Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
June 2008
Sunday, June 1, 2008
There is a pulse to a city, and it never stops beating.
In the wake of Brute Force, producer Mark Hellinger re-teamed with director Jules Dassin to make the ultimate docu-noir, 1948's The Naked City, which inspired the television show of the same name. It was Hellinger's last film before he was felled by a heart attack at the age of 44, and his fingerprints are all over it. He even provides the wry narration that runs throughout it, and he delivers the famous closing lines: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." Hellinger's isn't the only voice we hear, though. We're also privy to the inner thoughts of ordinary people going about their business -- even after the murder that sets the plot in motion.
Barry Fitzgerald stars as the wizened homicide detective put on the case of a dress shop model who was drowned in her bathtub. Don Taylor is the strapping young detective who does a lot of the legwork on the case (and whose home life we get to see in some detail). Howard Duff plays a friend of the deceased who turns out to be a terrible liar, and Dorothy Hart is his fiancée and a fellow dress model who can't believe that he would have anything to do with murder. Eventually the trail leads to a series of unsolved jewelry robberies and a harmonica-playing wrestler, but until the pieces start fitting together the detectives have a lot of blind alleys to run down.
The film's depiction of a murder investigation may seem quaint, particularly in light of the glut of police procedurals that litter television today, but it gets a great deal of mileage out of being shot almost entirely in real locations. (There's at least one shot in a moving vehicle that was obviously done on a sound stage with rear projection, but it's one out of hundreds.) It's a shame Dassin and Hellinger didn't get to make any more films together. They really brought out the best in each other.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Do you realize that the contents of this cabinet could rock London to its foundations?
When I was in England I watched a lot of television (it was British television, after all) and one afternoon I happened upon an obscure 1959 film called Carlton-Browne of the F.O. I tuned in because it featured Peter Sellers in a small role, but the star was a gap-toothed chap called Terry-Thomas, who I had seen once or twice before, but he had never made an impression. This was not their first onscreen pairing, though. Two years earlier they appeared on more equal footing in The Naked Truth, a rather broad comedy about an unscrupulous tabloid journalist (is there any other kind?) played by Dennis Price (the star of Kind Hearts and Coronets) and the victims of his insidious blackmail plot. They include Terry-Thomas's philandering lord, Sellers's beloved TV star and slumlord, Peggy Mount's prize-winning author with a dark secret, and Shirley Eaton's... well, I'm not entirely certain what Price was blackmailing her about, but it was enough for her to break her engagement to a Texas oilman's son. Independently, the four of them decide that their only recourse is to kill Price, but that's easier said than done, especially once they start falling all over each other to get to him. The screenplay was written by Michael Pertwee, who would acquit himself much better with The Mouse on the Moon and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (both of which were directed by Richard Lester) the following decade, and directed by Mario Zampi, a man whose other work I doubt I'll see much of. Heck, if this had been released on DVD under its American title -- Your Past Is Showing -- I probably wouldn't have even seen this one. The things I do for theme weeks...
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Exterminate all rational thought. This is the conclusion I have come to.
Any excuse to revisit David Cronenberg's work is a good excuse and Naked Week gives me the perfect chance to run Naked Lunch, his 1991 adaptation of the book by William S. Burroughs, again. Cronenberg got around the nearly insoluble problem of adapting the book (which, as he said, "would cost $400-500 million if you were to film it literally, and of course it would be banned in every country in the world") by focusing on the process by which Burroughs came to write it. To this end he incorporated pieces of Burroughs's biography (such as the shooting death of his wife) and some of his other works (the novel Exterminator! being a prime example), as well as a selection of "routines" from Naked Lunch that can be recited without being dramatized. In this way, he made a film that is both faithful to the spirit of Burroughs and recognizable as Cronenberg as well.
As Bill Lee, the fictional embodiment of the melding of their sensibilities, Cronenberg cast Peter Weller, whose deadpan delivery and emotional detachment is perfect for the role of an exterminator who gets hooked on his own bug powder (as well as a number of other, more exotic, substances) and flees to Interzone after doing his "William Tell routine" with wife Joan (Judy Davis). There he finds himself embroiled in a convoluted espionage plot and writes reports about the shady characters he encounters (played by the likes of Ian Holm, Julian Sands, Roy Scheider, Monique Mercure and Robert A. Silverman). He also finds his dead wife startlingly resurrected in the guise of Joan Frost (Davis again), the wife of Holm's character. For a while he seems to be in danger of losing himself to drugs and debauchery, but buckily he's been sending some of his work to his writer pals Nicholas Campbell and Michael Zelniker (as Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg stand-ins), who help him pull together the book he didn't even realize he was writing. Such is the power of bug powder, giant centipede meat and mugwump jism -- you hardly know what you're doing when you're on them.
Oh, hey. Did I neglect to mention all of the strange creatures Bill Lee encounters? Not just mugwumps, but bugs with talking sphincters, typewriters that mutate into insects and sex blobs, giant centipede-men and a device called the Mugwriter, which dispenses two types of liquid when it likes what you type into it. Cronenberg may be heterosexual, but the phallic imagery in the film is consistent with Burroughs's decidedly homosexual frame of reference. And it's not like Cronenberg hasn't gone there before. The phallic stinger in Marilyn Chambers's armpit in Rabid and James Wood's vaginal stomach slit in Videodrome are but two examples of Cronenberg's exploration of all types of sexual imagery in his films. The strangest was yet to come, though, as anyone who's seen Crash can attest. When is Criterion going to give that film the loaded edition it deserves? That's what I'd like to know.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Nudity in art, it's only a picture. Nudity in public is an aggression.
I know what you're thinking. "If this is Naked Week, when is he going to stop pussyfooting around and watch a film with full-frontal nudity?" Well, here it is, folks: the HBO documentary Naked World, in which photographer Spencer Tunick travels to all seven continents to shoot naked people in public places. Made in 2002, it was the follow-up to 2000's Naked States, which followed Tunick across the United States, and was followed by 2005's short subject Positively Naked. All three films were directed by Arlene Donnelly Nelson (also the cinematographer of Christopher Guest's A Mighty Wind) and one comes away with the impression that once you've seen one, you've seen them all. It just so happens that this is the one where he finds people in Montreal, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Melbourne, Tokyo, Capetown, Antarctica and São Paulo to get their kit off for him.
Tunick claims his goal is not to sexualize his subjects ("It's not pornography. It's not lewd. I'm forming shapes with human bodies," he says), but he has to admit that he's deliberately being provocative. Unless arrangements have been made in advance, there's always a chance that he and/or his volunteer models could be arrested for indecent exposure. (The film opens with footage of one such arrest in New York City.) It's also hard not to see him as an opportunist when he says, late in the game, that he'd like to sell some of his works so the expedition could turn a profit. The most damning moment comes on the boat ride back from Antarctica, though, when he admits that he doesn't particularly care if his photographs are good or not after a passenger chides him for the banality of his subject. I can see Tunick's point, though. If you went all way to the bottom of the world to photograph somebody nude, why shouldn't you frame them in front of a flock of penguins?
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
You fight like a young man; eager to start and quick to finish.
Okay, then. Having never been to a drive-in before, I have no idea what a typical experience is like, but my roommate Paul and I arrived at the Starlite at around eight and had to wait over an hour for dusk to come and the first movie to start. (Should we decide to go back, nine o'clock would appear to be adequate.) We got some food at the refreshment stand and watched with a certain amount of trepidation as a thunderstorm slowly rolled in. The Starlite has a system where people can tune into the soundtrack on their car stereo, which was useful when it started raining. The only problem then is dealing with the windows when they inevitably fog up. (I realize some people go to drive-ins specifically to fog up their windows, but that's certainly not what Paul and I were there for.)
First out of the gate was the Dreamworks animated feature Kung Fu Panda, starring Jack Black as a chubby panda who comes from a long line of lowly noodle sellers (at least as far as his father James Hong is concerned), but he dreams of becoming a kung fu legend like his idols, the Furious Five (a menagerie voiced by Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu and David Cross). Through circumstances too involved to get into, the novice panda is named the long-awaited Dragon Warrior, much to the consternation of kung fu master Dustin Hoffman, who very reluctantly agrees to train him. They don't have much time to get him into fighting shape, either, since vicious criminal (and Hoffman's former disciple) Ian McShane has broken out of prison and is bent on revenge. The characters are amusingly rendered and the script doesn't go overboard with the "learn to like yourself" moralizing -- and best of all it isn't saddled with extraneous pop culture references. It just tells its story, simply and briskly, and with a high quotient of laughs and kid-friendly martial arts action.
After an intermission which included a vintage ten-minute "Visit Our Refreshment Center" loop, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull started and so did the heavy rains that had held off throughout the first feature. Watching a big-budget special effects extravaganza between windshield wiper passes is far from ideal, but at least we were dry. (I was also very thankful that they had a backup generator all ready when the power went out with 15 minutes left to go.) Reuniting director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas (who co-wrote the story, but thankfully not the final script) for the first time in nearly two decades, this was an Indy eager to show that even if they (and star Harrison Ford) are getting up in years, they're still able to deliver the goods. And they do to a degree, but there's something vaguely warmed-over about the whole enterprise. Maybe 19 years is too long for a film to be in development.
Updating the action to the '50s -- and swapping in the Reds for the Nazis as the villains du jour -- Crystal Skull opens with a memorable visit to the same storage facility where we saw the Ark of the Covenant being stowed at the end of Raiders. This time Dr. Jones is being forced by Russian psychic researcher Cate Blanchett to find... Well, I suppose I could try to be coy about it, but let's cut to the chase: Blanchett is looking for the remains of the alien that crash landed in Roswell. She's also after the elusive Crystal Skull of Akator, which Indy goes searching for along with greaser Shia LaBeouf (modeling himself on Brando and Dean), who -- spoiler alert -- turns out to be his son by Karen Allen. I don't classify that as much of a spoiler, though, because the moment I found out Spielberg and Lucas had cast the young up-and-comer in the film I figured it had to be for the father-son angle. (I doubt it was based on his performance in Transformers.)
It wouldn't be an Indiana Jones movie without a few British thespians along for the ride, and this one offers up Ray Winstone as Indy's longtime partner in espionage whose loyalties come into question on a few occasions, John Hurt as his archaeological contemporary whose faculties aren't what they used to be thanks to prolonged exposure to the Crystal Skull, and Jim Broadbent as the one with the unenviable task of replacing Denholm Elliott as the dean of the college where Jones teaches. Elliott's character even gets name-checked a couple times, and Ford gets to linger a moment over Sean Connery's photograph since Henry Jones Sr. is also among those who have died in the interim since The Last Crusade. The rapport between Ford and LaBeouf can't possibly measure up to the one he had with Connery in that film, but that can also be chalked up to their lack of shared history.
So, to sum up, I don't regret seeing either of these films (although I probably would have been more jazzed about the Iron Man/Indiana Jones double feature the drive-in was running two weeks ago), but if I'm going to make a return trip to the Starlite, it's going to have to be on a much clearer night -- and one where I don't have to work the next morning.
Sounds just like a poem. If it rhymed, it would rhyme with murder.
Ever since I first got on my film noir kick last spring I figured I would eventually get around to The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Well, eventually was tonight. (I also thought I'd watch it back to back with Dr. Strangelove, but I took so long writing up my drive-in review this afternoon that I don't have time for that.) Made in 1946 and directed by Lewis Milestone (best known for helming the original versions of All Quiet on the Western Front, The Front Page, Of Mice and Men and Ocean's Eleven, among others), the film starts in 1928 when the young Martha is trying to run away from home with the help of Sam, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. They are discovered and Martha is brought back to her domineering aunt (Judith Anderson), a rich industrialist who believes that her wealth can buy her anything -- just not the obedience of her headstrong niece.
Eighteen years later Martha (played as an adult by Barbara Stanwyck) is in the same position, having inherited everything from her aunt and turned the factory into even more of a success (most likely during the war boom). She's even married to the district attorney (Kirk Douglas), who is up for re-election and likely to go about as high as she wants him to. Then Sam, in the guise of Van Heflin, comes back into her life and everything goes topsy-turvy. Heflin is just passing through with no real desire to catch up on old times, but then he gets stuck on a pouty mystery woman (Lizabeth Scott) who's out on probation and asks old pal Douglas to bail her out of trouble. Douglas thinks he's only after Stanwyck's money and pays some guys to rough him and dump him 25 miles out of town. Oh, did I mention that Douglas is a drunk and Stanwyck isn't in love with him? That might have something to do with it, too. It's slow-moving for a noir and it takes a long time for Stanwyck to even come close to being a femme fatale, but everything comes together at the climax, when long-buried secrets come to light and people start pointing guns at each other.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Nothing like a crisis to show what's really inside people.
Fox has released 1947's Daisy Kenyon as part of its Fox Film Noir series, which is mildly misleading to say the least. Sure, director Otto Preminger and stars Joan Crawford and Dana Andrews were all film noir veterans at this point in their careers, but no matter how you slice it this isn't one. Rather, Daisy Kenyon is what used to politely be called a "woman's picture" (before the term "chick flick" was invented), which were generally centered around a confident career woman who had to decide between the two men who love her. Crawford plays the title character, a successful commercial artist who is "the other woman" in high-powered attorney Andrews's life. While Andrews tries to extricate himself from his marriage (to shrewish Ruth Warrick), decorated war veteran Henry Fonda swoops in and offers Crawford a safer bet, which she takes despite calling him "nice, but a little unstable" after they first meet. Preminger tries to keep the film moving -- as much as he keeps his camera in near-constant motion -- but even a couple unbilled cameos by the likes of Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon (in a scene set in the famous Stork Club) can't liven it up. I'm not saying every film noir has to contain a murder or violent crime of some sort in order to go over, but it sure doesn't hurt.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Some of the criminal types these days, they think that they're real cowboys.
Walter Hill is the kind of director who unapologetically makes movies about guys for guys, and he knows his tough guys. One of his first jobs as a screenwriter was Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway and his debut as a writer/director was the Charles Bronson vehicle Hard Times. And based on the evidence of his second feature, 1978's The Driver, he also knows his cool guys. It's a sleek neo-noir very much in the mold of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, with Ryan O'Neal as The Driver, the best getaway driver in the business, and Bruce Dern as The Detective hot on his trail. (Nobody in the film has a name, everybody goes by what their function in the plot is.) O'Neal is a consummate professional and he expects the same from the crews he works with. For his own part, Dern is extremely cocky and, once he sets his sights on O'Neal, he will stop at nothing -- even going so far as to arrange a bank job -- to get him.
The film is not entirely bereft of the fairer sex, although they play a much less prominent role in the proceedings. Isabelle Adjani is The Player, who is hired to be O'Neal's alibi on the job that opens the film, and Ronee Blakley is The Connection, who sets up the jobs and then tries not to be involved after that point. There's no reason to believe that O'Neal is romantically involved with either of them and it doesn't seem likely that he'll have any such entanglements in the future, either. Maybe if he could find somebody who was willing to be The Passenger, he'd be in business.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
She be no lady. She be a French lieutenant's whore.
When Harold Pinter took on the challenge of adapting the novel The French Lieutenant's Woman to the screen, he came up with a most intriguing conceit for it. Interwoven with John Fowles's story (of an illicit love affair between people of different classes in Victorian England) is the story of the two lead actors in a film adaptation of the book who are also carrying on an affair (despite the fact that both of them are married). Meryl Streep plays the title character, the subject of gossip in her provincial town, and Jeremy Irons is the gentleman paleontologist who is betrothed to a rich merchant's daughter yet finds himself inexorably drawn to her -- as he is in their offscreen lives.
Also taking roles in the film-within-the-film are Peter Vaughan as the merchant who is initially pleased by his daughter's engagement, Leo McKern as a doctor in whom Irons confides (and who, rather amusingly, swears on Darwin's The Origin of Species), Richard Griffiths as one of the members of his gentleman's club, and David Warner (who had previously played the title role in director Karel Reisz's 1966 film Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment) as a rather severe lawyer. Many of them also pop up in the framing story, where Streep and Irons find their affair difficult to maintain once they're no longer on location and their spouses are back in the picture. Penelope Wilton deserves special mention for the way she, as Irons's wife, is able to convey without words that she knows what's been going on and that the easiest way to handle the infidelity is to wait for it to run its course. One gets the impression that this is far from the first time he's strayed -- and it won't be the last, either.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Our bodies are all we have. We can't afford to ruin them.
One year after the garish Gate of Flesh, Seijun Suzuki made Story of a Prostitute, a more muted black and white film about a handful of women servicing a battalion of Japanese soldiers in northern China and the new arrival who makes up her own rules. A remake of a 1950 film based on the same novel that boasted a screenplay co-written by Akira Kurosawa, it stars Yumiko Nogawa as the strong-willed Harumi, who gains the unwanted attentions of the adjutant (Isao Tamagawa) and takes up with his timid orderly (Tamio Kawaji) out of spite. Since he filmed his version in 1965, Suzuki was able to show a lot more flesh (both male and female) than what was in the 1950 version and his stylistic flourishes (such as the use of slow motion and freeze frames) would have also been difficult to imagine in the earlier film. Suzuki may not have had much control over the scripts he was given to film, but he always found novel ways to shoot them.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
The Sasaharas are men. Their pride will not let them back down.
Anybody going into 1967's Samurai Rebellion expecting non-stop action will most assuredly come away disappointed for this is a film where the characters exhaust every possible option before resorting to violence -- and because we've had time to get to know them and feel for them, when violence does erupt it's tragic, not cathartic. Directed by Masaki Kobayashi, the film is set during the Edo period between 1725-1727, which was a time of peace, but the characters serve a fickle lord who puts them in an untenable position. Toshiro Mifune (who also produced) stars as a henpecked cavalry officer who is ordered to accept one of his lord's mistresses (Yôko Tsukasa) as a wife for his elder son (Go Kato). At first Mifune tries his best to decline the offer without seeming to be disobedient, but once the marriage goes through it appears to be a good one and produces a daughter. It's when the lord asks for his mistress back that things begin to get hairy.
There is a great deal of maneuvering behind the scenes, with clan officials and family members alike trying to get Mifune and Kato (who has taken his place as the head of the family after Mifune's retirement) to take the path of least resistance and bow to their lord's whims. Nobody wants to have to confront Mifune in a fight, though, because his swordsmanship is without equal -- except maybe for that of his friend Tatsuya Nakadai, a border guard who tries his best to stay out of the quarrel. (It is remarked that the two of them have prudently avoided dueling, so it's only a matter of time before circumstances put them in a position where neither of them is able to back down.) For my last film from Criterion's "Rebel Samurai" box set, I couldn't have chosen a more compelling or heartbreaking one.
Sure, it's violent, but that's the way we love it! Violent, violent, violent!
Of all the high-concept genre movies Roger Corman's New World Pictures released in the '70s, the pinnacle was probably 1975's Death Race 2000, which may be nearly a decade past its sell-by date, but it still packs a satirical punch thanks to the contribution of director Paul Bartel, who zeroed in on the absurdity of a futuristic cross-country road race where the drivers score points by running down pedestrians. Set 21 years after the World Crash of '79, it posits a world where the Trans-Continental Road Race is "the most popular sporting event in the history of mankind" and is sanctioned by the president of the United Provinces of America, which is represented by a "bi-partisan" ruling party. Not everyone is fond of the spectacle, though, and anti-race rebels work to sabotage it and remove drivers from contention by any means necessary.
The star of the race -- and of the film -- is David Carradine's Frankenstein, one of the few surviving winners of past races who's had just about every part of his body replaced at one time or another. Simone Griffeth co-stars as his new navigator (Frankenstein's navigators apparently have the life expectancy of Spinal Tap drummers) who's actually working for the rebellion, and a then-unknown Sylvester Stallone plays his main rival, Italian mobster stereotype Machine Gun Joe Viterbo. In keeping with the over-the-top theme, the other drivers have colorful nicknames like Calamity Jane (Bartel film fixture Mary Woronov), Matilda the Hun (whose fans wear swastikas) and Nero the Hero (whose navigator is played by Leslie McRae, star of MST3K favorite Girl in Gold Boots). On the sidelines, the play-by-play is delivered by the always-enthusiastic Don Steele, with Joyce Jameson as his co-host (the well-named Grace Pander), Bartel in an uncredited cameo as Frankenstein's doctor and John Landis in a bit part as a mechanic who gets run over by a testy Stallone.
Unfortunately, the powers that be have seen fit to remake this film (shortening the title to just Death Race) and they've handed the reins over to Paul W.S. Anderson, the auteur behind Mortal Kombat, the Resident Evil movies and AVP: Alien vs. Predator. It's set to come out this August. As long as the air conditioning at my home is working, I can see no reason in the world why I would ever buy a ticket to see it. I'm not saying the original couldn't be improved upon (it stretches its meager budget at almost every level), but the cheesiness is half the fun. More than half, even.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Tonight death walks again in this evil house.
As it's Friday the 13th, I decided it was high time that I watch William Castle's 13 Ghosts, which I've had on tape for months. (What, did you think I was going to say something different?) Made in 1960 and shot in "Illusion-O" -- which allowed people to decide whether they wanted to see the ghosts or not -- it starred Donald Woods as Cyrus Zorba (who, incidentally, is not Greek), a financially-strapped paleontologist who inherits a haunted house from his eccentric uncle and immediately moves his family into it. His wife Hilda (Rosemary DeCamp) is less than enthused about the idea, but they're so hard up for cash (in the opening scene she calls Woods at work to inform him that their furniture is being repossessed for the umpteenth time) that they don't have much choice.
Now I'll bet you're wondering how they find out it's haunted. Well, that's no mystery: his uncle's lawyer (Martin Milner) tells them straight out. It seems Uncle Zorba traveled the world collecting ghosts -- and they go with the house. So does the creepy housekeeper (Margaret Hamilton) who stays on even though they can't pay her. Castle must have been so bowled over that he was able to get the Wicked Witch of the West that he worked several references to her looking like a witch into the dialogue, sticking most of them into the mouth of precocious ten-year-old Buck ('50s child star Charles Herbert, who gets top billing). That just leaves the older daughter Medea (Jo Morrow), who is the first to be threatened by the ghosts when the family plays a not-so-innocent game of Ouija.
Castle breaks out plenty of the standard haunted house tropes -- chills, plants withering, moaning behind the walls, secret passageways, assorted poltergeist activity (at one point the chef who haunts the kitchen dumps all of the ingredients for baking a cake onto the floor, and takes so long to do so that Woods can be called home from work to watch it) -- but the ghosts themselves are kinda lame and, for the most part, harmless. The oddest one of all, though, is the lion in the basement. Do animals really haunt people? What unfinished business could a lion actually have? And what about Scarecrow's brain? Sadly, Castle does not have answers for any of these questions -- and neither, I expect, does the crappy 2001 remake, but I'm not about to watch it to find out. I'm not that much of masochist.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Anyone can participate and anything goes. That makes for a very exciting race.
Thanks to films like Death Race 2000 and Eating Raoul I have long been a fan of director Paul Bartel, but it's taken me many years to catch up some of his other, lesser-known work. Such is the case with 1976's Cannonball! -- his second cross-country car race movie in a row, also made for Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Written by Bartel and future big shot producer Don Simpson, Cannonball! reverses the trajectory of Death Race, sending its contestants from Los Angeles to New York, and keeps the vehicles strictly realistic (even if many are supercharged). There's still a colorful cast of characters, though, headed up by David Carradine as Coy "Cannonball" Buckman, a former race car driver who breaks his parole to take part (and brings his parole officer/girlfriend Veronica Hamel along for the ride). Carradine must have relished the less constrictive costume since he gets to spend most of the movie with his shirt hanging open -- a far cry from Death Race's cumbersome mask, cape and assorted leather gear.
Carradine only got into one fist fight in Death Race, but this film gives him two -- one of them with his main rival, the unscrupulous Bill McKinney, who's none too pleased to be saddled with country singer Gerrit Graham and his manager. Their competition includes clean-cut young couple Robert Carradine and Belinda Balaski, underhanded family man Carl Gottlieb (who finds multiple ways to cheat), dismissive German professional James Keach (brother of Stacy) and Mary Woronov as the leader of a trio of girls in a van. The film also features Dick Miller as Cannonball's brother, who's in deep to mob boss Paul Bartel, and a raft of cameos by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Sylvester Stallone (as mafiosi), Roger Corman (as the L.A. District Attorney out to put a stop to the race before it begins) and Allan Arkush and Joe Dante (as two small-town kids who loan Cannonball their souped-up car after his gets smashed up).
In his scathing one-star review of this film, Roger Ebert lays into it, decrying its violence and nastiness. Comparatively, he lets The Gumball Rally -- which came out just three weeks later -- off easy, mostly because that movie (unseen by me) has a much lighter tone. (I suspect it's the clearer antecedent of the Cannonball Run movies that came along half a decade later.) I must admit I found some of violence in Cannonball! disturbing (I lost count of the number of explosions during the multiple-car pileup that comes near the end), but I chalk that up to the fact that Bartel (unlike the makers of The Gumball Rally and the Cannonball Run movies) was actually a serious director who wished to inject a sense of realism to a project he could have easily phoned in. At any rate, it was several years before he was able to get another project going and that was the largely self-financed Eating Raoul, a film more in line with his personal tastes.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
You may be family and everything, but I ain't siding with you.
Walter Hill's 1980 western The Long Riders has been on my to-see list for quite a while, largely on the basis of its clever stunt casting. Many films have been made about the exploits of the James-Younger Gang, but this is the one that actually cast four sets of brothers in the main roles. James and Stacy Keach (who co-wrote and executive produced the film) play Jesse and Frank James, with David, Keith and Robert Carradine as the Younger brothers, Dennis and Randy Quaid as the Millers, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest as Charlie and Bob Ford. It's a gambit that pays off in spades, especially when their partnership comes to an ignoble end and it's up to kin to stick together.
With so many characters to keep track of, the dialogue occasionally verges on the blatantly expository, but for the most part Hill is content to tell his story visually. He observes the gang as they rob banks, coaches and trains, then use their ill-gotten gains to carouse, gamble, chase women, get married and try to stay two steps ahead of the Pinkerton men (one of whom is played by John Carpenter favorite Peter Jason) on their trail. After one extremely close call, the gang splits up for a time, but they reunite for an ill-advised trip up north to hit a Northfield, Minnesota, bank. That's where Hill breaks out the slow-motion sequences, bloody squibs and gore effects that Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch introduced to the genre a decade earlier. It's not the most original western out there, but it's a very well-made one and it features a rousing score by Ry Cooder -- his first of many for Hill.
Monday, June 16, 2008
You and I are going to meet here without knowing anything that goes on outside here.
1972 was a pivotal year for Marlon Brando's career. Seemingly well past his prime, out of nowhere he starred in two widely-seen and controversial films -- The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. I've long been acquainted with the former, but only just got around to the latter because it's featured in Danny Peary's Cult Movies 2, which I recently acquired. Co-written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, who reportedly based the story on his own sexual fantasies, it stars Brando as a middle-aged American living in Paris who takes up with beautiful young stranger Maria Schneider -- and when I say "takes up," I mean within ten minutes of meeting they're having rough sex in the vacant apartment they're both looking to rent.
Thus begins a torrid affair that Brando keeps anonymous by insisting that they not reveal anything about themselves, especially their names. In the scenes that take place away from the apartment, we find out that Brando's wife has committed suicide and Schneider's fiancé (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is obsessively making a documentary about her, but the meat of the film -- and the source of its controversy -- is the frankness of the sexual encounters they have, which run the gamut and include one of the most notorious sex scenes in motion picture history. (It's the one that starts with Brando telling Schneider to "get the butter.") That it seems somewhat tame today can be chalked up to the fact that filmmakers -- Bertolucci included -- have been able to push things much further in the 36 years since Last Tango came out, but few mainstream films have ever been able to match its power, not by a long shot.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Gives me queasy innards to see a thing like that.
Next up in the cult movie roll call is Louis Malle's controversial 1978 film Pretty Baby, with a pre-teen Brooke Shields as a girl who has been raised in a bordello and Keith Carradine as the photographer who takes a shine to her. Set in Storyville, New Orleans in 1917 and written by Polly Platt (based on story by Platt and Malle), the film fakes us out right at the start by making us think Shields is watching, horrified, while her prostitute mother (Susan Sarandon) is having sex, but it turns out Sarandon is merely giving birth (one of the occupational hazards of her trade, along with the clap). That's just one of many times Malle and Platt lead us to think we're going to see one thing and then show us something different. To be fair, there are also plenty of times where they show us exactly what we are expecting to see, but then we're left to wonder whether we really wanted to or not.
All three leads give stunningly effective performances (Shields included), and the supporting cast contributes ably to the seedy atmosphere, with Frances Faye as the aged madam, Antonio Fargas as the piano player who watches, aghast, during the scene where Shields's virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder, Diana Scarwid (who went on to play the adult Christina Crawford in Mommie Dearest) and Barbara Steele as two of the more experienced whores on hand, and Gerrit Graham as a hotheaded gambler who's one of Sarandon's regular johns, but is more trouble than he's worth, especially when he starts waving a gun around and shooting up the place. Also helping to evoke World War I-era New Orleans is the cinematography by Sven Nykvist, who shot Malle's previous film, the 1975 sci-fi fantasy Black Moon. Now where, I ask, is the cult for that one?
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
I just wish they would leave me alone.
Another film that's been on my "to see" list forever that I finally got around to thanks to its inclusion in Cult Movies 2 is Abel Ferrara's bleak 1981 film Ms. 45, in which Zoë Tamerlis plays a mute seamstress in New York's garment district who has what understaters would call a bad day. On her way home from work she gets pulled into an alley and raped by a man in a creepy mask (played by Ferrara under the name Jimmy Laine, which he first used when he starred in 1979's Driller Killer, which was also scripted by his frequent collaborator Nicholas St. John). Then she staggers home and locks her door, only to be raped again by a burglar who's already in her apartment. She manages to bludgeon him to death, though, and takes care to dispose of his body without raising the suspicion of her nosy landlady or her yappy dog.
Armed with the robber's .45, Tamerlis adopts a "shoot first, don't ask questions later" philosophy, gunning down a street tough who chases her, a fashion photographer who gets too friendly, a black pimp hitting one of his women, and pretty much any man she sees taking advantage of a woman. Soon random encounters aren't enough for her and she starts getting dolled up and literally goes out looking for trouble. Lacking a voice, she can't express her inner thoughts the way Travis Bickle does, but her belief that she is some kind of holy avenger is made plain when she attends her company's Halloween party dressed as a nun. Significantly, after she unloads her weapon into a number of the men present (including her boss), it is a woman who puts an end to the carnage by stabbing her in the back with a very phallic knife (echoing the anal rape that she suffers at the beginning of the film). When Tamerlis turns to see who stabbed her, she looks betrayed. "Don't you realize I did this for you?" her shocked expression seems to say. Some people can be so ungrateful.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
It must be tough playing second fiddle to a one-eyed cripple.
Cult Movie Week continues with 1981's Cutter's Way, a film I've known about for a long time because it was always among the Employee Picks at the TLA Video on Locust St. in Philadelphia, but I always passed it up because, to be perfectly frank, the cover of the video made it look like a pirate movie (this was before it came to DVD). Danny Peary convinced me otherwise, though, first in his book Alternative Oscars (in which he named John Heard as the best actor of the year for his performance as volatile Vietnam vet Alex Cutter) and now in Cult Movies 2, in which he describes how the film came to develop its cult.
Heard may have the flashier part (how could he not with the eye patch, wooden leg and missing arm?), but Jeff Bridges has the pivotal role as his drifter friend Richard Bone. Late one night (after essentially prostituting himself with socialite Nina Van Pallandt in order to sell a boat), Bridges is witness to a body being dumped in an alley and the next day, while in the company of Heard and his wife Lisa Eichhorn, identifies a prominent civic leader (the honorary presidente of the Old Spanish Days parade) as the culprit. Heard seizes on this and, to the dismay of Bridges and Eichhorn, sets about trying to prove it, even involving the victim's sister (Ann Dusenberry) in a crazy blackmail scheme to flush the guilty party out. The problem is the man he's looking to take down is wealthy oil baron J. J. Cord (Stephen Elliott) -- not the sort of person you mess with lightly. (Then again, neither is Cutter.)
Directed by Czech expatriate Ivan Passer from a screenplay by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin, the film definitely doesn't make it easy to like its characters. Heard is frequently drunk and abusive to friends and strangers alike and he has a habit of pulling out his gun when he's riled, Bridges is a serial womanizer who is unwilling to take a stand for what he believes in (of course, there is the simple matter that after his initial identification he's not certain that Elliott is their man), and Eichhorn is a depressed alcoholic who's resigned herself to living with a man who will never again be whole. In many ways that's because Cutter and Bone are two halves of the same person -- one who went to war and one who avoided it by going to college -- and it isn't until the end of the film that they finally come together and act as one.
How about a nice Beaujolais? I'm sure it would go very well with your meat.
Danny Peary never wrote about Paul Bartel's 1982 black comedy Eating Raoul, but I'm sure if he had ever done a Cult Movies 4 he would have included it. It's certainly the best film he ever made, as well as the funniest. It stars Bartel and Mary Woronov as Paul and Mary Bland, a couple that still sleeps in separate beds after ten years of marriage and is disgusted by the swingers who have overrun the apartment building where they live. He's a wine connoisseur who works in a liquor store and she's a hospital nutritionist, but their dream is to buy a nice place in the country and open their own restaurant (Paul is partial to Chez Bland, but Mary prefers Paul and Mary's Country Kitchen). Their real estate agent (played by Bartel's co-writer Richard Blackburn) has even found the perfect place for them, if only they could find the money for it.
Miraculously, their money problems are solved when a stray swinger attacks Mary one night and Paul kills him with a frying pan. Rifling through his pockets they find he has a ton of cash on him, so they quickly hatch a plan to lure more swingers to their apartment and kill them in the same fashion. Of course, then they have to figure out what to do with the bodies, which is where libidinous Latino locksmith Robert Beltran (as the titular Raoul) enters the picture. Seems he knows a place that pays for meat by the pound and doesn't ask a lot of questions about where it comes from. And he also harbors an attraction to Mary, who loosens up a great deal with the help of some Thai stick. It's when he goes from being their business partner to Paul's rival for Mary's affections that the trouble sets in.
After failing to get funding through regular channels, Bartel begged, borrowed and stole from wherever he could to put his dream project before the cameras (although I'm sure he stopped short of murdering people with a frying pan). He also managed to get cameos out of the likes of Buck Henry (as a sex-crazed bank official), Ed Begley Jr. (as a hippie), Don Steele (as a swingers party host) and Edie McClurg (as a baby-voiced swinger). It's a shame that Bartel was never able to get the proposed sequel, which was to be called Bland Ambition, off the ground, but he and Woronov did reprise their roles in the 1986 "security robots on the rampage" horror film Chopping Mall, which was produced by Julie Corman (wife of Roger). I guess the place in the Valley didn't pan out for them.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Why are there people like Frank?
Just as 1981's Cult Movies begat Cult Movies 2 in 1983, so Danny Peary completed his trilogy in 1988 with Cult Movies 3. And in that book the film of the most recent vintage was David Lynch's Blue Velvet, which achieved instant cult status -- joining Eraserhead in the pantheon -- upon its release in 1986. After the debacle that was Dune, it convinced people that Lynch was still a director worth watching and it was a much better vehicle for Kyle MacLachlan, who took the part of naive small-town college boy Jeffrey Beaumont and made him into a complicated, conflicted character. On one hand he's in love with sweet, innocent Laura Dern, on the other he's entranced by sultry torch singer Isabella Rossellini and wants to help her break free from psychotic drug kingpin Dennis Hopper, who made Frank Booth one of the most indelible villains in movie history.
The film is full of quirky, unpredictable characters, most of whom operate in Frank's orbit. There's his drug connection, Ben, memorably incarnated by a fey, Roy Orbison lip-syching Dean Stockwell, and Frank's posse of miscreants includes Lynch film veterans Brad Dourif (who was in Dune) and Jack Nance (the star of Eraserhead and later the character who discovers Laura Palmer's body in the pilot for Twin Peaks). It's up to MacLachlan to carry the film, though, since he's in virtually every scene. It's not easy to pinpoint the moment when he loses his innocence, though. Is it when he witnesses Hooper viciously beating Rossellini or does it come later when he realizes that he gets a charge out of doing it, too? Suffice it to say, the Jeffrey Beaumont we see at the end of the film is far removed from the one who happened upon a severed ear in a field at the beginning.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
That's life. Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you.
Pity poor Tom Neal. All he wants to do is hitchhike from New York to Los Angeles to be with his fiancée (Claudia Drake), a singer who's trying to make it there. Neal is a classical pianist who's been reduced to playing at a seedy New York club, but he's anxious to rejoin Drake, who has always been super-supportive of him. He's most of the way there, too, when he gets picked up by a bookie (Edmund MacDonald) who dies accidentally on a lonely stretch of road in Arizona. Neal tries his best to cover it up, fearing that the cops would believe he bumped the guy off on purpose, but makes the mistake of picking up hitchhiker Ann Savage, who knows all about MacDonald and refuses to let Neal off the hook.
That's the story of Edgar G. Ulmer's bargain-basement film noir Detour, one of the grimmest examples of that fatalistic genre. Made in 1945 in six days for what appears to have been the change in his pockets, Detour is a prime example of the way Ulmer was able to squeeze maximal results out of minimal resources, using his severely limited budget to heighten the story's inherent claustrophobia. The film is narrated by Neal, who knows his goose is cooked right from the start, and he doesn't go out of his way to try to make us like him. It would be next to impossible to like such a self-pitying sap, anyway. As much as Neal would like to get back to Drake, one gets the distinct impression that she's better off without him.
They're just Louisiana versions of the same dumb rednecks I've been around my whole life.
Walter Hill's 1981 film Southern Comfort is the kind that always showed up on cable when I was younger, but even then I had a thing about watching cut versions of R-rated movies. Then, of course, there's the fact that it invariably got two stars (out of four), which isn't all that encouraging. While I'm catching up on his early films, though, I figured I'd give it a look. Written by Michael Kane and Hill & David Giler (Hill's producing partner on the Alien films, among others), the film concerns a squad of Louisiana National Guardsmen on maneuvers in the swamp who raise the ire of the indigenous Cajun population when they borrow some of their canoes without asking permission. Then one of the soldiers stupidly fires on the Cajuns (with blanks) and one of them fires back (with real bullets), taking out their staff sergeant. From there the Guardsmen beat a hasty retreat, trying to find their way back to civilization while evading the Cajuns who, naturally, have the advantage of knowing the terrain.
Hill assembles a cast of familiar faces as the displaced soldiers, including city boy Keith Carradine, who's a natural leader despite still being a private, Powers Boothe as the new guy who recently transferred from the Texas National Guard, Fred Ward as the corporal who brings his own live ammo (and good thing, too, otherwise they would have none), T.K. Carter as the private who comes to a "sticky" end while on point, and Peter Coyote as the staff sergeant who is the first to go down. And as the one-armed trapper the soldiers take prisoner, he cast Brion James, who would immediately go on to play one of the replicants in Blade Runner. (He looks a lot different with a crazy beard, I'll tell you that much.) Some have seen the film as a metaphor for our involvement in Vietnam and I have to say that interpretation is extremely apt. Of course, now people might see it as a metaphor for the quagmire in Iraq, but the quagmire here is literal.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
It ain't hard gettin' shot. It's the gettin' back up.
After watching Walter Hill's The Long Riders, which climaxes with the James-Younger Gang's raid on a Northfield, Minnesota, bank, it only seemed right for me to follow it up with 1972's The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid from Netflix. Written and directed by Philip Kaufman, it stars Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger and Robert Duvall as Jesse James, who react very differently when the Missouri legislature votes to give them amnesty. Robertson is all for sitting tight and settling down, but Duvall lights out for Minnesota, taking half the gang with him for one last score-settling guerrilla action against the Yankees. Robertson and the other half set out to stop them, but when they find out on the way that the amnesty deal is off, they decide that a good old-fashioned bank robbery isn't such a bad idea after all.
Complications set in when it turns out "the biggest bank west of the Mississippi River" isn't as solvent as its advertising led them to believe, but Robertson hatches a scheme with the crooked bank manager to get the townspeople to deposit their life's savings -- just in time for the gang to ride in and steal it. Kaufman plays up some of the rivalry between Robertson and Duvall, but there isn't the same sense of the gang breaking down along family lines as it did in Walter Hill's film -- that is until the end when the James boys escape, talking about starting a new gang with "that good-looking young kid" Bob Ford. Like Hill, Kaufman has a knack for casting great character actors like R.G. Armstrong (as Clell Miller), Donald Moffat (as one of the townspeople), Elisha Cook (as an ineffectual bank guard) and Royal Dano (as Gustavson, the town crazy), but what it really boils down to is scale. Hill simply had a larger canvas to work with.
Monday, June 23, 2008
What the hell do you want to go fuck around with that river for?
The first time I saw John Boorman's Deliverance was on basic cable, so certain scenes had to be cut (which may have made it more palatable, but robbed it of much of its effectiveness). The next time I saw it was when it was part of a repertory screening at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia (on a double bill with Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God), when its power was in full effect. And now I've watched it a third time on DVD -- it only seemed right in light of my viewing of Southern Comfort, a film that many have dubbed "Deliverance on the bayou."
Even people who have never seen a frame of Deliverance know that the story is about, but here it is a nutshell: Four Atlanta businessman (Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox) take a canoe trip down a river that's due to be dammed up and run afoul a couple of the locals, one of whom (Bill McKinney) takes certain liberties with Beatty and gets an arrow through the chest for his troubles. From there on out what was an idyllic commune with nature becomes a fight for survival, with all four of the men literally getting their hands dirty digging McKinney's grave. It's rather telling that Voight is the only one we see washing his hands of the deed, for soon after they get moving again Cox falls in the river, Reynolds (the most capable member of the group) breaks his leg in the rapids, and Beatty... Well, he was always kinda useless. That means it's up to Voight, the pipe-smoking man of indecision (who couldn't kill a deer when he got a bead on it), to become the man of action and save their bacon.
Based on the novel by James Dickey (who also wrote the screenplay and plays the part of the town sheriff at the end of the line), Deliverance is the ultimate man versus nature (and city slickers versus country folk) film and it represents Boorman at the absolute top of his game. It also features some stunning work by director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond, which is marred only by some distractingly unconvincing day-for-night shots near the end. If there's any one element that sticks out in people's imaginations, though (apart from the infamous "Squeal like a pig" scene, that is), it is the film's use of "Dueling Banjos." I'm sure it would be next to impossible to catalog every time that's been referenced or parodied over the past 36 years.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
A few last-minute script changes: no death, no parting.
Over the past few weeks I've been watching NBC's summer horror anthology series Fear Itself with some interest, hoping that it would eventually get around to airing an episode that wasn't a) disappointing, b) predictable or c) disappointingly predictable. It started off on the wrong foot by handing the reins of its premiere episode, a humdrum vampire story called "The Sacrifice," to Breck (son of Michael) Eisner, but the two follow-ups weren't much of an improvement. Typically I give a fledgling show three chances before I write it off, but I knew that tonight's entry was directed by John Landis, so I couldn't bail on it just yet.
I have yet to see either of Landis's Masters of Horror episodes, but I certainly hope they're better than "In Sickness and in Health," which unfortunately continues Fear Itself's string of misses. As usual, the problems start with the script and this one just so happens to have been written by Victor Salva, the writer/director of the Jeepers Creepers movies and a convicted child molester whose work I've managed to avoid up until now. I'm not saying he's incapable of making scary movies because of his checkered past (quite the opposite, in fact), but some people simply don't need to be encouraged. And if this teleplay is any indication of his talents, he won't be.
Anyway, "Sickness" stars Maggie Lawson as a bride-to-be who's somewhat rattled to receive a note on her wedding day that says her groom-to-be (James Roday) is a serial killer. Everyone seems to think she's rushing into the marriage in the first place, so to have that thrown on top of it is just the kernel of doubt she doesn't need. And speaking of things that aren't needed, veteran character Marshall Bell plays Roday's twin uncles for no discernible reason. I'm guessing Landis and/or Salva thought that would be a neat idea. Maybe they should have spent more time thinking up scarier things for the heroine to do than wander around a gloomily-lit church saying, "Is somebody there?" while the camera cuts to tilted shots of some bizarre and downright gruesome religious statuary. Also, I'd really like it if the series could end one episode without a lame twist. I'm not saying all twist endings are bad, but some of the ones in this show couldn't be more telegraphed if they were sent by Western Union.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Everything that happened, happened because of love.
While I'm just across the river, I made a trip into Philly to see a double feature of art films that I doubt will come within 50 miles of Bloomington. First up was Savage Grace, which represents Tom Kalin's return to feature films after an extended absence. His follow-up to 1992's Swoon, it stars Julianne Moore as the wife of Bakelite plastics fortune heir Stephen Dillane, and a woman who doesn't let something like having an infant son prevent her from planning a night out at the Stork Club. The film follows them from New York after World War II to Paris in the late '50s, where their son already shows signs of being a nascent homosexual, to the Spanish coast in the late 60's, where he's played by Eddie Redmayne. There he begins a tentative fling with local girl Elena Anaya, who ends up going off with Dillane, but not before Moore gets to make a very public scene about it.
With the help of gay walker Hugh Dancy, Moore attempts to re-enter society as a painter, but eventually he comes between mother and son -- quite literally in one scene -- and she attempts suicide upon their return to Paris. Meanwhile the relationship between Moore and Redmayne becomes increasingly incestuous until one fateful day in London in 1972 when things come to a most regrettable end. At the very least, I'm sure Moore regretted it. Savage Grace was based on a true story and so, to an extent, was my second film, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, but as filtered through Maddin's cranium, the distinction between fact and fantasy is ill-defined.
Presented by the Documentary Channel, My Winnipeg was written, conceived, narrated and directed by Maddin (with an assist on the dialogue by George Toles), who revisits some old haunts like the family beauty salon and the hockey arena that figured heavily into Cowards Bend the Knee. He even sublets his old house and hires actors to re-enact key moments from his childhood. Of course, his claim that his mother insisted on playing herself is undercut somewhat by the fact that it's Ann Savage (the femme fatale from Detour) playing the part.
The film revolves around a surrealistic, back-projected train journey as Maddin resolves to escape Winnipeg -- which he's called home for his entire life -- once and for all. In between he tells us that Winnipeg is a city of sleepwalkers, that it's the coldest city in the world, that its longest-running homegrown television show is a daily drama called Ledge Man (which just so happens to star his mother), that it has a history of paranormal activity, and that it has enacted civic laws that allow people to stay in any house they have a key for, that no public signs are ever allowed to be destroyed and that homeless people must live on the roofs of buildings.
And he invokes a Roger & Me-style rage at the civic mismanagement that led to a giant department store being razed and a hockey arena being built in its place, which resulted in the old historic arena also getting the wrecking ball treatment. When Maddin says that demolition is the only growth industry in Winnipeg, the bitterness in his voice makes me wonder what he could uncover if he made a less fanciful documentary about his hometown. Then again, it wouldn't be a Guy Maddin film, would it?
Monday, June 30, 2008
Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk.
Saw Iron Man this afternoon with my brother Jason. If we'd had our druthers, we probably would have rather seen Hellboy 2 (since we saw the first one together), but as that's not coming out for another couple weeks it wasn't exactly an option. And since Iron Man has been out for close to two whole months now, I expect there's very little about it that hasn't been picked over relentlessly by the fanboys, but the blog must go on.
Pretty much all I've been hearing for the past two months is that Iron Man is an awesome movie and that I had to see it. Now I have seen it and I must agree that it is, indeed, very exciting and unusually thought-provoking for a superhero movie. Batman Begins and the first two Spider-Man movies raised the bar for what a superhero movie could be and Iron Man measures up very well next to them. I'm sure a lot of this has to do with director Jon Favreau and his inspired choice of Matthew Libatique (best known for his work with Darren Aronofsky) as director of photography, but a movie can look great and still be hollow inside if the actors aren't up to snuff.
As embodied by Robert Downey Jr., both Tony Stark the cocky weapons manufacturer and Tony Stark the enlightened do-gooder are a lot of fun to be around, mostly because the character doesn't lose his swagger or his sense of humor just because he's had a brush with death and discovered a higher purpose for his life. And he's ably aided by Terrence Howard (as one of Stark's main allies in the military), Jeff Bridges (in a rare villain role), Gwyneth Paltrow (as Downey's perky personal assistant) and Clark Gregg (as a government agent), with cameos by the likes of Stan Lee (who is rather amusingly mistaken for Hugh Hefner), Peter Billingsley (yes, the kid from A Christmas Story) and an uncredited Samuel L. Jackson (as Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D., who makes a brief and -- it must be said -- underwhelming appearance after the credits).
There's already an Iron Man 2 in the works for 2010, so I suppose I'll be on board for that, but I don't see myself getting caught up in all of the Marvel movies they're planning on throwing at us over the next few years, leading up to 2011's The Avengers. (I've already decided to give this summer's The Incredible Hulk -- which includes a cameo by Tony Stark -- a miss.) I'm sure somebody out there believes that characters like Thor and Ant-Man need their own starring vehicles, but I'm not one of them.
It ain't hard gettin' shot. It's the gettin' back up.
While I was in town last Friday I got passes to a free screening of the new documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson tonight, so that is what Kevin and I did with our evening. Directed by Alex Gibney, who also made last year's Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side and 2005's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Gonzo is set to go into limited release this Friday, July 4, which is most appropriate considering Thompson was so concerned with the American Dream and determining when and where it had gone sour. The film is chock full of clips of Thompson from throughout his career, starting with his 1967 appearance on the panel show To Tell the Truth (recounting his time riding with the Hell's Angels) and going all the way up through the rash of documentaries that were made about him in the years between the filming of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and his suicide in 2005.
Even when he's not onscreen, Thompson's voice is all over the film, frequently in the form of Johnny Depp's readings from his books, including Hell's Angels, which gave notice that he was a journalist to be reckoned with and established his knack for inserting himself into his stories. (As one interview subject says, it's like he was embedded with the notorious biker gang.) From there the film follows him over a decade of professional highs and cultural lows, covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, his run for sheriff of Aspen in 1970 on the Freak Power ticket, and his writings for Rolling Stone magazine that formed the basis of the books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. It also includes interviews with political figures like Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart and George McGovern (the candidate Thompson was pulling for in 1972), his frequent illustrator Ralph Steadman, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, and (most improbably) musician Jimmy Buffett. The most telling clip, though, is from a 1978 television documentary wherein Thompson essentially stage manages his own funeral 27 years later. With such explicit instructions, how could his acolytes not send him off in style?
Back to May 2008 -- Onward to July 2008
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