About Last Night. . .
Oh, what a sequence of disgust! But that is what one might expect from former "Saturday Night Live" writer-actor Tim Kazurinsky, who along with wife Denise DeClue, wrote this mess. Kazurinsky also appeared in some of the Police Academy exercises in banality. Unless your goal in life is to watch Demi Moore and Rob Lowe simulate genital-locking, this attempt at making gamesmanship "hip" will only amuse you because of the profanity of Jim Belushi, whose presence is refreshing mainly because his existence is the only part of the process that does not feel contrived whether in retrospect or real time.
The basis for the movie, David Mamet's one-act play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, exploited simple-minded tensions between the two primary genders better than the movie because the play did not opt to blast the audience with the kind of audial tripe then-current on MTV, whereas the movie uses the dialogue as filler for the sonic vomit of Sheena Easton and Jermaine Jackson. On the other hand, if the mention of the names of these two plastic people lift your heart into the realms of perpetual titterhood, then please reverse all the bile and vituperation above and get yourself several copies post haste.
None of this should be misconstrued to imply that director and Chicago native Edward Zwick did a bad job accomplishing what he set out to do. About Last Night boasts a slickness that speaks to its self-confidence in exploiting the boring concept that men and women are often sexually attracted to one another without necessarily liking one another for any other reason, yet dressing up their desire in psychological excuses for not murdering one another, necrophilia being far too controversial for a movie that needs its audience to identify with its desperate craving for hipness. Zwick went on to direct Glory and Blood Diamond, each substantial improvements and better uses of his talents.
In 2014 some geniuses decided to remake the damned thing, this time moving the locale to Los Angeles and the race to African-American, both perceived by Sony Pictures as more hip than white Chicago. And hip is what this nonsense is all about.
The basis for the movie, David Mamet's one-act play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, exploited simple-minded tensions between the two primary genders better than the movie because the play did not opt to blast the audience with the kind of audial tripe then-current on MTV, whereas the movie uses the dialogue as filler for the sonic vomit of Sheena Easton and Jermaine Jackson. On the other hand, if the mention of the names of these two plastic people lift your heart into the realms of perpetual titterhood, then please reverse all the bile and vituperation above and get yourself several copies post haste.
None of this should be misconstrued to imply that director and Chicago native Edward Zwick did a bad job accomplishing what he set out to do. About Last Night boasts a slickness that speaks to its self-confidence in exploiting the boring concept that men and women are often sexually attracted to one another without necessarily liking one another for any other reason, yet dressing up their desire in psychological excuses for not murdering one another, necrophilia being far too controversial for a movie that needs its audience to identify with its desperate craving for hipness. Zwick went on to direct Glory and Blood Diamond, each substantial improvements and better uses of his talents.
In 2014 some geniuses decided to remake the damned thing, this time moving the locale to Los Angeles and the race to African-American, both perceived by Sony Pictures as more hip than white Chicago. And hip is what this nonsense is all about.
Absence of Malice
The truth of a given writing has not always been considered a legitimate defense in support of its publication. It was not until 1734, when John Peter Zinger published a satirical article about colonial governor William Cosby, that the suggestion of truth as a defense became relevant in defamation cases in what would soon become the United States of America. Defense attorney Andrew Hamilton convinced the jury that if a published statement can be proved true, then the charge of defamation cannot hold. Verdict for Zenger.
Forward to 1960. The New York Times published an advertisement titled "Heed Their Rising Voices." The ad addressed what the writers construed as an attempt to intimidate newspaper publishers from reporting on Southern actions against participants in the civil rights movement. The ad further alleged that the arrest of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. for perjury in Alabama was part of a campaign to destroy King's efforts to integrate public facilities and encourage blacks to vote. L. B. Sullivan, the Montgomery city commissioner, filed a libel action against the newspaper and four black ministers who were listed as endorsers of the ad, claiming that the allegations against the Montgomery police defamed him personally. Under Alabama law, Sullivan did not have to prove that he had been harmed. A defense claiming that the ad was truthful was inapplicable since the ad contained minor factual errors (the ad stated that Montgomery had arrested King seven times, whereas he had been arrested only four times, for instance). Sullivan won a $500,000 judgment.
The Times appealed to the United States Supreme Court. That court ruled in favor of the newspaper, stating "The First Amendment protects the publication of all statements, even false ones, about the conduct of public officials except when statements are made with actual malice (with knowledge that they are false or in reckless disregard of their truth or falsity)."
Thus was established the concept that even false statements are not libelous unless the person who claims he or she was defamed can prove that the writer or publisher was motivated by their dislike of the individual to do the proper checking to make sure the words correctly reflect reality.
In director Sydney Pollack's movie Absence of Malice, Paul Newman plays Mike Gallagher, a Miami liquor wholesaler who may have some connection to organized crime. After all, he is in the liquor business in Miami. Megan Carter, played by Sally Field, is the reporter who gets fed a false story about Gallagher by the FBI. She publishes the false tale and Gallagher takes her pretty ass to court.
This could have been a moderately entertaining and even an important film. Newman does what he does best: he allows his boiling intensity to fester beneath the surface without exploding into the camera. Someone (maybe Stella Adler, I don't know for certain) said that the key to acting is to develop the ability to show the character thinking one way and behaving another while both elements are clear to the audience. Newman does this with considerable panache.
Sally Field is not given that opportunity, which is a shame because she has the ability (as anyone who has seen Norma Rae or Places in the Heart can attest). Here she is given the task of being age thirty-nine and that is all. As a result, the audience cannot help but wonder what kind of sadistic impulse gripped the director that he would allow Newman tremendous freedom and yet hold Field back.
Forward to 1960. The New York Times published an advertisement titled "Heed Their Rising Voices." The ad addressed what the writers construed as an attempt to intimidate newspaper publishers from reporting on Southern actions against participants in the civil rights movement. The ad further alleged that the arrest of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. for perjury in Alabama was part of a campaign to destroy King's efforts to integrate public facilities and encourage blacks to vote. L. B. Sullivan, the Montgomery city commissioner, filed a libel action against the newspaper and four black ministers who were listed as endorsers of the ad, claiming that the allegations against the Montgomery police defamed him personally. Under Alabama law, Sullivan did not have to prove that he had been harmed. A defense claiming that the ad was truthful was inapplicable since the ad contained minor factual errors (the ad stated that Montgomery had arrested King seven times, whereas he had been arrested only four times, for instance). Sullivan won a $500,000 judgment.
The Times appealed to the United States Supreme Court. That court ruled in favor of the newspaper, stating "The First Amendment protects the publication of all statements, even false ones, about the conduct of public officials except when statements are made with actual malice (with knowledge that they are false or in reckless disregard of their truth or falsity)."
Thus was established the concept that even false statements are not libelous unless the person who claims he or she was defamed can prove that the writer or publisher was motivated by their dislike of the individual to do the proper checking to make sure the words correctly reflect reality.
In director Sydney Pollack's movie Absence of Malice, Paul Newman plays Mike Gallagher, a Miami liquor wholesaler who may have some connection to organized crime. After all, he is in the liquor business in Miami. Megan Carter, played by Sally Field, is the reporter who gets fed a false story about Gallagher by the FBI. She publishes the false tale and Gallagher takes her pretty ass to court.
This could have been a moderately entertaining and even an important film. Newman does what he does best: he allows his boiling intensity to fester beneath the surface without exploding into the camera. Someone (maybe Stella Adler, I don't know for certain) said that the key to acting is to develop the ability to show the character thinking one way and behaving another while both elements are clear to the audience. Newman does this with considerable panache.
Sally Field is not given that opportunity, which is a shame because she has the ability (as anyone who has seen Norma Rae or Places in the Heart can attest). Here she is given the task of being age thirty-nine and that is all. As a result, the audience cannot help but wonder what kind of sadistic impulse gripped the director that he would allow Newman tremendous freedom and yet hold Field back.
Baby Boom
Diane Keaton plays her cinematic roles with such precise imagination that it can be fun to argue that no one else could have embodied her characters in the early Woody Allen movies, or in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Crimes of the Heart, The Godfather, The Little Drummer Girl, or the majority of her other successes. It also holds true that on rare occasions some of us wince in pain when exposed to movies beneath her talent, movies that failed less because the roles were uninteresting and more because the premises of these films subvert the proud deviations her best works have celebrated.
Baby Boom (1987) stinks on ice.
No reasonable person can blame the odor on the acting. Keaton, Sam Shepard, James Spader, Sam Wanamaker, the twins who play the baby, even the typically estimable Harold Ramis all work their lines with brilliance. The script itself--and its directorial delivery--smells up the theater in this movie. It accomplishes this formidable task by its fevered embracing of the Yuppie Aesthetic so omnipresent during the 1980s love affair with what some sociopath decided to call romantic comedies.
Keaton plays J.C. Wyatt, an executive in some corporation who puts in a one hundred hour work week, has scheduled sex sessions with her paramour that last one full minute, and certainly has no time for a baby of her own. When one gets handed to her (it doesn't really matter how this comes about), she resists the idea and eventually gives in (as we know she will because otherwise there's no movie and what are we all doing sitting together in the cinema?) and moves, as all yuppies do, to the country where she develops her own brand of baby food which takes off like the Yarnell Fire and sweeps across the nation because clearly Keaton's character is made of stronger stuff than you or (especially) me.
If the storyline sounds moderately uninspired (I'd call it immoral, but I've taken a twelve minute vow of restraint), you should check out the dialogue that was geared for yucks.
Doctor Jess Cooper
You know, you kind of remind me of some kind of bull terrier.
J.C. Wyatt
I'll bet you say that to all the girls.
And then there's:
J.C. Wyatt
I can't have a baby because I have a twelve-thirty lunch meeting!
I know. Sad, isn't it? Perhaps the musical accompaniment will enhance the experience of being subjected to pre-programmed drivel? No chance. The songs were by Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager, the latter once described in writing as being so laid back it's a wonder she can stand up.
No, the entire enterprise (and that word is selected with serious intent) exists for no other reason than to reinforce the psychotic drive to be the best you can be by enlisting a supreme act of will and drive, one which deprives the actor of any auxiliary aspirations--doing what you do for the good of the company, the husband or boyfriend, the species, the child, the town--when there is no Godly reason to expect any person to forego an appreciation of the things in life that actually matter, things such as the company, boyfriend, species, child, town--things that might be valued if the actor/savior (after all, her name is J.C. for a reason) weren't so busy burning herself out to appreciate them.
Maybe that's one reason no one uses the word "yuppie" any more. It's certainly the main reason nobody rushes to Netflix or elsewhere looking up romantic comedies from the 1980s.
Baby Boom (1987) stinks on ice.
No reasonable person can blame the odor on the acting. Keaton, Sam Shepard, James Spader, Sam Wanamaker, the twins who play the baby, even the typically estimable Harold Ramis all work their lines with brilliance. The script itself--and its directorial delivery--smells up the theater in this movie. It accomplishes this formidable task by its fevered embracing of the Yuppie Aesthetic so omnipresent during the 1980s love affair with what some sociopath decided to call romantic comedies.
Keaton plays J.C. Wyatt, an executive in some corporation who puts in a one hundred hour work week, has scheduled sex sessions with her paramour that last one full minute, and certainly has no time for a baby of her own. When one gets handed to her (it doesn't really matter how this comes about), she resists the idea and eventually gives in (as we know she will because otherwise there's no movie and what are we all doing sitting together in the cinema?) and moves, as all yuppies do, to the country where she develops her own brand of baby food which takes off like the Yarnell Fire and sweeps across the nation because clearly Keaton's character is made of stronger stuff than you or (especially) me.
If the storyline sounds moderately uninspired (I'd call it immoral, but I've taken a twelve minute vow of restraint), you should check out the dialogue that was geared for yucks.
Doctor Jess Cooper
You know, you kind of remind me of some kind of bull terrier.
J.C. Wyatt
I'll bet you say that to all the girls.
And then there's:
J.C. Wyatt
I can't have a baby because I have a twelve-thirty lunch meeting!
I know. Sad, isn't it? Perhaps the musical accompaniment will enhance the experience of being subjected to pre-programmed drivel? No chance. The songs were by Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager, the latter once described in writing as being so laid back it's a wonder she can stand up.
No, the entire enterprise (and that word is selected with serious intent) exists for no other reason than to reinforce the psychotic drive to be the best you can be by enlisting a supreme act of will and drive, one which deprives the actor of any auxiliary aspirations--doing what you do for the good of the company, the husband or boyfriend, the species, the child, the town--when there is no Godly reason to expect any person to forego an appreciation of the things in life that actually matter, things such as the company, boyfriend, species, child, town--things that might be valued if the actor/savior (after all, her name is J.C. for a reason) weren't so busy burning herself out to appreciate them.
Maybe that's one reason no one uses the word "yuppie" any more. It's certainly the main reason nobody rushes to Netflix or elsewhere looking up romantic comedies from the 1980s.
The Coca-Cola Kid
When you think of Australia, what comes to mind? Fosters beer? Kangaroos? Tiny bears with claws? Mel "Mad Max" Gibson? Steve Irwin? Crocodile Dundee? The Outback Steakhouse?
Here in Anderson Valley, we think about Coca-Cola. The time was when this old coot named T. George McDowell brewed his own cola right over yonder. Yep, it was the only place in all of Australia where those Marines from Atlanta had yet to penetrate with their red and white delivery trucks. That soda came out here in all kinds of different flavors. Every bottle bore the resemblance of T. George himself. That was fine with us. After all, he owned the town. He was like a little version of Henry Ford. Well, you know, if Henry Ford had been in the cola business. Or if he'd been Australian.
So one day sometime in the summer of 1985, things changed. Yep, this guy named Becker came to Sidney, looking for trouble. He was from the Coca-Cola corporate offices, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He said he wanted to save the day. The boys in Sidney didn't know what the hell to think. Frank, the man in charge in the Sidney office, he says to Becker, "I like a man who arrives before his papers." Becker says to fire the projectionist wearing the Pepsi t-shirt. So you see right off what kind of a guy this Becker was. Shoot, the valets at the hotel all thought he was with the CIA.
He put his sites right on Anderson Valley. Since 1915 old T. George had been making his own cola. He didn't want that Coke boy sniffing around these parts here. He sent the Lone Ranger to chase him off. Becker dragged the Ranger home by the back of his jeep. That was kind of what we called impressive. T. George took him on a tour of his facility. Nice place, Becker admits. 15,000 bottles a month, boasts T. George.
Now what was nice about this situation was that T. George, he wasn't anybody's idea of a saint. Oh, hell no, he wasn't. And the Coca-Cola Kid, he kind of represented everything us locals hated about the Yanks. You know, he was brash, impatient, too focused and just plain mesmerized by himself. He was the kind of guy you just knew stood in front of one of those full-length mirrors, digging himself. But T. George, as I say, was no angel. Hell, he'd married a Yank way back when, brought her to Anderson Valley, which she never quite took to, you see. Fact is she killed herself, but not before giving birth to Terri, the hot little number in this here story. Terri was divorced from some vodka-making degenerate. They had a cute little girl together. Terri was secretly involved with this guy from the band Crowded House, guy name of Tim Finn. Tim went on to write and perform a Coca-Cola commercial jingle that was the catchiest damned thing you ever heard. I think it was called "Got You by the Throat." It definitely had that "Australian sound" that Becker kept yammering about. "Is that the sound you were looking for, Mr. Becker?" asked Tim Finn. "Why, I don't know, Philip," replied Becker, calling Tim by a different name. "You tell me." I'll tell you. It was a fine tune. You won't forget it soon, either.
The cool thing is that this war that broke out between Becker and T. George didn't have any automatic heroes. The truth is that there were those of us who thought maybe Terri egged on that war as a way of getting Becker and her father to destroy themselves, what with all of her real guy friends being gay and all. Terri's motivation is the real mystery. Was she a flake? Was she a shrew? All I ever knew was that people said she looked good on a bed of feathers against a black Australian sky, the moonlight shining through that dark hair of hers.
The battle itself struck us all as kinda weird, too. You had the Coke armies all decked out like Santa Claus. You had the Local Soda damsels dressed like St. Paulie girls and shaking poms. I'd call the thing surreal if I only knew the meaning of the word.
But getting back to cases of cola, the intriguing thing about Becker and T. George was that both of them was basically not instantly recognized as being lovable. Like if you was to cast Becker in a movie, you'd make Eric Roberts play him. As for T. George McDowell, you'd find some old guy who looked like the pappy of Grizzly Adams, except kind of scrawny and kind of smart.
I decline to reveal what happened here in Anderson Valley. I won't say what happened to Becker, either. I will tell you that both he and T. George are out of the soda business.
Probably if they ever do make a movie about this, some people would call it a romantic comedy. But I'll bet you there'll be some smart Alec guy who reads some deeper meanings into it. Who knows? Those deeper meanings might even be legitimate.
Here in Anderson Valley, we think about Coca-Cola. The time was when this old coot named T. George McDowell brewed his own cola right over yonder. Yep, it was the only place in all of Australia where those Marines from Atlanta had yet to penetrate with their red and white delivery trucks. That soda came out here in all kinds of different flavors. Every bottle bore the resemblance of T. George himself. That was fine with us. After all, he owned the town. He was like a little version of Henry Ford. Well, you know, if Henry Ford had been in the cola business. Or if he'd been Australian.
So one day sometime in the summer of 1985, things changed. Yep, this guy named Becker came to Sidney, looking for trouble. He was from the Coca-Cola corporate offices, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He said he wanted to save the day. The boys in Sidney didn't know what the hell to think. Frank, the man in charge in the Sidney office, he says to Becker, "I like a man who arrives before his papers." Becker says to fire the projectionist wearing the Pepsi t-shirt. So you see right off what kind of a guy this Becker was. Shoot, the valets at the hotel all thought he was with the CIA.
He put his sites right on Anderson Valley. Since 1915 old T. George had been making his own cola. He didn't want that Coke boy sniffing around these parts here. He sent the Lone Ranger to chase him off. Becker dragged the Ranger home by the back of his jeep. That was kind of what we called impressive. T. George took him on a tour of his facility. Nice place, Becker admits. 15,000 bottles a month, boasts T. George.
Now what was nice about this situation was that T. George, he wasn't anybody's idea of a saint. Oh, hell no, he wasn't. And the Coca-Cola Kid, he kind of represented everything us locals hated about the Yanks. You know, he was brash, impatient, too focused and just plain mesmerized by himself. He was the kind of guy you just knew stood in front of one of those full-length mirrors, digging himself. But T. George, as I say, was no angel. Hell, he'd married a Yank way back when, brought her to Anderson Valley, which she never quite took to, you see. Fact is she killed herself, but not before giving birth to Terri, the hot little number in this here story. Terri was divorced from some vodka-making degenerate. They had a cute little girl together. Terri was secretly involved with this guy from the band Crowded House, guy name of Tim Finn. Tim went on to write and perform a Coca-Cola commercial jingle that was the catchiest damned thing you ever heard. I think it was called "Got You by the Throat." It definitely had that "Australian sound" that Becker kept yammering about. "Is that the sound you were looking for, Mr. Becker?" asked Tim Finn. "Why, I don't know, Philip," replied Becker, calling Tim by a different name. "You tell me." I'll tell you. It was a fine tune. You won't forget it soon, either.
The cool thing is that this war that broke out between Becker and T. George didn't have any automatic heroes. The truth is that there were those of us who thought maybe Terri egged on that war as a way of getting Becker and her father to destroy themselves, what with all of her real guy friends being gay and all. Terri's motivation is the real mystery. Was she a flake? Was she a shrew? All I ever knew was that people said she looked good on a bed of feathers against a black Australian sky, the moonlight shining through that dark hair of hers.
The battle itself struck us all as kinda weird, too. You had the Coke armies all decked out like Santa Claus. You had the Local Soda damsels dressed like St. Paulie girls and shaking poms. I'd call the thing surreal if I only knew the meaning of the word.
But getting back to cases of cola, the intriguing thing about Becker and T. George was that both of them was basically not instantly recognized as being lovable. Like if you was to cast Becker in a movie, you'd make Eric Roberts play him. As for T. George McDowell, you'd find some old guy who looked like the pappy of Grizzly Adams, except kind of scrawny and kind of smart.
I decline to reveal what happened here in Anderson Valley. I won't say what happened to Becker, either. I will tell you that both he and T. George are out of the soda business.
Probably if they ever do make a movie about this, some people would call it a romantic comedy. But I'll bet you there'll be some smart Alec guy who reads some deeper meanings into it. Who knows? Those deeper meanings might even be legitimate.
Here are a couple other things you should know. The movie, if there ever was one, would be based on a string of short stories by a writer named Frank Moorhouse. The collection would be called The Americans, Baby. It would be cool if Eric Roberts was reading that book in the actual movie. It would also be kind of nice if nobody associated with the film bothered to get Coke's permission to mention their products, show their beverages, or display their signs. Coke probably would mistake the movie as being pro-Coca-Cola when in fact the politics of the matter would be nonexistent.
The Executioner's Song
Here is a little secret that filmmakers know: Every movie contains a moral center. The moral center is the person or thing to whom the audience looks for the established and proper psychological response to what is happening. In an essentially simple police drama, for instance, the officer of the law represents the moral center while the unrepentant criminal gives the moral center something to be offended by. In slightly more complex configurations, the criminal may indeed be the moral center, as in The Story of Robin Hood, where it is the Sheriff of Nottingham, the keeper of order, who portrays evil while Robin Hood, the thief, is the person we look to for reassurance. Far more complex is the use of the anti-hero, as one finds in the character of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, where the hoodlum narrates the tale and posits his behavior as morally superior to those of the manipulative society at large. A similar device is used by Oliver Stone in Natural Born Killers, where the serial killers Mickey and Mallory Knox are ultimately shown to be better than the society that celebrates their criminality. On some occasions, the moral center is simply ridiculous, or may be satirized, or may only be developed throughout the motion picture. Tragedies, comedies, historical works, even documentaries utilize this moral center. Sometimes the camera itself should be credited with the role.
In the important movie The Executioner's Song (1982), Christine Lahti works her brains out to be that moral center for us. As Brenda Nicol, a cousin to the man who would reverse ten years of societal abstinence from the horrors of capital punishment in the United States, Lahti strains with every scene to be that thing that producer-director Lawrence Schiller tries valiantly to resist: giving this film the energy to lift itself up out of the gutter. Tommy Lee Jones, as convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, does his damnedest to foil the core--that is, after all, his job. He does not in any way disappoint. A mere two years after appearing as Doolittle in Coal Miner's Daughter, Jones recreated himself with a conviction, so to speak, that would have taken lesser men lifetimes to master.
Jones avoids going for cheap sentiment. We feel no particular sympathy for Gilmore and that's appropriate. We feel no particular sympathy for his two murder victims and--depending on where the film leads--that might get away with being appropriate. So let's turn to Gilmore's acquaintances. Surely there will be some sympathy worked out there. We meet the frequently naked and fascinating Rosanna Arquette, who plays the love interest, a nineteen year-old confusion case stacked against Gilmore's naive misanthropy. But, no, she doesn't give us any moral compunctions one way or the other, one minute loving the killer and the next schtupping guys while he rots in jail. Even when she tries to kill herself so that she may join Gary in the afterlife--at Gilmore's urging--we feel an exhausted sense of pity, but not a flicker of sympathy.
Okay, then it must be Eli Wallach, that lovable and totally dependable old stand-by who plays Uncle Vern. Surely his world view will give us something to grip! Nope. Not a thing. One minute he's calmly warning Gary to keep his hands off the granddaughter and the next he's saying, "Oh well, the kid could never mend shoes worth a damn."
Without doubt the moral center or core, to the extent that Schiller allows it to exist at all, comes from Christine Lahti. But the director, who seems to have learned his trade from working Quinn Martin productions in the lazy days of police dramas, cannot be bothered to jazz up the Norman Mailer screenplay because, gosh oh whiz, Mailer did after all win the Pulitzer Prize for the novel (which was a lot more interesting) and no one could dare stand up to The Man Himself, now could they? Well, it's clear that Schiller couldn't. Time after time we keep expecting Gilmore to make us cringe or weep or maybe even laugh. Time after time we are disappointed, the only relief being when Lahti finally casts some tired judgment on her cousin and calls him a shithead, which he apparently was.
Gilmore, convicted of two murders, was sentenced to death. He opted to face a firing squad. His attorney appealed the sentence and Gilmore dismissed him. The ACLU appealed the sentence. At last the Supreme Court ruled that Gilmore had the right to be executed according to due process. He was shot to death on January 17, 1977. That execution was the first in U.S. history since Luis Monge was killed in June 1967.
As of January 1, 2012, 1277 convicted murderers have been put to death in this country. Three of those have been by firing squad. Those three were in Utah. Gilmore was the first.
477 of those executions have been in Texas.
There were no executions at all in 1978. Then in 1984 the government killed twenty-one prisoners. By 1993 the number of executions had risen to thirty-eight, perhaps demonstrating that both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations like the taste of blood. By 1997 we were up to seventy-four executions. Gilmore's corneas were transplanted into two different people following the execution.
The above information might have been the moral core of a film about Gilmore. It was not.
Schiller does his best to restrain Lahti from reflecting, much less inspiring, societal values here. To the extent that she managed to defy those attempts sings hosannas to her own talents as an actor.
In the important movie The Executioner's Song (1982), Christine Lahti works her brains out to be that moral center for us. As Brenda Nicol, a cousin to the man who would reverse ten years of societal abstinence from the horrors of capital punishment in the United States, Lahti strains with every scene to be that thing that producer-director Lawrence Schiller tries valiantly to resist: giving this film the energy to lift itself up out of the gutter. Tommy Lee Jones, as convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, does his damnedest to foil the core--that is, after all, his job. He does not in any way disappoint. A mere two years after appearing as Doolittle in Coal Miner's Daughter, Jones recreated himself with a conviction, so to speak, that would have taken lesser men lifetimes to master.
Jones avoids going for cheap sentiment. We feel no particular sympathy for Gilmore and that's appropriate. We feel no particular sympathy for his two murder victims and--depending on where the film leads--that might get away with being appropriate. So let's turn to Gilmore's acquaintances. Surely there will be some sympathy worked out there. We meet the frequently naked and fascinating Rosanna Arquette, who plays the love interest, a nineteen year-old confusion case stacked against Gilmore's naive misanthropy. But, no, she doesn't give us any moral compunctions one way or the other, one minute loving the killer and the next schtupping guys while he rots in jail. Even when she tries to kill herself so that she may join Gary in the afterlife--at Gilmore's urging--we feel an exhausted sense of pity, but not a flicker of sympathy.
Okay, then it must be Eli Wallach, that lovable and totally dependable old stand-by who plays Uncle Vern. Surely his world view will give us something to grip! Nope. Not a thing. One minute he's calmly warning Gary to keep his hands off the granddaughter and the next he's saying, "Oh well, the kid could never mend shoes worth a damn."
Without doubt the moral center or core, to the extent that Schiller allows it to exist at all, comes from Christine Lahti. But the director, who seems to have learned his trade from working Quinn Martin productions in the lazy days of police dramas, cannot be bothered to jazz up the Norman Mailer screenplay because, gosh oh whiz, Mailer did after all win the Pulitzer Prize for the novel (which was a lot more interesting) and no one could dare stand up to The Man Himself, now could they? Well, it's clear that Schiller couldn't. Time after time we keep expecting Gilmore to make us cringe or weep or maybe even laugh. Time after time we are disappointed, the only relief being when Lahti finally casts some tired judgment on her cousin and calls him a shithead, which he apparently was.
Gilmore, convicted of two murders, was sentenced to death. He opted to face a firing squad. His attorney appealed the sentence and Gilmore dismissed him. The ACLU appealed the sentence. At last the Supreme Court ruled that Gilmore had the right to be executed according to due process. He was shot to death on January 17, 1977. That execution was the first in U.S. history since Luis Monge was killed in June 1967.
As of January 1, 2012, 1277 convicted murderers have been put to death in this country. Three of those have been by firing squad. Those three were in Utah. Gilmore was the first.
477 of those executions have been in Texas.
There were no executions at all in 1978. Then in 1984 the government killed twenty-one prisoners. By 1993 the number of executions had risen to thirty-eight, perhaps demonstrating that both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations like the taste of blood. By 1997 we were up to seventy-four executions. Gilmore's corneas were transplanted into two different people following the execution.
The above information might have been the moral core of a film about Gilmore. It was not.
Schiller does his best to restrain Lahti from reflecting, much less inspiring, societal values here. To the extent that she managed to defy those attempts sings hosannas to her own talents as an actor.
Reds
The year was 1981. Everyone from Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Communist Party was positively raving about this new Warren Beatty movie called Reds. They said it was an epic. They said that it combined elements of a documentary with a love story. They said that it shined light on a fascinating period in world history.
They were all quite correct.
Reds actually is an epic. At a little more than three hours duration, I suppose it had better be. Beatty co-wrote and directed the film which featured himself in the role of John Reed, a radical American journalist, to date the only American buried in the Kremlin.
Getting beaten by police and thrown in jail in defense of the right to assemble is a fine way to become radicalized and that is precisely what happened with this Harvard graduate as he sought to make a career as a journalist. Meeting up with such famous or infamous writers and publishers as Lincoln Steffens, Max Eastman and Ida Tarbell, Reed earned a national reputation as an outstanding writer for his first-hand coverage of Poncho Villa's Mexican revolution in 1913. He traveled back and forth between New York and Europe during the early years of the first World War, finding himself appalled at how the "war to end all wars" was being fought for profits in the name of democracy. Then, late in 1915, he met a woman named Louise Bryant, a writer and feminist. They moved in together in Greenwich Village, the locale for all aspiring Bohemian artists and activists of the day.
For the most part, this is where we meet Reed and Bryant, the latter character played by Diane Keaton. In this rare and fascinating world, they interact with Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson), Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton), and Eastman (Edward Herrmann), as well as other roustabouts, having themselves a fine old time despite Louise's failed attempts at getting recognized for her own work.
Disheartened by Woodrow Wilson's broken promise to stay out of the war, Reed went to Russia in 1917 to cover the revolution. Accompanie by Bryant, Reed was a witness to the toppling of the Winter Palace and the ascension of the Bolshevik party's revolution. Reed's book, 10 Days That Shook the World, is well-title and among the finest examples of participatory journalism, the kind of stuff that truly frightens most American media types. It takes guts to make history while reporting it, there isn't much in the way of glamour attached to it (unless you think of being locked away in a Finnish prison as glamorous), and the authorities have a nasty habit of refusing exit visas when you would most enjoy having one.
The movie Reds dramatizes all this and more, not that much dramatization was needed. Beatty gets all the broad historical strokes right and the few minor discrepancies don't impact our enjoyment of the film at all. The beach scenes exemplify artistic panache, Beatty and Keaton are thoroughly convincing as lovers, as mutual antagonists and as loyal, committed colleagues. Nicholson's role as O'Neill was so powerful it damn near stole the movie out from under Beatty and Keaton, which is maybe why his playwright character essentially dropped out of the film just when it would have been most glorious to have had his wry cynicism adding some bourgeois bitterness.
that is a clue to the only problem a reasonable person could really have with this otherwise fascinating and beautiful movie. We meet so many interesting characters in this film and we get caught up in wondering about whatever happened to them that we almost wish the movie was twice as long just so we could follow them around awhile. In addition to Nicholson, we wouldn't mind hanging with Jerzy Kosinski in the role of Grigory Zinoviev (who looks one hell of a lot like Trotsky), or with Emma Goldman as she gets deported to the Soviet Union for being a Jewish anarchist, or with Dolph Sweet as Big Bill Haywood of the IWW, or with any of the wonderful old folks who comment on the characters in this epic, such as Will Durant, Henry Miller and George Seldes, three of the most important people of the twentieth century.
The broad details, as I say, are not only exact but mesmerizing. I doubt one need be a student of history to find this story engrossing. You should, however, be prepare to be inspired to become such a student because one of the big things that this movie gets right is--regardless of the pre-existing disposition of the viewer (think of the movie Patton, written by people every bit as conservative as Beatty is progressive and yet the result is satisfying to both sides of the coin)--its fascination with the time, a time when many countries, including the United States, were sending troops to Soviet Russia to defeat their former ally in response to that ally pulling out of the war, as well as in retribution for the revolution; a time when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his young protege J Edgar Hoover were launching red scare raids against suspected fellow travelers, ultimately discovering that more than half the members of the U.S Communist Party were undercover federal agents; a time when free love ran through the streets of New York, despite women in this country not yet having the vote; a time when an emotional solidarity and an intellectual rigor united people who did not necessarily see eye to eye on every detail of the promise of the future; and a time before movies this good were ever imagined.
They were all quite correct.
Reds actually is an epic. At a little more than three hours duration, I suppose it had better be. Beatty co-wrote and directed the film which featured himself in the role of John Reed, a radical American journalist, to date the only American buried in the Kremlin.
Getting beaten by police and thrown in jail in defense of the right to assemble is a fine way to become radicalized and that is precisely what happened with this Harvard graduate as he sought to make a career as a journalist. Meeting up with such famous or infamous writers and publishers as Lincoln Steffens, Max Eastman and Ida Tarbell, Reed earned a national reputation as an outstanding writer for his first-hand coverage of Poncho Villa's Mexican revolution in 1913. He traveled back and forth between New York and Europe during the early years of the first World War, finding himself appalled at how the "war to end all wars" was being fought for profits in the name of democracy. Then, late in 1915, he met a woman named Louise Bryant, a writer and feminist. They moved in together in Greenwich Village, the locale for all aspiring Bohemian artists and activists of the day.
For the most part, this is where we meet Reed and Bryant, the latter character played by Diane Keaton. In this rare and fascinating world, they interact with Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson), Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton), and Eastman (Edward Herrmann), as well as other roustabouts, having themselves a fine old time despite Louise's failed attempts at getting recognized for her own work.
Disheartened by Woodrow Wilson's broken promise to stay out of the war, Reed went to Russia in 1917 to cover the revolution. Accompanie by Bryant, Reed was a witness to the toppling of the Winter Palace and the ascension of the Bolshevik party's revolution. Reed's book, 10 Days That Shook the World, is well-title and among the finest examples of participatory journalism, the kind of stuff that truly frightens most American media types. It takes guts to make history while reporting it, there isn't much in the way of glamour attached to it (unless you think of being locked away in a Finnish prison as glamorous), and the authorities have a nasty habit of refusing exit visas when you would most enjoy having one.
The movie Reds dramatizes all this and more, not that much dramatization was needed. Beatty gets all the broad historical strokes right and the few minor discrepancies don't impact our enjoyment of the film at all. The beach scenes exemplify artistic panache, Beatty and Keaton are thoroughly convincing as lovers, as mutual antagonists and as loyal, committed colleagues. Nicholson's role as O'Neill was so powerful it damn near stole the movie out from under Beatty and Keaton, which is maybe why his playwright character essentially dropped out of the film just when it would have been most glorious to have had his wry cynicism adding some bourgeois bitterness.
that is a clue to the only problem a reasonable person could really have with this otherwise fascinating and beautiful movie. We meet so many interesting characters in this film and we get caught up in wondering about whatever happened to them that we almost wish the movie was twice as long just so we could follow them around awhile. In addition to Nicholson, we wouldn't mind hanging with Jerzy Kosinski in the role of Grigory Zinoviev (who looks one hell of a lot like Trotsky), or with Emma Goldman as she gets deported to the Soviet Union for being a Jewish anarchist, or with Dolph Sweet as Big Bill Haywood of the IWW, or with any of the wonderful old folks who comment on the characters in this epic, such as Will Durant, Henry Miller and George Seldes, three of the most important people of the twentieth century.
The broad details, as I say, are not only exact but mesmerizing. I doubt one need be a student of history to find this story engrossing. You should, however, be prepare to be inspired to become such a student because one of the big things that this movie gets right is--regardless of the pre-existing disposition of the viewer (think of the movie Patton, written by people every bit as conservative as Beatty is progressive and yet the result is satisfying to both sides of the coin)--its fascination with the time, a time when many countries, including the United States, were sending troops to Soviet Russia to defeat their former ally in response to that ally pulling out of the war, as well as in retribution for the revolution; a time when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his young protege J Edgar Hoover were launching red scare raids against suspected fellow travelers, ultimately discovering that more than half the members of the U.S Communist Party were undercover federal agents; a time when free love ran through the streets of New York, despite women in this country not yet having the vote; a time when an emotional solidarity and an intellectual rigor united people who did not necessarily see eye to eye on every detail of the promise of the future; and a time before movies this good were ever imagined.
Frances
The first time I saw Frances (1982), I thought they should have called the movie Jessica because clearly the star, Jessica Lange, had to be doing something far beyond mere acting in order to communicate the thoughts in the mind of the on-screen version of 1930s-40s actor Frances Farmer. Viewing the film again last night, I stand by my earlier assertion. While standing, I will even take things a step farther and make the claim right here that Jessica Lange's performance in Frances is the best acting job in the history of the medium. What's that? You've heard me rave before and have grown accustomed to this type of hyperbole? Well, judge for yourself, wiseguy.
Watch her in the scene with the despicable psychiatrist, Dr. Simington, the way her face contorts to betray her character's thoughts of sarcasm as a defense against her own personal terror. Then ask yourself if you could pull that off. Could you act as if you were a coquette only as a way of sending the shrink a sign of confusion about your motives so that you could feel good about being in control of the situation while what you actually are is scared to death? If you answered yes to this question, congratulations on being Jessica Lange because nobody else in the history of the medium has ever given us this.
More's the pity since the movie itself, while making all kinds of assertions about how Hollywood eats its own and the hypocrisy of the Seattle community, doesn't quite convince us of those sub-themes, in large part because of the often pitiful support cast. Kim Stanley does a fine job as Frances' mother Lillian, but beyond that, Lange is surrounded with several strings of television-quality actors (although, if you look closely, you will see Kevin Costner standing in the alley). The best of these TV actors is Jeffrey DeMunn, who plays playwright Clifford Odets with an almost eerie authenticity. The problem isn't so much that these TV actors cannot act. They certainly can. What they cannot do is fly, which is what they needed to be able to do in order to come across as if they were in the same movie as Ms. Lange. Even San Shepard, who tries like a bastard to keep up, simply cannot.
Then there's the problem with the facts. The real Frances Farmer was indeed a fascinating and apparently charming lady. She did not, from all reports--including her own--undergo the lobotomy to which this movie of her life leads inexorably. However, she was institutionalized and the movie does a fine job of mimicking the extreme heartlessness of the Mental Hygiene industry.
The movie also does a great job of recreating the tension between a daughter and mother that is sympathetic to both without lapsing into caricature. Real life is seldom cut and dried and this movie knows that, Lange and Stanley know that, and no one here plays the film for cheap sentiment, except possibly the writers, who admitted they didn't want to "nickle and dime the audience with facts."
So fuck the writers. This is an actors film. Not a lot of those have been made. See this one while you still can.
Watch her in the scene with the despicable psychiatrist, Dr. Simington, the way her face contorts to betray her character's thoughts of sarcasm as a defense against her own personal terror. Then ask yourself if you could pull that off. Could you act as if you were a coquette only as a way of sending the shrink a sign of confusion about your motives so that you could feel good about being in control of the situation while what you actually are is scared to death? If you answered yes to this question, congratulations on being Jessica Lange because nobody else in the history of the medium has ever given us this.
More's the pity since the movie itself, while making all kinds of assertions about how Hollywood eats its own and the hypocrisy of the Seattle community, doesn't quite convince us of those sub-themes, in large part because of the often pitiful support cast. Kim Stanley does a fine job as Frances' mother Lillian, but beyond that, Lange is surrounded with several strings of television-quality actors (although, if you look closely, you will see Kevin Costner standing in the alley). The best of these TV actors is Jeffrey DeMunn, who plays playwright Clifford Odets with an almost eerie authenticity. The problem isn't so much that these TV actors cannot act. They certainly can. What they cannot do is fly, which is what they needed to be able to do in order to come across as if they were in the same movie as Ms. Lange. Even San Shepard, who tries like a bastard to keep up, simply cannot.
Then there's the problem with the facts. The real Frances Farmer was indeed a fascinating and apparently charming lady. She did not, from all reports--including her own--undergo the lobotomy to which this movie of her life leads inexorably. However, she was institutionalized and the movie does a fine job of mimicking the extreme heartlessness of the Mental Hygiene industry.
The movie also does a great job of recreating the tension between a daughter and mother that is sympathetic to both without lapsing into caricature. Real life is seldom cut and dried and this movie knows that, Lange and Stanley know that, and no one here plays the film for cheap sentiment, except possibly the writers, who admitted they didn't want to "nickle and dime the audience with facts."
So fuck the writers. This is an actors film. Not a lot of those have been made. See this one while you still can.
Talk Radio
Alan Berg was a Denver talk radio host. On June 18, 1984, members of a white supremacist group calling themselves The Order shot him thirteen times as he stepped out of his car at his home. He died. The Order was a neo-Nazi gang inspired by The Turner Diaries. They were also inspired by the curse of minuscule penises and inferior brain capacities. If The Turner Diaries sounds familiar to you, that may be because the badly written 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce was the same book that was loved by Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City Bombing infamy. It was also mentioned by John King, the evil racist who dragged James Byrd by the neck from the back of his car. Eric Bogosian rants about him the book in the 1988 Oliver Stone movie Talk Radio, the movie based on the life and death of Alan Berg.
As we get into a discussion of this movie, I should perhaps mention that I strongly dislike shrivel-dicked neo-Nazis, just as I strongly dislike lots of other types of people, including folks who discriminate against others, folks who like things without knowing why they like them, stupid people, knee-jerk reaction people, folks who have to read a book to know what to do, obsessive people, compulsive people, people who forget to wipe their noses (or other orifices), and people who shout "Wheeeee!" out of moving automobiles for no discernible reason. That said, Talk Radio is a blast, mainly because Eric Bogosian's portrayal of Barry Champlain is a warts-and-all examination of not only the Alan Berg on-air personality, but also of the frequently psychotic types who tuned in to listen to him. To be very good in the talk radio world requires something bigger than just ego; it requires a level of narcissism that is beyond most of us and the ability to communicate this trait without seeming like a fool is hard. Bogosian--no stranger to ego--pulled off the characterization like the genius I suspect he is.
The screenplay, a collaboration between Bogosian and Stone, is first rate, based as it is on the star's own stage play, which in turn was based on the Stephen Singular book Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg. The love interest stuff gets in the way a bit, as one might expect, but otherwise the pace of this extremely monologue-driven narrative jumps right along like a speeding train in search of a set of tracks. This is a Big Issues movie and with Stone in the chair, the audience is not spared a well-deserved bang on the noggin for making the mistake of identifying with any of the support characters.
One of the most moving scenes in the film occurs at some type of athletic ceremony when, after getting sprayed with coffee by a hostile fan, Barry approaches the microphone to speak and is roundly booed by most of those in attendance. His few supporters are the lunatic fringe who give him little comfort.
As we get into a discussion of this movie, I should perhaps mention that I strongly dislike shrivel-dicked neo-Nazis, just as I strongly dislike lots of other types of people, including folks who discriminate against others, folks who like things without knowing why they like them, stupid people, knee-jerk reaction people, folks who have to read a book to know what to do, obsessive people, compulsive people, people who forget to wipe their noses (or other orifices), and people who shout "Wheeeee!" out of moving automobiles for no discernible reason. That said, Talk Radio is a blast, mainly because Eric Bogosian's portrayal of Barry Champlain is a warts-and-all examination of not only the Alan Berg on-air personality, but also of the frequently psychotic types who tuned in to listen to him. To be very good in the talk radio world requires something bigger than just ego; it requires a level of narcissism that is beyond most of us and the ability to communicate this trait without seeming like a fool is hard. Bogosian--no stranger to ego--pulled off the characterization like the genius I suspect he is.
The screenplay, a collaboration between Bogosian and Stone, is first rate, based as it is on the star's own stage play, which in turn was based on the Stephen Singular book Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg. The love interest stuff gets in the way a bit, as one might expect, but otherwise the pace of this extremely monologue-driven narrative jumps right along like a speeding train in search of a set of tracks. This is a Big Issues movie and with Stone in the chair, the audience is not spared a well-deserved bang on the noggin for making the mistake of identifying with any of the support characters.
One of the most moving scenes in the film occurs at some type of athletic ceremony when, after getting sprayed with coffee by a hostile fan, Barry approaches the microphone to speak and is roundly booed by most of those in attendance. His few supporters are the lunatic fringe who give him little comfort.
The movie features several folks you will recognize, including John C. McGinley ("Scrubs") as Stu the phone guy, Alec Baldwin ("30 Rock") as Dan the boss, and John Pankow ("Mad About You") as Dietz, the corporate dude who is in charge of deciding whether or not Barry's show will go national. But this is Bogosian's movie from start to finish and even the masterful cinematography cannot take away from what should have been an Oscar-winning performance. That in years since, Eric has been diminished to playing the honcho in a Dick Wolf TV cop show is a sad commentary, but not as sad as what happened to Alan Berg in Denver.
Erik the Viking
I have noticed that not for everyone is the humor of the cast of Monty Python what you would call funny. No less a talent than Stephanie Miller has bemoaned the fact that she herself simply "does not get it." Seeing as how Ms. Miller is, to me, one of the sexiest people on this planet, my heart falls like a resilient rubber turd every time I think about the dear girl scratching her head at the references to class warfare in The Holy Grail. Ah, but that's my own personal chalice to drain.
One reason that those of us to whom the sun does not pierce the stratosphere without a daily dose or two of Python-ology love that gang of comedic hoodlums so much is specifically because certain other people do not get it, to use Ms. Miller's phraseology. Some people enjoyed "Three's Company" for its intellect and wit. The rest of us grooved to "Monty Python's Flying Circus."
It's not so much the occasionally indecipherable and definitely rapid-fire dialect of the actors. It's not the often esoteric-in-extremis nature of the guffaws. It's not the fact that most of us originally gained our enlightenment on Saturday nights watching PBS while our compatriots were out schtupping their way through the neighborhoods with a bottle of Remy Martin in one hand and a condom dispenser in the other. Well, actually, that last item might have a bit to do with it. But what it really is, I think, is that Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam were, are, and some day with God's help will be five, six or seven extremely funny people, albeit, five, six, or seven extremely funny people that Stephanie Miller does not quite get.
There has been much talk over the years about who--if indeed anyone--was the sixth, seventh, or eighth Python. As of this date there can be no dispute that this person was none other (or any other, for that matter) than Neil Innes. This musical manchild had made and buried his bones with the cosmic act The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band sometime between 1962 and 1970. Along the way he made the appropriate navigation away from Vivian Stanshall and linked his mind with that of former, future and present Python alum Eric Idle, the two forming a satiric and genuinely talented band of pre-fab four called The Rutles.
The Rutles were simply fantastic. They were also complexly fantastic. In one simple--yet complex--album, they managed to parody every song The Beatles ever made, plus a few more still in the developmental stages. Ah, but like their inspiration, the band eventually went the way of all good jokes and descended into a flat-lined whoopie cushion.
Still, there were all kinds of side projects the original troupe involved itself in. Mr. Chapman went on to make and star in the sixth worst movie ever filmed, one called Yellowbeard. It is possible, although not very likely, that the making of this film is what finally killed Chapman. But you didn't read that here.
Michael Palin fared well post-Python. He co-wrote with Terry Gilliam the merely silly and not merely over the top Time Bandits in 1981. Still, according to many people using my name, his best work was as Jack Lunt in Brazil, the sixth greatest film ever made.
John Cleese has been in dozens of films and has excelled in them all. From his small role in Silverado to his expanded performance in The Wind in the Willows, Cleese has done it all and has done all of it.
That leaves poor Terry Jones, in many ways a very funny fellow and certainly one of the smartest folks to ever walk with a hyphenated limp. It also brings us to tonight's film review and the movie that inspired that review, Erik The Viking. It would seem that this movie had everything in the world going for it: a director (Terry Jones), a writer (Terry Jones), and actors (one of whom was named Terry Jones). The actors themselves can be said to have played no part in this film's failure as a comedic tour de force, or even pub-crawling de force. It stars Tim Robbins as Erik, a Viking who gets a sense that there may be more to life than just raping and pillaging. And drinking. And fighting. There might be something more, something like sunshine. So he visits Eartha Kitt and gets some advice. He is told to cross the sea and find the horn. He should blow the horn, or see that the horn is blown, or facilitate the voyage that leads to the blowing of the horn. He must also avoid hating people.
He gathers together an amusing group of Viking warriors to launch this mission. The voyage gives us all a chance to laugh at Stephanie Miller because she probably wouldn't get the references to Vahalla. I didn't get most of them myself, but I wasn't about to admit that to the bevvy of beauties sitting on my remote control while I watched this disaster film. Two of those warriors are the father and son team known as the Bezerkas, two of the funniest folks in the film.
One reason that those of us to whom the sun does not pierce the stratosphere without a daily dose or two of Python-ology love that gang of comedic hoodlums so much is specifically because certain other people do not get it, to use Ms. Miller's phraseology. Some people enjoyed "Three's Company" for its intellect and wit. The rest of us grooved to "Monty Python's Flying Circus."
It's not so much the occasionally indecipherable and definitely rapid-fire dialect of the actors. It's not the often esoteric-in-extremis nature of the guffaws. It's not the fact that most of us originally gained our enlightenment on Saturday nights watching PBS while our compatriots were out schtupping their way through the neighborhoods with a bottle of Remy Martin in one hand and a condom dispenser in the other. Well, actually, that last item might have a bit to do with it. But what it really is, I think, is that Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam were, are, and some day with God's help will be five, six or seven extremely funny people, albeit, five, six, or seven extremely funny people that Stephanie Miller does not quite get.
There has been much talk over the years about who--if indeed anyone--was the sixth, seventh, or eighth Python. As of this date there can be no dispute that this person was none other (or any other, for that matter) than Neil Innes. This musical manchild had made and buried his bones with the cosmic act The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band sometime between 1962 and 1970. Along the way he made the appropriate navigation away from Vivian Stanshall and linked his mind with that of former, future and present Python alum Eric Idle, the two forming a satiric and genuinely talented band of pre-fab four called The Rutles.
The Rutles were simply fantastic. They were also complexly fantastic. In one simple--yet complex--album, they managed to parody every song The Beatles ever made, plus a few more still in the developmental stages. Ah, but like their inspiration, the band eventually went the way of all good jokes and descended into a flat-lined whoopie cushion.
Still, there were all kinds of side projects the original troupe involved itself in. Mr. Chapman went on to make and star in the sixth worst movie ever filmed, one called Yellowbeard. It is possible, although not very likely, that the making of this film is what finally killed Chapman. But you didn't read that here.
Michael Palin fared well post-Python. He co-wrote with Terry Gilliam the merely silly and not merely over the top Time Bandits in 1981. Still, according to many people using my name, his best work was as Jack Lunt in Brazil, the sixth greatest film ever made.
John Cleese has been in dozens of films and has excelled in them all. From his small role in Silverado to his expanded performance in The Wind in the Willows, Cleese has done it all and has done all of it.
That leaves poor Terry Jones, in many ways a very funny fellow and certainly one of the smartest folks to ever walk with a hyphenated limp. It also brings us to tonight's film review and the movie that inspired that review, Erik The Viking. It would seem that this movie had everything in the world going for it: a director (Terry Jones), a writer (Terry Jones), and actors (one of whom was named Terry Jones). The actors themselves can be said to have played no part in this film's failure as a comedic tour de force, or even pub-crawling de force. It stars Tim Robbins as Erik, a Viking who gets a sense that there may be more to life than just raping and pillaging. And drinking. And fighting. There might be something more, something like sunshine. So he visits Eartha Kitt and gets some advice. He is told to cross the sea and find the horn. He should blow the horn, or see that the horn is blown, or facilitate the voyage that leads to the blowing of the horn. He must also avoid hating people.
He gathers together an amusing group of Viking warriors to launch this mission. The voyage gives us all a chance to laugh at Stephanie Miller because she probably wouldn't get the references to Vahalla. I didn't get most of them myself, but I wasn't about to admit that to the bevvy of beauties sitting on my remote control while I watched this disaster film. Two of those warriors are the father and son team known as the Bezerkas, two of the funniest folks in the film.
John Cleese makes recurring appearances in Erik the Viking and those appearances add a lot of black humor to the story. Halfdan the Black is a professional torturer and when someone in that occupation saves a film from the spittoon of history, well, I suppose that tells us something about the quality of the celluloid, although I'm not quite certain what.
All in all the whole experience is visually impressive, if not a bit in your face. But what actually saves this film from Spittoon Land (aside from the aforementioned work of Mr Cleese) is Neil Innes' music. Well, that and the hilarious demise of the island of Hy-Brasil, which Terry Jones, as the king of said island denies is actually sinking because it simply cannot be. "Be calm," he announces. "This is not happening." One might wish the same for oneself as one disgorges oneself from one's telephone booth after watching this disappointing effort from some otherwise very talented, smart and too-dense for Ms. Miller talents.
All in all the whole experience is visually impressive, if not a bit in your face. But what actually saves this film from Spittoon Land (aside from the aforementioned work of Mr Cleese) is Neil Innes' music. Well, that and the hilarious demise of the island of Hy-Brasil, which Terry Jones, as the king of said island denies is actually sinking because it simply cannot be. "Be calm," he announces. "This is not happening." One might wish the same for oneself as one disgorges oneself from one's telephone booth after watching this disappointing effort from some otherwise very talented, smart and too-dense for Ms. Miller talents.
Sometimes They Come Back
I was there, brother. I saw all of them. Yep, that's right. Some of them I watched at the Keith Albee movie theater in Huntington, West Virginia. Others I took in here in Phoenix, either at one of the rundown drive-ins or at one of those putrid multiplex disperia factories. There was even a movie house in the town where I grew up, a burg called Circleville, and even though I watched a million movies there, not one of them was based on a book or a story written by the one, the only, you know him, you love him, you cannot live without him, king of the killer chills, Stephen King. That's because his work had not yet caught on back then, which is one of the things I most regret about my youth. Having Stephen King novels to read would have made those years of torpid adolescence a lot more tolerable.
I don't care if you were the suavest of jocks, the most kitten-like of coquettes, the young dude in black leather on a Suzuki, the main skirt at the embarrassingly maudlin Homecoming dance, the guy with the bottle and red pills in the backseat parked outside the stadium, or the girl whose first name never quite registered on people's memories. It doesn't matter what clique you imagine yourself to have been a part of--if any--the fact is that those so-called glory days were anything but that. There's a Reason for that illusion. The Reason doesn't actually care whether you were smart or stupid, average or exceptional, front row or barrel boy--the Reason just does not give a damn. The Reason doesn't have to care and that's because the Reason is that you spent your youth learning to grow up.
Maybe you spent your spare time holed up in your room, writing things in your spiral notebook, things that you went back to regularly because those things made you feel validated in some way. Maybe you blasted out your mind with whatever form of musical torture was popular in your day. Maybe you played a lot of baseball. There's even a good chance that you discovered your genitals substantially before anyone else discovered them for you. Whatever little secret thing you did to try to stave off the unrelenting and inexorable agony of growing up, somewhere in the back of your mind, in that part of your brain that you always tried to ignore and never quite could, there was a shrill and nagging voice reminding you that there was a Reason for all the torment that we put on one another back in those glory days. The Reason was preparation for all the senseless crap we have to go through as adults. God knows none of us would be ready for the adult level of incipient uselessness fresh out of the womb. No, we have to spend sixteen, eighteen years, maybe longer, learning to toughen ourselves up for the horrifying drag that is maturity on this here madly spinning orb of a planet.
So, yes, it would have been nice to have had some of those Stephen King novels and short story collections. They would have placed some imaginary exclamation points in our young lives.
Incidentally, I am in no way suggesting that everything about growing up is tedious and banal. True, ninety-nine percent of it is exactly that. However, the remaining one percent is often packed with just enough excitement to help us delude our presumably mature selves that all those years were something more than embryonic posturing while we waited to be turned loose on a society that met us with a shrug. The first kiss, the first grope, the first time getting drunk, maybe the first or second time of really connecting with friends, people you met on the academic team at school, or after the football game, or in marching band, or during the class play. Sure, that's real and it would be unfair to ignore those important times.
But that's not really what happened anyway. What really happened was that most of your good times were just a respite from the process of getting whipped into shape to become a good living zombie so you could later learn some trade or skill and hope to have someone under you that you could boss around--or slap around. And if that didn't work out, you could always aspire to be the company snitch, or the departmental bitch. Maybe you could even grow up to write some deceptively literate stories that always seemed to connect back to those days that you even now cannot decide if you loved or hated.
Stephen King was not there for me. As I say, it would have helped.
I feel a bit funny writing those preceding sentences because even though I have read everything the man ever published, the truth is that for at least twenty years now most of his books have lacked the visceral connection that the ones he wrote from, say, Carrie through Needful Things did have.
Carrie I watched before I read it. But that was the last time things happened in that order. That was his first novel and it was also the first movie someone made based on one of his writings. I was sure that my life would never be the same.
Of course, it was very much the same. But I was taken in. I was very much taken in, just as you were taken in and that is the best argument I can make for the quality of King's work. For just a while you could believe with every fiber of your being that, despite coming of age like a person who grew up through a rotted floor of woodworm, there was at least one other person who got the details right. The shower scene? It was exactly correct, every last detail, from the exploding self-awareness to the giggling insensitivity, from the awkward principal to the emotionally repressed gym teacher, from the hellbent neighbors to the domineering matriarch--every last goddamned detail in that book-movie was perfect. You recognized yourself somewhere in that novel and while that recognition scared you shitless, at least there was the comfort of knowing that you were not nearly as alone as you may have thought.
Then it was time to go back to class and we all kept repeating the same idiotic behavior, having learned nothing from the story because we were too busy learning how to be numbed-out grown-ups.
Sometimes I can still taste the smell of that woodworm.
I feel like Ben Mears in Salem's Lot, drawn back to his childhood, not because it was a specifically happy time but rather because there were things that even today feel as if they need to be worked out, brought to some form of resolution. A lot of times those memories help me hold things together and other times they torture me. One day I remember myself stripped to the waist, drum sticks clinched in each hand, wailing away on my trap set in the early summer mornings, making more noise than music, and even once in a while breaking through to the future as a pent-up energy exploded across my walls and the voices of people I would later meet clapped their hands in time to the roar.
Sometimes I feel like Jack Torrance from The Shining. Struggling to hold things together, fooling myself that I'm in charge of my own destiny. Other times I remind myself of Bill Denbrough from It, always coming up against a Henry Bowers-style sociopath.
I must admit, with some reluctance, that I have never felt much like Jim Norman, the protagonist in the movie Sometimes They Come Back. That's probably in part because I was an only child. King has written a couple of stories that have been turned into movies about a kid whose brother died. The first of these stories was the outstanding novella The Body. As you probably recall, that one was made by Rob Reiner into the excellent Stand By Me. Sometimes They Come Back is not Stand By Me. It does have a bit of overlap, however, mostly at the hands of director Tom McLoughlin via the production company of Dino DeLaurintiis, a man whose knack for the contrived storyline has carried mediocrity into the realm of Low Art. In this story, we have the painfully sincere Tim Matheson as Jim Norman, a teacher who was kicked out of his job back in Chicago and who now has brought his wife and son with him to some small town which is the only place where he can get a teaching job. The small town just happens to be the place where he grew up. And the place where he grew up just happens to be the place where the pivotal downturn of his life began with the brutal murder of his older brother Wayne. So far we have managed to cross elements of The Shining withStand By Me. But wait. Here comes Salem's Lot. The teenage hoodlums who murder Wayne are smashed and killed by a train that overtakes them in a tunnel. (Tunnel? Now I'm recalling Silver Bullet.) Years later, in the present time, three of the four bullies come back from the grave to inhabit seats in Jim Norman's high school classroom. If you remember "Welcome Back, Kotter," you sort of get the idea, except these are not lovable sweathogs. These are vicious greasers. Switchblades. Rotten teeth. Black jackets. So bad they even scare the janitor.
As family-friendly as this made-for-tv slop is, it does have the redeeming value of getting certain vital details exactly right. Chip, the spoiled leader of the jocks, hassles the teacher from day one, but even he doesn't have any interest in killing the guy. Granted, the only reason the director gave him a bit of humanity was to make him less two-dimensional within the framework of a lot of very one-dimensional characters, most especially wife Sally, played with customary stick figure passion by Brooke Adams. But at least the Chip character tries. None of the other good guys in the film do anything except collide off one another's lines, leaving plenty of room for the three ghost hoodlums to stretch out and they do put on quite a show. Had there been even a little bit of subtle musical undertow, these three would have been in the pantheon of King's nastiest villains.
The ending of the film is a complete cheat, one which is worsened by the fact that someone apparently forgot that Matheson's character was supposed to be narrating the story, a facet that goes by the wayside about ten minutes in.
Despite all these overly harsh barbs I'm swinging against this movie, I still have to recommend it to you because of the classroom scenes. They are so close to being the way I remember things that I'm inclined to suspect that I may be remembering someone else's adolescence by mistake. Here's a for instance. Even though the movie makes a big deal out of the fact that Jim Norman is a teacher with a bubbling-under temper, we never once get so much as a clue as to what subject the man teaches. This is probably just an accident in the writing, but at first I thought it might have been the most clever use of verisimilitude ever filmed. Why? Well, simply because when I was a high school senior, every class was exactly the same as every other class. You couldn't tell chemistry from physical education or English from trig. Each and every one of those classes existed in our young lives for absolutely no other reason than to prepare us for the heavy monotony and stupid predictability of our adult lives. In that one respect, those identically anemic classes were most successful.
So, yes, please watch Sometimes They Come Back. It will help convince you that nothing that happened in high school really mattered at all, not even then. It will also confirm in you that your same high school was just a stage production of your later life. Unless, of course, you happen to have been very lucky.
Some of us are. Hoping you are as well, I remain
Your Humble Servant,
Phil Mershon
I don't care if you were the suavest of jocks, the most kitten-like of coquettes, the young dude in black leather on a Suzuki, the main skirt at the embarrassingly maudlin Homecoming dance, the guy with the bottle and red pills in the backseat parked outside the stadium, or the girl whose first name never quite registered on people's memories. It doesn't matter what clique you imagine yourself to have been a part of--if any--the fact is that those so-called glory days were anything but that. There's a Reason for that illusion. The Reason doesn't actually care whether you were smart or stupid, average or exceptional, front row or barrel boy--the Reason just does not give a damn. The Reason doesn't have to care and that's because the Reason is that you spent your youth learning to grow up.
Maybe you spent your spare time holed up in your room, writing things in your spiral notebook, things that you went back to regularly because those things made you feel validated in some way. Maybe you blasted out your mind with whatever form of musical torture was popular in your day. Maybe you played a lot of baseball. There's even a good chance that you discovered your genitals substantially before anyone else discovered them for you. Whatever little secret thing you did to try to stave off the unrelenting and inexorable agony of growing up, somewhere in the back of your mind, in that part of your brain that you always tried to ignore and never quite could, there was a shrill and nagging voice reminding you that there was a Reason for all the torment that we put on one another back in those glory days. The Reason was preparation for all the senseless crap we have to go through as adults. God knows none of us would be ready for the adult level of incipient uselessness fresh out of the womb. No, we have to spend sixteen, eighteen years, maybe longer, learning to toughen ourselves up for the horrifying drag that is maturity on this here madly spinning orb of a planet.
So, yes, it would have been nice to have had some of those Stephen King novels and short story collections. They would have placed some imaginary exclamation points in our young lives.
Incidentally, I am in no way suggesting that everything about growing up is tedious and banal. True, ninety-nine percent of it is exactly that. However, the remaining one percent is often packed with just enough excitement to help us delude our presumably mature selves that all those years were something more than embryonic posturing while we waited to be turned loose on a society that met us with a shrug. The first kiss, the first grope, the first time getting drunk, maybe the first or second time of really connecting with friends, people you met on the academic team at school, or after the football game, or in marching band, or during the class play. Sure, that's real and it would be unfair to ignore those important times.
But that's not really what happened anyway. What really happened was that most of your good times were just a respite from the process of getting whipped into shape to become a good living zombie so you could later learn some trade or skill and hope to have someone under you that you could boss around--or slap around. And if that didn't work out, you could always aspire to be the company snitch, or the departmental bitch. Maybe you could even grow up to write some deceptively literate stories that always seemed to connect back to those days that you even now cannot decide if you loved or hated.
Stephen King was not there for me. As I say, it would have helped.
I feel a bit funny writing those preceding sentences because even though I have read everything the man ever published, the truth is that for at least twenty years now most of his books have lacked the visceral connection that the ones he wrote from, say, Carrie through Needful Things did have.
Carrie I watched before I read it. But that was the last time things happened in that order. That was his first novel and it was also the first movie someone made based on one of his writings. I was sure that my life would never be the same.
Of course, it was very much the same. But I was taken in. I was very much taken in, just as you were taken in and that is the best argument I can make for the quality of King's work. For just a while you could believe with every fiber of your being that, despite coming of age like a person who grew up through a rotted floor of woodworm, there was at least one other person who got the details right. The shower scene? It was exactly correct, every last detail, from the exploding self-awareness to the giggling insensitivity, from the awkward principal to the emotionally repressed gym teacher, from the hellbent neighbors to the domineering matriarch--every last goddamned detail in that book-movie was perfect. You recognized yourself somewhere in that novel and while that recognition scared you shitless, at least there was the comfort of knowing that you were not nearly as alone as you may have thought.
Then it was time to go back to class and we all kept repeating the same idiotic behavior, having learned nothing from the story because we were too busy learning how to be numbed-out grown-ups.
Sometimes I can still taste the smell of that woodworm.
I feel like Ben Mears in Salem's Lot, drawn back to his childhood, not because it was a specifically happy time but rather because there were things that even today feel as if they need to be worked out, brought to some form of resolution. A lot of times those memories help me hold things together and other times they torture me. One day I remember myself stripped to the waist, drum sticks clinched in each hand, wailing away on my trap set in the early summer mornings, making more noise than music, and even once in a while breaking through to the future as a pent-up energy exploded across my walls and the voices of people I would later meet clapped their hands in time to the roar.
Sometimes I feel like Jack Torrance from The Shining. Struggling to hold things together, fooling myself that I'm in charge of my own destiny. Other times I remind myself of Bill Denbrough from It, always coming up against a Henry Bowers-style sociopath.
I must admit, with some reluctance, that I have never felt much like Jim Norman, the protagonist in the movie Sometimes They Come Back. That's probably in part because I was an only child. King has written a couple of stories that have been turned into movies about a kid whose brother died. The first of these stories was the outstanding novella The Body. As you probably recall, that one was made by Rob Reiner into the excellent Stand By Me. Sometimes They Come Back is not Stand By Me. It does have a bit of overlap, however, mostly at the hands of director Tom McLoughlin via the production company of Dino DeLaurintiis, a man whose knack for the contrived storyline has carried mediocrity into the realm of Low Art. In this story, we have the painfully sincere Tim Matheson as Jim Norman, a teacher who was kicked out of his job back in Chicago and who now has brought his wife and son with him to some small town which is the only place where he can get a teaching job. The small town just happens to be the place where he grew up. And the place where he grew up just happens to be the place where the pivotal downturn of his life began with the brutal murder of his older brother Wayne. So far we have managed to cross elements of The Shining withStand By Me. But wait. Here comes Salem's Lot. The teenage hoodlums who murder Wayne are smashed and killed by a train that overtakes them in a tunnel. (Tunnel? Now I'm recalling Silver Bullet.) Years later, in the present time, three of the four bullies come back from the grave to inhabit seats in Jim Norman's high school classroom. If you remember "Welcome Back, Kotter," you sort of get the idea, except these are not lovable sweathogs. These are vicious greasers. Switchblades. Rotten teeth. Black jackets. So bad they even scare the janitor.
As family-friendly as this made-for-tv slop is, it does have the redeeming value of getting certain vital details exactly right. Chip, the spoiled leader of the jocks, hassles the teacher from day one, but even he doesn't have any interest in killing the guy. Granted, the only reason the director gave him a bit of humanity was to make him less two-dimensional within the framework of a lot of very one-dimensional characters, most especially wife Sally, played with customary stick figure passion by Brooke Adams. But at least the Chip character tries. None of the other good guys in the film do anything except collide off one another's lines, leaving plenty of room for the three ghost hoodlums to stretch out and they do put on quite a show. Had there been even a little bit of subtle musical undertow, these three would have been in the pantheon of King's nastiest villains.
The ending of the film is a complete cheat, one which is worsened by the fact that someone apparently forgot that Matheson's character was supposed to be narrating the story, a facet that goes by the wayside about ten minutes in.
Despite all these overly harsh barbs I'm swinging against this movie, I still have to recommend it to you because of the classroom scenes. They are so close to being the way I remember things that I'm inclined to suspect that I may be remembering someone else's adolescence by mistake. Here's a for instance. Even though the movie makes a big deal out of the fact that Jim Norman is a teacher with a bubbling-under temper, we never once get so much as a clue as to what subject the man teaches. This is probably just an accident in the writing, but at first I thought it might have been the most clever use of verisimilitude ever filmed. Why? Well, simply because when I was a high school senior, every class was exactly the same as every other class. You couldn't tell chemistry from physical education or English from trig. Each and every one of those classes existed in our young lives for absolutely no other reason than to prepare us for the heavy monotony and stupid predictability of our adult lives. In that one respect, those identically anemic classes were most successful.
So, yes, please watch Sometimes They Come Back. It will help convince you that nothing that happened in high school really mattered at all, not even then. It will also confirm in you that your same high school was just a stage production of your later life. Unless, of course, you happen to have been very lucky.
Some of us are. Hoping you are as well, I remain
Your Humble Servant,
Phil Mershon
The Pope of Greenwich Village
I would just like to mention that I do not care for the work of Michael Cimino. It isn't merely a matter of differing allegiances. I simply have never been impressed by the man's work. Most of us first heard of him as the co-writer of Magnum Force, the second Dirty Harry movie in the franchise. That was the movie that gave us a pair of immortal lines intended to sound profound within the context of an anti-hippie mentality. The first was: "This is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and it could blow your head clean off. Do you feel lucky? Well, punk--Do ya?" The other was: "A man's got to know his limitations." Clearly Cimino should have listened to himself because his next film, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, had the chance to be a lot edgier than it pretended to be, give or take the strained relationship between Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges. But he just didn't know his own limitations.
The Deer Hunter, which won all kinds of Academy Awards, was the one true fascist film that Cimino had in him. Cimino had been aiming for exactly this kind of emotionally charged bit of propaganda his whole life and as co-producer, co-writer and director, he finally put the last touch of blood on his own bones. The Deer Hunter is so virulently anti-human that one wonders how or why so many expert talents appeared in front of Cimino's camera. Meryl Streep had exactly nothing to contribute to this film, almost as if by design. And while her paralyzed silence screamed for a release, even the murky display of routine emotions as exhibited by Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken were only felt at all during the film's most memorable and pointless scene, where the men are sitting around a POW camp, being forced at gunpoint to play Russian Roulette while the sinister Vietnamese threaten to shoot them if they don't.
That scene only served the plot--such as it was--in the way of all inspired propaganda by making the other guys into monsters without putting forth the actual hard work of explaining why they might have become such. But as in all Cimino product, the enemies--whether black street tough, counter-cultural violence freak, or blood thirsty Vietnamese--only exist as causation for the hero's behavior. Harry is a gun nut, not because he likes being that way, but rather because all the minorities and longhairs have left him no other choice. DeNiro and Walken aren't emotionless monsters because of the lies they were told by the people who steered them into war. No, it was all because of the Vietnamese atrocities.
So, yeah, I don't care for Cimino.
You don't want to get me started about Heaven's Gate or The Year of the Dragon. I will say that either one of these makes both Ishtar and Showgirlslook brilliant by comparison.
None of this pleasant Cimino bashing would be appropriate were it not that tonight's film, The Pope of Greenwich Village, was almost directed by Michael Cimino. The job ended up being handled by Stuart Rosenberg, the man who had earlier directed Cool Hand Luke, which Pope resembles.
The Pope of Greenwich Village is a movie that is about something not contained in its own plot. The plot is that Charlie (Mickey Rourke) and Paulie (Eric Roberts) are a couple of guys looking to get out from under the old neighborhood by committing one simple little crime. That is not, as I say, what the movie is actually about. The movie is about incredible acting. There is an incredible feel of improvisation about this tightly scripted work.
The Deer Hunter, which won all kinds of Academy Awards, was the one true fascist film that Cimino had in him. Cimino had been aiming for exactly this kind of emotionally charged bit of propaganda his whole life and as co-producer, co-writer and director, he finally put the last touch of blood on his own bones. The Deer Hunter is so virulently anti-human that one wonders how or why so many expert talents appeared in front of Cimino's camera. Meryl Streep had exactly nothing to contribute to this film, almost as if by design. And while her paralyzed silence screamed for a release, even the murky display of routine emotions as exhibited by Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken were only felt at all during the film's most memorable and pointless scene, where the men are sitting around a POW camp, being forced at gunpoint to play Russian Roulette while the sinister Vietnamese threaten to shoot them if they don't.
That scene only served the plot--such as it was--in the way of all inspired propaganda by making the other guys into monsters without putting forth the actual hard work of explaining why they might have become such. But as in all Cimino product, the enemies--whether black street tough, counter-cultural violence freak, or blood thirsty Vietnamese--only exist as causation for the hero's behavior. Harry is a gun nut, not because he likes being that way, but rather because all the minorities and longhairs have left him no other choice. DeNiro and Walken aren't emotionless monsters because of the lies they were told by the people who steered them into war. No, it was all because of the Vietnamese atrocities.
So, yeah, I don't care for Cimino.
You don't want to get me started about Heaven's Gate or The Year of the Dragon. I will say that either one of these makes both Ishtar and Showgirlslook brilliant by comparison.
None of this pleasant Cimino bashing would be appropriate were it not that tonight's film, The Pope of Greenwich Village, was almost directed by Michael Cimino. The job ended up being handled by Stuart Rosenberg, the man who had earlier directed Cool Hand Luke, which Pope resembles.
The Pope of Greenwich Village is a movie that is about something not contained in its own plot. The plot is that Charlie (Mickey Rourke) and Paulie (Eric Roberts) are a couple of guys looking to get out from under the old neighborhood by committing one simple little crime. That is not, as I say, what the movie is actually about. The movie is about incredible acting. There is an incredible feel of improvisation about this tightly scripted work.
Can you imagine how this movie would have been mangled if Cimino had been at the helm? The emphasis would have been entirely on the sawing off of the thumb, of Paulie swallowing the pain pills, of the hoodlums making jokes about it later. None of that would have allowed for any stretching out with the actors and stretching out is exactly what is happening in the above scene and ninety-nine percent of the rest of the movie. There's no silent soliloquies, no clever asides, no dwelling on confusion. This movie is about the freedom inherent in playing a scene with someone who knows about acting and reacting, a lot of which even spilled off onto Daryl Hannah, to the extent that I would even argue this was the first time she ever actually acted in a motion picture.
I should probably mention that not everyone agrees that this is a wonderful movie. Roger Ebert praised it with faint damns by concluding the movie had nothing to do with human nature. Dennis Schwartz called it a second-rate Mean Streets. Dave Kehr called it a generic New York Street movie. Each of these observations has some merit. Still, each of them also miss the point. I think that every movie deserves the respect required to sit down and to actually have the audience sit down and attempt to connect with the film, even if that connection has to come from artificial places, such as memories that we may never have had. The young adulthood of Charlie or Paulie could not be any more removed from that of my own upbringing. Yet, if one can allow oneself to be even half as free as these actors, this movie pays you back time and again with lines that are memorable because they spilled out within a framework of friendship and nothing on this here madly spinning orb connects with an audience they way friendship does. Charlie knows that Paulie is a perpetual dreaming loser. But he accepts him, at least most of the time, because he is family. "She outgrew me," Charlie explains to Paulie about why Diane is no longer his girlfriend. "That's what WASPs do: They outgrow people." It doesn't matter at all whether there's truth to that observation. In fact, the more ridiculous the sincere observation, the better the insight we gain into the character's thinking. And that's where the real stories take place, after all. It's not in the actor's ability to fulfill the plot and it isn't about how true to the original novel the director keeps his film. What matters is how the actors convey what their characters are thinking. To that end, The Pope of Greenwich Village is a thinking person's motion picture.
I should probably mention that not everyone agrees that this is a wonderful movie. Roger Ebert praised it with faint damns by concluding the movie had nothing to do with human nature. Dennis Schwartz called it a second-rate Mean Streets. Dave Kehr called it a generic New York Street movie. Each of these observations has some merit. Still, each of them also miss the point. I think that every movie deserves the respect required to sit down and to actually have the audience sit down and attempt to connect with the film, even if that connection has to come from artificial places, such as memories that we may never have had. The young adulthood of Charlie or Paulie could not be any more removed from that of my own upbringing. Yet, if one can allow oneself to be even half as free as these actors, this movie pays you back time and again with lines that are memorable because they spilled out within a framework of friendship and nothing on this here madly spinning orb connects with an audience they way friendship does. Charlie knows that Paulie is a perpetual dreaming loser. But he accepts him, at least most of the time, because he is family. "She outgrew me," Charlie explains to Paulie about why Diane is no longer his girlfriend. "That's what WASPs do: They outgrow people." It doesn't matter at all whether there's truth to that observation. In fact, the more ridiculous the sincere observation, the better the insight we gain into the character's thinking. And that's where the real stories take place, after all. It's not in the actor's ability to fulfill the plot and it isn't about how true to the original novel the director keeps his film. What matters is how the actors convey what their characters are thinking. To that end, The Pope of Greenwich Village is a thinking person's motion picture.
Blow Out
Blow Out (1981) is director Brian De Palma's best movie by such a wide margin that it often feels that all but one of his other movies were created by someone else. That single exception was Greetings (1968) and like its parent film Blow Out, it deliberately evoked Antonioni. Blow Out is not Blow-Up, although both are in their own ways political thrillers done with considerable self-conscious artfulness. What De Palma does with his movie is to take the idea of making a film and set that as the starting point for everything that follows. After an intro that is far funnier than any recent parodies of slasher films, we meet Jack Terry (John Travolta), a sound man for a film company that makes slasher movies and who needs to acquire an authentic scream to dub in for a girl in a shower scene whose own sounds of terror are a bit inadequate. As a director, Brian De Palma is fascinated by the use of just this type of subterfuge. In Body Double, the impetus for the unraveling of the plot is the use of a substitute actress. In Dressed to Kill, Michael Caine plays a man who acts as a psychiatrist even though he ends up being a patient as well as transforming into something of a woman. When we meet Travolta in Blow Out, we're not all that surprised when he turns out to be something more than just a hack in the technical aspects of movie making. He is also a hustler, every bit as busy creating illusions just as Nancy Allen's character creates them for the men she meets. Indeed, we soon learn that Jack is a thoughtful man who sees his craft as being something more than mere technique. Ultimately, his skills not only accidentally record the necessary evidence to solve a political murder; they cause one of the unwitting conspirators to wind up in a perilous situation, although that person's terror does solve the problem of the inadequate shower scream.
But this movie is enjoyable for more reasons than a fascination with illusion. Travolta and Allen, who were first together in De Palma'sCarrie, act-- perhaps for the first time in their lives--as the perfect Hollywood couple, neither one being completely honest with the other, both impatient and headstrong, yet each inexorably drawn to the other. Rounding out an almost Raymond Chandler style Los Angeles seediness--even though the action takes place in Philadelphia--is the presence of a young Dennis Franz, who plays Manny Karp, a hack operative in the planned assassination of the career of an up and coming Senatorial candidate (shades of Chappaquidick). Manny is on screen about five seconds before everyone in the theater feels the need to take a lava shower to wash away the slime.
It is no turn of coincidence that the movie takes place in Philadelphia. As John Lithgow is trying to murder Nancy Allen, the great big celebration of the city's patriotic past is underway, perhaps suggesting that beneath all the veneer of the biggest and loudest country in the world, there lurks an underside that only those beneath the glimmer can detect. More than the steady allusions to both Antonioni and Hitchcock or even Coppola (and this is the first film where De Palma moved beyond parody, imitation or homage and actually embraced his influences and even transcended them), this aspect is the real genius of De Palma's film. Well, that, and Travolta's acting which, again, takes the breath away every bit as much as the suspense the story provides.
We also get some inventive use of split screen techniques that we've seen in Carrie and Dressed to Kill, where they were admittedly used to great effect, but here they feel strangely less self-conscious, more like real life. And Blow Out is above all else something that smacks us over and over with its realism. As in Coppola's The Conversation, we are insiders in the unraveling of a mystery that is all too contemporary. The power of the suggestions De Palma gives stays with us for longer and with greater intensity than most other movies precisely because from the moment the film ends we have the pleasure of wondering about the source of every other ancillary sound in any film we've ever seen.
But this movie is enjoyable for more reasons than a fascination with illusion. Travolta and Allen, who were first together in De Palma'sCarrie, act-- perhaps for the first time in their lives--as the perfect Hollywood couple, neither one being completely honest with the other, both impatient and headstrong, yet each inexorably drawn to the other. Rounding out an almost Raymond Chandler style Los Angeles seediness--even though the action takes place in Philadelphia--is the presence of a young Dennis Franz, who plays Manny Karp, a hack operative in the planned assassination of the career of an up and coming Senatorial candidate (shades of Chappaquidick). Manny is on screen about five seconds before everyone in the theater feels the need to take a lava shower to wash away the slime.
It is no turn of coincidence that the movie takes place in Philadelphia. As John Lithgow is trying to murder Nancy Allen, the great big celebration of the city's patriotic past is underway, perhaps suggesting that beneath all the veneer of the biggest and loudest country in the world, there lurks an underside that only those beneath the glimmer can detect. More than the steady allusions to both Antonioni and Hitchcock or even Coppola (and this is the first film where De Palma moved beyond parody, imitation or homage and actually embraced his influences and even transcended them), this aspect is the real genius of De Palma's film. Well, that, and Travolta's acting which, again, takes the breath away every bit as much as the suspense the story provides.
We also get some inventive use of split screen techniques that we've seen in Carrie and Dressed to Kill, where they were admittedly used to great effect, but here they feel strangely less self-conscious, more like real life. And Blow Out is above all else something that smacks us over and over with its realism. As in Coppola's The Conversation, we are insiders in the unraveling of a mystery that is all too contemporary. The power of the suggestions De Palma gives stays with us for longer and with greater intensity than most other movies precisely because from the moment the film ends we have the pleasure of wondering about the source of every other ancillary sound in any film we've ever seen.
White Dog
White Dog (1982) was the monster movie that Cujo could have been.
Samuel Fuller developed the screenplay and directed this fascinating film which wrapped up in 1982 but did not see theatrical release in the United States until ten years had passed. Why? Paramount, in its infinite chickenness, was scared to release the movie they themselves had backed. The reason? Race fear.
White Dog, you see, is a movie about a dog that has been trained to attack and kill black people. It is also about the efforts of a man named Keys (Paul Winfield) to deprogram the race hate out of that attack dog.
Certain members of the NAACP objected to the subject matter and Paramount clasped their corporate hands and declared, "Oh my. This is nasty, ain't it?"
The history of German Shepherds and other big dogs being trained to attack African Americans makes some people very uncomfortable. The tradition goes back to pre-Civil War America, when plantation owners would sic their powerful canines on runaway slaves. By the 1940s, the progeny of those dogs were being used to track down runaway convicts. In the early 1960s, their descendants were terrorizing civil rights workers. By the 1980s, the dogs were sold as security specialists who would protect rich homes from black invaders. Look, there's a reason skinheads favor pitbulls, Shepherds and dobies. It's not because of some twisted concept of cuteness. It's because those dogs--perhaps not instinctively but after well-thought-out abuse training--are very effective at killing people.
(I know whereof I speak. I have two dogs, one a German Shepherd-Greyhound mix and the other some type of mongrel Pitbull. The Shepherd was never trained to be anything but sweet. The Pit, however, by the time we got her, had developed a severe distrust and hatred for African Americans, to the extent that black people in our neighborhood could not walk past out gate without fearing that Sarah the dog would leap up and over the gate and disembowel them. We have not been able to completely eradicate this evil impulse, although when she watches us being social with our black friends, she chills out a bit. Before she came to live with us, Sarah had been raised by racist drug dealers who kept her tied to a tree with a two-foot rope so that she could not relieve her bowels without standing up. Just like some people, she let her mind jump from the specific to the general and her fear of abuse became hate.)
White Dog is far from a perfect movie, but what it lacks in panache it more than makes up for in guts. Fuller cast Kristy McNichol and Jameson Parker as leads here, but it's really Paul Winfield and Burl Ives who do the acting. Winfield in particular is just incredible. The camera stays on his face as he discovers that the dog he has been trying to deprogram has killed a black man and left the man's body face down in a Christian Church, with Mother Mary and all the Saints looking on. We never see the man's body and there's no need for us to see it. Winfield's expressions tell us all we can bear.
I wish I could tell you that all the acting here is as great at Paul Winfield's. That would be a lie. Parker and McNichol do what is expected of them. They look wholesome and concerned, the type of liberal hypocrites who are on the side of the dog in good times and who want to have it shot when the going gets rough. Ives is likable, although his performance here is a hell of a long drop from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But what I suspect Fuller was going for here was something similar to what Roger Corman did more successfully with The Intruder. He made a family-oriented film that was almost positively going to freak out the family. I tried--unsuccessfully--to explain this to my roommate. After I had detailed the plot, she said, "This is a family film?" It really isn't, I suppose, that is, unless you're looking to shove a black finger in your family's face or trying to understand how come that stray you picked up off Mulholland is so sweet with you and so angry when the landscaper comes over.
Samuel Fuller developed the screenplay and directed this fascinating film which wrapped up in 1982 but did not see theatrical release in the United States until ten years had passed. Why? Paramount, in its infinite chickenness, was scared to release the movie they themselves had backed. The reason? Race fear.
White Dog, you see, is a movie about a dog that has been trained to attack and kill black people. It is also about the efforts of a man named Keys (Paul Winfield) to deprogram the race hate out of that attack dog.
Certain members of the NAACP objected to the subject matter and Paramount clasped their corporate hands and declared, "Oh my. This is nasty, ain't it?"
The history of German Shepherds and other big dogs being trained to attack African Americans makes some people very uncomfortable. The tradition goes back to pre-Civil War America, when plantation owners would sic their powerful canines on runaway slaves. By the 1940s, the progeny of those dogs were being used to track down runaway convicts. In the early 1960s, their descendants were terrorizing civil rights workers. By the 1980s, the dogs were sold as security specialists who would protect rich homes from black invaders. Look, there's a reason skinheads favor pitbulls, Shepherds and dobies. It's not because of some twisted concept of cuteness. It's because those dogs--perhaps not instinctively but after well-thought-out abuse training--are very effective at killing people.
(I know whereof I speak. I have two dogs, one a German Shepherd-Greyhound mix and the other some type of mongrel Pitbull. The Shepherd was never trained to be anything but sweet. The Pit, however, by the time we got her, had developed a severe distrust and hatred for African Americans, to the extent that black people in our neighborhood could not walk past out gate without fearing that Sarah the dog would leap up and over the gate and disembowel them. We have not been able to completely eradicate this evil impulse, although when she watches us being social with our black friends, she chills out a bit. Before she came to live with us, Sarah had been raised by racist drug dealers who kept her tied to a tree with a two-foot rope so that she could not relieve her bowels without standing up. Just like some people, she let her mind jump from the specific to the general and her fear of abuse became hate.)
White Dog is far from a perfect movie, but what it lacks in panache it more than makes up for in guts. Fuller cast Kristy McNichol and Jameson Parker as leads here, but it's really Paul Winfield and Burl Ives who do the acting. Winfield in particular is just incredible. The camera stays on his face as he discovers that the dog he has been trying to deprogram has killed a black man and left the man's body face down in a Christian Church, with Mother Mary and all the Saints looking on. We never see the man's body and there's no need for us to see it. Winfield's expressions tell us all we can bear.
I wish I could tell you that all the acting here is as great at Paul Winfield's. That would be a lie. Parker and McNichol do what is expected of them. They look wholesome and concerned, the type of liberal hypocrites who are on the side of the dog in good times and who want to have it shot when the going gets rough. Ives is likable, although his performance here is a hell of a long drop from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But what I suspect Fuller was going for here was something similar to what Roger Corman did more successfully with The Intruder. He made a family-oriented film that was almost positively going to freak out the family. I tried--unsuccessfully--to explain this to my roommate. After I had detailed the plot, she said, "This is a family film?" It really isn't, I suppose, that is, unless you're looking to shove a black finger in your family's face or trying to understand how come that stray you picked up off Mulholland is so sweet with you and so angry when the landscaper comes over.