The Arrogant (1987)

Out of all the implements of death any character can have at their disposal, I think that the axe is perhaps the least well-used (just hear me out).  Since this is one of those things that can be debated ad nauseum, and since we’re not actually speaking (I know, my writing is so good that sometimes it feels like we are, but we’re not), I’ll just give you some of my reasoning on the matter.  The axe is a cleaving weapon.  Aside from having a spear point at the top end of the haft, the weapon can’t really be used for stabbing.  Add to that the fact that, typically, an axe (okay, maybe just a battleaxe) is not only heavy but top-heavy at that.  Almost any blow that can be delivered with an axe will usually be done by hauling off with both hands on the axe handle, thus  telegraphing your shot, so to speak, and giving the user no free hand to block any incoming attack.  Much like the three-section staff, the axe is a weapon which must be mastered to be used effectively.  Oh, sure, slashers have used axes to mount up a nice body count, but rarely are they used with any true finesse.  To my mind, only one fictional character (beside Paul Bunyan, but he had other advantages, a giant blue bull notwithstanding) has truly belonged with an axe in his hand, and that would be Conan of Cimmeria, by Crom.  Search your conscience.  You know I’m right on this one.

Giovanni (Gary Graham) is a bit of a spoiled prick.  At dinner with his Senator father-in-law (Joe Condon) and apparently his entire extended family, Giovanni and the old man basically tell each other how much they want each other dead.  Giovanni sneaks off, ostensibly to get some wine from the garage wine cellar but actually to bang his wife Elvira’s (Kimberly Baucum) sister Laticia (Leigh Wood).  Having picked up a black cat during all this (read: foreshadowing), Giovanni is confronted by the Senator on his way back to the dinner.  Wielding an axe, the Senator only succeeds in splitting the cat in twain (see?) and sending Giovanni through a window, a shard of which Giovanni uses to stab and kill the Senator.  Feeling suddenly unwelcome and wanting to continue his journey of bald-faced debauchery, Giovanni takes off on his motorcycle (and for the purposes of this review, I would suggest pronouncing it “motor-sickle” in your head as you read this) and makes for the desert.  There he picks up hitchhiking waitress Julie (the late, great Sylvia Kristel), and the pair travel around for the rest of the film.

To give you more of the “plot” of Philippe Blot’s The Arrogant (aka Sylvia Kristel’s Desires) would only wind up being an exercise in futility.  On that same note, if what I’ve written above entices you in any way to see this film, you have my sincerest apologies.  This can best be described as an Art film, though it’s not very artfully done.  The plot is set up like a series of vignettes punctuated by extended scenes (let’s call them diatribes) of Giovanni and Julie having “deep” philosophical debates.  In my opinion, Art films, like Science Fiction films should give you its points, raise questions, and give the viewer something on which to ponder.  The much-parodied dialogue style of this type of film is usually intentionally oblique (“You impede me.  I excrete you.” – thank you to Saturday Night Live’s “Sprockets” for that one).  It is meant to generate ideas, to engage the viewer and force (for lack of a better term) an active thought process in order to digest the work (though sometimes the intent is to confound, as well).  This is why Art films are so notoriously difficult to do well and why they are so easy to parody.  Blot’s film posits itself as an Art film, so we expect a bit of pretension to go with his ideas.  

Unfortunately, what we get is a lot of pretension and some seriously self-serious dialogue that could be called purple-nosed, since that is its style and placement.  Witness:  “There is nothing worse than virtue and those who speak of it.”  “You confuse rage with vengeance.”  “I am my king!  My master!  My fate and my god!”  “I don’t know anything about God, but you drive me into Hell.”  The list goes on.  It feels as if Blot took a few first year college philosophy classes and tried to do his best at aping what he thought he learned.  His visual style is no different.  A black limo follows Giovanni around, a symbol for his past following him as well as an angel of death biding its time for the right moment.  At one point, Giovanni seduces a young woman (Teresa Gilmore), and the scene is shot almost entirely from his perspective.  The few cut-aways in the scene are almost always of Giovanni’s eyes in extreme closeup, frozen in a lupine stare.  The obvious meaning is not just of the control of the male gaze but also that Giovanni is a wolf who takes what he wants.  All well and good, but the mashing together of the closeups with the POV camera work draws attention to itself and not in a good way.  Rather than permitting us to think about the film, Blot tells us what to think at almost every turn while managing to remain befuddling.  It is ham-fisted metaphoric filmmaking, and it all amounts to a lecture being delivered to the audience, something which most intelligent viewers will resist and resent (I’m not saying I’m oh-so-smart, but how much do you enjoy receiving a talking-to?).

The Arrogant is also very much a religious film, and calling it heavy-handed is like saying the McGuire Twins were kind of stocky.  Regardless of your own personal views on religion, it is blindingly obvious that Blot does believe in a higher power, and he goes out of his way to pound the audience over the head with his views on it.  Giovanni is a bad man, but he is also arrogant (hence the title) in thinking that he can continue to defy God without consequence.  He’s supposed to be an anti-hero, but he actually comes off as being extremely unsavory.   As a counterpoint (and the only way the film is made even remotely palatable), Julie tries to convince Giovanni that he’s wrong and headed for disaster.  That she puts up with Giovanni’s antics at all is mind-boggling, but more headache-inducing is how their relationship ultimately resolves itself.  The entire film is a series of encounters with Giovanni basically being a massive douche and then challenging Julie to prove that he’s wrong, when he does it himself.  On a moral rather than religious scale, any viewer can still recognize that Giovanni does evil simply for the sake of evil, but he couches it as an act of defiance toward God, as if that makes it okay.  When the final “twist” is revealed, though, it is not only conspicuously predictable but illogical by the film’s own logic.  Even an Art film needs to follow some of the rules it establishes for itself (including the rule that “there are no rules”).  When it doesn’t, as it doesn’t here, it reeks of laziness trying to disguise itself as avant-garde filmmaking, and to my mind, that’s more offensive than any sinning our main character can get up to.

MVT:  The best thing about this film is the desert setting.  I love films shot in the desert, and there’s so much that can be done with it, visually and thematically.  Blot does manage to wring some nice images from the backdrop.  Though outside of that and seeing a few naked/semi-naked women, there’s really no reason anyone should ever watch this film.

Make Or Break:  The Break is the philosophical debate scenes between Giovanni and Julie.  These circular dialectics (wow, that’s giving them a hell of a lot of credit) are over-emphasized in the film, and by about the third one, they have not only made their point, but also worn out their welcome, crapped on your favorite throw rug, and lit your aquarium on fire.  They are pure garbage, and that they are the seeming center point of the film speaks volumes.

Score:  3/10           

Robot Jox (1989)

If I’ve discovered one thing about myself in this lifetime it’s that, in the realm open debate, I’m just no damn fun at all.  It’s not that I don’t have my opinions.  I do.  We all do.  However, I seem to have a knack (we could even call it a penchant) for being able to empathize with the other side of an argument, even if I in no way agree with anything that’s being said.  This doesn’t mean that I can be swayed easily, or that I will endorse an opponent’s views.  It simply means that I can get where the opposing opinion is coming from and understand the context of the argument if not the content.  Some would say this makes me a pushover, but I disagree (ho, ho).  I simply understand and acknowledge the idea that reasonable people can disagree and most (but definitely not all) disagreements should be handled calmly and rationally to the extent that the participants can do so.  And this is the reason why I don’t generally get into anything political or religious with anyone on the internet.  There is no respect for the other person’s opinion from what I’ve seen in general, just children flinging poo with every ounce of strength they can muster rather than making any type of effort to come to a consensus (they basic reason for getting in an argument in the first place).  People value their own opinions, and I think that’s just ducky.  But just because you say something louder and more obnoxiously than others doesn’t make you right.  But I’d like to think we are collectively better than that.  Of course, sometimes I wouldn’t mind telling people to just go fuck themselves, either.

Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox opens in the future, some fifty years after a nuclear war has wreaked havoc with the world.  However, nations still exist (or at least two do, at any rate), and when they have a dispute over territory or anything else, their fighters (called “Jox” or “Jocks”) duke it out from within Brobdingnagian armored systems.  American Robojock Achilles (Gary Graham) watches his friend Hercules (Russel Case) get stomped by evil Russkie, sorry, Confederation Jock Alexander (Paul Koslo).  Meanwhile, Dr. Laplace (Hilary Mason) has developed genetically engineered humans, derisively called “Tubies,” and she wants them to get into robot piloting to prove her work’s merit.  Plus, there’s a spy giving American secrets to the Commies, sorry, Confederation, making them even harder to beat.  And on top of all that, the Reds, sorry, Confederation are disputing our ownership of Alaska, bringing Achilles and Alexander robotic toe to robotic toe in a battle to the death.

It’s been suggested in the past (I cannot recall by whom at present) that the premise of this film is almost exactly how the world should settle all its disagreements (though he/she wasn’t speaking with this specific film in mind, of course).  Take the top executives from the nations who have a gripe with each other, toss them in a pit, and whoever comes out is the winner.  Of course, that would also mean that government would have to be selected on the basis of physical superiority rather than on any type of mental acuity (and add to that a likely high rate of attrition).  So, geo-politics would turn into the singles bar/pageant scene (moreso than it already is), and let’s not even think about the inherent corruption that would fill the void behind the public faces of government.  In this film, the government has proxies in the form of the Robojox, so the politicians don’t have to get their hands dirty (as per usual).  And even though war itself has been outlawed in this future time, the thought of robots fighting out our problems somehow makes the thought of war slightly less scary.  The long-distance annihilation prevalent with the invention of the atomic bomb is off the table.  Everything is reduced to the credo “might makes right.”  If your robot is superior and has a superior pilot, your country will be the victor.  Logistical strategy is out the window, by and large.  Your opponent is in front of you.  Hit it until it can’t get up anymore.

This sense of tactility extends to the control systems for the robots.  There appears to have been a decent amount of thought put into how the robots operate, and it all makes sense from a design standpoint.  What it also does is provide a theme of synthesis between human and robot.  Granted, if a robot’s arm is blown off, the Jock doesn’t feel it, but since the destruction of the robot tacitly implies the destruction of its pilot, their fates are inextricably linked in the same way that the pilot occupies the inside of the robot (it is, after all, a giant metal coffin-in-waiting).  

For anyone who is a fan of Japanese anime, the basic hook of this film should feel extremely familiar.  Science Fiction in anime very often has at least one giant robot either piloted by or controlled by one or more humans (inexplicably youthful ones at that).  In Japan, this idea of symbiosis with man and machine is rather old hat and even kind of accepted as fairly normal (but who am I to say it’s not, right?).  Naturally, there are more than enough anime (animes?) with nary a robot in sight, but admit it: when you hear the term “anime,” the first thing you think of is some giant robot kicking the shit out of some other giant robot or tentacle monstrosity.  

This synthesis of man and robot can be extrapolated to include “others” in the form of the genetically engineered humans who, at first glance, appear to be the next step in evolution.  In essence, they are people who were grown, embodying only the best in physical traits, but they remain inferior to natural humans, because their thinking has been developed within strict parameters none of which take into account things like luck, intuition, or compassion.  The Gen-Jox also proffer a focus for the film’s commentary on both sexism and racism (unthinkable in the future, I know).  Showing a rather ugly side to his character (and aside from calling them “Tubies” in the first place), Achilles refers to these new people as “manufactured.”  In other words, they may live and breathe and have their own thoughts, but they are worth less than regular humans (sound familiar?).  The Gen-Jox are, in effect, no more significant than a coffee maker or the robot that Achilles pilots.  Intriguingly, the actors portraying the Tubies are all non-Caucasian (or at the very least appear to be) as well, giving the audience the general idea without having to actually point it out.  Adding to and proceeding from this aspect of the film is the lone female Tubie, Athena (Ann-Marie Johnson), who has to not only gain respect despite her genesis but must also prove herself in a male-dominated society and a male-dominated sport.  That she proves herself as worthy as she does is impressive.  That the filmmakers don’t quite allow her to make good on her promise is a bit of a let-down.  But for some of the more progressive ideas brought up in Robot Jox, at the end of the day, it’s a somewhat vanilla affair that manages to succeed well as a Science Fiction/Action film. 

MVT:  Much like with The Crater Lake Monster, the greatest thing about this film is the robot fights (not that there are robot fights in that one, but I think you understand where I’m coming from here).  The late, great David Allen’s stop-motion work is fantastic, and the miniature work is convincing, for the most part.  The battles are fierce, and you can almost feel the impacts (that the robots’ armor isn’t able to withstand more than they can is interesting on a contextual level but frustrating on an entertainment level, but still…)

Make Or Break:  The Make for me was what I like to call the “Monkey Bar Scene.”  All of the Gen-Jox are in a plain white room with an asymmetrical metal pipe structure in the middle.  The Gen-Jox are instructed to climb the bars and get through a hole in the ceiling.  Needless to say, it’s more difficult than it appears.  This was a very well-executed scene that worked for me on a narrative and thematic level.

Score:  6.5/10