A Review of the Jazz Singer, or Kevin Smith and Geoffrey Rush are Time Travelers

This was going to be a review of the first successful sound film, The Jazz Singer. I was going to talk about how it's enjoyable, especially if you love old jazz songs, but not quiet as enjoyable as the best silent films of the time. Still, it is a cultural milestone that set off a sea change in film making and is worth watching if only so that you'll get the next "get down on my knees and sing Mamie" reference that someone will no doubt drop in your everyday conversation. That was the plan, but it all got blown out of the water when I realized that two of the films co-stars are Kevin Smith and Geoffrey Rush. Allow me to explain.

The Jazz Singer is the story of a young Jewish kid who runs away from his family to try his luck at being a jazz singer. His father is the local Cantor, the singer of the holy songs on the holy days, and can't bear the thought of his song throwing away his voice on jazz music. Early on, the boy, Jakie (or Jack, as he goes by), is discovered singing in a jazz hall when Jack's father's friend, Moisha Yudelson, sees him on stage. This is Moisha Yudelson:

If you're thinking "Wait a minute, haven't I seen that guy before in multiple Oscar-nominated roles?" you're correct. Here's another shot of him:

Okay, so the second picture is from Shakespeare in Love, not The Jazz Singer. Whatever. Put a fedora on him and it's the same guy.

But wait, how can Geoffrey Rush be in a movie that came out twenty-four years before he was born? Is he a vampire along with Nicolas Cage, or an immortal along with Keanu Reeves? No, of course not. That's silly. He's a time traveler.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that time travelers have to operate in pairs; how else to maintain their sanity? So Rush must have had a partner. What did Jake's father look like again?

That's weird. Now, where have I seen that face before...

And who is that guy?

So, you should see The Jazz Singer because it is both a cultural milestone AND incontrovertible proof that Kevin Smith and Geoffrey Rush are time travelling partners who--and here I venture away from fact into conjecture--occasionally get bored with their careers and crank the clock back to early sound films when the cinema status quo was in such a state of upheaval that any actor with a pulse and a decent voice could walk into a studio and find work, regardless of whether or not they were from the future.

Rock of Ages (watch)

Inevitably in the discussion of whether Rock of Ages is a good movie or a bad movie, someone, in the style propagated by “predator dating” books, seminars, and the guy in the fuzzy top hat, will backhand the film with compliments, saying something along the lines of “It’s fun, but it’s a bad film” or “Sure I laughed, but that doesn’t make it good.”

To be fair, there are a number of people I imagine wouldn’t like Rock of Ages. It’s a musical staged around 80s rock songs, so people who don’t like 80s rock and/or musicals are right out. Some people have a blinding, seething hatred for Tom Cruise; they will probably not enjoy his spot-on-hyperbole of a performance. And then there are those who feel like anyone singing a song apart from the original band on the original recording are blasphemers; those people, too, should stay away.

Rock of Ages, simply put, is fun. It’s not subtle, but then subtle is not in the lexicon of musicals. It’s a comedy, really, that frequently bursts into song. Of the three love stories that wind their way through the film (that’s a joke about cassette tapes), only one, the young, amateur-singer couple, is played (ha!) with any sense of straightness. The other two are purely played for comedy. The humorous script and the performances, from Alec Baldwin’s and Russell Brand’s slightly inept bar owners, to Bryan Cranston’s adulterous husband/mayor of Los Angeles, to Tom Cruise’s Axl Rose/Gary Busey-hybrid rocksexgod save the film from being just an excuse to listen to 80s rock.

Some critics, no doubt, are going to attack the film for its ridiculous over-the-topness. And there’s no denying that it is way, way over the top, as well as hugely sex-obsessed. But these aren’t detriments to the film, they are necessary components. Fittingly, for a movie about 80s rock songs, the film itself becomes an 80s rock song. Bawdy, hyperbolic, lewd, loud, tongue-in-cheek; the kind of song you look forward to hearing again.

Dead Island (play)

In light of Deep Silver’s recent announcement of Dead Island: Riptide, I’ve been trying to figure out why I beat the first game. Story is the predominant determining factor in whether or not I even play a game, and aside from some interesting NPCs, Dead Island really had no story beyond GET OFF THE DAMN ISLAND (ZOMBIES). The whole game is one long fetch quest in exchange for four Golden Tickets (Zombie Chocolate Factory? Now that’s a game I’d play). Humorously, the four main characters pick up on the flimsiness of the plot, calling out the people you can’t trust way in advance, as if they too had seen this movie before. A great main character (or characters) can sometimes make up for a weak plot, but Dead Island’s four protagonists’ only glimmers of character are their weapon specialties and some mild bickering in about 90 seconds worth of cutscenes. At some point, I just started to refer to them as Knife, Gun, Phil LaMarr, and Texan.

But despite having almost no story, I enjoyed playing Dead Island, at least up until the sewers and the prison levels when fetch fatigue set in. I think it was because of a few simple gameplay elements: the loot/crafting system, the melee combat, and how death was handled. Loot was done as in most Diablo-esque loot games. There is loot out there that’s better than the loot you have; go get it. The crafting system was where the loot really shined though. Anything you picked up in the game could be crafted into a weapon provided you found the recipe for the weapon. This led to some great tongue-in-cheek moments as you barreled down hallways with a flaming machete or a deodorant bomb.  I looked forward to crafting things just to see what was possible, as opposed to, say, Skyrim’s crafting, which became a grind to get to Dragon Armor.

The Skyrim comparison also bears in melee combat. The Elder Scrolls games take some light heckling for their combat system being essentially two people hacking at each other with swords, axes, etc., until one of them falls down. But Techland has nailed first-person fighting. While the gun play just meets par, the melee is visceral, sharp, and reactive. Hit a zombie at the right angle and it loses an arm, or a leg, or a head. Miss with just a couple of swings or get distracted for a few seconds and you’re the one losing a head. This is how fighting should feel in a zombie game, like you could die at any minute. The developers balanced this propensity to die with a forgiving respawn. While you lose in-game resources in the form of cash, you only lose a few seconds of that most important of real-world resources, time. You’re punished, but not in the form of restarting half-a-mile away from where you died.

While I enjoyed most of my Dead Island playthrough, I know I’m never going to go back to it, nor can I say that I plan to pick up Riptide. On top of the lack of story and unending fetch structure, the leveling system, which is usually a major draw for me (I’ll play Magic Pony Sparkle Horse if I can upgrade my pony’s mane for more sparkle and his saddle to hold four rocket launchers instead of two), was weighed down by incremental improvements that didn’t have much impact on the gameplay. Oh cool, a +2% chance of a critical hit. Oh cool, an edged weapons +5% damage bonus. Leveling up was just something I did because a Level Up message kept popping on screen. The question of Riptide is the same as most sequels; can they hold onto the things that worked and improve upon the things that did not? Given the mediocre DLC released so far, I’m inclined to believe that Riptide will just be more of the same, not a 2.0 or 1.5 so much as a 1.1.

Das Boot

If war is Hell, then Hell largely consists of waiting. At least, that's what Das Boot suggests. The Wolfgang Petersen-directed German submarine film follows the Captain and crew of a German U-Boat as they attempt to disrupt British shipping lines. For the most part though, the viewer just hangs out on board. After an opening scene set at a drunken, lascivious party for the men about to ship out on subs, the camera descends down into the metal tube with them, and, excepting a few scenes, that's where the camera stays, in the long, crowded hallway that makes up the majority of the ship. Petersen and cinematographer Jost Vacano choose to keep things crowded and claustrophobic. With the ship interior lit naturally in harsh glares of white, blue, and red, the camera bangs into people, walls, and the food supplies that are stored throughout the ship, all the while executing impressive steady-cam shots following crewmen from one end of the ship and back. The camera practically becomes a member of the crew, and as such so does the viewer. The sound work adds to the feeling. Every groan of the U-96 as it sinks lower into the ocean, every radar "boop", every creek of a bolt giving in to pressure breaks the silence as you and the crew wait. The camera likes to wait as well, lingering on a shot after other more time conscious editors would have cut away. The lingering lets you see some quiet, more subdued character moments, while reinforcing the sense of boredom and frustration the crew feels as they wait for orders, wait to get to their destinations, and wait until it is safe to move. The crew starts out fresh-faced, clean-shaven, excited to head out to sea. By the end, they're bearded, covered in weeks of sweat and sea water, and while they've learned to wait, their excitement of war has drained away.

I should note that I watched the Director's Cut version, which is about an hour longer than the theatrical version, but still an hour and a half shorter than the Uncut version.