Critically Acclaimed

by J. Ryan Stradal

  Several of the sequels in the KK franchise begin with the same jumping-off point: the end of the All Valley Karate Tournament in which Daniel has beaten Johnny Lawrence. For example, KKII begins with Miyagi rescuing Johnny from his abusive sensei, who is infuriated that his pupil has lost to the skinny Italian kid from New Jersey and is disciplining Johnny in front of all of the other Cobra Kai. Or the third film, which focuses upon the aforementioned abusive sensei as the primary antagonist, and which also begins immediately after Johnny’s defeat at All Valley and chronicles the sensei’s immediate downfall. While von Trier’s insistence upon a singular narrative timeframe without flashbacks or flashforwards may seem to have made this structural conceit inherently impossible, he ingeniously begins his own film with a scene that still thematically creates this overlap. In the scene, several prisoners at Sobibor argue over a piece of bread that one of them has smuggled from the kitchen. The actors in this scene are played by the entire original cast of actors that played the members of the Cobra Kai, including a now middle-aged William Zabka, Ron “Sweep the Leg” Thomas, Rob “Get Him a Bodybag” Garrison, and Martin Kove, who played the sensei. The ensuing result is both emotionally and metaphorically jarring and, oddly enough, a totally appropriate way to begin a martial arts movie.

  After losing the fight for the piece of bread in the opening of the film, young Jerzy (played by Ryan Gosling) finds out that he and his mother are being transferred from Sobibor to Auschwitz. Jerzy’s mother (Björk) is a deaf-mute camp prostitute whose vagina is slowly growing closed shut due to a rare genetic disorder. Her son Jerzy has inherited the male version of the same disease, so his mother has been saving her rations of soup and bread for the last three years in order to pay for an underground surgery to open up her son’s shrinking penis hole permanently. But no one knows of her secret, not even Jerzy, and their transfer to Auschwitz has effectively ruined all of her preparations.

  Jerzy and his mother go reluctantly to Auschwitz, where Jerzy can’t seem to avoid trouble, both with the Germans and his fellow prisoners alike. His main tormentors are an entire group of his bunkmates, a gang known around the camp as the Kosher Kai, who use their advanced Krav Magra moves to humiliate him in front of all of the other prisoners during their Halloween dance parties and beach bonfires. In one particularly brutal scene, the boys in the Kosher Kai strip all of their clothes off before going to hunt Jerzy down, thus resembling a starved-down gang of martial-arts skeletons. As they close in on Jerzy, an eighteen-year-old Miyagi emerges from behind a barbed wire fence, and although his karate moves are somewhat slow and incredibly stiff, he magically defeats all of the Kosher Kai, who are depicted by actual officers in the Israeli army and Mossad. Jerzy and Miyagi slip away completely unharmed, and Miyagi leads them to the Zen garden that he has been secretly making inside of an unused gas chamber. Over green tea and sushi, Miyagi tells Jerzy of his background, of growing up in Okinawa and coming over to Poland along with a battalion of Japanese soldiers in support of the Third Reich.

  He tells Jerzy how almost his entire battalion was raped and murdered by their German allies on their first night in Poland, and how he and the few other survivors were immediately shipped off to various work and death camps. Miyagi, who is currently Auschwitz’s handyman, tells Jerzy all of this in near-perfect Polish, and von Trier’s decision to not include English translations through subtitles, while baffling at first, does seem to further maintain the film’s authenticity. Also, von Trier’s decision to alter Miyagi’s background, whom we know from the previous films to have come to America and joined the American army during World War II, seems to be a further commitment to making more complex and often morally conflicted main characters. Some critics have gone so far as to posit von Trier’s new view of Miyagi as being akin to Batman’s transition from comic books to the Dark Knight of the graphic novels.

  After auditioning thousands of Asian American and Asian actors for the role of young Miyagi, the producers of the film made the controversial decision (despite the vehement objections by von Trier) to digitally create the character of Miyagi, combining the technology used for the film Avatar and for the Gollum character in the Lord of the Rings series. Martial arts legend Steven Seagal dons a special effects green suit to portray the physical movements of Miyagi, while actor Hank Azaria does his voice, and although it goes completely against his Dogme 95 aesthetic, the director has now conceded that digitally creating the character was the only real logical choice. Von Trier states, “Because we couldn’t find a good half-Asian actor, we figured in the end that special effects were still preferable to casting a full-Asian type of Asian, which would not have been as believable.” And the moody, morally complex Jerzy is played so perfectly by Gosling that we immediately forget all the controversy surrounding the digital Miyagi. And while some online sources have accused Gosling and his management team of deliberately choosing a role to offset his portrayal of a young neo-Nazi in The Believer, von Trier has come out personally to state that he cast Gosling because of the actor’s “Semitic bone structure. Also, Ryan seems to be very good with money,” the director has said, “which seemed realistic to me. Also, I believe that Hitler, if I were to step into his shoes for a little bit, would have hated a person that looked like Ryan, or people like Ryan. I don’t know why, probably because of the size and shape of their noses, but I don’t really know, I am just trying to empathize with a misunderstood man here, because that is how you get to the ultimate truth.”

  The film culminates the only way that martial arts movies should ever culminate: a fighting tournament. Miyagi, who has been dutifully training Jerzy by embedding karate techniques that normally take a lifetime to master into such mundane tasks as digging mass graves, painting tanks of Zyklon gas, skinning corpses, and waxing U-Boats, has signed Jerzy up for this year’s All Auschwitz Tournament. There are a few surprising and welcome cameo appearances at the tournament, including Ralph Macchio as Primo Levi, Peter Dinklage as Elias the Dwarf, and Woody Allen as himself. While this critic won’t reveal the film’s overall and extremely surprising teleology, I will say that the conclusion is much more Rocky I than Rocky V. And I will also say that the numerous rape scenes throughout the film could have probably been boiled down to one or possibly even two rape scenes, or maybe even just a brief rape montage to get the point across, but again, I understand that it’s all about realism and truth here. This Karate Kid prequel has changed my perception and emotional expectations for martial arts films, and will undoubtedly inform my future choices in life, should I ever find myself interned in an infamous Nazi concentration camp.

  Directed by Gus Van Sant. Written by Dustin Lance Black. Produced by Harvey Weinstein. Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley, and Christina Applegate.

  With most filmmakers these days referencing seventies cinema—films like Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Deer Hunter—as the height of American filmmaking, a time when a director made a movie and not the studio, it comes as no surprise that a filmmaker with the caliber of Gus Van Sant has remade Charly, the 1968 adaptation of the novel Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

  “When the Weinsteins brought me the script I’d just wrapped Milk and was exhausted,” said Van Sant. “I had no intention of taking on another project at the time even if Dustin [Lance Black] had written it. I had tears in my eyes by page three. Then Harvey [Weinstein] told me that Maggie and Jake [Gyllenhaal] were attached as the love interests…and…I wept again.”

  In a role that won Cliff Robertson an Academy Award, Jake Gyllenhaal boldly portrays Charly Gordon, a mentally disabled man who undergoes an experimental surgery designed to make him normal. After the procedure, Charly awakens to the world around him, gaining an understanding he’d been unable to attain before, and at the same time grappling with more complex emotional equations.

  “It was an incredible challenge to act retarded,” says Jake Gyllenhaal. “And then to switch and pretend to be really sm
art. There are so many levels to the mentally disabled and the super intelligent. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intimidated…but I did a lot of research. I volunteered at a special-needs camp and realized that they face complex life situations. It’s not all crayons and waffle cones like some people think.”

  Charly’s tutor, Alice Kinnian, played so gracefully by Maggie Gyllenhaal, realizes Charly is surpassing the doctor’s wildest expectations and becoming a genius, while at the same time trying to deny her blossoming feelings for an increasingly attentive Charly. When she refuses his initial advances, Charly tours the country on a motorcycle. Here, Van Sant captures the majestic American landscape beautifully and manages to layer the scenes with the political underpinnings of intolerance, all through Charly’s eyes.

  Charly’s passion-filled return to Alice instantly puts this film into cinematic history. The starkly lit, tear-stained love scenes are some of the most haunting visuals ever caught on celluloid and will surely catch the attention of the Academy in the film’s late-year release.

  At the press tour in New York, Maggie had this to say: “What we had to do was shed our brother/sister identities, our familial ties, rise above them so to speak. Gus was very patient with us [she laughs] in rehearsals and on set. He was very kind and let us explore the nature of these characters, the subtle intricacies of this relationship for however long we needed.”

  Dr. Richard Nemur (Sir Ben Kingsley) and Dr. Anna Straus (Christina Applegate) track Charly’s progress post-surgery and are exhilarated by the implications of the surgery’s success until it’s noticed that Algernon, the laboratory mouse and original recipient of the experimental procedure, is regressing, losing his ability to complete even simple mazes and slowly grows more retarded than he’d been before. Nemur and Straus are now left, along with the film’s viewers, to wonder what will become of Charly Gordon and Alice Kinnian as their story continues to unfold.

  Van Sant successfully kept this project from the public eye by shooting all the interiors at Leavesden Studios in London and using both Maggie and Jake on location only one time.

  “We had to shoot for Central Park. So, we talked to the London Film Commission and were able to block off almost six acres in Thames Chase Park for the picnic scene. It was quite a feat. We just didn’t want people judging the film before we had the chance to present it in the proper context,” said Van Sant. In addition, only Sir Ben Kingsley was privy to the fact that the brother and sister duo were the leads as he had several scenes with the both of them.

  “When I saw the film,” said Applegate, “I was floored. It’s truly beautiful. But they should’ve told me. I mean, I wouldn’t have said anything.”

  Critics and moviegoers will be talking about this film for years to come. The Gyllenhaals’ transformation into these characters, as well as their onscreen chemistry, is so spellbinding that one’s initial fears and expectations are set aside once the film begins to roll. Charly is a triumph over taboos.

  Abbott and Costello Meet the Bankers (1949)

  Coming just a year on the heels of the considerable box-office success of their lash-up with the Universal monsters in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and employing much of the same cast, this late A&C vehicle featured some memorably grotesque imagery and low comedy, but its unexpectedly apocalyptic ending—featuring the collapse of the world economy and the boys’ decision, having been marooned at sea, to eat the stowaway they find cowering in their lifeboat, Pillage Today magazine editor Waldo Whinesecker (Vincent Price)—pretty much insured the end of Universal’s attempts at a Boys-Meet-the-Monsters cycle.

  The world of Wall Street messengers Herbie Broadhurst (Lou Costello) and Chick Young (Bud Abbott) is turned topsy-turvy when Haldex Fisting, the president of the US Bank of the Republic (Bela Lugosi), in league with the craven and zoophagous head of the Federal Reserve J. Roscoe Eck (Dwight Frye, in a performance that makes even his Renfield in 1931’s Dracula seem the very model of comportment and dignity), hatch a plot to secretly dump the Bank’s toxic derivatives into a taxpayer-insured subsidiary.

  With Glenn Strange, Lon Chaney Jr. and Lavrentiy Beria (!) in a rare cameo as the Secretary of the Treasury.

  The Five Obstructions (2012)

  Provocateur Lars von Trier’s remake of his own semi-documentary The Five Obstructions from 2003, with the same premise, features his mischievous dare that five of the Justices of the United States Supreme Court are to attempt, in various ways that he has stipulated, to dismantle American democracy. With James Woods as John Roberts, John Lithgow as Anthony Kennedy, Kevin Pollack as Samuel Alito, Roseanne Barr as Antonin Scalia, and Robert Downey Jr. as Clarence Thomas.

  20,000 Years in Sing Sing (2014)

  Jim Carrey’s searing remake of Michael Curtiz’s 1933 classic about unjust incarceration, with Tom Hanks as the history high school teacher/Little League coach turned hardened criminal after having spent forty-five years in prison, having been sentenced for attending a rally in support of the right to rally under the terms of President Obama’s new NDAA law allowing the indefinite detention of American citizens. With both Rooney Mara and Helen Mirren as his heartbroken and long-suffering wife (Mara when he goes in, and Mirren when he comes out) and Rahm Emmanuel in his Academy Award-winning and legendarily persuasive turn as the smoothly charming and heartless warden.

  Directed by Curtis Hanson. Starring: Jamie Foxx, Owen Wilson, Adam Goldberg, and Will Smith as Allen Ginsberg. Inspired by Kerouac: A Biography by Ann Charters.

  Anne Charters asked Kerouac a simple question: “What do you think about On The Road?” To which he replied: “I spent half my life writing On The Road and the other half living it down.” Simply put: no one took Kerouac or anything he wrote as seriously after achieving such success so early in his career. The power of Curtis Hanson’s new film is the tribute he pays to not only the author of On The Road but the legions of wayward souls that read it and found solace in what they perceived as the “story of their lives”; however, this isn’t the core of Hanson’s film. On the contrary, On The Road, and the actual road trip(s) that spawned the novel, are only window dressing into the layered complexities of Sal Paradise himself.

  The camera pulls back from the side of the road and pans across the green leaves of corn stalks standing erect in the Midwest as a 1945 Buick roars past them. We’re now in the passenger seat with two of the most iconic figures of postwar beatdown America: Jack Kerouac (Jamie Foxx) and his accomplice Neal Cassady (Owen Wilson). The car is roaring with two young men who embody, like this film, all that was wrong in a time when the world was recovering from World War II but at the same time embody and represent youth, beauty, and what’s ever-present and possible in the human condition. But Foxx and Wilson aren’t really part of America; their dialogue is concerned with Schopenhauer and the thing in and of itself being this or that sign or signifier. They are roaring through the backbone of the American breadbasket but their minds are strolling the gardens of the Buddha while their bodies could be temples to either Venus or Apollo. Hanson maneuvers his characters through a world that should be familiar, is familiar, but at the same time is a disjointed homage to the program and aesthetic of what later becomes the beatnik movement. The beats were not musicians in the sense that a beatnik wandered the world with bongos, a necklace of wooden and ceramic beads, and a soulpatch. No, a beatnik had been beaten down and the smack dab that Hanson performs on his audience is a dissociative one that splits viewer from familiarity of location and casts an audience en masse into disenfranchisement. Even though the diners “on the road” are as familiar as the apple pie served in them, the conversation and the personalities, scrolls of paper, Benzedrine binges in which Foxx hunches over his Underwood typing at a frenetic pace—they approach the beatitude of a saint from another era that’s altogether foreign to the landscape of America and presents the audience with a fundamental question to answer: Whose America is this?

  Even
though Foxx wasn’t a natural fit for the role of Jack Kerouac, he brings to the film a certain natural dislocation and disenfranchisement (don’t repeat this word) that from the first scene marks him like Cain. No one ever questions that Foxx is meant to stay at the Docks in San Francisco, or that any decision he makes is truly his own. Quite the contrary, the more Foxx’s Kerouac rebels against what appears normal, and/or sane, the more we cheer and find ourselves in need of a personal and profound revolution—violence of course is optional.

  This cross-country trip is ultimately trumped as Kerouac falls into the circle of miscreants and social pariahs called artists until the spectacled king and high priest of Doric romance walks out of a bathroom in a Soho loft party amid a cloud of smoke so thick a ghost would feel lost: Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg (Will Smith) is immediately attracted to Jack, who stands bridging the world of the American male and the nineteenth-century dandy, a gruff blue-collar exterior with a gentle and honed sense of beauty within. Smith floats like Balanchine to the side of Kerouac and without any great surprise or heavy-handed profundity says. “Cigarette?” The offer of a fag between the two men hangs as thick as caramel in the air; Foxx and Smith, their eyes locked in a duel like Ice and Bernardo, until they drop their ocular knives as recognition takes hold and the word “brother” manifests in the sugar between them.

  But we know all to well what’s too come amidst New York hipsters: the scene is thick with binge-drinking and benny-popping that fuels intelligentsia and its love affair with itself—but that’s not the only love afoot. It’s no great secret that Ginsberg’s affection for boys wasn’t restricted to those younger than him, but rather after his return from India and an obvious tussle among street urchins he sets his crosshairs on a slowly eroding Jack.