“We’re Cannon Films and We’re Dynamite!”

As a child of the Seventies (a mere babe of the Sixties), I tend to look down on Eighties nostalgia, since so much of it is purely tacky and not even (ahem) innovatively or offensively tacky. Well, there was one independent movie studio, Cannon Films, that pretty much embodied the era, for better and (mostly) worse, and thus I was interested to see that one British fan has created a Cannon tribute site, and has posted countless trailers (and logos, he loves the studio’s logos) on, where else, YouTube.

First, the site. Reading the voluminous materials he’s collected on Cannon Films, you do learn a lot about the company (and there are plenty of wonderfully overwrought posters and video-box art to delight yer orbs). To put it plainly, Cannon Films started in the late 1960s, handled a number of foreign features, like the great Inga (1968), and also produced some terrific low-budget American films, like Joe (1970).

The studio’s best-known incarnation started in 1979 and ended exactly a decade later, when “the Go-go boys,” Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus too over (their names were really both Globus — Menahem named himself after the Golan Heights). G&G had the instincts of exploitation filmmakers, but Golan also harbored artistic ambitions, and under their guidance, the studio produced a very mixed bag of movies, ranging from their first hit, Breakin’(1984), to enormously popular bad action flicks and modest arthouse hits.

You can find all of the Cannon trailers here on YT, but I thought I’d single out a few for special consideration. I will avoid the most obvious of their productions, the lower-budgeted films that did boffo box-office, things starring Charles Bronson (aging Bronson), Stallone (post-Rocky/Rambo Sly), Norris (then just an ex-karate champ, not yet the superstar), and Van Damme (on his way up to a pretty rapid descent). Cannon also fostered action heroes who were solely their own, like Michael Dudikoff and Robert Ginty (check out this trailer for Exterminator 2 -- ah, the VHS “buzz”!) I will instead point out the kind of sleaze picture I would actually make tracks to attend, things like The Naked Cage (1986), a fairly standard but still pretty vigorously sleazy women’s prison picture:

URL

Golan and Globus were top-shelf merchandisers who did things that even Menahem’s former mentor Roger Corman hadn’t thought of, like shooting two films with one star simultaneously (Missing in Action and its sequel) just to maximize productivity (sounds like Bollywood). They also tried every so often to do weirdly mingle things they knew were popular internationally (like romance, and rap music!) with stuff that wasn’t (like an opera star and a clearly European-based plot). Here, as with many of this poster’s trailers, is a trailer for an unknown item called Berlin Blues (1988) that is most likely more entertaining than the film it represents — something that makes this YouTube poster’s trove all the more essential.



The studio got fairly enterprising as the money from the kickboxing and breakdancing movies flowed in. One experiment consisted of making features out of fairy tales (taking a major leaf from Shelley Duvall’s “Fairie Tale Theater”). And just to make the films more memorable (and damnably kitschy), they were turned into musicals.

Like Snow White (1987, starring Diana Rigg and Billy Barty!)


Or The Frog Prince (1986, with the girl from Annie, Helen Hunt, and Pee-Wee’s “Jambi,” John Paragon):


Or two older Broadway vets markin’ time, Robert Morse and Sid Caesar in The Emperor’s New Clothes (1987)


Golan’s artistic ambitions led him to direct some very middling pictures, but I would single out his Mack the Knife (a post-Cannon effort, thus not rep-ed on YT) as it has got to be the most misguided Threepenny Opera adaptation ever mounted (with a new, mediocre translation, and Oliver!-like choreography — "consider yourself" un-entertained!). Of course, Golan also directed The Delta Force(1986) so he knows how to make some first-rate, grade-A exploitation crap when he wants to.

But there were “art pictures” from Cannon made by other directors. Much as Coppola had with Zoetrope, the Go-go cousins funded famous directors to make films for them. Some of the results were misguided (my least fave Polanski pic, the execrable Pirates; Godard’s ambiguous and amusing but meandering King Lear(1987) — which opens with this conversation between JLG and Golan), and some were decent (Barfly with Mickey Rourke doing Snagglepuss, Maria’s Lovers with a very sexy Nastasja Kinski and a perennially crying John Savage, Runaway Train). A small handful were excellent (That Championship Season, 52 Pickup — not an art film, but a quality thriller). The two that were by far the best and were true auteurist masterworks were Robert Altman’s terrific adaptation of Sam Shepherd’s Fool for Love (1985):



And Cassavetes’ final personal film, Love Streams (1984). No trailer for this has been posted, but here is one of the most beautifully genuine moments, showing Gena Rowlands’ perfection and Cassavetes’ own view of the tenuousness nature of love:



I would end on that beyond-par sequence, but I must point out that Cannon also produced two Funhouse favorites, two movies that are so far over the top they deserve to be celebrated, but in a much different way than Love Streams. They are Norman Mailer’s brilliant bit of oddball noir Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987).



And a jaw-dropper par excellence, the sci-fi rock musical (with Biblical overtones) The Apple (1980).



Oh, and as for the Go-go twins? They both left the company in 1989 (after their Superman sequel, among several other things, flopped). They continued to make excellent kitsch (including both Lambada movies!) and are both still alive, causin’ trouble and makin’ movies in Israel. It is noted on the Cannon Films tribute site that Menahem had a big success with a Sound of Music production that found the Nazis (and everyone else, of course) speaking in Hebrew.

Best and brightest of the pundits: Rachel Maddow

Since I still actively listen to the Device Forgotten by Time, namely radio, I am always glad to hear someone who knows how to use the medium properly (read: entertain and/or enlighten ME, I ain’t worryin’ about the rest of yez). In line with that, I will publicly proclaim that, yes, I’ve been listening to the trainwreck known as Air America Radio since its inception, and as the network has continually gained and lost ground on a creative level, there has been only one constant in the whole process: Rachel Maddow.

Rachel is best known these days as a talking-head on MSNBC (most notably Countdown, which I commented on below), but she has maintained her foothold in radio, a medium that she utterly rules. I’m taking nothing away from her as a TV presence: she is beyond welcome in the 24-hour news-net jungle. She is as fresh a face on the scene as Obama, representing a new kind of broadcaster (yeah yeah right, now’s the time to mention she’s an out lesbian. Okay, done). She looks different than the other women pundits on the “cycle,” she’s leagues smarter than just about all of them, and she has an extremely natural presence on-air, which is of course a double-edged sword.

Meaning? Well, I'm glad that MSNBC allows for a slightly less frantic pace than CNN or Fox, because Rachel's particular talent lies in explaining a situation clearly and concisely, while conveying her own opinion. She is quite open about venting her frustration with certain events and policies, which I like and respond to (see my post on Olbermann below), as it's something we haven't seen from the Left in the mainstream media; we have had exemplars of classic journalism like Amy Goodman, but they never exhibit any true despair or (more importantly) annoyance at the way things are going. Rachel, however, also possesses the worst ailment Left Wing thinkers suffer from, namely an overload of good solid information (information that, of course, the average American dunce would prefer to ignore, and does NOT want to hear about). This makes her have to speak faster on some of the pundit shows to convey twice the information in half the time (whereas hardcore racist expert "Uncle" Pat Buchanan can take his own sweet time about things, because he just believes in simple things, like war and White Folks). She is lost in the context of a panel show like the current MSNBC series “Race for the White House” (sorta like that late-night “America: Held Hostage” ABC series, but without the drama) because each “head” gets their two minutes and they’re out. She does not back down from the Right reps on these shows, but is also not a master of oneupsmanship, which is the key to these clusterfuck programs (possibly the most bizarre place to see nasty Left/Right arguments is on Larry King; then again, most things on King’s show are actively surreal — from his tributes to old show-biz to the several weeks he’s spent on those underaged moms in the Texas compound).

So we have a new presence in the pundit world that doesn’t quite fit into the mold. Her radio background came to the fore when she guest-hosted for Olbermann recently and she got the chance to interview guests, something that brought out her “warm” side from radio (see my McLuhan post above!) and her ability to clarify, footnote, and still make the conversation seem mellow. Interestingly, given her current work on TV, she has publicly expressed her doubts about appearing on the “TV machine” as she likes to call it, and had a very interesting exchange on her radio show with the ubiquitous Ms. Huffington, where she asked the latter if being a Left representative on TV merely opened the floodgates for more right-wing propaganda to be spread during the faux "debates" those shows thrive on. You wouldn't hear most pundits even stopping for a second to question their own legitimacy as experts, and for this I value Rachel all the more.

I’m glad as well that, despite the fact that her star is now rightfully rising, she has remained on the uneven, uncertain institution that is Air America Radio. For the moment, her show really runs only about an hour (7-8PM EST, normally 6-9PM), since she’s on MSNBC’s nightly run-the-election-into-the-ground-cast (which is aired on AAR, and man, you don’t miss a thing on radio), and the third hour of her show is a call-in fest hosted by her friend and “political guru” David Bender (who is extremely intelligent and incisive, but just doesn’t grab me as a host). That said, even an hour of Rachel on the radio is better than catching her only as a talking-head stuck in between “Uncle Pat” the friendly hater and various journalists.

I know that others share my appreciation of Rachel’s intelligence and easygoing media presence — in fact Time’s Richard Corliss (whom I admire as a critic, but am even more thrilled to count as a regular Funhouse viewer) wrote an article on Air America in which he proclaimed himself “president of the Tribeca branch of the Rachel Maddow fan club.” Sez RC, “Maddow, with a Stanford undergraduate degree and a doctorate from Oxford, is a natural radio personality: sensible, charming, with an easy-going commitment and flashes of impish wit. She'd please any listener, make any parent proud. And she's cute too.”

In closing, I can add nothing, except that I do hope that, whatever offers come her way in the news-net jungle, she will continue to stay on radio, since that medium really (really) needs as much help as it can get, especially in NYC. And if they bring her to TV for a Countdown-style show, I hope they rehire her terrific radio colleague — who was axed by Air America in its Mark Green-era crackdown on show budgets — the wonderful comedy writer and performer Kent Jones (only guy to get the Winchell bit right, and he’s not trying it on seriously, like that oh-so-aptly named Drudge dude). He and Rachel were a team for quite a while (from the “Unfiltered” show she hosted with Lizz Winstead and Chuck D. of Public Enemy — now those were some fun mornings — to the insanely awful 5:00AM slot). With Jones along for the ride, I can see an incredibly smart and (can it be?) easygoing left-wing political show that would represent (it can happen!) something new under the sun.

I would link to video clips of Rachel, but you can find them all here at the “Maddow fans” website.