Returning to their hometown in Missouri in the days following the end of the Civil War, former Confederate guerrillas Jesse James (Colin Farrell) and Cole Younger (Scott Caan) are disgusted to discover that the railroad companies are trying to take over everyone’s land. After Cole’s cousin and Jesse’s mother are killed by railway thugs, Jesse and Cole take revenge by forming the James/Younger Gang and robbing banks. Soon, the members of the James/Younger Gang become folk heroes and the railroad company resorts to bringing in Alan Pinkerton (Timothy Dalton) to track the outlaws down. However, even as they try to remain out of the clutches of Pinkerton’s men, there is growing dissension in the ranks of the James/Younger Gang. Cole feels like Jesse doesn’t respect his opinions while Jesse is falling in love with Zee (Ali Larter) and it’s hard to court a girl when you’re constantly having to hide out from Alan Pinkertson. Meanwhile, the other members of the gang wonder why their wanted posters never look as good as Jesse’s and Cole’s.
There have been many movies made about the James/Younger Gang and this is certainly one of them. What sets this telling apart from other versions of this familiar tale is that American Outlaws is the feel-good version of the story. Bob and Charley Ford are nowhere to be seen in American Outlaws and Jesse James doesn’t get shot in the back while straightening a picture. This approach misses the point of what makes the legend of Jesse James so memorable in the first place. Jesse James was the greatest outlaw in the west but he was ultimately taken down by a coward who shot him in the back. Take out that part of the story and the story loses all of its power. Jesse James just becomes another outlaw.
In real life, the James/Younger Gang were reportedly a rough group of outlaws who didn’t hesitate when it came to killing. In American Outlaws, they come across more like a boy band with a side hustle robbing banks. Jesse is the soulful leader, Cole is the rebel, and the other members of the gang are the interchangeable backup vocalists. There’s been many good and even great films made about the James/Younger Game. American Outlaws is not one of them. For a good movie about the life and times of Jesse James and his associates, I would suggest checking out Walter Hill’s The Long Riders or Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Occasionally, if you’re lucky, you come across a film that so totally and completely conforms to your own worldview that you’re forced to wonder if maybe you wrote the script and then somehow forgot about it.
That was certainly the case, for me, when I recently watched 2008’s Boot Camp, a teen melodrama with an anti-authoritarian subtext. Check out the trailer:
In Boot Camp, Mila Kunis plays Sophie. Sophie is rich and, in the eyes of her parents, out of control. She talks back. She sneaks out of the house. She hangs out at all the wrong clubs and with all the wrong people. You know the story. We’ve all seen the talk shows. Sophie’s parents are convinced that the only way that they can get Sophie under control is to exile her to what the film calls a “tough love boot camp.”
The boot camp is located on an island, just a few miles away from a luxurious resort. From the minute Sophie arrives, she is told that escape is impossible and she can only leave after the facility’s founder, Dr. Arthur Hall (Peter Stomare), says that she can. Some people have been at the camp for years, waiting for Dr. Hall to announce that they’re rehabilitated.
The rest of the film follows Sophie and several other inmates as they try to survive boot camp without surrendering their free will. It’s not easy. Though he is more than happy to take their money, Dr. Hall resents the parents and his program is mostly designed to brainwash the inmates into thinking of him as being their new father figure. The camp is staffed with brutes, sadists, and rapists. When one inmate drowns, the staff tries to cover up his death. Eventually, like the inhabitants of the Island of Dr. Moreau, Sophie and the other inmates have no choice but to rise up in rebellion against their masters.
“Tough love boot camps” are a real thing. They used to be hugely popular with daytime talk show audiences and I know that Dr. Phil still has a ranch to which he sends “out of control” teens. (I put “out of control” in quotes because, often times, it seems that “out of control” is code for “thinking for yourself.”) The idea is that rebellious teenagers are sent to the camp, where they get yelled at until they agree to stop being so rebellious. Over the years, there’s been a lot of debate over whether boot camps actually work. If I had been sent to a boot camp, I think I would have just lied about my feelings and put on a repentant good girl act just to get the yelling to stop. I’d be perfectly humble and contrite for three months and then, as soon as I got out of the camp, I’d go back to sneaking out of the house, skipping school, shoplifting, doing drugs, and whatever else got me sent to the camp in the first place. From what I’ve seen of the whole boot camp experience, it seems to be more about brainwashing than anything else. What’s the point of having well-behaved children if they can’t think for themselves?
But, then again, boot camps have never really been about helping the teenagers sent to them. Instead, they’ve always been about making lousy parents feel better about themselves. Parents who have spent the last 14 years totally fucking up their children get to pat themselves on the back because they sent their kids to boot camp. Other adults, bitter over having lost their youth, get to say, “It’s time to teach those ungrateful children to respect authority.” As for the people who run the boot camps, it’s less about the inmates and more about power and money.
That’s certainly the message of Boot Camp. In fact, I was taken by surprise to discover just how much Boot Camp conformed to my own thinking on … well, on just about everything. Make no mistake, Boot Camp is a flawed film. There’s nothing subtle about Christian Duguay’s direction and, with the exception of Mila Kunis, none of the performances are as memorable as you might hope that they would be. Peter Stomare is way too obvious in his villainy, giving a performance that belongs in the Overacting Hall Of Fame. (You’ll find Stomare’s Dr. Hall in the villain wing, right next to Christoph Waltz in SPECTRE.)
But, even with all that in mind, it was impossible for me not to get excited when Sophie and her fellow out-of-control teens finally made their move against their tormentors. The final third of Boot Camp turns into a celebration of disobedience and rebellion and it was impossible for me not to be thrilled by it. Considering the increasingly Orwellian nature of American culture, we need more movies that celebrate revolution and individual freedom. At a time when we’re being told that we “have to do this” or “have to do that,” Boot Camp says, “Nobody has to do anything, beyond what they choose.”
It’s an important message and one that people need to start heeding.
It’s been brought to my attention that I’ve been going off on Canada a lot lately, which is odd since some of my favorite Twitter friends happen to live up in Canada. Unfortunately, so does my one twitter enemy. I’m not going to give out his name (though I call him Monsieur Petit Pénis) or go in to all the gory details but oh my God, I hate him so much it’s not even funny. Seriously. Hate him. Forever and ever.
But anyway, just in case I have been tarring an entire nation based on one freaking lewser, I want to take some time to acknowledge the greatest thing to come out of Canada since Ryan Gosling, Hobo With A Shotgun.
Rutger Hauer plays the title character and hero of this nicely demented little film. When we first meet Hobo, he doesn’t have a shotgun. He’s just a vagabond, a proverbial man with no name who finds himself in the most run-down slum of a town ever. Hope Town appears to be located in one of the lesser known rings of Hell and basically seems to consist almost exclusively of burned-out storefronts, trash-strewn alleys, and seedy amusement parks. Seriously, the New York City of Taxi Driver hasn’t got a thing on Hope Town.
As soon as the Hobo arrives, the first thing he witnesses is the town’s local crime boss, the Drake (Brian Downey), decapitating a man in broad daylight while the citizens of the town apathetically watch. The Drake looks a lot like Peter Popoff (a preacher who comes on TV around 2 in the morning around these parts; he sells magic holy water) and he has two equally sadistic sons, Slick (Gregory Smith, who looks like Tom Cruise on extasy) and the idiotic Ivan (Nick Bateman). It soon becomes obvious that the Drake and his sons control the town because nobody has ever previously considered grabbing a shotgun and gunning them down. Nobody until the Hobo that is.
Originally, of course, the Hobo had different plans. He was attempting to raise the money necessary to buy a used lawn mower sitting in the local pawn shop, the idea being that he could use that mower to start a lawn care business. (The joke here, of course, is that nobody in Hope City appears to have a lawn. Seriously, they should have called it Cement City.) However, right when the Hobo is preparing to buy the lawn mower, the pawn shop is held up by two thugs. Luckily, along with the lawn mower, there’s also a shotgun — which happens to cost the exact same amount as the lawn mower — in the sales window. The Hobo purchases the shotgun and soon, with the help of a sympathetic prostitute named Abby (Molly Dunsworth) he sets out to clean up Hope City, one criminal at a time.
Now, it might sound like I’m making fun of the film’s plot but nothing could be further from the truth. This film is perfectly aware of how ludicrous all of this is and director Eisener quite wisely never apologizes for the story he tells or the way he tells it. From the start, Hobo With A Shotgun shows that it is a film without shame and therefore, one that you can watch without shame.
It’s also follows Robert Rodriguez’s Machete as the second film to be based on a fake trailer made for the Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaborative film Grindhouse. Here’s the original “fake” trailer that led to a very real movie:
Though it’s gotten nowhere as much hype, I actually think Hobo With A Shotgun is superior to Machete. Grindhouse films may have been excessive but they were still films being made by filmmakers and, as Quentin Tarantino has always seemed to understand, the truly great grindhouse films (the ones that we eagerly wait to see released on DVD) never used the art of excess as just an excuse to do whatever they wanted. The best grindhouse films created their own unique worlds with their own unique rules but once those rules had been set, they weren’t broken. (That, of course, wasn’t true of all grindhouse films. Just the good ones.) That is where Hobo With A Shotgun truly triumphs. You believe in this odd, over-the-top world that the film creates. Everything from the graffiti-covered walls to the garish cinematography to even the overacting of most of the supporting cast; it all comes together to create its own unique world. And once you surrender to that the film’s odd “reality,” the film becomes, in its own warped way, quite compelling.
With the exception of Rutger Hauer in the title role, the cast of Hobo With A Shotgun is largely made up of unknowns and that’s quite a contrast to Machete. However, and I may be in the minority here, I actually felt that all the famous faces in Machete actually had a detrimental effect on the overall film. Too many of them seemed to be slumming or treating Machete as a lark and true grindhouse is never a lark. If there’s one thing you can say for sure about Rutger Hauer’s performance here, it’s that he’s definitely not slumming. Hauer seems to understand that a film like this needs an anchor, something steady that the audience can grab on to whenever the film itself threatens to spin out of control. Wisely, Hauer chooses to underplay his character and, as a result, he dominates the entire film. It’s really a performance that all aspiring actors should watch. Hauer might be playing a hobo with a shotgun but that doesn’t keep him from being the most compelling and believable hobo with a shotgun possible. Out of the rest of the cast, Molly Dunsworth does a good job and manages to be believable whether she’s mourning her lost innocence or stabbing a bad guy to death with a fragment of bone.
Hobo With A Shotgun is currently in limited release here in the United States. What does that mean? Well, that means that if you’re living on the West or East coast you’re in luck. However, if you’re like me and you actually live in a city that’s not going to be targeted by terrorists in the near future, things are a bit more problematic. Luckily, for us, Hobo With Shotgun is available OnDemand which is how I ended up seeing it.
In conclusion, allow me to say, “Canada, you rock!”
Returning to their hometown in Missouri in the days following the end of the Civil War, former Confederate guerrillas Jesse James (Colin Farrell) and Cole Younger (Scott Caan) are disgusted to discover that the railroad companies are trying to take over everyone’s land. After Cole’s cousin and Jesse’s mother are killed by railway thugs, Jesse and Cole take revenge by forming the James/Younger Gang and robbing banks. Soon, the members of the James/Younger Gang become folk heroes and the railroad company resorts to bringing in Alan Pinkerton (Timothy Dalton) to track the outlaws down. However, even as they try to remain out of the clutches of Pinkerton’s men, there is growing dissension in the ranks of the James/Younger Gang. Cole feels like Jesse doesn’t respect his opinions while Jesse is falling in love with Zee (Ali Larter) and it’s hard to court a girl when you’re constantly having to hide out from Alan Pinkertson. Meanwhile, the other members of the gang wonder why their wanted posters never look as good as Jesse’s and Cole’s.
Through the Shattered Lens 