From the Rental Vault (1966): The Hills Run Red

Although Italian moviemakers had been creating American Western movies for some time, Sergio Leone along with Clint Eastwood defined the "spaghetti Western" genre with his "Man With No Name" trilogy in the mid-1960s. Those three, especially the pair's first collaboration in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, featured several of the Italian interpretation's key features: characters pushed past both archetype and stereotype straight into mythical icon status, stories in which heroes had a little villain in them and some villains showed a human side and situations that bypassed grand schemes and themes for low-level grifters, cowboys and crooks. Quentin Tarantino often travels this path today.

Leone's success inspired several other high-profile Italian directors to try their hand at the American west, including the award-winning director and screenwriter Carlo Lizzani. Working as "Lee W. Beaver," he helmed two Westerns, including The Hills Run Red. Bandits Jerry Brewster and Ken Siegel have stolen several hundred thousand dollars from a government office and try to flee. In order to make sure Siegel gets away, Brewster draws pursuing cavalrymen after him and is caught. He serves five years and on release heads for his home, where he hopes to find his wife and son waiting for him. But they are gone, and it turns out Siegel broke his promise to care for them and has used the robbery's take to finance his ranching operations. With his lieutenant Mendez, he is slowly bullying and cowing the other ranchers so he can control the whole territory.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly worked because even though its characters were absolutely nothing new to the Western story, the three actors playing them -- Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach -- had the skill and charisma to make them larger than life. The Hills Run Red has Thomas Hunter, who displays less charisma than his saddle. The alpha baddie Siegel, played by Italian character actor Nando Gazzolo, is even duller. On the other hand, Dan Duryea as the wanderer Winny Getz and Henry Silva as the jovial psychopath Mendez light up whatever screen time they have -- I can't imagine I'm the first person who watched this movie who wishes they'd been the leads instead of Thomas and Gazzolo.

Hills starts to have some interesting things to say about revenge and its cost, but loses that thread when Brewster gets to town and starts to work with the townspeople against Siegel. The story itself starts lurching around from one implausibility to another and winds up just filling space in between an interesting opening third and the final gunfight. It's not the worst spaghetti Western to ever cross the Atlantic, but viewing it is more for the completist than the casual movie fan.

(PS -- If you do decide to rent or watch The Hills Run Red, specify the 1966 Western. There is a 2009 horror movie that goes by the same name, and judging by its IMDb entry it's the same exercise in anencephaly that keeps being released over and over again for people who can be entertained by senseless gory slaughter.)

Super Bowl - A - Ganza

The game gets an A or at the very least a solid B+; close contest unlike many of the over-by-the-third-quarter contests that have sometimes happened. If this is going to be the last football game we see until August, it's a fine way to go out.

The halftime show is a B- or maybe a C. Madonna pretty much had to pull out "Vogue," since it's her most recent ubiquitous hit -- much of her career-establishing work from the mid-80s might not even be known to a 2012 audience. And there's something a little pathetic about a woman north of 50 singing "Like a Virgin." "Like a Prayer" was a good choice because of the ability to work in a choir, which adds to the spectacle. Although the Material One still knows how to command a stage, she had said she was nursing a bum leg and that may have slowed her down. She gets a downgrade for trying some moves that probably should have been written out if her leg was indeed that much of a hindrance. The show itself gets a downgrade from the inexplicable presence of Nikki Minaj, Cee-Lo Green and M.I.A. The presence of an "electro-pop" duo that calls itself LMFAO was apparently a satirical jab at the entire idea of a halftime show since they are demonstrably without talent, charisma or reason for being on my TV screen.

The commercials? For a long time we have been told that Super Bowl commercials are something special and it may be that the hype has oversold the quality. A lot of them were cute, but the idea of watching them over and over and over again? Probably not. Once the joke's been told, it's not all that funny the second time. The Budweiser hockey spot was nice and was one of the two commercials I noticed really draw people's attention. I was actually watching a lot of the game at a restaurant and the only other commercial that actually caused conversation to drop and draw people's eyes to the screen was Clint Eastwood's "Halftime in America" commercial for Chrysler. I'm pretty sure that had more to do with Clint's imposing presence and gravelly voice than with a car company that, along with General Motors, caused almost $24 billion to vanish from the public coffers over the last three years. Other than that, I liked the commercials for John Carter and The Avengers, probably because I really want to see those movies.

From the Rental Vault (2005): The Legend of the Shadowless Sword

Most of us today know about the division of the Korean peninsula into two separate countries -- the Western-allied democratic South and the oppressive totalitarian North. But over its history, the nation that became Korea grew from a number of other states, some of which spread out into the region we know as Manchuria. One such kingdom was the nation of Balhae, which was conquered in 926 by the Khitan people and divided between the Liao Dynasty empire of eastern and northern China and the Goryeo nation in the south -- the people who would one day give the nation of Korea its name. The Legend of the Shadowless Sword (in Korean, Mu-yeong-gum) is a 2005 movie that tells the fictionalized story of Balhae's last king and his resistance to the Khitan conquest.

Gun Hwa-pyung, the commander of the Killer Blade Army, is tracking down all of the members of the Balhae royal family to either capture or exterminate them. His own desire for vengeance has pretty much left out the "either capture or" part of that mission, though, and now the hidden prince Dae Jeong-hyun is the only survivor. The great warrior woman Yeon So-ha is dispatched to find him and bring him to where the Balhae army is encamped, to be their leader.

She finds him, but he's living by selling stolen goods and has little desire to risk his life as a prince or king. Survival is his primary goal. Yeon So-ha convinces him to accompany her -- mostly because the Killer Blade Army has tracked him down and Mae Yung-ok, its lieutenant, has only been prevented from killing him by Yeon's skill with her "shadowless sword."

As they flee from their pursuers, So-ha's loyalty and devotion begin to crack Dae's cynicism and remind him of his own heroic past. She in turn learns that a king feels responsible for his subjects and the best rulers are the ones who as willing to risk themselves for their people as their people might be to risk themselves for their ruler. Drawing on the strength of the idea that their shared military experience and near-mystical weaponry is to be used for protection, they eventually face off against Gun and Mae, who see those same things only as ways to kill and destroy.

Korean action star Shin Hyun-jun takes on what is for him the unfamiliar role as a villain as the vengeance-obsessed murderous Gun. He plays the commander as stoic and quiet, lending his outbursts of violence an even greater impact by contrast. As Prince Dae, Lee Seo Jin makes a believable journey from cynical fence looking out for his own hide to a noble leader who accepts his duties. Yoon So Yi, only 20 when Sword was being made, carries some of the heaviest load of both action and drama and does so quite well. She expresses So-ha's deadliness, naïveté and no-nonsense attitude towards her duties with equal skill. 

Sword is a wire-fighting movie, meaning the characters leap impossible distances and hang in the air long enough to perform impossible feats. The technique can look silly sometimes, but director Kim Young-jun and the effects department for Sword use it sparingly and make the super-human feats more like the qualities of characters in a folk tale than some kind of mystic art.

It's only available in a subtitled version rather than a dubbed one, which can make following it more work than one might be used to. But it's a great story, well-acted and worth that extra effort for those who like their action movies to give the neurons a workout as well.

It's Not Easy, Being Green

Former comedienne Roseanne Barr has announced she is officially seeking the Green Party nomination for president. In response to one of the items on the party's questionnaire, she said this:

"I will barnstorm American living rooms..."

Madam, this is the United States of America. We consider it unseemly to threaten people in order to obtain their votes.

From the Rental Vault (1968): The Scalphunters

Folks who watch a lot of movies know that sometimes, any hack can make a watchable genre picture. When the genre is something as well-known and features as many automatic sequences as the Western, that can go double. But the best directors, writers and actors use genre pictures not only to tell their stories but to provoke thought about something bigger.

Director Sidney Pollack and stars Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis do just that with the 1968 movie that earned Davis a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actor, The Scalphunters.

Lancaster is Joe Bass, a fur trapper who finds himself outnumbered by a Kiowa war band and forced to "trade" his winter's work for the escaped slave Joseph Lee, played by Davis. Bass trails the Indians with an eye towards getting his furs back, but before he can make his move the band is ambushed by scalphunters -- raiders who slaughter Indians for the bounties the U.S. government has placed on their scalps. The raiders, led by Telly Savalas as Jim Howie, make off with Bass's furs. Now he is on their trail, accompanied by Joseph Lee, tracking them as they reunite with their camp and Howie's girl Kate (Shelley Winters). Bass and Lee uneasily coexist until Lee is taken into the raider camp.

Scalphunters was probably a tough movie to market -- it's certainly a Western, but it's not particularly reverent towards the genre. Protagonist Bass is stubborn and needlessly cruel to Lee. Winters may be The Girl for this movie, but she was nearing 50 when it was made and doesn't bring many of that role's traditional softening touches to the screen. The story's filled with comedic touches and high-energy banter between Lancaster and Davis, but the laughter has a lot of burred edges to it and often bites harder than it smiles.

These factors make William Norton's adaptation of the Edward Friend novel pretty much a dead-on bullseye for Lancaster and Davis. As Bass, the former's detached cynicism brings every bit of bitterness he can muster to the stubborn illiterate trapper. Davis's Lee is a man of natural dignity, gifted with an education by proxy (he had been owned by a very educated family in Louisiana before his escape) far beyond any of the people around him that society has designated as his betters simply based on skin color. Most of the time Lee is untouched by their slighting, knowing himself to be a better man no matter what their attitudes towards him are, but every so often he shows the pain the thousand little indignities cause him and his self-disgust at how easily he assents to it. When he discovers he can in fact assert himself as a man who might rule his own destiny, his joy and wonder are themselves wonderful to see. Davis's own dignity, precision elocution and regal bearing convey just as much of Lee's character as his words.

The Scalphunters is a movie with a couple of things to say, but Pollack and his cast were canny enough to show them to the audience instead of preaching them. That sets it more than a few rungs above a lot of its contemporaries and makes it good viewing even if some of its ideas and part of its message are less of a novelty to us in 2012 than they were in 1968.

Beware the Groundhog!

Today being Groundhog Day, large sections of news media folks, national and local, will pay far too much attention to how a rodent responds to the presence or absence of sunlight upon his actions (If you have liberal political persuasions, press "1" to make that sentence a Newt Gingrich joke. If you have conservative political persuasions, press "2" to make it an Eric Holder joke).

Actually, we will note whether or not the groundhogs see their shadows, which is supposed to indicate how much longer we will have to put up with winter. A nice lady at Mental Floss wrote up a fun history of Groundhog Day, including the possible religious origins and the connection to other holidays and observances marked at this time of the year.

The most interesting thing to me was that we rely on the groundhog for his weather forecasting skills -- ill-advisedly, it seems, as premier groundhog Punxsatawney Phil has only a 39% accuracy rating -- because Dutch immigrants to Pennsylvania brought with them the German tradition of basing weather predictions on an animal response to sunlight on Candlemas. But the German tradition focused on a badger. The eastern United States being badger-bereft at that time, the groundhog was brought in off the bench.

Animal scientists have not commented on whether or not the substitution and subsequent loss of fame and positive regard could be at the root of the generally surly badger disposition we see today.

Stale Legislative Pi

This article at io9.com is a fun exploration of an attempt in the late 19th century to get the Indiana legislature to declare the value of pi to be 3.2 It's pretty entertaining and has a little bit of educational stuff going on as well -- the man who pushed for the legislation had apparently developed a mathematical method of doing something called "squaring the circle," but it required pi to be 3.2 exactly instead of the infinitely extending fraction we know it to be, starting with 3.14159 and going on from there.

"Squaring the circle" is a way of referring to a specific geometrical problem: Using just a compass and a straightedge, construct a square that has exactly the same area as a given circle. The problem is that a square's area can be determined with a very basic formula: s2, where s is the length of the side of the square. No matter what number s is, simple multiplication gives the area of the square made up of four lines of that length.

But in order to figure the area of the circle, you have to use pi or π, as it's usually written. The formula is area = πr2, with r being the radius of the circle -- the distance from the midpoint to the edge. In order to make the area of the square equal the area of the circle, you have to create an equation between them, and that equation runs into problems because π doesn't repeat and doesn't stop. Dr. Edwin Goodman, a physician who believed God had revealed to him the fact that π should be 3.2, set that number and apparently used it to develop a solution to the squaring the circle problem that had plagued mathematicians for centuries.

The thing that most interested me was that the Indiana legislature took up the matter based almost entirely on Dr. Goodwin's say-so. The Indiana House passed it unanimously even though many members -- including the representative who introduced the bill -- freely admitted they had no idea what it was talking about. Before the Indiana Senate took up the matter, an actual professor of mathematics cornered a few of them and coached them on how to speak out against Goodwin's idea. The Senate voted against the bill, even though those who opposed it also were clear they didn't really know what it was talking about and were more concerned with the fact that its subject wasn't a proper one for the legislature's time and people in big cities were making fun of them.

In other words, we have a bill that J. Random Eccentric manages to talk his state legislator into introducing even though that legislator has no idea what it's about or what impact it might have. Because it seems harmless, an entire house of legislators passes it. Then in the other house, another guy coaches legislators what to say about the bill even though they also don't know what they're talking about and they vote based on what they're coached to say and what their public image looks like.

The more things change...