer to justice.  To accomplish this, she hires the meanest Marshall in the territory, Rooster Cogburn.  That's pretty much it.  Sure, country legend Glen Campbell (sporting the same haircut he has today) is a Texas Ranger that helps them on their mission, but it's a pretty bare bones plot.  Cogburn is mean and drunk, while Ross is strong-willed and obstinate; the movie is about how their personalities clash and gel.

While the script is good and the plot is fairly plain, the acting and directing stand out.  Of course, Wayne plays himself, albeit an older, crotchety version of his classic tough guy.  But Darby does a good job as the obstinate young woman and her acting makes the growing connection between her and Wayne's character believable.  They didn't do it all alone, though.  Glen Campbell is okay, I guess.  Initially, I thought he didn't do much in the movie, but his performance does help explain how Cogburn and Mattie Ross can get along, adding an everyman presence to a movie where the two main characters stray far from the norm.  Dennis Hopper manages to not seriously overact in a small role.  Robert Duvall (who apparently never had a full head of hair) does a predictably good job as a villain who just seems desperate, not evil.  Villains in the 1960s are often over-the-top, mwa-ha-ha, twirling-their-mustache evil, especially in westerns.  Here, Duvall turns in an understated but believable performance, as he has done so many times since.  I credit most of these performances to director Henry Hathaway.  If you have seen any of John Wayne's less famous movies, you know how terrible the supporting cast can be, even with a decent script.  Being able to push Darby and Campbell to where their characters needed to be made this movie what it is.

This isn't a flawless movie, of course.  A lot of it has aged poorly as the popularity of westerns has declined over the past few decades.  John Wayne at his best still has the tendencies of John Wayne at his worst; I've seen toddlers that can play a more convincing drunk than him.  The viewer is forced to invest a lot of their interest in Darby early on, and it takes a while to believe that it's going to be worth it, because she is pretty annoying without Wayne to counterbalance her.  Still, this is an all-ages western that manages to be endearing, funny, and touching, even to those that are normally bored stupid watching westerns.