To Attempt the Unthinkable: In Defense of Uwe Boll
Not long ago it was my privilege to spend six dollars and fifty cents on admission to a screening of BloodRayne, the latest video game-based opus from director Uwe Boll. What, you haven't heard of Uwe Boll? Worry not, Wikipedia does, and the synopsis is waiting in the following paragraphs.

German auteur Uwe Boll has helmed ten films so far. The first four were German language releases that never made it past that nation's borders. In 2000 things really got rolling when he founded his own production company, Boll KG, and started working in English. He directed three micro-budget pictures that never made it to theaters, before hitting on a concept that would dominate all his his subsequent pictures. Boll discovered video games. Three video game-based movies have been released, with another in post production and at least four more in the works.

All of that is true, but none of it really gives you a sense of the man behind the lense. Uwe Boll is not a good director. Let me rephrase that. Uwe Boll is the cinema as Hitler is to the Jews. The man has apparently made it his mission to make the world's worst movies. Countless critics have observed that he does not speak the language of the cinema, but that's hardly the end of it. He doesn't seem to even speak the language of his actors. Possibly the most entertaining aspect of Boll's career is his steadfast defense of his pictures. He reads all the major film discussion websites, and, with some regularity, signs up to argue for his movies. The results are not pleasant, unless one has a taste for blood.

Boll has no fans in the traditional sense. The best compliments his films get are "so bad it's good" reviews, and comparisons to the beloved Ed Wood, long considered the worst director of all time. There doesn't seem to be anyone but Boll himself who doesn't think he should fall back on his doctorate in literate. That's right; the worst movies of the young millennium were directed by a doctor.

This is the background. Today I am going to try to write an article in support of Uwe Boll. My brief research suggests that this has never been done before. Frankly, I'm not surprised. The man is deserving of much of the criticism he's received, however there are three major points in his favor.


Point the first: His movies are profitable.

There are many people who see the cinema as an art form. I would count myself among their ranks, but one should not forget that there is another dimension to the movies, one that doesn't seem to occur to many aspiring filmmakers: the cinema is a business. Hollywood is in the business of making movies. If a movie doesn't make money it is not a success in those terms. There plenty of wonderful movies that made no money at all, which, at the end of the day, is not a good way of doing business. It's one thing to make a beautiful and moving masterpiece. It's quite another to secure financing for your next picture.

Uwe Boll is not the Picasso of 35mm. He is not the Beethoven of 35mm. Nor is he deserving of comparisons to David Lynch Sergio Leone (He has made those comparisons himself). Uwe Boll is, in short, a terrible artist. Why does he keep making movies? Because it is profitable for him to do so. It's the same reason his fellow perennial critical punching bag Michael Bay keeps churning out movies.

What separates Boll from Bay is only scale. Michael Bay has been helming summer blockbusters with budgets well past the nine digit mark. Boll's first US theatrical release, House of the Dead was made on seven million dollars and made over ten million in the US alone. Not a dramatic profit, but a noticeable one.

He's not a stupid guy, though his broken English is often enough to fool the casual listener. Take a look at this quotation on casting for BloodRayne. "They were better than actors. We looked for local Romanian actresses, but there they are all from the theater and act very broadly. For 150 euros a piece the whores would be naked and do as they were told. It was better." How's that for thinking outside the box? He got exactly what he wanted for less than many other directors would have to end up paying. Whether or not he was actually well-served by his prostitutes is open to debate; that we should praise this as shrewd moviemaking is not.

Of course the real genius of Boll's productions is that they don't have to make money to make money. German tax has a built-in loophole for films owned by German companies. The laws are such that even a movie that fails to turn a profit at the box office can be profitable to its investors. The only real cost for Boll is securing the rights to his films, and he has shrewdly gobbled up about a dozen video game properties at bargain basement prices.

There has been talk of the loophole being closed, but, at least for now, Boll still gets his tax incentive. The law has been amended to prevent American production companies from taking advantage of the tax shelter via surrogate owners (much like the minority-run businesses in America that were controlled by whites taking advantage of the system). Boll's movies are owned and produced by Germans and often even filmed in Germany. It is extremely unlikely that he'll fall off the gravy train any time in the foreseeable future.


Point the second: He has a fantastic talent for casting.

Boll has released three movies in American theatres and finished filming a fourth. Altogether they cost something in the vicinity of hundred million dollars. Every movies he's made has been universally hated by film critic and film audience alike. Yet here's a brief list of some of the star power he's been able to contract.

Burt Reynolds
Ron Perlman
Jason Statham
Ray Liotta
Jurgen Prochnow
Michael Madsen
John Rhys-Davies
Christian Slater
Academy Award-winner Ben Kingsley

Yes, that Academy Award-winning Ben Kingsley. This isn't all the big names he's secured either. I tried to highlight some of the most talented people who somehow found themselves working with the good Dr. Boll. So why are these people working with Uwe Boll, not to mention apparently doing it for less money then they could have gotten? Boll's secret is twofold. One he is said to be incredibly charismatic (it doesn't come out in any of the interviews I've seen, but a whole lot of people see it) and two, he has memory. A memory? What has a memory to do with casting? If you look closely at most of actors in the list above and the many other "big names" he's cast, you'll notice that, by and large, they are fallen stars, has-beens.

Imagine you used to be a big star commanding fat paychecks and bringing in audiences with name alone. Today you don't seem to be getting much work, and when you do it's usually just cameos. Then one day a passionate and charismatic German doctor tells you he wants you to be the star of his epic new adventure pic. Finally a chance at a comeback!

Of course it doesn't really work out that way in the end, but everywhere you turn there are more former celebrities to cast. Be honest, would you have ever been able to envision Leelee Sobieski in another movie? Of course not. We can barely remember her name, but that doesn't make her any less of a star, because, even if just barely, we do remember. As to how Jason Statham, whose career seems to be rock solid, got involved in Boll picture we have to wonder. On the other hand, the once great actor named Academy Award-winner Ben Kingsley is said to have taken the role of Kagan in BloodRayne to finally fulfill his longstanding desire to play a vampire. Congrats Benny, you did it. I don't think there's any way to retract a knighting, but if there is someone ought to look into for Sir Ben Kingsley.


Point the third: He's stated a desire to improve and shown signs of doing just that.

"Saying Uwe Boll's Alone in the Dark is better than his 2003 American debut House of the Dead is akin to praising syphilis for not being HIV." (Nicholas Schager, Slant Magazine) It is interesting to note that Schager's simile is far more appropriate than he himself seems to have recognized. To wit: HIV is incurable; syphilis is not. After watching House of the Dead one is struck by the fact that it is an unmitigated disaster. There is nothing good about it. There isn't even anything mediocre about it. It's just plain atrocious. Upon subsequent viewings it becomes clear that many of the film's problems are not due to cheap and shoddy craftsmanship, but rather to conceptual flaws. One, it is flat out impossible to make a good movie with that script. Two, Boll appears to have been trying to make an arthouse zombie flick.

What?

This is not some slapped together piece-of-shit action movie. This is actually a carefully orchestrated piece-of-shit art movie. What Boll was trying to do was trying to bring the media of video game and movie closer than they had ever been before. Think of it like Sin City.* The difference is that Sin City went about recreating the feel of the comic by translating everything to the screen as directly as possible. Nearly every panel of the comic is directly reproduced on screen. House of the Dead, on the other hand, bears no plot similarities to its predecessor. There isn't even a house for chrissakes. What there is is little to no plot or character development (a video game hallmark) coupled with a number of effects very much video game-inspired. Most obvious is Boll's use of actual in game footage during the opening credits, between scenes, and during the largest battle scene. He also makes constant use of bullet-time, and does it so as toreminiscentcent of video game cutscenes, and to top it all off, he announces each characters death with a steady image of said character as the screen fades to red. You're surprised when the movie doesn't demand that insert moremore coins.

This movie is Boll the auteur ascendant. He's being daring and not worrying so much about what people think as what will be the most interesting way to get his ideas across. Make no mistake, the movie is a colossal failure, but the intent needs to be recorded, since there was no way to save the script anyway.

After House of the Dead Boll moved on to Alone in the Dark, his syphilitic masterpiece. Alone in the Dark is also a bad movie, but it is a much better one, and one that suggests a further improvement. Gone are most of the artistic ambitions. Hstillstil trying to do neat things with bullet-time, but for the most part Boll settles down to make a commercial blockbuster. It's not a success, and he still seems fundamentally incompetent.

Unlike House though, Alone does have certifiable good points. Or rather a good point, which is the performances of its male leads, Christian Slater and Stephen Dorff. They both play arrogant posturing tough guys, but they do it right. It's all the more laudable when you consider that they did it with shitty lines, a ridiculous plot, terrible costars, and a director who doesn't seem to speak their language. Despite it all they are convincing in their one dimensional roles. That's pretty much all there is to say about Alone in the Dark: two good performances in a movie where nothing else goes right. The picture gets lost sometimes and never really makes all that much sense, but it never gets bogged down its own awfulness the way House of the Dead did. It's not a very good movie, but it could have been so, so much worse.

BloodRayne is more difficult to judge. Boll seems to have fallen into a backslide towards martisticsitc approach. He approaches the video concept from a different angle this time though. BloodRayne actually has level bosses and powerups. One reviewer scorned the movie pointedly for this conceit, but it is an interesting thought experiment. BloodRayne is an exploration of the medium of video game movies. The important thing is perhaps more the journey than the result. That is if he learns from his mistake.

BloodRayne is a step up in its action elements (the most important part of an action movie after all); the fights are more realistic feeling, the effects are better, and the staging is less ridiculous. For the first time in Boll cinema there is a segment that is genuinely cool (tempered somewhat by the realization that you're watching a level boss fight). The story also pretty much makes sense, albeit with a few exceptions here and there, and Boll has greatly expanded the scope of the picture. House of the Dead pretty much alternated between a forest and a shack, while Alone in the Dark stuck to warehouses and laboratories. BloodRayne is actually something of a sweeping epic, with a variety of distinctive feeling locales.

On the downside the acting is much worse (with the exception of Billy Zane's brief appearance), almost to House of the Dead levels, and there's a really, really silly scene that is somehow more tasteless when it isn't showing any skin. Like House of the Dead, BloodRayne labeledlled a prequel, but both movies ended up as incompatible with existing mythos as Alone in the Dark.

Uwe has given a lot of interviews in his brief time making movies for America, and unsurprisingly he's been pretty defensive about his movies. It's to be expected that you'd be protective of your babies. Yet he is willing to look for places to improve. Sure he says that he's "still happy" about Alone in the Dark and that "the only weak part...is maybe Tara Reid's acting," but he's willing also to talk about it as a learning experience. And he has learned from his failures. His pictures are improving, and he's getting more of a sense of how the cinema works. He'll never be a great director. He'll probably never qualify as a good one, but if critics are willing to judge the movies on their own merits rather than Dr. Boll's reputation I think they'll find some if not good at least acceptable ones in the coming years.


I don't know if what I've written here today has had any effect on your opinion of the good doctor Boll, or even if you knew who he was before reading this. Regardless, I think this has been a worthwhile exercise. I'll go so far as to say that I'm likely to try arguing for unpopular opinions with perhaps some degree of regularity here on Lemon Party. If you have strong feelings one way or the other you could let me know via the comment system, or then again you could choose not to.

This seems a poor note to end on, so I'll leave you with one final reason to like Uwe Boll more than you did yesterday. Here we go, straight from the horse's mouth.

"What is disappointment, disappointment for all the fans is that Tara Reid is not losing her bra but this is a typical prude U.S. err, uh, thing like uh, the actresses are not willing play nudity normally and it's very disappointing for us Europeans and for the U.S. audience I think. Good that Kristanna Loken in BloodRayne is full naked."



And remember the guiding light, lest we forget the glory that be Lemon Party.
Because your blog sucks.

*Incidentally another movie that pulled down a fantastic array of names on the cheap, most likely again due to the charisma of the director and the power of his vision. Bruce Willis's salary would have most likely been about half the total cost of the production.
- posted by Odovaucer @ 3:40 AM