Break Down

FILM:

Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo - 1984
See link for writing credits
Directed by Sam Firstenberg
With Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones, Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers & Lucinda Dickey


When Golan & Globus managed to beat Beat Street to theaters with Breakin', it became the first break dancing movie and a huge success for Cannon Films.  Never one to leave perfectly good money laying around, Menahem Golan immediately ordered a sequel, and had it to theaters in seven months' time.  That's right, both Breakin' and Breakin' 2 were released in 1984.  Of course, even if you've never seen Breakin' 2, you still remember it for one of the most legendary film titles in cinematic history; Electric Boogaloo.  No one knows what it is (including the stars), but it's all over the sequel.

Now, Breakin' was not a great movie.  It was totally formulaic and had some culturally tone-deaf production elements, but it served its purpose well as an introduction to the world of hip-hop dance.  My abiding impression of Breakin' was that it would have benefitted from a streamlined story and more dancing.

Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo listened to the desires that people surely must have had from the first, and then makes them regret it.

While I declared Breakin' to have the story of "every dance movie ever" it turns out that Breakin' 2 has an even older formula; The Big Show.  A bunch of free-spirited and idealistic young people (including our returning heroes) determine to "put on a show" to save their community center.  There's still some "You don't understand my art! You never supported me!" melodrama with Kelly and her super-WASPy rich parents.

There are also the romantic sub-plots, for both good and ill.  Kelly and Ozone continue their painfully awkward hand-holding "romance."  As if their inherent lack of chemistry weren't complicated enough, there's a tall drink of hairspray that reckons she should be Ozone's lady instead and means to chase Kelly (an outsider anyway) away.  There is no reason to care about any of this, and it's just painful to even be reminded that we're pretending they work as a couple.  Confidentially, if Ozone isn't dancing, he looks like he's upset about something he smelled.  All that really comes out of this is a reason for Ozone to get angry about Kelly taking a job in France, which is another subplot that I didn't care about either.

Meanwhile, Turbo gets a love interest this time around too.  He's gobsmacked by a young Latina dancer named Lucia, and although she evidently speaks no English, their limited amount of chemistry only highlights the agony of Kelly & Ozone's.  We get more Turbo, thanks to this, and that just adds personality to the film.  This is a big plus.

Unfortunately, there are just so many more minuses.

Breakin' succeeded despite itself thanks to the dancing, even if it leaves us wanting much more.  Breakin' 2 gives us more dancing.  Sadly, it doesn't give us all that much more breaking.  There is a LOT of dancing in Breakin' 2, but where the original had only flirted with clueless Hollywood floundering, the sequel fully embraces it.  Dance numbers are filled with a great deal of skipping through the streets.  They're much more designed as stage routines than authentic b-boyism.  Despite having more dance overall, I feel fairly comfortable guessing that Breakin' 2 has less actual breakin' than the original.  I was prepared to forgive all other categories if Electric Booglaoo simply had more of the kind of dancing that Breakin' had, but that's the problem.  It's not the kind of dancing we came to see.  There are nuggets of break dance in the other routines, but they play more like guest solos than a full revue.  Despite being Ozone & Turbo's world, the dance is far more Kelly than it was before.

Which is not to say that there isn't ANY good dance.  There's a good number where Ozone & Turbo fight over a "partner" and, as in the first movie, the show-stopper belongs to Turbo.  This time, he break dances his feelings (with actual breaking moves) for Lucia in a number that calls back Fred Astaire, as he dances up the walls and spins on the ceiling.  While this crowd-pleaser gives us a more generous high-concept dose of "Boogaloo Shrimp," it's counterbalanced by a painful and embarrassing "dance combat" number between rival dance crews.  Electric Boogaloo is a heartbreaking example of old guys telling the kids what they're into rather than letting the kids just do their thing.  What they needed to do: feature more break dancers.  What they did; hired more Hollywood dancers.

The really obvious clue that Breakin' 2 was misdirected comes from the costumes.  Breakin's costumes were highly stylized versions of era-appropriate fashion trends.  Breakin' 2's costumes are an old man's reactions to youth culture.  Almost everything is day-glo bright.  If you've only read about the 80s, you might think that's normal, but the day-glo color trend really didn't happen until the late decade.  This reminded me more of an episode of Batman I recently saw where Milton Berle plays a gangster manipulating a "Flower People" youth culture of comically dressed nitwits.  It augments the screen impact, but it diminishes the cultural cache.

The music in Electric Boogaloo follows much the same pattern as its other component parts.  It's bigger, but it's worse and less appropriate.  More radio poppy, less hip-hoppy.  Ice-T returns for some reason, looking like he scored his wardrobe from a picked-over sale of Mad Max leftovers.

While Breakin' aims low and delivered a passably enjoyable artifact of early hip-hop culture, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo tries to go for "more" in all the wrong ways.  There IS some enjoyable dance, but it's buried under a pile of all the things that the sequel made worse through wrong-headed overreach. 

In fact, I'm going to do you a favor.  Here's Turbo's dance on the ceiling on YouTube.  Please enjoy it at your leisure.  Now you have no reason to mess around with Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.  Even when Golan & Globus had a good thing on their hands, they couldn't resist giving it the Anti-Midas Touch.

A Runaway Hit -- Really, A Smash!

The next collaboration isn't ready yet, so I decided to treat myself to one of Cannon's most atypically lauded offerings...

FILM:

Runaway Train - 1985
See link for complete writing credits
Directed by Andrey Konchalovskiy
With Jon Voight, Eric Roberts & Rebecca DeMornay


While the history of Cannon Films is defined by low-brow id-chow, Menahem Golan occasionally liked to hire a prestigious director (often from Europe) to make a movie for Cannon that would dilute their reputation for crap.  He bundled these with the usual brain-dead carnography so that theater owners who wanted the latest Bronson or Norris xenophobic murder porn would also have to take the fancy-pantsy art-house fare.  While I don't think that necessarily implies that he secretly had a sense of taste that he otherwise chose not to use, he still didn't have to make Zefirelli's Otello or Reggio's Powaqqatsi.  Maybe his ego needed the legitimacy, but his business model didn't necessarily.  They could have gone just as far if not farther by continuing to shovel the shit -- McDonald's certainly has.

Runaway Train was one of Cannon Films' biggest and most successful "prestige" titles, and not without cause.  It's a gritty, rock-solid action adventure film that eschews the traditional Hollywood need to make everyone likeable, and lets some of the light of actual character depth shine through.

The story is more-or-less as simple as it sounds.  Notorious criminal and habitual jail-breaker Oscar "Manny" Manheim (Jon Voight as his most anti-social) and his hero-worshipping sidekick, Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts) break out of a brutal Alaskan penitentiary, then hop a train to freedom, little realizing that the train's conductor has just had a heart attack and pitched over the side of the train.  By the time they discover they're on a Runaway Train it may be too late to do anything about it.  That's the plot, but it's not the whole story.  That structure is ornamented with tense action on both small and grand scales, and embossed with moments of humanity where Buck's admiration for Manny becomes evident, and where Manny's reactions reveal that he wants nothing of the sort for Buck, recognizing that it was that kind of naive, young buck stupidity that made his life the kind of waste that necessitated a talent for jail-breaking at all.  Indeed, he wants nothing of the sort for himself, but fatalistically accepts the limited number of choices with which he has left himself.

Legendary Japanese director is credited with the original story idea, which appears to have gone through a number of drafts along the way.  As a viewer who approached this not merely as another movie, but the product of Golan & Globus, I experienced a kind of tension throughout, wondering where the next words spoken were going to come from.  Would it be a moment of insightful humanity?  Tense exposition?  Uber-macho and heavily stereotyped prison color?  The director, Andrey Konchalovskiy doesn't appear to have made an action movie before this, but he handles it with all appropriate tension.  Runaway Train apparently got him hired for Tango & Cash (an above-average Stallone film), and Tango & Cash apparently put him off action.  His refined palette of film-making choices smooth out some of the rough spots in the script and make Runaway Train much more than it needed to be.

Jon Voight was still doing some of his best work at this point in his career -- not the mere casual gravitas that he's settled into, but when he was really cooking, and filled his characters with yearning, fire and pain.  It's not often that you see a character thinking while they're speaking.  The last time it really struck me was Matthew McConaughey in True Detective, but Voight has that here in Runaway Train too.  Manny is not an innocent man falsely accused.  He is a lifelong con who knows nothing else and is only too happy to take violent offense at the least perceived sleight.  He is a desperate criminal, and shows it.

Now, I've developed a pretty solid rule of thumb over the past few years.  Is Eric Roberts in a given movie?  If yes, then you can usually be pretty sure that it's not a good movie.  It's not that Roberts is terrible (he's wildly inconsistent), so much as he makes terrible, horrible choices.  In Runaway Train, he has a director that figured out how to get the most out of him, even if that's still inconsistent.  Roberts is sort of the Lenny to Voight's George.  Rather than asking about the rabbits, Buck fantasizes about the next big score, hopefully with Manny as his partner, and their eventual flight to the criminal equivalent of "milk & honey."  Much of Roberts' career has been spent playing seething creeps and sneering villains, but it's here, as an ignorant, dumb punk, that he gives one of his better performances, inconsistencies and all.

The surprise member of their trainbound trio is Sara (Rebecca DeMornay), the conductor's young assistant.  Like Roberts, she's playing against what would later become her established "type."  She's not just scared, she's vulnerable.  The strength she displays doesn't come from any inflated sense of confidence, but from that place of calm certainty that comes from accepting one's own responsibility for keeping oneself alive.

I really found the production texture interesting on Runaway Train.  There IS a sort of sheen of cheapness on it, but it's also clear that they spent on the kind of things that show up on the screen in a more direct way.  There's a lot of external action on a train speeding through snow (and other obstacles) and that clearly cost money.  In fact, a lot of the snowy exteriors look like they must have taken effort and expense to get to and shoot.

While I certainly enjoy the occasional spectacle, Runaway Train is the kind of movie that's just a good movie.  It doesn't have to rely on explosions to give it life.  It focuses on lives to make it explosive.

Separated at the Studio

FILM:

One of my first jobs out of high school in the late 80s was as a clerk in a mom-n-pop video rental store.  Now, The Kids Today aren't going to fully appreciate what a big deal video rental was at the time.  Cable had far fewer selections than it does now, and far, far fewer of them were any good.  You pretty much had the options of watching broadcast network TV when it was on, going to the movies, watching the same limited rotation of cable programming, or renting videos.  The video store was the introduction of viewer choice on a grand scale.  All of the options and control that video rental provided totally mitigated the hassle of hitching up the horses to leave the farm.

Video stores were the Netflix of the day -- which shouldn't come as a particular surprise when you remember where Netflix came from, but it's important to carry over the cultural significance of Netflix now and apply it to the rental shops of the 80s.  They're all but gone now, but they were important in their time.  In a video store, not only could you catch up on cinema hits in your own time, but you quickly learned about viewing options you didn't even know existed, thanks to the garish and lurid posters that socially savvy studios schlepped onto stores.  "Straight to Video" supplanted the grindhouse and drive-in theaters, and the companies knew that the poster was a MUCH larger percentage of their marketing than they were for bigger budget films.

Which is to say, I became pretty familiar with the releases from The Cannon Group/Golan-Globus Productions, because they always came with a box of posters.  By "familiar" I mean it didn't take long for me to recognize a certain pattern -- "Golan-Globus Productions" on the outside means "cheap and stupid" on the inside.

Their names have been a go-to punchline for me for 25 years now, but I've never really gotten the story on who they were, why they made so many lousy movies, and where they went.  Well, as Lawrence Kasdan wrote in his film Grand Canyon, "All of life's riddles are solved in the movies."

You just have to wait long enough, I suppose, because I just recently saw a new documentary about the rise and fall of Cannon Films and the Israeli cousins who ran it, Menahem Golan and Yoran Globus.

This film is:
Electric Boogaloo:The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films - 2014
Written & Directed by Mark Hartley

This film is:

The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films - 2014

Written by Hilla Medalia & Daniel Sivan

Directed by Hilla Medalia

This documentary tells the story of two cousins from Israel who come to America to make movies.

This documentary tells the story of two cousins from Israel who go to America to make movies.

Electric Boogaloo has clear affection for its subject; film.  It follows a well-structured arc that tracks Golan & Globus from their Israeli success to their American ambition and excess and ultimately their economic downfall -- an apparent natural outcome of Golan's character and hubris.

Go-Go Boys has clear affection for its subject; Menahem Golan.  It follows a poorly structured narrative arc that tracks Golan & Globus from their Israeli success to their American ambition and excess and ultimately their economic downfall -- the apparent result of everyone's actions but their own.

While Menahem Golan's psychology and personality are clearly essential to telling the story of who he is and what he did, it is but the engine, driving the narrative about their low-budget, low-brainpower, low-brow secret of success.  In embracing the grand scale of this character, it shows how his passion for film entwined with his tone-deafness to quality, his dangerously ambitious sales techniques, and his irresponsibility with money, which made Yoram Globus such an essential co-conspirator and enabler.

While Menahem Golan's psychology and personality are clearly essential to telling the story of who he is and what he did, this film just stops there.  It eschews the stronger narrative and the celebration of film in favor of an incomplete personality profile.  It embraces the grand scale of the character, and then never lets go, failing to pull back enough to give us a fuller perspective.  The film is primarily interested in celebrating Golan... in Golan's own words, and without much of the bigger story.

Boogaloo was in production over a few years.  It is packed with interviews and film clips, and edited with a subject-appropriate energy and enthusiasm.  It does NOT have interviews with Golan or Globus beyond what file footage it pulled together.

Go-Go Boys was produced over a few months.  It has fewer interview subjects and film clips, but it has more interview content and personal photos from people closer to Golan & Globus.  It DOES have interviews with Golan & Globus, but that may not be what it needs.

As it turns out, Electric Boogaloo is a fond, but fair documentary by Mark Hartley, who has directed several documentaries about the fringes of film.  When Hartley contacted Golan and Globus for interviews, it turned out that they suddenly, and without and previous indication, were backing another documentary about them.  This would become The Go-Go boys, directed by Hilla Medalia, a documentarian primarily telling the stories of Israeli life.  The difference is significant, and while Medalia has a more highly rated list of credits, Go-Go Boys falls short of the honesty that she must use in her other works.  In classic Cannon form, it also beat Boogaloo to release by 3 weeks.

In Boogaloo, we get interviews with many of the filmmakers who worked closely with Golan & Globus, and stars of many of their films.  The range reaches from the highly botoxed Laurene Landon who sets fire to the DVD of her film (I want to say America 3000) to Franco Zeffirelli who calls Golan the best producer he ever worked with ("He left me alone.").  The films are core.

In Go-Go Boys, we get interviews with more of the Israeli filmmakers who worked with Golan & Globus and a few stars, but also their families, and most of all, we get the cousins themselves.  The picture here is an interesting one.  The more Golan talks (and you get the impression he does a lot of that), the more he reveals of himself, albeit not necessarily in the way he intends.  The relationship is core.

Both films use a quote from an old interview with Golan & Globus, although the context of each colors its meaning.  "We are unique partners, I think... more than brothers.  We forge each others signatures on checks, if you understand that.  It's the maximum where you can get to."  Both films use this as an example of their close interaction, but only Boogaloo provides the context to cast the light of caution on the signature forging.

Hartley approaches the subject as a film buff, which is apt to be the way that most viewers will be approaching the film.  He has no loyalty here to anything but the story and the celebration of movies that, admittedly, may not deserve celebration.  While overall very upbeat and fond of his subject, Hartley pulls no punches when addressing Golan's faults.  Menahem Golan is clearly a larger-than-life (and yet all-too-human) character.  He has a deep passion for movies, which one interviewee would describe as a child's love, without discernment for quality.  His focused and driven personality led him to success, but it's also what led him to failure.  He pitched posters before he had a script and took distribution payments in advance to fund his films.  His business model was based on market share; producing more movies faster and cheaper than the studio system, with quality only serving as a gimmick to bestow legitimacy.  He short-changed, deceived and harangued most of the people who worked with him.  He paid Stallone more than his asking price (sparking the $20 Million Paycheck Race in 90s Hollywood) in a desperate bid to break into top tier action.  And when his unsustainable business practices caught up with him, he made a deal with a shady Italian "businessman" to survive, that ended up costing him an empire.

Medalia approaches the subject as an Israeli who was hired by Globus Productions, which might be more interesting to the Israeli television audience for who it originally aired than it is to the casual film buff.  Her loyalty is clearly with her subjects, which is a slight advantage... and a HUGE problem.  While Medalia pulls all of her punches, I have come to question whether she had genuine affection for the subject.  While she never questions his narrative or takes him to task, she DOES, at times, appear to give Golan enough room to indict himself through his own self-centered nature.  Menahem Golan is clearly a larger-than-life (and seemingly more-than-human) character.  He has a deep passion for movies that extends back to childhood, and may be deeply convoluted with acceptance issues.  He pitched posters for movies before he had a script, but that was super-innovative and not-at-all shady and irresponsible, you guys!  Many people said mean things about his movies, but they were just jealous they don't understand immigrants and they never made 50 movies in a year.  His cheapness was just "hard work."  His business faltered due to elitist reviewers and studio system sabotage and had nothing to do with him paying Stallone $10-13 million for a movie about a truck driver winning back his son's love through the visually magnificent sport of arm wrasslin'.  Cousin Yoram was seduced away from him by the Mafia accountant.  Yoram, for his own part, is somewhat honest about having been exhausted with being Menahem's enabler, unable to keep pulling $5 million a month out of the air to support his cousin's film making habit and gross ambition.  The only time we see the cracks in Golan's story are when A) Globus offers an alternate perspective on situations, although these are often tempered from decades of habitual coddling of Golan's overbearing personality, and B) when Golan won't shut up and his excuses begin to beg the very questions he was trying to prevent.

Electric Boogaloo is structured as a narrative, telling the story of two men (but one in particular) who capitalized on their success at home to come to America, challenge Hollywood as hubristic outsiders who thought they (he) knew a better way, and meeting with the kind of poetic fate that has been found in tales of hubris for millennia.  Along the way, they (he) were responsible for a LOT of bad movies, and a few good ones, which we can now celebrate as nostalgic artifacts, as well as recognizing how their focus on serving the lowest-common-denominator would come to influence a generation of film makers.

The Go-Go Boys is structured as a character study, paying homage to two men (but one in particular) who capitalized on their success at home to GO TO America, teach Hollywood a lesson about film making, and falling victim to jealousy, conspiracy and betrayal through no fault of their (his) own, save for an unbridled passion for movies.  Along the way, they (he) were responsible for crowd-pleasing (if often misunderstood) films which underwrote their charitable work with European art house directors like Goddard & Zeffirelli.  In the end, they returned to the welcoming bosom of Israel, where all was redeemed, if not forgotten.

In the parallel universe created by the coexistence of Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films and The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films, the evil universe goatee must go to...

...The Go-Go Boys.  Even in telling their own story, they can't help but muck it up with unbelievable heroes and villains.

Which is not to say that there is nothing redeeming in Go-Go Boys.  If you see only one documentary about Cannon Films, then that HAS to be Electric Boogaloo.  But once you've seen that and still think "Say, I could really go for a character study about these guys, now that I have some context," then Go-Go Boys does play an interesting counterpoint.  Don't rely on Menahem's talent for storytelling, and you just might find yourself entertained.


This is the first in a summer series of articles about Cannon Films/Golan-Globus Productions.  Having taken care of the backstory here, the rest of the series will feature specific Cannon productions, and in the interest of fun and partnership, many of them will include special guest stars!  So make like Chuck Norris and kick it with us here at Media Bliss.