CHAPPIE (2015)

Neill Blomkamp's Chappie is one of the most archetypally dense films I've seen in a while. It pretty much touches all the bases of man-made life, from Frankenstein to Pinocchio to Robocop, yet manages to make a modestly original contribution of its own. I think it's a better riff on the Pinocchio myth than the vaunted Kubrick-Spielberg AI (2001) because of its incorporation of the other archetypes, all in one character, and because of the way it turns the Pinocchio idea on its head at the end. The film's Geppetto is Deon (Dev Patel), the creator for the Tetravaal corporation of a line of "scout" robots that assist police in fighting crime in day-after-tomorrow Johannesburg. Deon wants to develop artificial intelligence further, to create a robot that is itself creative. Since that doesn't really promise to pay, Deon has to pursue his project clandestinely, all the while being spied on by an envious rival (Hugh Jackman) promoting the Moose, a more ED-209 type unit. It's just Deon's luck that he and his creation are kidnapped by gangsters with day-glo guns who want to hack into a scout and turn it into a gangster robot. Ninja (Watkin Tudor "Ninja" Jones) and his expatriate buddy America (Jose Pablo Cantillo) are disappointed when Deon introduces them to a robot with the mind of a baby, but Ninja's moll Yo-Landi (Yo-Landi Visser) bonds with the poor frightened thing and calls it a "happy chappie." The new creature, adopting Chappie as its name, is hereafter torn by conflicting influences. "Creator" Deon wants it to act ethically and encourages its artistic potential whenever he can. "Daddy" Ninja wants to train it to be a badass criminal and distrusts Deon's influence as much as Deon does his. "Mommy" Yo-Landi almost instinctively feels that Chappie ought to be allowed to grow up as it wants.

Through a series of circumstances "Daddy" gets the upper hand despite his casual mistreatment of Chappie. He tips the balance his way when Chappie discovers his mortality. Deon installed his new AI software in a damaged scout limited to the life of its. current battery, and a horrified Chappie feels betrayed that Deon would create him only so he would die. Yo-Landi talks of the soul moving to another place at death, but Deon doubts that Chappie's software can transmigrate that way. But when Deon explains a stolen helmet the Jackman character uses to control the Moose, Chappie intuits that he could project his consciousness into another body if he can only crack the right codes. On this hope Ninja hangs a plan for Chappie to override his objection to heisting -- taught, not programmed, by Deon -- in order to earn the money for a new body. This only sets up another betrayal when Ninja admits, after the fact, that he lied about the availability of another body for Chappie, but by this point another gangster storms in demanding Chappie for himself, and Jackman's robot closes in with a mission to destroy Chappie and everyone else....

Blomkamp alter ego Sharlito Copley provided visual inspiration and voice for Chappie, while Jackman's grotesque hair and clothing suggest that he's playing a version of Sharlito Copley. Both actors were overshadowed, for many hostile reviewers, by the musicians Ninja and Yo-landi playing versions of themselves, but rather than being annoyed by their mannerisms I found them appropriately odd figures in the film's futuristic fairy-tale landscape. Meanwhile, Copley does a great job animating Chappie -- he's especially good portraying the robot's confused anger at his plight, which persists despite his learning at a rapid rate -- while Jackman delivers one of last year's most entertainingly loathsome villain turns. I think Chappie goes a little overboard in pursuit of a happy ending that not everyone in the film or watching it might find happy -- I was left wondering what Ninja and Yo-Landi would actually think of the destiny the film intends for the latter -- but I admired the integrity of the production and its commitment to big ideas in candy-coated form. It's a great comeback for Blomkamp after the disaster of Elysium and leaves him once again a figure to watch in the sci-fi action genre.

DVR Diary: THE JACKALS (1967)

A dead man wrote The Jackals, and it shows. Robert D. Webb's film is the story of a gang of bandits who flee across a stretch of desert to escape a posse after a bank holdup. Barely making it through the parched landscape, they end up in a ghost town, where they encounter a tough young woman who lives alone with her grizzled grandfather. The gunmen guess that the only reason the pair stays on is gold. Everyone else thought the vein had been played out -- hence the ghost town -- but grandpa knows better. The gang wants the gold, but the gang leader grows a conscience. Finally, the gang divides against itself as the repentant leader faces off against his dandyish rival with lives and a fortune at stake.

Perhaps this rings a bell. Imagine a black and white desert and Gregory Peck and Richard Widmark leading the gang across. Imagine Anne Baxter as the tomboy decking Peck with a punch but later falling in love with him. That's William Wellman's Yellow Sky (1948), one of that decade's best westerns. Lamar Trotti adapted a story by gangster specialist W. R. Burnett to grim, gritty effect. Trotti died in 1952, but Twentieth Century-Fox resurrected him when the opportunity arose to remake Yellow Sky. The dead man shared script credit with Harold Medford, whose job it was to translate place names and monetary units into terms fit for the story's new setting, the wastes of South Africa. Medford and Webb did a similar translation of Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street the same year, calling it The Cape Town Affair. I haven't seen that, and now I better not, given how godforsaken The Jackals is. The direction is uninspired. The music almost invariably finds the wrong tone. The actors, with one exception, may as well be an amateur production of Yellow Sky. Jackals replaces Gregory Peck with Robert Gunner, best known (if known at all) as one of the other astronauts in the original Planet of the Apes. It replaces Richard Widmark with Bob Courtney, a British actor with a grand total of 12 screen credits, which is more than Gunner has. It replaces Anne Baxter with Diana Ivarson, best known (if known at all) for appearing in two episodes of the Batman TV show. They stink. Billed above them all is the actor playing our grizzled grandpa, a role played in Yellow Sky by veteran character actor James Barton. This part they needed a star for, and they brought in Vincent Price. He stinks. Whatever his virtues, grizzled is a type Price could not do. He camps it up like he thinks himself the comedy relief. Not one line he speaks rings true. I hope whatever painting he bought with his paycheck was a fake.

Robert D. Webb directed at least one halfway-decent movie in his career, the 1956 Robert Ryan western The Proud Ones. Others more familiar with his work may cite other films worth remembering. The Jackals was his last feature film, not counting a 1968 documentary, and it's clear that he was played out by the time he ended up in South Africa. He brings nothing to this picture; he either copies Wellman's shots or comes up with far less effective shots of his own, and he has no control over Price. His direction is as uninspired as the idea of remaking Yellow Sky in another country. Maybe my high regard for the original handicaps Jackals in my eyes, but I'd like to think that someone who's never seen or heard of the Wellman film would also recognize the Webb for the inert crap it is. It's hard to see any historical interest or curiosity value that would justify anyone else wasting their time with it, however, so take my word on this one.

KILL OR BE KILLED (1977-80)

Netflix is tricky sometimes. I'm sure they don't mean it, but sometimes they offer you one thing and give you another. That's what happened to me last night when I was browsing through their new arrivals. Something seemed funny about that 1950 film noir they were advertising as a free stream. The thumbnail art didn't look right. It looked like a long-haired guy screaming -- definitely not 1950 material. And wouldn't you know? Two reviewers on the actual page for the movie said it wasn't a noir at all. It didn't even have Laurence Tierney in it. Instead, it was a Seventies karate movie with a Nazi and a dwarf. Then the title rang a bell. Memories flooded back of a heavy-duty ad campaign that saturated TV when I was still a kid. They really put that film over as an event, and my curiosity was stoked, but I didn't have a chance to see it back then. But now I did.

Maybe those of you of my age remember the ad campaign. If so, maybe you remember further back to the Berlin Olympiad of 1941. Designed as a show of Axis solidarity and superiority, it ended in controversy surrounding the karate tournament. Baron Von Rudloff, captain of the silver-medal German team, accused the captain of the Japanese gold medalists, Mr. Miyagi (soft g, please) of bribing his compatriots into throwing their matches with diamonds. Unfortunately for the Baron, der Fuehrer wasn't interested in excuses. Rudloff was kicked off the team, stripped of his rank and dishonorably discharged. For more than thirty years afterward, the German nursed his grudge.

"Don't make me come down there!" Norman Coombes presides over the school of hard knocks in Kill or Be Killed.

Sometime in the 1970s, Rudloff reigns over a karate school in the middle of a South African desert from the vantage of the tower of his toylike castle -- the thing looks like it's made of Styrofoam. His most trusted lieutenant and confidant is Chico the dwarf, whom the Baron rescued from the humiliations of circus life. Now he's humiliated by the karate students, especially when he takes out his old circus hand puppet and reminisces about the past. But he humors the Baron's dream of staging a new Karate Olympiad in his own stadium, an exact reproduction of the surprisingly spartan venue Albert Speer designed for the 1941 extravaganza, and avenging his own humiliation at the hands and diamonds of the dread Miyagi.

"We were just sparring, Herr Baron." Chico (Daniel DuPlessis, right) and friend.

One of the Baron's students isn't quite with the program. Steve (James Ryan) apparently didn't have a problem with learning martial arts from a strutting, ranting uniformed Nazi originally, but he's starting to grow impatient and disgruntled with the situation. He wants to know what they're training for, but his attitude only gets him into fights with more loyal students. Steve's feelings for Rudloff's one female student, Olga, are the only thing keeping him in the desert. But once the Baron at last announces the purpose of their training, having lured Miyagi into accepting the challenge with smuggled diamonds, and then tells Olga that she can't be on the team and has to leave, Steve wants to go with her. They manage to flee together, with some sneaky help from a sympathetic Chico, in a battered Volkswagen. But Steve's car fu proves very poor, and the karate couple find themselves stranded in the desert. Their solution: dismantle the car, raise a big, fortunately available hunk of canvas on a mast attached to the chassis and sail to civilization.

Meanwhile, the Baron doesn't yet have a full 20-man team fit to fight Miyagi's picked squad. He sends Chico around the world to recruit the best remaining karate men. The dwarf's journey is filmed with magazine and book illustrations of London, just as Rudloff's hysterical flashback of World War II earlier in the picture was portrayed with cutouts and recordings of Hitler rants. Chico goes straight to the nearest karate school, but the teacher rebuffs him with proverbs. That forces him to recruit more creatively. We find him in a junkyard, where he's ready to make an offer to a dude who happens to be sitting in a jalopy with his pals and can bust a cinder block with his head. Turns out he'd already signed with Miyagi. This happens to Chico a lot, even in New York, when he makes an offer to an acrobatic mugger. Strangely, his quest for the kings of karate never takes him to Japan, but when you consider that he's only offering $5,000 ("plus expenses")to each prospect, his budget, like the movie's, was obviously limited.

At the same time, Rudloff still wants Steve on his side. Once the fact of Steve's attachment to Olga finally sinks in on the old Nazi, he regrets expelling her from his school. A repentant Rudloff now orders one of his goons to kidnap her. The goon surprises Olga in the middle of a lesson from her new, personal, private, female karate instructor -- she'd shooed Steve away for some reason. There ensues perhaps the most gratuitously destructive episode of fight-scene vandalism since the Jonathan Winters-Arnold Stang gas-station battle in It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as the goon smashes a piano, a guitar, statuary, a TV set, etc in a protracted effort to subdue Olga. Eventually he succeeds, leaving Steve to discover an empty, devastated house. Rudloff's strategy works -- sort of. Steve enters the tournament, but on Miyagi's team, the Japanese having somehow convinced Steve that it'd be easier to infiltrate the Baron's dungeon and free his girl if he joins the enemy side.

"We were just sparring, whoever you are." Olga (Charlotte Michelle, left) and friend. Below, the Baron's goon perpares to El Kabong himself in an intimidating display of stupidity.

Once the tournament gets under way, after a round of feasting and dwarf entertainment, and proves quite an even affair, with fighters on both sides equally willing to cheat, the Baron decides to make the best of a bad situation. Determined to restore his honor by winning at all costs, he tells Steve to throw his fights if he hopes to see Olga again. Steve is too proud to do that, but Rudloff's prize specimen, the hulking Luke, seems quite capable of beating our hero anyway. Since these are supposed to be death matches -- a detail the film occasionally loses track of -- the Baron would just as soon see Steve die. But Chico, still remembering Steve and Olga's kindness, convinces his master to spare Steve so he can "suffer" more later.

"Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, we accept you..."

Eventually, the tournament gets out of the Baron's control as more fighters on both sides object to his, well, Nazi-like dominance. Tiring of it all himself, Rudloff has his Foreign Legion-outfitted guards herd all the karate men into two adjoining cells. And here he made his great mistake, and an inconceivable one for one so devoted to the power of the open hand. Put a few dozen guys whose hands and feet are deadly weapons in two cells separated by a wall and what are they going to do? They're going to punch and kick that wall into oblivion, of course, and then they're going to combine their strength into approximately one Hercules-unit of power, enough to bend the cell bars so they can all escape. So remember: the next time you stage a karate tournament, make sure your dungeon has solitary confinement for everyone.

The movie won't end this easily...

Seeing a rebellion break out, Rudloff, Chico and Luke pack Olga into their car and flee into the desert. Steve commandeers a vehicle to pursue him, but his car-fu is as bad as ever. In an automotive answer to drunken boxing, however, he turns obstacles into shortcuts, flipping and barrel-rolling his wreck until he blocks the Baron's escape route. Somehow he's capable of crawling out and engaging Luke in a final battle as the Baron watches and Chico holds a gun on the Baron. Strangely, the story ends with the Nazi and the dwarf, with Rudloff given the choice between revenge on his betrayers and the Spellbound finish....

According to Wikipedia, director Ivan Hall filmed Kill or Be Killed in South Africa in 1977 -- belying the ad assertion that it was "The Greatest Hollywood Martial Arts Film Ever Made," --but the film wasn't released for another three years. Then, on the strength of the U.S. ad campaign, the movie went over big enough to justify a sequel, Kill and Kill Again. Having watched it, I can understand why someone might have thought the film unreleasable. Most of what little budget Hall had went to hiring fighters; the castle looks like the sort of thing you rent for birthday parties. The "location" work is worse than a joke. The writing is witless, especially when it aspires to wit.

Rudloff: It seems that Asians never age...
Miyagi: Only today, now, is important.
Rudloff: But my letter reached you in the past.
Miyagi: To be answered by the present person...

There's also something slightly offensive in the idea that two teams combining the best karate men on earth, one of them coached by a Japanese person (played by a Chinese person who looks just a little like Dana Carvey), don't appear to have a single Asian between them. They manage to have a black man, after all, and this is apartheid South Africa -- one of the few places, I imagine, where unrepentant Nazis could parade about more or less openly. But apart from the black guy, the fact that so many of the fighters look alike confuses the film a bit. It's hard to tell all the shirtless dudes with similar hairstyles apart. On the other hand, they're all legitimate karate men, and they strongly enhance the movie's entertainment value by beating the crap out of one another with gusto. The violence is on a strictly PG level (by 1980 standards), but it looks convincingly brutal when perpetrated by guys who probably beat one another up on a daily basis. The fights are constructed more through editing than choreography, and the editing is often pretty choppy, but the action is consistently energetic enough to keep you watching.

James Ryan is a wiry, acrobatic, intense and loud performer. His accent seems right when you're used to hearing martial artists talk in vaguely Anglo tones, and his amplified battle cries (they often sound like, "YEAHHHH!!!") are almost unsettlingly enthusiastic. He's perhaps too fond of his signature move of leaping, flipping and boxing his opponent's ears, but that does make a cool visual. While Kill or Be Killed was meant to make him a star, Ryan is inevitably overshadowed by the Nazi and the dwarf. Chico is Daniel DuPlessis's only film role, if we can trust IMDB, and he makes the most of it. But he and everyone else is eclipsed by Norman Coombes's instinctively berserk performance as Baron von Rudloff.

The only fault I can find with this sort of exploitation star turn is that Coombes's big scene comes way too early in the picture, as the camera does a 360 around him as he sieg-heils and rants about his past humiliations ("I vas DISHONORABLY DISCHARGED!!!") in a still weed-covered stadium. Looking somewhat like Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October and sporting a range of costumes from Gestapo chic to suspenders over bared chest for desert training, Coombes is all bonus for a project like this one. You can even forgive the fact that this karate fanatic never actually fights in the picture, so that there's never a proper showdown between villain and hero. Without Coombes, Kill or Be Killed is just another tournament movie, with less variety of fighting styles than most. With him, it's on another heroically weird level, and those who travel the wild world of cinema seeking fresh frissons of weirdness may find some in the White Castle in the desert of Ivan Hall's imagination.

The only vestige of the TV ad campaign I could find online was this 9-second spot uploaded to YouTube by robatsea2009. Maybe it'll jog some memories.

SON OF MAN (2006)

Mark Dornford-May's movie, only his second feature, is a retelling of the Jesus story in 21st century Africa. Stylistically it's most likely inspiration is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), which, while ostensibly set in the correct historical period, embraced anachronistic elements (like American gospel songs on the soundtrack) while paring away the opulent details that characterized Hollywood gospel films. Son of Man is a very musical film, its range extending from spiritual ecstasy to choral defiance. The music carries much of the burden of the film's spirituality. The story, as told here, is arguably more mundane.

The opening promises something less mundane. We start with the temptations in the desert, Satan goading a Jesus in robes and whiteface to make stones from bread, jump off a cliff, etc. Jesus (Andile Kosi) has enough, finally, and shoves the Evil One off a sand dune. "Get thee behind me Satan," he says -- familiar enough. What follows isn't: "This is my world!" Satan disagrees, of course.

It looks like we've been dropped in the middle of a familiar story in well-established modern cinema fashion, but this opening proves more of a prologue, a preliminary to Jesus's decision to be born in the African kingdom of Judea, a nation torn by strife pitting King Herode against a shadowy foreign-backed Democratic Coalition. In a village a woman flees from machete-wielding dancing killers. She plays dead in a schoolroom full of massacred children, and the soldiers (and Satan) miss her. Just when she thinks she's safe an angel, a child adorned with white feathers, performs the annunciation. She and her husband (his role as minimal as ever) become refugees, and she gives birth in a shed as a host of child-angels summon shepherds to the scene. A few years later the family barely escapes a massacre of children at a checkpoint. The child angel appears again, offering little Jesus his protection. The boy rejects it, reaffirming: "This is my world!"

From this point, Dornford-May and his writing team try to have things both ways. Jesus retains his own divine powers, enabling him to heal, exorcise and revive. But while he's clearly a supernatural being, his kingdom is very much of this (or "my") world. In fact, he hardly talks of a "kingdom" at all, of God or otherwise. His is a political mission. He denounces Herode and his foreign-manipulated successors in turn; he denounces the imperialist mentality that dismisses Africans as mere tribal savages; he denounces the U.S. for blocking the production of cheap medicine through the use of commercial patents. "We have been lied to," he repeats, "Evil did not fall." His answer is solidarity, justice and nonviolence. Some of his own disciples have been guerrilla fighters (some of the others are women); he makes them give up their guns. As videos of his sermons circulate and stories of miracles boost his credibility, the Democratic Coalition sees him as a political rival. They want their inside man, Judas, to get the evidence they need to justify taking Jesus down. The Passion, or at least the opening act, will be televised -- or at least it could be later....

As a non-believer, it may not be my business to say whether Son of Man gets Jesus "right" or not, but two things about it struck me as peculiar. First, the concept of Jesus as a primarily political actor is bound to be controversial. The idea of a Jesus who really says nothing about God or God's supposed love for man, will be a deal-breaker for many Christians. For my part, I do wonder whether it misrepresents the historical Jesus, but some people say the Gospels misrepresent him, also. Second, Christianity is going to have a very different history in the video age. The African Jesus is sometimes surrounded by camcorders, and some of his sayings, at least, can be recorded indisputably. But because the filmmakers are bound by the traditional Jesus narrative, they don't really explore the implications of an Incarnation in the Information Age.

Son of Man is ultimately a cultural rather than a religious document, though it could be described as liberation theology. Its effort to make Jesus relevant to contemporary Africa tells us as much about the filmmakers' vision of Africa as it does about their idea of Christianity. As a Jesus movie, some viewers will find it more palatable than the more gruesomely faithful Passion of the Christ. People who admire the Pasolini Gospel may find Son of Man a natural next step, though they might be surprised to see the end borrow the long shadow symbolizing resurrection from the Nicholas Ray King of Kings. For people who are students or fans of the Jesus genre, as I am to an extent, Son of Man is obviously worth seeing, but I'd also recommend it as a film of interest, if not necessarily a great film, to anyone interested in politically-committed African cinema.

This trailer, uploaded to YouTube by AiMfilmfest, gives a good idea of the mix of modernity and archetypes throughout the picture: