Sunday, July 10, 2011
The Next 60 Seconds Are All That Matter
By J.D.
John Carpenter is one of those rare filmmakers that entertains while also trying to say something about the society in which we live in. It is a tough balancing act that few can maintain but Carpenter's films make it look easy. From the special effects opus/remake drenched in paranoia of The Thing (1982) to the two-fisted diatribe against Reaganomics of They Live (1988), he hasn't been afraid to sandwich a thought-provoking message in between action sequences. In this respect, his films are much more than genre pictures; rather they critique the problems of contemporary society. And for its time, Escape From New York(1981) was no different. Carpenter's film examined the validity of the presidency and the increase of crime and disguised it as a slick, futuristic race against time that was very prescient, going on to influence similarly minded and looking films for years, including a fascinating subgenre of Italian rip-offs.
Escape From New York is set in 1997 (?!) and crime in the United States has grown so bad that Manhattan Island in New York has become a maximum security prison with one simple rule: "Once you go in, you don't come out." One night, the president's plane is taken over by terrorists who crash it into the prison. The president (Donald Pleasence) escapes but quickly becomes a prisoner of the inmates led by the Duke (Isaac Hayes). It seems that the president is carrying a vital piece of information that is to be delivered to a historical summit in Hartford. Enter Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), an ex-soldier, now legendary fugitive who has been captured by the government and is scheduled to be transferred into the prison. Instead, Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) offers him a deal: go into the prison, find the president, and bring him and the information back in exchange for a full pardon. Sounds easy, right? There's a catch: Snake only has 22 hours to do all this because by then the conference will be over and the world will be thrown into chaos. As an incentive he has two explosive charges lodged in his neck to keep him focused on the task at hand. With this enticing opening, the film kicks into high gear as Snake enters the world's most dangerous prison to find the president and save the world.
Carpenter had just made Dark Star (1974) and no one wanted to hire him as a director so he shifted his focus to screenwriting. Inspired by the Charles Bronson film Death Wish (1974), Carpenter originally wrote the screenplay in 1974. He didn’t agree with the film’s philosophy but liked how it conveyed “the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make an SF film along these lines. He was also influenced by the Watergate scandal. "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the president. I wrote the screenplay and no studio wanted to make it" because the general feeling was that “It was too violent, too scary, too weird.” And so the director went on to do other films with the intention of making Escape later. After the successes of Halloween (1978) and The Fog (1980), Carpenter was in a position to make a motion picture with a big budget. He decided to revive his Escape script, but something seemed to be missing. "This was basically a straight action film. And at one point I realized it really doesn't have this kind of crazy humor that people from New York would expect to see." So, he brought in Nick Castle, a friend from his film school days at University of Southern California. Castle invented the Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) character and came up with the film's humorous conclusion that offset the bleak tone of the film with a skewed sense of satire.
The film's setting proved to be another potential problem for Carpenter. It is apocalyptic in tone: a decaying, semi-destroyed version of New York. How could Carpenter create this world on only a budget of $6 million (his biggest at the time)? As fate would have it, in 1977 there was a big fire in St. Louis that burned out several blocks of the downtown area. Carpenter and his crew convinced the city to shut off the electricity to these blocks at night and then proceeded to transform the remains into a New York of the future. They even found an exact replica of Grand Central Station that was deserted and unused. It was a tough, demanding shoot that Carpenter had never experienced before. "We'd finish shooting at about 6 a.m. and I'd just be going to sleep at 7 when the sun would be coming up. I'd wake up around 5 or 6 p.m., depending on whether or not we had dailies, and by the time I got going the sun would be setting. So for about two and a half months I never saw daylight, which was really strange." This approach paid off, creating a dark, foreboding atmosphere of a futuristic film noir.
In addition, Carpenter shot parts of the film in Los Angeles and New York. He and his film company were the first ones ever to be allowed to shoot on Liberty Island, at the Statue of Liberty at night. They let Carpenter have free run of the entire island. He remembers, “We were lucky. It wasn’t easy to get that initial permission. They’d had a bombing three months earlier, and were worried about trouble.” With Escape, the director created two distinct looks: “one is the police state, high tech, lots of neon, a United States dominated by underground computers. That was easy to shoot compared to the Manhattan Island prison sequences, which had few lights, mainly torch lights, like feudal England.”
The heart of Escape From New York lies in its main character: Snake Plissken. His cynical, world-weary attitude flies in the face of the earnest authorities who send him off to the save the world. Snake could care less. All that matters to him is "the next 60 seconds," as Kurt Russell commented in an interview. "Living for exactly that next minute is all there is." It is this kind of intensity that makes Snake such an interesting
character. He is the ideal antihero — intent on getting the job done and content on being left alone. Snake doesn't need anyone. Russell's performance clearly echoes Clint Eastwood's style of acting — the strong, silent type. Snake is a clever hybrid of The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry. It is an amusing riff on Eastwood's two most famous characters, which is only reinforced by the appearance of Lee Van Cleef (who appeared in a few films opposite Eastwood). It is to Russell's credit that he makes Snake a character you want to root for, that you want to see win at the end. There is something charismatic about Snake that makes you automatically want to like him. What is so great about the character is that Carpenter and co-screenwriter Nick Castle remain true to him throughout. They don’t saddle him with a love interest or dilute his intensity by having him crack the occasional joke. Snake remains an unrepentant badass, the proverbial fly in the ointment with a surly disregard for authority right up to the last shot of the film.
And to think that the studio did not want Carpenter to cast Russell in the role. Up until then the actor had done a string of Disney films as a youth and worked with Carpenter on a TV movie about Elvis Presley. The studio did not see Russell as a tough action hero. In fact, Charles Bronson expressed an interest in playing Snake (Tommy Lee Jones also was considered). However, by Carpenter’s own admission, “I was afraid of working with him. He was a big star and I was this little-shit nobody.” Fortunately, the filmmaker had faith in Russell and Escape From New York continued a long-standing relationship between the two men — both personal and professional — that continues to this day.
Escape From New York also features a strong supporting cast of character actors such as veteran thespian Harry Dean Stanton as Brain, the smartest man in the prison, and Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie, a hack who stayed in New York even after it changed into a prison. Let’s not forget Adrienne Barbeau as the Brain’s girlfriend Maggie and yet she is anything but that, as the talented actress plays her character as the tough-minded female equivalent of Snake. The film contains an eccentric assortment of characters each of who get their moment to shine and this only enhances the enjoyment of watching Escape. One of the best things about it is how these characters interact with Snake and how he views them. The supporting cast also fleshes out more of this fascinating world. They continually offer all sorts of tantalizing tidbits that allude to Snake's colorful past, to conditions in the prison and how the inmates have created their own world.
Escape from New York received mostly positive reviews when it was released. Newsweek magazine felt that Carpenter had a “deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility — which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. He uses Russell well, however.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “John Carpenter is offering this summer's moviegoers a rare opportunity: to escape from the air-conditioned torpor of ordinary entertainment into the hothouse humidity of their own paranoia. It's a trip worth taking.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "[The film] is not to be analyzed too solemnly, though. It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season." However, the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr felt that the film, “fails to satisfy — it gives us too little of too much.”
First and foremost Escape From New York is a fast-paced action film that is never dull to watch. However, the film also contains a dark, satirical edge that never falters, even right up to the film's conclusion. One the most frustrating problems of most films is how they end. No one seems to know how to end a film without relying on tried and true clichés. Carpenter's film does not fall into this trap. Escape may be an action film but it also makes some very interesting comments about crime in the United States that are still relevant even today. One could argue that Carpenter's film is almost intended to be a warning. That if things get any worse, the world that is depicted in this film isn't that far off. It is these sobering thoughts that make Escape From New York as powerful and entertaining today as it was when it first hit the screens in 1981.
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Labels: 80s, Borgnine, Eastwood, Elvis, John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, Movie Tributes, Pleasence, Tommy Lee Jones
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Saturday, July 02, 2011
It's All in the Reflexes
By VenetianBlond
Today we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Big Trouble in Little China, a movie that made little impact in theaters but now evokes a certain nostalgia in those of us who watched it repeatedly on VHS or on Sunday afternoon cable TV. Directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, and Dennis Dun, it’s an action-adventure-comedy-kung-fu-creature feature-romance set in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Russell’s Jack Burton is a blowhard of a truck driver who gets entangled in a Chinese mystery when his best friend Wang’s (Dun) fiance Miao Yin is kidnapped just as she’s disembarking from her flight from China. It seems there’s a robust sex slave trade being combated by activist attorney Gracie Law (Cattrall). Burton, Wang, Cattrall, and eventually Egg Shen, the good-guy-sorcerer, go to the brothel where they think Miao Yin is being held. The rest of the film is an extended chase scene punctuated by kung-fu battles and magical set pieces. Lo Pan, a 2,000 year old cursed spirit, must marry a green-eyed girl to become flesh again, and both Miao Yin and Gracie have green eyes.
After being given a studio script that was completely overhauled from its original form as a Western, Carpenter knew he needed to bring in an actor with some box office heft to sell a virtually inexplicable film. He and Russell had worked together for 1982’s The Thing, although the studio hemmed and hawed on that casting. Once Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson (seriously?) proved unavailable, Russell was given the job. Unfortunately, Russell did not prove to be as much of a draw as was hoped, and the experience soured Carpenter on working on studio projects entirely so he returned to independent filmmaking.
Part of the problem is that the characters are actually characterizations. Burton is a John Wayne Lite who has a high opinion of himself and is just as likely to get conked on the head as he is to strike the fatal blow. Wang is channeling a 1940s motormouthed gangster, and Gracie is a breathless ingénue with nerves of steel in the Scarlett O’Hara mode. In addition, it was a martial-arts film before the big wave of popular martial-arts films hit the U.S. so mainstream audiences didn’t quite know what to make of it.
However, Carpenter’s filmmaking vocabulary was quite precise and he kept control of the pace and tone throughout. From visual jokes like Jack perpetually bringing a knife to gun fights to his heroic and completely phony line, “OK. You people sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning. And if we're not back by dawn…call the president,” the action is
punctuated by humor and self-awareness. It makes sense, because Jack Burton himself is completely self-aware. He does and says what he does to make himself look like the built-up ideal of himself in his mind. Carpenter also directs the action well, keeping a coherent through-line as well as identifying the good fighters, emphasizing different techniques, and generally keeping a sense of urgency throughout each fight. This is not to say he doesn’t also give the chopsocky style bulgy-eyed staredown its due, but even with the directorial winks, the stakes of each battle are clear.
Where Carpenter really excelled was in the effects and the monsters. Jack and Wang must swim through the “Hell of the Upside-Down Sinners” and the submerged and rotting corpses drift in front of our heroes and the camera just right. Toward the end, once the “big boss” is defeated, one of his minions puffs up and explodes. Literally. One of the creatures shows up in a fantastic little postscript at the end of the film but it’s not gratuitous. It’s Carpenter saying that there’s still crazy stuff out there, so you had better always be on your guard.
I generally like Kurt Russell’s acting, but I love his Jack Burton. There’s the level of player and blowhard, but he also shows how Burton is so completely out of his element. He manages to fire a round into a bad guy and is completely surprised that it worked. I don’t know whose idea it was, but after rescuing Gracie and laying a big kiss on her, he walks into the next battle with her lipstick smeared all over his mouth and teeth. The real hero is Wang, the apparent sidekick who has right and honor on his side as well as the mad kung-fu skills.
Big Trouble in Little China is entertainment, first and foremost, that manages to use action tropes while joking about them at the same time. I’d posit that few action films from the 80’s have aged as well, even given Kurt Russell’s acid wash jeans.
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Labels: 80s, Eastwood, John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, Movie Tributes, Nicholson, Wayne
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Monday, September 13, 2010
Harold Gould (1923-2010)
By Edward Copeland
Though he had a long career, Harold Gould always seemed to look the same: The thick head of white hair with the similarly colored mustache. Through his appearances on film and television, most often in comedies, he was one of our most dependable character actors. Gould died Saturday at the age of 86.
Gould actually began his public acting career rather late in life. He had a doctorate in theater and spent most of his years teaching until he turned to cameras in the 1960s. His early work consisted mostly of episodic television spanning a wide range of series such as Route 66, The Untouchables and Dennis the Menace. He also appeared twice on The Twilight Zone and once on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Later, comedies seemed to draw him more often such as Get Smart, That Girl and Hogan's Heroes.
His first credited feature film came in 1963's The Yellow Canary starring Pat Boone and Barbara Eden.
The 1970s seemed to be his breakout decade. In the Love, American Style segment "Love and Happy Days" which would later spawn Happy Days, he was the original Howard Cunningham. His big break, in terms of notable television roles, came as Martin Morgenstern, Rhoda's father, which he played on both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the spin-off Rhoda.
In 1973, he landed one of his biggest film roles as one of the team of con men helping to carry out The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. A year later, he played the mayor in Billy Wilder's remake of The Front Page with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Two years later, he appeared in the Disney comedy The Strongest Man in the World with Kurt Russell and Woody Allen's Love and Death.
Other films from this decade include Mel Brooks' Silent Movie, Gus, The Big Bus and The One and Only. Of his many TV appearances, a particularly notable one was as Barney Gerber, Jodie's hospital roommate on Soap. Jodie (Billy Crystal) goes in to have a sex change but instead tries to commit suicide. As he's slipping out of consciousness, Gould delivers a tremendously moving and poignant monologue about the losses in Barney's life.
His work continued to be prolific in the 1980s, but he perhaps was recognized most as Rose's boyfriend Miles on The Golden Girls.
He continued to work in the 1990s in films such as My Giant, Patch Adams and the remake of Freaky Friday with Jaime Lee Curtis. His last role was on an episode of Nip/Tuck which aired Feb. 24.
RIP Mr. Gould.
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Labels: Disney, Hitchcock, Kurt Russell, Lemmon, Matthau, Mel Brooks, Newman, Obituary, Redford, Television, Wilder, Woody
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Sunday, July 11, 2010
“Fifty bucks never killed anybody.”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
I can’t always rely on what is admittedly a somewhat imperfect memory, but the way I remember it was that a group of my high school friends were gathered around and talking animatedly about a film they had just seen that, in the vernacular they used at the time, was “fucking hilarious.” One of my pals went into particular detail about a scene in which a woman’s dress got caught on a car hood that was being opened up, and in the process her breasts were exposed on live television…to the approval of a large audience who had tuned in to watch the weekly gridiron exploits on Monday Night Football.
I asked Mike, the friend who took pleasure in describing this gag what movie he was talking about. “Used Cars,” he replied. “Goddamn, it’s a funny movie.”
“Who’s in it?” I asked him further. “Kurt Russell,” he returned. Then he sounded sort of surprised. “You mean you haven’t went and seen it yet?”
I was a little too embarrassed to tell my pal that the likelihood of me seeing a movie with both Kurt Russell and naked breasts were pretty slim, given as how my family was used to watching the actor cavort in Disney films where he played a hapless college student that had weird things happen to him…like invisibility and super-strength. No, I’d have to wait until Used Cars (1980) turned up on pay cable to watch what is one of the funniest comedies in the history of cinema…because 30 years ago on this date, the film was released to theaters…and I was several months shy of my 17th birthday.
Upon its release, Used Cars received an “R” rating — and in fact, would be the only film directed by Robert Zemeckis to do so as of this post. Zemeckis, who had only two years earlier had his first feature film effort, the alternately silly and sublime I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), released to critical acclaim, was rapidly becoming the flavor-of-the-month in Hollywood by that time along with his longtime collaborator Bob Gale. Though the two men had experienced a temporary setback scripting Steven Spielberg’s failed bigger-isn’t-necessarily-better 1941 (1979), they would soldier on to greater triumphs, culminating with Zemeckis’ directing Romancing the Stone (1984)…and the 1985 mega-hit Back to the Future. Zemeckis would receive the respect of his peers by winning multiple Oscars for Forrest Gump (1994), a film that filled me with so much revulsion at the time that I seriously contemplated giving up movies. (Fortunately, saner heads prevailed.) He has since entertained audiences with ponderous special effects outings such as Contact (1997) and The Polar Express (2004), movies that have since made me nostalgic for those earlier vehicles that relied on nothing more complex than how the lives of several individuals were changed by the appearance of John, Paul, George and Ringo on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Theatres may not have enforced the “No one under 17 admitted” guideline with R-rated films back in my day, but Mama and Papa Shreve certainly did. In fact, I ended up taking my father with me to see Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) because I was only 16 at the time…and truth be told, I was a little bit embarrassed to be sitting next to him in the theater as the film unfurled. To my surprise, he genuinely liked the film…but admonished me: “I wouldn’t discuss the content of this movie with your younger sisters.”
Dad wasn’t around the first time I watched Used Cars, which I finally caught on HBO months after its abortive run in theaters. I’ve seen it several more times since then (a couple with my father), and I fervently believe that the film transcends its “loud, vulgar and unrepentantly raunchy” reputation (according to The Onion’s Scott Tobias) to be a first-rate, relentlessly cynical satire on “the American Dream.” Former Disney stalwart Russell plays Rudy Russo, a con man/used car salesman (I know, it’s pretty much redundant) without a whiff of scruples who’s employed by Luke Fuchs (Jack Warden), a slightly more straight-arrow car dealer with serious health issues (he has a bad ticker). Rudy has aspirations to advance to a position where the real graft is there for the taking — he has an opportunity to buy his way into a party nomination as state senator…and though Luke thinks he’s crazy, he agrees to help Rudy begin his journey into politics.
Luke has a twin brother, unrepentant douchebag Roy L. (also played by Warden), who’s learned through his attorney (Joe Flaherty) that his (Roy’s) car lot is going to be razed (via eminent domain) to make room for a new highway overpass. This will make his brother’s lot the most valuable piece of property in the area, and since efforts to buy out Luke in the past have failed, Roy L. has to resort to strong-arm tactics (a demolition derby expert (Michael Talbott) takes Luke for a wild spin test-driving a car, and Luke’s heart can’t take the excitement) to “inherit” the lot. Returning from his adventure, Luke expires on the floor of the New Deal Used Cars’ sales office…but Rudy, who’s counting on the money Luke promised him for the state senatorship, talks fellow salesman Jeff (Gerrit Graham) and mechanic Jim (Frank McRae) into concealing Luke’s untimely demise by placing him in his antique ’59 Edsel and burying him in a pit in the back of the lot.
Unbeknownst to Rudy, Luke received a phone call from his daughter Barbara Jane (Deborah Harmon) earlier that evening — she’s anxious to reconcile with her father after being estranged from him for a goodly number of years. She arrives at the lot for their reunion; putting Rudy in the uncomfortable position of having to continue the deception that her father is still hale and hearty (he’s told both her and Roy L. that Luke went south to Miami Beach for a little R&R). Because the deadline to submit the paperwork for the state senate office has been moved up, Rudy also has to get his hands on some fast cash — so he resorts to enlisting the help of a pair of electronic whiz kids (Michael “Lenny” McKean and David L. “Squiggy” Lander) to interrupt a televised football game to do a commercial for the used car business…which results in a financial windfall as several hundred customers arrive at the lot that next day. The “interrupting-your-regularly-scheduled-programming” shenanigans continue when our heroes are daring enough to preempt a presidential address being given by then -Commander-in-Chief Jimmy Carter.
Rudy and company make a valiant effort to keep the news of Luke’s demise secret from Barbara Jane and Roy, but eventually the cat is out of the bag — and furious at Rudy’s dishonesty, she fires him along with Jeff and Jim. But the three men have to pitch in to save Barbara Jane’s business when she’s hauled into court due to a false advertising lawsuit (Roy has used a little technical chicanery of his own to overdub a dubious claim into one of her commercials), and accomplish with a balls-out slapstick chase involving a “mile” of automobile clunkers driven by a pack of high school driver’s ed students.
The concept of Used Cars originated with writer-director-producer John Milius, who pitched the idea to scribes Zemeckis and Gale while they were still hard at work on what would become 1941. When the original deal to produce Cars fell through at Universal, Steven Spielberg (working on 1941 for Columbia Pictures) was able to secure financing through Columbia by signing on with Milius as an executive producer. Zemeckis shot Cars in a breakneck 28 days at a Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in Mesa, Ariz. — and the finished product scored extremely high with audiences at its preview. But Columbia foolishly chose to release the film in July 1980 (it was originally slated for August) at a time when Airplane! (1980) was just beginning to convulse audiences in theaters…and to add insult to injury, bungled the film’s marketing campaign to the point where anyone who did manage to see it in a theater was very, very lucky. Despite its low profile, the film received a great deal of critical acclaim, including the notoriously finicky Pauline Kael…who described Cars as “a classic screwball fantasy — a neglected modern comedy that’s like a more restless and visually high-spirited version of the W.C. Fields pictures.”
At the time of Used Cars’ release, the vogue in cinematic mirth-making was what was known as “slob comedy”—a trend that kicked off with National Lampoon’s Animal House in 1978, and later introduced hit films such as Meatballs, Caddyshack and Stripes. Cars is cut from the same bolt of cloth — it revels in its cheerfully bad taste — but it transcends its raunchy brethren in other ways by satirizing taboo, sacred cow subjects as politics, the legal system, television and consumerism. To borrow the words of critic Tobias, Cars “starts with the premise that all politicians are salesmen, all salesmen are liars and the best believe their own lies with stirring conviction.” “You know, it used to be when you bought a politician, that son of a bitch stayed bought,” snarls Roy L. Fuchs in a line that I’ll bet not a day goes by when either my father or I aren’t using it in some sort of context. There’s nothing particularly socially redeeming about any of the characters in the film — Zemeckis once described Cars as “a Frank Capra movie where everybody lies” — but it’s hard not to be in the corner of someone like Rudy, who despite his con man demeanor also is the classic American underdog, just doing what he can to hustle a buck and keep groceries on the table.
No other film comedy used profanity in such a gleeful manner as Used Cars, which surely must have held the record until Quentin Tarantino decided to get into the movie business. The line that still makes me laugh until there are tears in my eyes occurs when Jeff is in the middle of his FCC-violating car commercial during the president’s speech: “Now wait just a goddamn minute…what the hell is this? Is this a 1974 Mercedes 450SL for $24,000? That's too fucking high!!!” He then proceeds to destroy the car with a charge of dynamite. My other favorite is a line of Roy L.’s, said in response to Jeff’s annoying habit of repeating everything he’s just said: “What are you, a fuckin’ parrot?” (I later learned that Warden ad-libbed this, and it is a thing of beauty.)
The comedy centerpiece that everyone who’s seen Used Cars remembers to this day occurs shortly after Luke’s hair-raising mishap as the unfortunate passenger in the car piloted by the wild-and-crazy driver in Roy L.’s employ. At the same time this is occurring, Rudy is negotiating with a stubborn customer (Andrew Duncan) who’s determined to keep haggling about the price. “Fifty bucks never killed anybody,” the man keeps repeating over and over again like a mantra…until Rudy throws up his hands in frustration. “But I'm telling ya…my boss sees these figures — he's going to have a stroke.” Cue Luke’s entrance — red-faced and clutching his chest and in desperate need of the nitroglycerin he takes for his bad heart, he goes through a series of spastic motions before expiring on the floor. “OK, it's a deal, it's a deal! I'll sign! I'll sign!” the customer says, panicking as he grabs a pen and the agreement. (I defy anyone not to wet-their-pants in laughter at this truly classic moment.)
But there are other unforgettable comic encounters in Used Cars that do not necessarily rely on questionably bad-taste humor — my favorite is a hysterically funny scene where superstitious Jeff goes nuts in a bar, spilling salt and crawling under ladders (and finally throwing a chair through a mirror in the establishment) in an effort to bring on bad luck so that Rudy can beat the point spread on a football game he’s bet his entire savings on in an attempt to raise the kitty he needs for his state senator nomination. And then there’s the climactic car chase, as a multitude of high-school kids (which include Wendie Jo Sperber and Marc McClure, both of whom have memorable roles in Zemeckis’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Back to the Future) drive 250 cars back to the used car lot in order that Barbara Jane’s claim of New Deal’s “mile of cars” can be proved legit. Sequences like this would become a trademark in the comedies written by Zemeckis and Gale —such as Hand’s climactic events surrounding the Fab Four’s appearance on Sullivan, or Back to the Future’s breathless series of obstacles leading up to Marty McFly’s race-against-time maneuver to return to his own time period.
Actor Russell had been trying to make a concerted effort to shake the Walt Disney stigma at the time of Used Cars’ release, and though he had made inroads in that area with his critically lauded turn as the titular rock ‘n’ roller in the TV-movie Elvis (1979) it’s not entirely incorrect to say that Cars was the film in which he was finally allowed to “grow up.” Veteran character actor Warden wasn’t interested in Cars in the beginning but acquiesced after talking Zemeckis and Gale into letting him play both Luke and Roy L. Fuchs. These two incredible thesps head up an amazing cast of superb comic actors which also include, in addition to those already named, Dub Taylor (as the crooked party chief), Alfonso Arau, Woodrow Parfey…and the incomparable Al “Grandpa” Lewis as Judge “Hanging” H.H. Harrison. (Sharp-eyed viewers will also spot Roger Corman regular Dick Miller making love and a pre-Hill Street Blues Betty Thomas shaking her moneymaker on top of a used car.)
Normally, I would encourage anyone who hasn’t experienced the tasteless pleasures of Used Cars to see it in a theater the way most movies should be viewed (since it’s a comedy, it should always be seen with an audience) but unless you spot it at your local repertory the next-best solution is to buy or rent the DVD. That way, you’ll be able to enjoy writers Zemeckis and Gale and actor Russell spouting their memories and anecdotes into one of the best DVD commentaries ever recorded. Seriously — this is one of the most audience-pleasing comedies ever produced. Trust me.
Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. blogs at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, and it took him months to get him to stop saying “Jesus Palomino!” after first seeing Used Cars.
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Labels: 80s, Capra, Corman, Disney, Dub Taylor, Elvis, Fields, Jack Warden, Kael, Kurt Russell, Movie Tributes, Spielberg, Tarantino, Television, Zemeckis
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008
It's not always best to go second
By Edward Copeland
I got through the second part of the surgically altered DVD of Grindhouse, finally seeing the extended version of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. Aside from Kurt Russell's fun performance as Stuntman Mike, the movie is a real letdown.
I doubt if I'd seen the shorter version I would have felt that much more favorably toward Death Proof.
In Planet Terror, all the actors seemed to be on the same page as to what type of movie they were in. In Death Proof, few of the characters have any sort of distinct personality outside of Russell, especially in the case of the first group of young women Stuntman Mike terrorizes.
Most of the actresses in the early sequence are really bad, and not in a good way. Since we spend nearly an hour with them, it gets to be unbearable.
The second group of women, which includes Rosario Dawson, are slightly better, but their repartee comes off as very tired. On top of that, Tarantino seems to have grown bored with his own movie.
Whereas the first portion of the film functions with the same spirit as Planet Terror in terms of washed-out colors and scratched-up prints, when he leaps ahead to the second batch he films an entire sequence in vivid black-and-white for no apparent reason. Then, when he switches back to color, the film seems like just any other reasonably well-shot color film.
Russell's hilarious performance can only take you so far and by the time Death Proof finally wraps up, it seems as if it had been running on empty for quite some time. It did remind me of something I meant to write in my Planet Terror review that has been driving me crazy ever since: I remember clearly going to the movie theater chain in the 1970s that played that clickety little tune that you hear over the "Feature Presentation" card of both films, but for the life of me I can't remember which chain it was.
Anyone out there have any idea?
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I got through the second part of the surgically altered DVD of Grindhouse, finally seeing the extended version of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. Aside from Kurt Russell's fun performance as Stuntman Mike, the movie is a real letdown.
I doubt if I'd seen the shorter version I would have felt that much more favorably toward Death Proof.
In Planet Terror, all the actors seemed to be on the same page as to what type of movie they were in. In Death Proof, few of the characters have any sort of distinct personality outside of Russell, especially in the case of the first group of young women Stuntman Mike terrorizes.
Most of the actresses in the early sequence are really bad, and not in a good way. Since we spend nearly an hour with them, it gets to be unbearable.
The second group of women, which includes Rosario Dawson, are slightly better, but their repartee comes off as very tired. On top of that, Tarantino seems to have grown bored with his own movie.
Whereas the first portion of the film functions with the same spirit as Planet Terror in terms of washed-out colors and scratched-up prints, when he leaps ahead to the second batch he films an entire sequence in vivid black-and-white for no apparent reason. Then, when he switches back to color, the film seems like just any other reasonably well-shot color film.
Russell's hilarious performance can only take you so far and by the time Death Proof finally wraps up, it seems as if it had been running on empty for quite some time. It did remind me of something I meant to write in my Planet Terror review that has been driving me crazy ever since: I remember clearly going to the movie theater chain in the 1970s that played that clickety little tune that you hear over the "Feature Presentation" card of both films, but for the life of me I can't remember which chain it was.
Anyone out there have any idea?
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Labels: 00s, Kurt Russell, Tarantino
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