Wednesday, September 21, 2011
With the exposition out of the way, will a story be starting soon?
By Edward Copeland
I didn't think it was possible for a movie that's 1 hour and 50 minutes long (including end credits and requisite Marvel teaser scene) to end up spending all but about the last half-hour of that time on exposition, but indeed that's what Thor plays like.
As the comic book empire continues to expand its movie franchises for an inevitable film that brings the Marvel characters together under the leadership of that mysterious SHIELD organization which allows Samuel L. Jackson to earn a living by making cameos while Clark Gregg wears suits and travels from film to film so he can report to Jackson's Nick Fury. (Have no fear — there's the required Stan Lee cameo as well.) When they toss Robert Downey Jr. in as a reformed arms maker in Iron Man and Iron Man 2, it turns out to be great fun. With Thor, you literally get an hour and 20 minutes of gobbledy-gook followed by about 25 minutes of yawn-inducing action and it's over.
Kenneth Branagh directs. Yes, that Kenneth Branagh. The man once spoken of being the next Olivier in terms of bringing Shakespeare to film but he can't even be the new Olivier on an entertaining level of whoredom. His acting for cash is sporadic and not hammy enough to be a hoot and his non-Shakespeare direction results in films such as a remake of Sleuth that no one was asking for and the godawful Mary Shelley's Frankenstein where both he and Robert De Niro were so over-the-top that it turned out that John Cleese gave the film's best performance. He even marred his Shakespeare films with stunt casting that probably made the Bard in the afterlife wish the stories were true that he weren't the true author of his works.
Fortunately, Anthony Hopkins is on hand to pick up some of that U.K. actor "I'll blow anyone for cash" spirit to his role as Odin, Thor's father, the king of Asgard, the realm from which Thor (Chris Hemsworth) comes. Not that Hopkins gets much emoting to do: His job — other than making certain the check clears — consists of little more than standing (and lying) around in a fancy metallic-looking suit with a patch on his eye and seriously imparting information to both the audience and to his sons, Thor and Loki (Tom Hiddleston).
Thor tends to be a bit of an arrogant hothead and when a group of Asgard's enemies (I'd look up their names if I truly gave a damn, but I don't. They're sort of blue and icy) somehow invade their realm and violate a sacred area with sacred relics, Thor leads an unsanctioned raid on them which Odin did not approve. As a result, his father banishes Thor to Earth for his actions and, because all the exposition hasn't been revealed yet, decides this is the best possible time to let Loki know that he was adopted (though stolen seems a more accurate description) from the same realm and while he doesn't look blue and icy, he belongs to that enemy's race. Loki, now next in line to be king anyway since Thor has been jettisoned, in a fit of spite, plots a coup and throws Odin into a coma.
Meanwhile on Earth, Thor lacks his powers, but he does fall for a young researcher, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), when he lands on the RV of her and her scientific team Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) and Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings, who was so good in the woefully underrated Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist). Gregg's SHIELD agent promptly steals the RV and their research and holds Thor who can't lift his sacred hammer, which has been embedded in the desert. (Speaking of hammered, getting drunk might make Thor go by quicker.)
Though it will be next to impossible, don't blink or you'll miss that Rene Russo plays Odin's wife Frigga, which as far as I know is not Norse for friggin' as in "give me a friggin' break." Poor Idris Elba, who has been good in so many things but most memorably as Stringer Bell in the first three seasons of The Wire, gets hidden by an elaborate costume as Asgard's gatekeeper who controls "the bridge" between different realms.
In fact, the costumes and design of Asgard really offer the only good things about Thor. Those parts are gorgeous to gaze upon. Bo Welch's production design and Alexandra Byrne's costumes on Asgard do leave quite an impression even if the film itself doesn't. In theaters, the film, which was shot regularly, was converted to 3-D for some showings and I can't imagine how exciting exposition plays in three dimensions. Wow — Thor and Jane lie by a campfire and point to a paper so he can show her where he comes from. It's like I'm in the scene! Their "romance" has about as much believability as the little kids' attachment to Frosty the Snowman when they've known him for about 15 minutes.
As the credits roll, before we get the requisite teaser scene with Nick Fury and the next Marvel movie, words tell us that Thor will return in The Avengers. I imagine that movie will at least have a story and, if nothing else, the IMDb cast list promises Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, so that at least holds the promise of some entertainment.
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Labels: 10s, Branagh, Cleese, De Niro, Hopkins, Natalie Portman, Olivier, Remakes, Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Shakespeare, The Wire
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Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Let Live and Love
By Jonathan Pacheco
Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever is an uncompromisingly pessimistic examination of our society’s inability to accept two people of different races coming together in love or lust. Twenty years after the film was released, I’d like to think our society has progressed somewhat from the plaguing issues Lee harps on in the film, but no doubt, the problems remain simply as an extension of the greater racial misconceptions we still harbor, even if prejudices these days seem to be slightly more about culture than literal skin tone. Lee’s intentions, as usual, come from a place of passion and good will, but the director seems to get lost in his own film, becoming a little too self-involved to fully take care of his characters and his audience.
The interracial affair between Flipper (Wesley Snipes), an ambitious black architect in an all-white firm, and Angie (Annabella Sciorra), his new Italian secretary from the temp agency, is the catalyst for the rest of the film’s painful and occasionally violent events, but their relationship is unrealistic and unconvincing at best. Granted, Jungle Fever is indeed a melodrama occasionally bordering on allegory (the name “Flipper Purify” should tip you off to the character’s trajectory), so heightened emotions and exaggerated sequences of events should be expected, but even in that context, Flip’s head-spinning 180, going from trying to get Angie’s white butt fired because she’s not an African American to screwing her on his drafting table, all in near-record time, is absurdly comical in a way Lee probably never intended.
Lee’s passion and anger for the film’s topic is clear from the opening moments as the director dedicates the film to Yusuf Hawkins, a black teenager who, at the time of this film, was the latest victim of several New York City incidents of white mobs killing black men after they were suspected of dating white girls. The matter was fresh in Lee’s mind, so it’s understandable that his film might characterize people and events a bit more extremely to get his audience’s attention, but I fear that some of his tactics, namely portraying nearly every character as a shameless slur-slinging racist, makes his message slightly off-putting and less accessible to those who need to hear it.
Samuel L. Jackson’s much-lauded and award-winning turn as Flip’s crackhead brother Gator still ranks among his best (heck, whenever he’s at least tolerable I consider it an accomplishment), but it almost feels like a wasted performance since the subplot of Gator’s addiction and estrangement from the Purify family never jells with the rest of Jungle Fever. It always entertains, like the hellish sequence involving Flip desperately trying to find Gator in the “Trump Tower of crack houses,” and sadly, the arc is far more developed than the central Flip/Angie relationship, but it’s so ill-fitting in this particular film, lingering awkwardly even after the other main plot threads have been tied up.
Across all storylines, Jungle Fever examines how different people fight the adversity they face. Once Angie and Flipper become pariahs of their respective worlds, they shack up in an apartment together, half as a “screw you” to those who disapprove of their union, and half because it’s their only remaining option. Angie’s attitude toward the situation exhibits her defiance; sick of being pushed around by her father and brothers, she’s willing to ride out this taboo relationship to the end, perhaps seeing something in it that never was there. Flipper, however, needs the shelter of his racial community, the one that empowered him to stand up to his discriminatory bosses earlier in the film. Throughout Jungle Fever Flip has fallen back on race, always playing the victim to the white man’s oppression, so when he’s forced to live without that crutch, stuck in a relationship created by an affair of mere curiosity (or so he claims), he does everything he can to deny the relationship altogether, from secretly trying to reconcile with his wife to berating Angie for publicly acknowledging that the two are lovers.
Paulie (a wonderful John Turturro), the good-hearted neighborhood guy that Angie left for Flip, is a social punching bag for most of Jungle Fever and was often encouraged by Angie to push back against his own oppressors (usually her bullying brothers). He eventually fights adversity with defiance as well, but not one guided by sexual passion, curiosity, and confusion, but by logical thought and genuine emotion.
His regulars at the shop he runs bust his balls incessantly for one thing or another, and it’s during one of these sessions that Spike Lee hides the key to Paulie’s eventual personal liberation. The young, abrasive Italian and Jewish men in the shop land on the subject of New York politics one morning, in particular their displeasure with having a black mayor (David Dinkins, who referred to the city as a “gorgeous mosaic” of diversity when he took the oath of office) instead of their own personal white choice, Rudy Giuliani. When Paulie goes around the room asking how many of these knuckleheads even voted in the last election, every one had an excuse except for Paulie himself, who indeed voted — for Dinkins.
So when Paulie eventually chooses to ask the kind, encouraging, attractive black patron (Tyra Ferrell) out on a date, it’s not out of some “jungle fever” lust or curiosity, it’s because Paulie knows his heart and knows his reasons for being attracted to her are real, just as he knows his reasons for voting for David Dinkins are genuine, not color-based. Paulie’s defiance of racial taboos, both as an honest citizen and as a human being looking for a relationship with solid footing, may be the film’s most sustaining message after 20 years.
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Labels: 90s, John Turturro, Movie Tributes, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee
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Monday, January 03, 2011
This film is more than all right
By Edward Copeland
While all the buzz surrounding Annette Bening this year has circled her solid work in the overrated The Kids Are All Right, she turns in a much-better performance as the largest figure in another superb 2010 ensemble, the one assembled by writer-director Rodrigo Garcia in the criminally overlooked Mother and Child.
The Kids Are All Right and Mother and Child have more than just Bening in common: Both films' plots concern adoption. In Mother and Child, it tells three central stories: Karen (Bening), who gave up a daughter she gave birth to at 14; Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), a lawyer with the inability to form permanent relationships who was given up for adoption as a baby; and Lucy (Kerry Washington), who is determined to adopt a child since she and her husband Joseph (David Ramsey) can't conceive.
Beyond the three main characters, this film's rich cast includes Eileen Ryan, Cherry Jones, Jimmy Smits, Elpidia Carrillo, Carla Gallo, Marc Blucas, S. Epatha Merkerson, Shareeka Epps, David Morse, Amy Brenneman, Elizabeth Pena, Lawrence Pressman and, in his best and most unique performance in ages, Samuel L. Jackson as Watts' boss at her law firm. Ahmed Best even turns up in a small role without a trace of Jar-Jar Binks.
I hate to keep comparing Mother and Child to The Kids Are All Right, but the first film so perfectly illustrates the problems I had with the second. Both are blessed with excellent casts (the difference being that Mother and Child's group of players is much larger), but whereas in Kids the acting saves an inferior and predictable script, in Mother and Child, the performers only enhance Garcia's screenplay, which did surprise me in several spots with the turns it made. On top of that, since the underlying structure proves so much stronger, Mother and Child affected me far more emotionally than Kids, which felt as if it were running through its story by rote.
Still, though there isn't a weak link in the cast, some individual praise must be doled out. Bening has given herself a helluva year, even if I didn't care for her other big movie. She's been good for a long time, but too often as she's aged, she's seemed stuck in a shrill sort of mode in films ranging from American Beauty to the wretched Running With Scissors. With Karen here and Nic in The Kids Are All Right, she gives relaxed performances that seem as if they mark new territory for her. What's even better is that for an actress who started out as a sex bomb who could act in films such as The Grifters, these two films show her unafraid to age on film and with so many actresses warping their facial muscles into misuse, that alone deserves accolades.
Watts, who almost always turns in a good performance as well, gives one of her best here as Elizabeth. Coming so soon after I saw her competent work as Valerie Plame in Fair Game, Elizabeth in Mother and Child is a wonder. This may be her best turn since she first gained notice in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.
As I mentioned earlier, it's really refreshing to see Jackson in the part he plays here. I can't remember the last movie I saw him in in which he didn't shout. His part isn't large, but it isn't showy either and it's just good to see him be instead of BE. I'd also be remiss if I didn't specifically mention Cherry Jones. I never got to see her in the stage version of Doubt and Meryl Streep took her role as the nun in the film version, but she does get to don a habit here, though at least this sister is a kind and conscientious one.
Garcia directs the film well, keeping the film moving smoothly as it segues between its stories, though it's his script that's the real star here. Mother and Child deserves more attention than it received.
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Labels: 10s, Bening, D. Morse, Lynch, Naomi Watts, Samuel L. Jackson, Streep, Theater
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Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Sometimes you need some mind candy
By Edward Copeland
Though I saw it during one of the blog's hiatuses and didn't review it, I really enjoyed the first Iron Man. Based on the reviews, I expected a little less from its sequel, but damn if I didn't enjoy Iron Man 2 just as much as the original. This is my kind of mindless, comic-book inspired entertainment: sleek, funny, well-acted and just the right length, resisting the urge of so many action films to pad their running times.
As in the first film, the key to its success is Robert Downey Jr. as weapons magnate turned peacenik/Iron Man. He's charming, witty and really has more personality than any other superhero in the history of superhero screen incarnations. He's rich and fun loving, still loves to knock back some drinks or to race in the Monaco Grand Prix and he gives very entertaining witness testimony at a Senate hearing. (If Downey weren't enough to make the scene a blast, they cast Garry Shandling as the jackass senator to ensure that the sequence is a hoot.) Stark may save the world, but he doesn't mope like Batman, he's not perfect like Superman and you know he's having a good time saving the world and probably getting laid as well.
When it was announced that Jon Favreau was directing the first Iron Man, it was viewed as an odd choice, but really Favreau, who repeats those duties here as well as playing Stark's driver, makes perfect sense. He's the man who wrote Swingers and the Tony Stark character as portrayed by Downey is so money and he knows it, only he's not a pretender as Favreau and Vince Vaughn's characters were in the film that begat that phrase, Stark's the real deal.
Ironically, in another funny performance, the would-be "swinger" of Iron Man 2 is Sam Rockwell playing rival weapons magnate Justin Hammer who dreams of living the Stark lifestyle, both businesswise and otherwise. He's the corporate villain of the movie, but he's just as funny. In fact, the action scenes when they happen, though they deliver, mostly are by the numbers. It's the comic tone that makes this series so much more fun than the brooding or goody-goodness of the others in this genre.
Terrence Howard has been replaced in the role of Lt. Col. James Rhodes by Don Cheadle and while Howard is a fine actor, Cheadle actually is an improvement because he has an innate levity that Howard doesn't so he meshes better with Downey and the rest of the cast.
Of course, the real villain of Iron Man 2 is Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko, a Russian physicist whose family feels ruined by Stark's father (the great John Slattery, who only appears in old film footage — and with brown hair!) and vows to seek revenge on Tony Stark, a task Hammer unwittingly helps him to carry out while he thinks he's using Vanko to gain an edge in the arms business.
There also is a story strand involving Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, which I guess has something to do with a league of comic-book heroes called The S.H.I.E.L.D. that Stark's father helped to form and The Avengers Institute (though I don't think it involves Emma Peel), but I'm not up on my Marvel history to know that backstory, though it hardly matters. However, Jackson does deliver Fury with the same vocal cadence he used as Jules in Pulp Fiction.
Still, there isn't a weak link in the cast which includes Gwyneth Paltrow, who I tend not to like outside of The Royal Tenenbaums. If this weren't a sequel to a comic-book adaptation, saying it deserved consideration for ensemble acting awards would be taken seriously.
Justin Theroux wrote the screenplay and also came up with the story for Tropic Thunder, but many may know him best as an actor, especially for his roles in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and as Brenda's neighbor on HBO's Six Feet Under.
I tend to frown upon endless sequels in series. I liked the first two X-Men movies, but the third one stunk and I didn't even bother to see Wolverine. Still, I had so much fun turning off my brain and enjoying both installments of Iron Man, I wouldn't object to another even though I know the odds are against a third time being a charm.
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Labels: 10s, Gwyneth Paltrow, HBO, John Slattery, Lynch, Mickey Rourke, Robert Downey Jr., Sam Rockwell, Samuel L. Jackson, Sequels, Shandling, Television
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Monday, July 26, 2010
Remembering James Gammon in Major League
By David Gaffen
For avid moviegoers one of the pleasures of the film-viewing experience is the chance to see recognizable faces again and again — character actors who are so instantly familiar that they bring a knowing smile upon their first appearance on the screen. Sometimes these people turn, however slowly, into the kind of name that ends up third- or fourth-billed in a movie, like Steve Buscemi or Sam Elliott, or into a strange sort of star such as Philip Seymour Hoffman.
More often than not, though, they appear in what seems to be every movie made, like M. Emmet Walsh. We lost one of those character actors recently, a gem of a movie presence, James Gammon, a longtime theater performer who was best known for his portrayal of Cleveland Indians manager Lou Brown in Major League.
Gammon had a bushy mustache and one of the most recognizable voices in the business, a raspy, gravelly croak perfectly suited for cowboys and weary authority figures. He shows up in Urban Cowboy and had a memorable bit in Silverado as a gunman incredulous that Scott Glenn’s character has brought a posse to one of his best hideouts.
Major League was released in 1989 and exists in the public consciousness as a sister to Bull Durham, which hit theaters a year earlier, because they share a subject matter (baseball) and they’re both comedies.
The reality is that Major League isn’t half the movie Bull Durham is, and without Gammon, it would be more or less unwatchable.
Looking back, with the exception of Bob Uecker’s moments as the team announcer, just about every amusing part of the movie involves Gammon in one way or another. He dismisses Wesley Snipes’ Willie “Mays” Hayes, who says, "I hit like Mays but I run like Mays," after he bats a pop-up with this terse summation: “You may run like Hayes, but you hit like shit.”
His early reaction to Dennis Haysbert’s breaking-ball challenged Pedro Cerrano is another great throwaway moment. Cerrano is crushing the ball during batting practice, and Gammon muses, “This guy hits a ton. How come nobody picked him up?” Cerrano then whiffs, badly, at a breaking ball, and Gammon, deflated, groans, “Ohhhhh.”
Frequent moviegoers are demanding of actors, generally not wanting to see big-name guys assume the same persona throughout each movie, which may be part of the reason certain stars seem to dim after they’ve been seen mining familiar ground. (Samuel L. Jackson’s shtick, for one, is really tired these days.)
Character actors get a good bit of latitude in this way, perhaps because their part in a production is limited, and so a familiar personality livens up the screen for a brief period of time before they fade into the background. Think of Dylan Baker in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment of glee in the underrated Changing Lanes, or Bill Nighy’s venomous pharma exec in The Constant Gardener.
Gammon will forever be one of those. He had a couple of good meaty roles in later years, playing another cowboy in Traveller, a little-seen, but interesting character study with Bill Paxton and Mark Wahlberg, and one of the only roles really worth a darn in the overwrought Cold Mountain.
But it will be Lou Brown for which Gammon is most remembered for movie fans. It’s fitting that the sequel, Major League II, was vastly less successful than the original. (The original grossed nearly $50 million; five years later, the sequel only made $30 million.)
On some level, that had to be for the disastrous decision by the writers to sideline the character with a heart attack, only to give more screen time to the sleep-inducing character played by Tom Berenger. Lou Brown, given the chance to look at the script, would have reacted to that in the same fashion he did when confronted with an annoying provision in Roger Dorn’s (Corbin Bernsen) contract — threw it on the ground and pissed all over it.
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Labels: Berenger, Buscemi, P.S. Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson
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Sunday, June 27, 2010
From the Vault: Pulp Fiction
As a filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino works like a crafty pickpocket, approaching strangers and diverting their attention with entertaining conversation. It's only later that the victim realizes something more serious has transpired. This is definitely the case with Tarantino's second film, Pulp Fiction. There is so much energy and joy overflowing in Pulp Fiction that the viewer has too much fun to realize there is a deeper film at work. It takes awhile for the film's full wallop to register.
Like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction is a true ensemble work with a brilliant cast. Pulp Fiction builds on the unique structural technique Tarantino utilized in Reservoir Dogs and takes it several steps further, telling disparate stories out of chronological order. To tell too much of the story would diminish the visceral and comic impact of the film, which Tarantino also wrote from stories he and Roger Avary conjured up.
From the tale of a prize fighter (Bruce Willis) paid to take a dive to the amazing speech that Christopher Walken gives that lurches from the reverent to the absurd, Tarantino's words are almost quicker than the ear's ability to catch them. The performances are all top notch, with special notice given to Walken, John Travolta, Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth. Samuel L. Jackson, who gives one great performance after another, paints perhaps his most vivid portrait as Jules, a verbose hit man considering a career change.
Harvey Keitel, one of the most intrinsically interesting actors around, pops up late in the film, steals his scenes and makes a hasty exit. In a vengeful mobster's drug-taking wife, Uma Thurman finally finds a role that capitalizes on the potential she's shown. The actors are able to perform well thanks to the script itself. No one writes dialogue like Tarantino. Every word sounds as if it came from the same mouth, yet every character has humanity and individuality.
Tarantino's direction has grown more polished. He's got a great eye. His gift isn't really an animalistic passion like Martin Scorsese, but a biting comic brilliance rarely seen. What's so fascinating about Tarantino is as much what he takes out as what he leaves in. He tells a boxing story without showing a fight, makes the contents of a briefcase important without revealing them.
In fact, Tarantino's method is reminiscent of a passage from U and I, novelist Nicholson Baker's autobiographical essay about his imagined relationship with John Updike. Baker talks about his fascination with the "narrative clogs" of fiction, the passages that give a work its flavor even though they might be extraneous. He writes: "... the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked-for-seepage points of passage."
In the end, that's where Pulp Fiction excels, showing the passage of time and of various criminal lowlifes in a sometimes disturbing but consistently comic way.
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Labels: 90s, Keitel, Samuel L. Jackson, Scorsese, Tarantino, Travolta, Updike, Walken, Willis
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From the Vault: Quentin Tarantino
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCT. 14, 1994
NEW YORK (September 1994) — Quentin Tarantino moves at a pace even faster than his movies, if that's possible. The energy that drives his stories at warp speed comes straight from the joy he gets from talking about film. With the tone that discussions about or with Tarantino take, it would seem as if he were a veteran filmmaker, but Pulp Fiction is only his second directing effort. Two of his screenplays have been made by other hands, the fairly faithful True Romance and the Oliver Stone-ified Natural Born Killers, a film Tarantino has yet to see.
"I was kind of interested in seeing (Natural Born Killers) for awhile, with all the pre-release hype around it ... and kind of got caught up in that, but then I ended up leaving the country when it opened. I was doing press in Japan. Then I came back, and went and saw Color of Night instead."
Pulp Fiction, however, has been a much more satisfying experience. Following his impressive debut writing, directing and acting in 1992's Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino has created a whirlwind movie ride with a great cast including John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman and Harvey Keitel, among others. The reaction to Pulp Fiction has been almost universally positive. The movie won the coveted top prize, the Palme d'Or, at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Like Reservoir Dogs before it, Pulp Fiction will likely draw controversy over its violent content, though it's at a much lower level than in Tarantino's first work.
"The only thing I don't like about motion picture violence is talking about motion picture violence. The only danger is that you could die of boredom talking about it."
What bothers the 31-year-old filmmaker the most is how violence can be used to dismiss a film without seeing its context.
"It's a drag being rejected out of hand, pigeonholed or misunderstood just because of one element of my film. It gets to be a real drag when I think I've tried to put many elements in my movie, having one magnified. Just talking about it analytically gives a false impression that I'm thinking about it that way, but I'm not — I'm telling stories. I never think in terms of violence in my stories, it's just what happens, where the characters go."
He also dismisses the notion that violence in movies and television fiction desensitizes viewers to violence in real life.
"I've never bought that argument about desensitizing ... did the reign of the Borgias desensitize the peasants in Italy? It's one of those things that happens through the decades — 'There's crime in the streets, There's blood in the streets, murder — blame the playmakers.'"
As Pulp Fiction co-star Willis said during interviews for the film:
"I don't think anyone in Rwanda has seen my films, yet 500,000 people were macheted to death."
He might not like the violence tag, but that's the way the game is played.
"That's just the price you pay. If sex is part of your deal, or violence is part of what you do or things of a political nature are part of what you do. If you have one of those three elements in your movie, you know going in that everything else you are doing is going to be talked to secondarily compared to those three volatile things."
The political aspect certainly drives and affects Stone, who was the first person in Hollywood to buy a Tarantino script, but then made Natural Born Killers completely his own. Though Tarantino has been fairly candid about his dissatisfaction with Natural Born Killers, it wasn't the pain of seeing his script changed dramatically that kept him from seeing it.
"(It was) more just lack of interest. It's been quite painful for awhile and now it's not painful, it's just kind of there."
As for the writer-director-actor and his relationship with Stone now, Tarantino admits, "He's not inviting me over to his house for tea and crumpets. I think I've gotten my position very clear that I've distanced myself from the film."
"Actually, to give the devil his due, he was very cool when I said I wanted to take my name off the screenplay. He facilitated that to happen. He could have caused a big problem, but he didn't. When it comes to Natural Born Killers, more or less the final word on it is that it has nothing to do with me. One of the reasons I wanted just a story credit was I wanted that to get across. If you like the movie, it's Oliver. If you don't like the movie, it's Oliver."
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Labels: Interview, Keitel, Oliver Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Tarantino, Travolta, Willis
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Monday, August 31, 2009
From the Vault: Menace II Society
No recent film has deserved as much praise while simultaneously proving as difficult to recommend than Menace II Society. The first film by 21-year-old twins Albert and Allen Hughes, who directed and conceived the screenplay with Tyger Williams, provides yet another stunningly assured debut by the growing crop of young filmmakers.
Menace II Society takes a grim and somewhat depressing look at urban life in Los Angeles, never shying away from showing the brutality of 1993 Watts. The viewer may feel compelled to look away, but its artistry and shocking candor keeps eyes glued to the screen.
The film tells the story of Caine (Tyrin Turner), a recent high school grad who learned to survive on the streets after the deaths of both parents. He deals drugs and commits many crimes.
To its credit, the film doesn't portray Caine as a villain or a sympathetic victim of circumstance -- he's just a product of his environs.
The film probably will draw comparisons to John Singleton's excellent 1991 film Boyz N the Hood, but Menace II Society doesn't even offer the smallest dashes of hope that Boyz did and it avoids the melodramatic tendencies that hampered Singleton's film.
Menace II Society, for me at least, more closely resembles Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer with its unflinching portrait of a madman.
Both films are compelling and unpleasant and by the end of each, the audience longs for better lives for their protagonists, despite their heinous crimes. Toward the end of Menace II Society, when Caine lashes out at a drunken friend, you're relieved he only uses the butt of a gun instead of its bullets.
Luckily, like Henry, this film doesn't let the audience off the hook with the happy endings to which they've become accustomed. Instead, the Hughes brothers' strict adherence to their vision produces one of the most powerful films in recent memory. No other recent film has made me feel sadder or more helpless.
The actors excel, especially Turner in the difficult role of Caine, and Larenz Tate as his dangerous friend O-Dog, who earns comparisons to Joe Pesci's Tommy in Goodfellas. Veterans Samuel L. Jackson, Charles S. Dutton and Bill Duke also provide strong cameos.
Those brave enough to sit through this film will not only be rewarded with a great movie but will probably ponder Menace II Society for a long time. Given the subject matter, anything that spurs discussion and contemplation of the difficult issues it raises deserves accolades.
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Labels: 90s, Hughes Brothers, Pesci, Samuel L. Jackson, Zemeckis
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Wednesday, July 04, 2007
The moan is blues
By Edward Copeland
For a movie whose central plot point concerns a young Southern sexpot chained to a radiator by a down-on-his-luck blues musician intent on changing her "wicked" ways, Craig Brewer's Black Snake Moan actually proves to be mostly a bore, despite some good performances.
Samuel L. Jackson stars as Lazarus (no subtlety there), a former blues guitarist living in an isolated cabin after splitting with his wife who had an affair with his brother.
Christina Ricci plays Rae, the town tart whose boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) is leaving for the Army but who tends to take any man who comes her way, thanks to sexual abuse from her younger past. When Ronnie's friend (Michael Raymond-James) beats Rae and leaves her on a road when she spurns his advances, Lazarus finds the girl and takes her back to the cabin to nurse her wounds.
When she makes her usual seductive moves, Lazarus will have none of it and does what any reasonable person seeking an intervention would do: Grabs an extremely long length of chain and attaches Rae to his radiator until he can "cure her."
Brewer, who made the impressive Hustle & Flow, has a very intriguing premise, but somehow it just falls flat. It doesn't shock, inspire or affect you much in the ways of emotion. It also seems as if where the movie is headed is so preordained, that boredom sets in quickly.
Despite that, Jackson and Ricci both turn in good performances and Jackson is impressive in the scenes where he performs the blues as well. There also are solid supporting turns by John Cothran Jr. as a minister, S. Epatha Merkeson as a drug store worker who catches Lazarus' eye and Kim Richards as Rae's bitter mother.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Justin Timberlake, which is quite a disappointment after his well-acted turn earlier this year in Alpha Dog. He never quite gets a handle on Ronnie and some of his histrionics end up being downright embarrassing.
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For a movie whose central plot point concerns a young Southern sexpot chained to a radiator by a down-on-his-luck blues musician intent on changing her "wicked" ways, Craig Brewer's Black Snake Moan actually proves to be mostly a bore, despite some good performances.
Samuel L. Jackson stars as Lazarus (no subtlety there), a former blues guitarist living in an isolated cabin after splitting with his wife who had an affair with his brother.
Christina Ricci plays Rae, the town tart whose boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) is leaving for the Army but who tends to take any man who comes her way, thanks to sexual abuse from her younger past. When Ronnie's friend (Michael Raymond-James) beats Rae and leaves her on a road when she spurns his advances, Lazarus finds the girl and takes her back to the cabin to nurse her wounds.
When she makes her usual seductive moves, Lazarus will have none of it and does what any reasonable person seeking an intervention would do: Grabs an extremely long length of chain and attaches Rae to his radiator until he can "cure her."
Brewer, who made the impressive Hustle & Flow, has a very intriguing premise, but somehow it just falls flat. It doesn't shock, inspire or affect you much in the ways of emotion. It also seems as if where the movie is headed is so preordained, that boredom sets in quickly.
Despite that, Jackson and Ricci both turn in good performances and Jackson is impressive in the scenes where he performs the blues as well. There also are solid supporting turns by John Cothran Jr. as a minister, S. Epatha Merkeson as a drug store worker who catches Lazarus' eye and Kim Richards as Rae's bitter mother.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Justin Timberlake, which is quite a disappointment after his well-acted turn earlier this year in Alpha Dog. He never quite gets a handle on Ronnie and some of his histrionics end up being downright embarrassing.
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Labels: 00s, Samuel L. Jackson
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Friday, May 25, 2007
Homeboy in Outer Space
By Odienator
In 1978, when Rio Bravo screenwriter Leigh Brackett turned in her first draft for The Empire Strikes Back, the only brother who had been in a cinematic space ship was O.J. Simpson in Capricorn One. He wound up dead. A year later, Yaphet Kotto joined the Homeboys in Outer Space Club; this time they called it Alien. He wound up dead too. Leaving the earth was an unlucky thing if you had a permanent tan. George Clinton and Parliament landed the Mother Ship on Earth for a reason — it was safer.
Eighty-seven minutes into The Empire Strikes Back, Lando Calrissian made his first appearance, greeting his old buddy Han Solo on the landing pad in Cloud City. Lando was a brother, which meant his name must have been short for "Rolando Calrissian," and he was played by a smoother than silk Billy Dee Williams. At the Hudson Mall Twin, where I had seen the aforementioned dead brothers in space features, my cousins and I looked up at the screen and knew two things: Lando was going to be dead before the movie ended, and he was going to offer the Princess some malt liquor. We were wrong about the former; the latter is still open to debate.
Before Billy Dee brought the ultra perm to the cosmos, he endeared himself to women with his suave performance in Diana Ross' Lady Sings the Blues. He was so smooth and sexy that some critics called him the "Black Clark Gable." He continued to endear himself to women by appearing with Miss Ross again in Mahogany, one of the worst movies ever made. His onscreen persona was ladies' man, and we wanted to be as good with the women as he seemed to be. We could never get as lucky as Billy Dee, but he was willing to help us find an alternative: Colt 45. Mr. Williams looked at us from our TV sets during Soul Train and told us that Colt 45 malt liquor "works every time." I was an adult when I realized he was telling me that, after about 10 Colt 45s, a woman would look at me and see him instead.
But I digress. Lando Calrissian is the only human character in the entire Star Wars series who is allowed to acknowledge his horniness. He's not onscreen 30 seconds before he makes a beeline for Princess Leia. He completely forgets about pal Han Solo, whom he hasn’t seen in ages, and starts running his game. "Hello," he says to Leia, "what have we here? I'm Lando Calrissian, the administrator of this facility. And who might you be?" Reading it won't do justice to Lando's delivery. The man is wearing a cape, for God's sake, and it's blowing in the wind like a superhero. If John Williams wrote soul music, there'd be a wah-wah guitar on the soundtrack. When Leia introduces herself, Lando says "Welcome, Leia," then slowly takes her hand and kisses it. It takes an eternity for him to give her hand back; in fact, Han Solo has to retrieve it. As Leia walks away, C-3PO tries to introduce himself, but Lando's too busy watching the Princess leave to care. The Empire Strikes Back is rated PG, but Calrissian's intentions are a hard R.
Later, Billy Dee reminds us of his commercial aspirations. "Would you join me for a little refreshment, Princess?" he asks after a come-on line that puts Anakin's ridiculous "I don't like the sand" come-on speech to shame. Walking into the room, he coos to Leia "you look absolutely beautiful. You truly belong here with us in the clouds." Cloud City even sounds like something that comes in a 40 oz. bottle. Leia remains suspicious of Lando, and with good reason. Said refreshments turn out to be a giant swig of Darth Vader. In a move that made our jaws drop in the theater, Lando sells out our heroes to the enemy. For us, it was almost as big a shock as that OTHER revelation in the movie.
Lando shares his "Hot for Leia" with Jabba the Hutt, but he shares his arc of redemption with Darth Vader. In the first trilogy, they are the characters who do awful deeds yet make up for them with later actions. Lando realizes that, in betraying Han Solo, he has also betrayed a much nobler cause that was on his side. Seeing the error of his ways, he joins a resistance that thankfully doesn't hold a grudge, and becomes one of the heroes of Return of the Jedi.
In Empire, we learn that the Millennium Falcon was once Calrissian's, but was won by Han Solo in a card game (shades of the Western genre to which Star Wars truly belongs). The end of Empire and most of Jedi puts Lando in the driver's seat of his former ship, making his plotline an integral part of the series. As Luke confronts Vader and Han and Leia have fun with my favorite non-human characters in the first trilogy, the Ewoks, Lando leads his squadron to the skies above Endor to destroy the new, improved Death Star. He gets to blow stuff up, bark commands and ooze the kind of cool Sam Jackson's Mace Windu wasn't allowed to exude. He doesn't get the Princess, but he gets to kick serious ass instead.
I've always wondered what would have happened if Lucas had paired Lando and Han Solo together in the
Falcon earlier in the series. It would have been fascinating, as they are both rogues and smart-asses, and he would have bested Walter Hill by two years, creating the popular Black guy/White guy partnership that films such as 48 Hrs. would emulate. I would have given anything for him to run a parallel storyline like this in any of the prequels instead of all that boring political nonsense he crammed into them. Han and Lando, the early days. What the "prequels" were missing was the sense of fun brought to the earlier series by characters like Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. Perhaps Lucas was so mired in his desire to make a statement that he forgot the series was supposed to be fun, even in the darker installments like Empire.Until Will Smith came along, Lando Calrissian was the most popular Homeboy in Outer Space. If anything, he remains the smoothest ladies man in a galaxy far, far away.
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Labels: Blog-a-thons, Gable, John Williams, Lucas, Samuel L. Jackson, Star Wars
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Sunday, April 08, 2007
Gangs for the memories
This post is running as part of the Mob-a-Thon being conducted by The Boob Tubers to mark the return of The Sopranos for its final nine episodes.
By Edward Copeland
To mark the return and final stand (at least as we've been led to believe) of The Sopranos, the folks at The Boob Tubers have called for a Mob-a-Thon today on mobsters and gangsters in general. So, I've tossed together a list of 10 of my favorite movie gangsters, in no particular order, to mark the occasion. Inevitably, many good ones have been omitted such as the various Corleones and Duke Mantee. I've also limited myself to one role per actor, so people such as James Cagney won't be doubling up.
Not just top of the world ma, but top of the heap. Cagney's triumphant return to the genre that made him famous in 1949 marked one of the greatest criminal creations ever put on screen. How on earth he failed to get an Oscar nomination for Raoul Walsh's classic is mind-boggling. I haven't seen Richard Todd in The Hasty Heart, but I'd rank Cagney's Jarrett higher than Broderick Crawford's winning Willie Stark in All the King's Men, Kirk Douglas in Champion, Gregory Peck in Twelve O'Clock High and John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima. Jarrett beats them all — and would probably do it literally if given the chance. Jarrett's mental instability makes Tommy in Goodfellas seem well adjusted. He has mother issues that almost rival Norman Bates' and can be particularly detached from his killings. When the henchman of a rival asks if Cody can really kill him in cold blood, Jarrett replies, "No, I'll let ya warm up a little."
Speaking of Tommy, he did win an Oscar for Martin Scorsese's mob masterpiece which really should get the bulk of credit for The Sopranos. Sure, no one went to a shrink here, but the depiction of "normal" family life among mobsters wasn't really portrayed until this movie. (Let's face — it the Corleones were upper class all the way.) I had to laugh when in the series finale of HBO's Rome, the by-then barking mad Marc Antony starts ranting, "Am I a clown? Do I amuse you?" Pesci's Oscar was most deserved. His ability to change moods on a dime truly frightens. He's laughing one second, killing the next, but in all of the movie's minutes with him, he's riveting.
"Mother of Mercy. Could this be the end of Rico?" Not as long as prints of Mervyn LeRoy's landmark gangster film exist and keep being preserved and transferred to whatever new media arrive. It was hard to pick just one Robinson performance for this list, but I settled on the most famous. Part of me wanted to go with John Ford's delightful The Whole Town's Talking from 1935 where Eddie G. got to play both an ordinary schmuck and the vicious gangster he's mistaken for. Another part wanted to single out Rocco in John Huston's Key Largo. Honestly, both of those other films are better ones than Little Caesar, but it's hard to argue with a character and a performance this iconic.
I had to go with a tag team on this one because Hoskins and Gwynne as Owney Madden and his invaluable lieutenant Frenchy Demange in Francis Ford Coppola's underrated Cotton Club simply are inseparable. Sure, the real gangster of the piece is James Remar's menacing Dutch Schultz, but Hoskins as club owner Madden and Gwynne, miles removed from Herman Munster, really highlight the film with their loving, fractious platonic relationship. The bond between the two is exemplified by the scene where Frenchy returns to Owney, battered and bruised after being held hostage by some young thugs. He conceals his anger at Madden's handling of the crisis before asking to see Owney's beloved pocketwatch and smashing it to smithereens. As Owney is ready to explode, Frenchy pulls a wrapped box out of his coat pocket and Madden sees that Frenchy already had a replacement pocketwatch at the ready. The duo hug. The viewer shouldn't be worried about the romantic fates of Richard Gere and Diane Lane or Gregory Hines and Lonette McKee — Hoskins and Gwynne are the couple we couldn't bear to see part ways.
"This killing of the police captain's wife is costing us ... all ... too ... much." Don't let Corrado Prizzi's decrepit and near-death demeanor deceive you: This don is still sharp as a tack and able to manipulate those around him like a pro. The iconoclastic Hickey earned an Oscar nomination for this great role, but lost to the sympathy vote for Don Ameche in Cocoon who, let's be frank, wasn't even the best supporting actor in Cocoon. Decades from now, when people no longer know what breakdancing even is, John Huston's great comic mob tale should stand the test of time and Hickey will be one of its strongest assets in a great cast that includes Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, Robert Loggia and Anjelica Huston. Have another cookie, my dear? I certainly will if it's Don Corrado offering the treat. It's a snack you can't refuse.
Bill Murray as one of the great movie gangsters? You wouldn't be puzzled if you'd seen his work in John MacNaughton's Mad Dog & Glory. The movie itself is a mixed bag, telling the story of a shy police photographer (Robert De Niro) who unwittingly saves the life of the mobster and would-be stand up comic who rewards him by giving him one of "his girls" (Uma Thurman). Murray has been justly praised in recent years for his acting chops, but truly 1993 may have marked the turning point. Not only did Murray create a complete original with Frank Milo, smooth and scary simultaneously, it also was the year he starred in Groundhog Day, so really the Academy snubbed him in two categories that year, though that was a particularly fruitful year for male performances. If you'd never seen Bill Murray before and Mad Dog & Glory were your introduction, you'd ask in amazement: Where has this guy been hiding? It would have made him a star if not for the fact he already was one.
When you think of conflicted movie mobsters, most people leap to poor Michael Corleone, pulled into the family business he never sought but becoming as ruthless as he needs to be. Do we know why Michael is conflicted? Does he ever say that he recognizes that the path he goes on is the wrong one? No. He just wants to stay rich but become legit. Jules Winfield however, a gangster of a different kind, decides to change his ways because of what he considers divine intervention. Samuel L. Jackson has never really been able to equal the greatness he was able to display in his role in Pulp Fiction. While the film is filled with great lines and performances, no one quite puts the brilliant spin on Tarantino's words the way Jackson did as Jules. To watch his transformation from ruthless killer to reformed criminal in gestation, even within the fractured narrative, is a wonder to behold. Jules tells his partner Vincent (John Travolta) that he considers himself retired and plans to "walk the earth" like Cain in Kung Fu. I hope Jules got his wish and got out and no one pulled him back in.
Who knew that Gandhi could be so frightening? When Ben Kingsley arrives on the screen in Sexy Beast, he unleashes such ferocity and heat that you fear that the celluloid will melt as it runs through the projector (if anyone still gets to see films that way). He should have won that supporting actor Oscar that year. To think that one man could give performances for the ages as the epitome of nonviolence and the embodiment of brutality truly amazes. Kingsley even got to do a sardonic take on himself on an episode of The Sopranos when last we saw them and he was really the only highlight of one of the series' weakest episodes.
Here's another recent case of a past Oscar-winning best actor who comes back with a memorable supporting turn as a bad guy. Hurt, sometimes criticized for coldness and who the late Spy magazine once labeled "the thinking man's asshole," uses that reputation to his advantage here in David Cronenberg's most accessible film. He enters the film late, after Ed Harris has already given a memorable appearance as a villain, and proceeds to steal the entire film. While Hurt does have scary moments, what really makes Hurt's Richie so memorable is that he's so damn funny. Some complained that his appearance in the film was so brief that he didn't deserve a nomination. It's not the size of the role, it's the impression it leaves afterward.
It's hard when you've been called "the most vile gangster in the galaxy" to leave you off a list of memorable gangsters, even if that galaxy is far, far away. Jabba's appearance in Return of the Jedi was a great payoff for a character who'd been mentioned but not seen in two previous films (until George Lucas had to go back and ruin things by inserting him unnecessarily in Star Wars). Tony Soprano often is noted for his girth, but he's got nothing on the Hutt, who outshines the New Jersey boss in his lust for money, power and pleasure. He was a truly unique creation but thanks to Leia's strength with chains (though I still don't see how she'd be strong enough, Jedi blood or not, to pull off strangling him to death), Jabba is bantha fodder now.
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Labels: Cagney, Coppola, Cronenberg, De Niro, Edward G., Gregory Peck, Huston, Kingsley, Lucas, Murray, Nicholson, Pesci, Samuel L. Jackson, Scorsese, Star Wars, Tarantino, Travolta, Walsh, William Hurt, Zemeckis
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Friday, April 06, 2007
SMOOP II: Electric Boogaloo
By Odienator
After the success of last year's Shameful Movies of Odie's Past Film Festival (henceforth known as SMOOP), I decided to make it an annual tradition. The rules can be found at the above link, but to recap, every showing at SMOOP is a double feature of films that I should be ashamed for liking, but am not. Each double feature has a title and a theme, though the movies may not be related thematically.
Last year, however, several people took me to task for selecting movies that were not shameful enough. This presented a wonderful yet expected challenge for me. Sequels are bigger, noisier, and worse than their predecessors, so I expected nothing less than to go back and revisit some tackier fare. We got it all: pimps, hos, car crashes, chicks in chains, and very strange foreign movies with sex scenes I hope someone will be able to explain to me.
Quentin and Robert aren't the only guys who spent time at grindhouses. I grew up with the 42nd Street theaters, which smelled like pee and had posters in their windows that advertised the kind of sin and degradation that earned you a one way ticket to the home of Linda Blair's possessor. Some of the films below I actually saw on 42nd Street; others fill that crazy desire of SMOOP's programmer, a guy with a love for gory horror movies, gratuitous nudity and musicals. In honor of the Trashy Movie Blog-a-thon and the release of Grindhouse, I give you SMOOP II: Electric Boogaloo. Bigger, badder, and with even more shame!
Chicks in Chains, Literally and Figuratively
Shameful movies: Willie Dynamite and Black Mama, White Mama
When Three-6 Mafia wrote the Oscar-winning “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp,” they must have been thinking about 1975’s Willie Dynamite. The titular pimp has plenty of problems. His theme song sounds like a commercial for a Blaxploitation soft drink (“Will-ayyyyy! Oh-ohhh Willl-eee Deeee! Will-ay D!”). His bitches keep getting arrested and/or sliced up by razors. His pimpmobile can’t stay away from tow-away zones. Rival pimps keep pressuring him to join their punany-pushers union; and his stable is repeatedly threatened by the self-proclaimed “Ralph Nader for hookers,” a former prostitute who tries to talk the girls out of walking for Willie or, at the very least, becoming their own bosses. Worst of all, by day Willie D. has to deal with an “8-foot yellow turkey” and the trash can-living grouch who hates him. That’s right, Willie Dynamite’s alter ego is Gordon (Roscoe Orman) on Sesame Street! When he wasn’t also bitchslapping Donna all over Locust Street on All My Children, Orman was teaching kids like us our ABC’s. “A is for ass, B is for bottom bitches…”
Despite my seeing this on a 42nd Street double bill in 1977, Willie Dynamite isn’t as trashy as most grindhouse fare. The actors, especially the late Diana Sands as Ho Ralph Nader, give fairly decent performances. There is very little nudity and, apart from a rather vicious throat-slashing, very little violence. What elevates this to trash-status is the sheer audacity of the screenplay. It thinks it’s a respectable expose on pimpdom, yet it absurdly demands you feel sorry for its hero — and not just because he’s wearing dead animals disguised as fur hats on his head. Willie D is compulsively watchable and fun because its big studio producers, Richard Zanuck and David Brown, are terrified to plumb the depths Roger Corman would have gone to had he made this film. It’s an ABC Afterschool Special on pimping. Toss in bad '70s fashion, a family dinner where Willie’s Mom thinks he’s an Amway salesperson (or something like that) and scenes that remind us what 42nd Street was like before Disney destroyed it, and you have the makings of an unintentionally hilarious cautionary tale/trash classic. This is the original Hustle and Flow.
Special mention goes to the “villain” of the piece, Diana Sands, who sadly died way too early from cancer. She manages to infuse with gravity the lousy dialogue and situations she’s given, which is no easy task. She’s even “conflicted” when she realizes how ruined Willie D’s career winds up being. Her last scene with Willie has a poignant quality that had me scratching my head, yet I couldn’t stop watching her.
Far more appropriate for SMOOP is the movie that filled the aforementioned double bill with Willie D, Black Mama, White Mama. Whaddaya get when you cross a chicks-in-chains movie with The Defiant Ones? You get a Black chick and a White chick chained together, on the run from a Philippine prison, “learnin’ ‘bout each other while they do their thing.” Unlike Willie D., however, there’s no pretense behind the message of Ebony and Ivory female empowerment; the filmmakers just want to show you some tits.
Co-written by Jonathan Demme, who cut his teeth on prison movies such as this and Caged Heat, Black Mama, White Mama chains Pam Grier to her three-time co-star Margaret Markov, and welds a women’s prison movie to the equally popular jungle revolutionary movie. Poitier and Curtis, I mean Grier and Markov, escape from one of those women’s jungle penitentiaries so popular in the early '70s, and while on the run have more catfights than Joan Collins while successfully falling out of their tops. Markov and Grier are both tough chicks, and neither is hard on the eyes nor are they shy about giving you what you paid to see.
All the requisites of both film genres are in abundance: there are grungy guys with guns shooting people for their cause AND a multi-culti shower scene, complete with a masturbating female guard peering through a hole in the shower wall. “Did you enjoy yourself?” asks another guard after busting her overheated colleague. “Hell yes!” said a voice that sounded like me.
The Black and White Nookie Of Death
Shameful Movies: Species and Def By Temptation
Guys, ever have one of those nights when, smack dab in the middle of some super-hot first date sex, your date turns into an alien or the Devil? Stuff like that really crushes one’s ego. “Did you hear?” the gossipmongers would whisper, “he was so bad in bed, the girl turned into Satan and killed his ass.”
Both Species and Def By Temptation use gore, nudity and violence to remind you that Jesus doesn’t like it if you bump uglies before marriage. They played together here at SMOOP to illustrate that old Eddie Murphy comedy routine about the difference between Black people and White people in horror movies. No matter the color, the dudes put their dongs where they don’t belong and die; it’s what happens when they deduce they are doomed that’s different.
Species tells the heartwarming story of an alien named Sil whose race sends instructions on how to create a human/alien mutation. The scientists create a female named Sil, unaware that the alien DNA comes with a case of that disease Christina Ricci has in Black Snake Moan. Sil escapes, heading into the night to breed a race of superaliens the old fashioned way. It’s easy for Sil to find volunteers for her sex-o-rama—she looks like model Natasha Henstridge. Men mistake her immediate demands for sex as a stroke of good luck, and pay dearly for it. Nothing’s free in this world, ESPECIALLY not hot sex with models.
Chasing Sil amongst the broken bodies of her victims (she pulls one female rival’s spine out) are Oscar winners Ben Kingsley and Forest Whitaker, Virginia Madsen’s bro, Doctor Octopus and that chick from CSI. One of those people satisfies the hottie the way most men wish they could, and gets killed anyway, proving that there’s just no pleasing women in bed. Showing that he was an equal opportunity offender, screenwriter Dennis Feldman wrote a sequel where the primary alien looking for love in all the wrong places is male. Avoid that one.
Ernest Dickerson’s cin-tog livens up Def by Temptation, a Troma release that features writer-director James Bond the Third as a divinity student in the big city. Temptation appears in the guise of Cynthia Bond, a demon/vampire/succubus who crawls the bars in Black neighborhoods looking for guys out for an easy score. She takes them home and gives the gossipmongers grist for the mill when she turns into the kind of nasty girl Vanity wasn’t singing about in that song. Blood and gore ensues as she gives the guys an AIDS metaphor.
Chasing Ms. Bond is the unrelated Bond the Third, Dwayne Wayne from A Different World, Radio Raheem, and Samuel L. Jackson who, if memory serves me, isn’t even allowed to say his favorite 12-letter word. Dickerson’s camerawork adds atmosphere and a few surprises, including the scene that proves Murphy’s point that Black people DO act differently in horror movies. When bartender John Canada Terrell realizes the woman he’s banging in the shower is Old Scratch, the next shot is a skewed camera perspective of him running, full frontal nude, directly at the audience. No towel, no drawers, nothing. He was willing to run down the street like that to escape the date from Hell. Ms. Bond gets him anyway (the shot of that is creepily effective), but still. He ran without asking why. Nobody in Species even thinks to run away before Sil kills them. "Push that bitch offa you and run!" one patron yelled at the screening I attended. Men. They never listen.
Hell on Wheels, and Under Them Too
Shameful Movies: Death Race 2000 and Psychomania
It’s fun when we get to the year depicted in futuristic movies and books, because we get to see if they were eerily prescient. Unless you lived near Queens Boulevard, Death Race 2000 was thankfully erroneous in its depiction of Y2K. In DR2K, people compete in a sporting event that involves running people over with your car. Different types of hit people earn different types of points. Manning the wheels are David Carradine (who also starred in the pseudo sequel Deathsport, which I saw on the Forty-Deuce) and Rocky Balboa, Mr. Sylvester Stallone.
QT certainly saw Death Race 2000 before he made Death Proof, his section of Grindhouse. This Roger Corman quickie, directed by Paul Bartel and featuring his Eating Raoul cohort Mary Woronov, has car crashes and pedestrian pummeling galore. Years before I saw this film, my uncle Chris told me this film was “very nasty” and he was right. With a low budget, filmmakers have to be a little less subtle and a lot more offensive with their satirical points, so Bartel and company resort to such scenes as rolling old people in wheelchairs out into the middle of the road so that cars may forcibly remove them from it (this doesn’t go as you may expect). Roger Corman knows how to stroke our baser instincts, which explains why the legend is he has never lost money on a production.
All About Eve is my favorite movie, and I should have been brutally distressed to see George Sanders in a Satanic biker movie. But I found it easy to believe Addison DeWitt would engage in a ritual that turns a woman into a frog in exchange for sending the bikers back to Hell. Psychomania is a confused biker movie that scared the ever-loving shit out of me as a kid, but is tame enough for a PG. A biker gang called The Living Dead make a deal with the Devil to become just that — the living dead. After a ludicrously funny mass suicide and return, they wreak “havoc” on a California town. Havoc includes knocking over a baby carriage and making loads and loads of donuts in the dust. They hook up with a girl hot for trouble, and eventually return to Hell via the aforementioned reverse Frog Prince deal. The movie does not make one lick of sense, but it’s fun to watch and would make a damn fine drinking game. Every time these hell’s angels rev their engines, take a drink. You’ll be dead.
Spanish Fly, or Grabbing the Bull by the Horns With Your Johnson
Shameful Movies: Jamon, Jamon and Matador
SMOOP goes international, and la fiesta está caliente! You may think I’m cheating by selecting a film by Oscar winner Pedro Almodóvar, but back then, he wasn’t known as the guy who directed Todo Sobre Mi Madre. He was the sick bastard who made candy-colored Spanish movies that gave the MPAA fits when they came to this country. Matador is old-fashioned Almodóvar, full of what made grindhouse movies famous: envelope pushing sex and violence. A gored bullfighter (Nacho Martinez) gets off while watching people get murdered and/or murdering people while a criminal lawyer gets off on killing people while getting off on them. Still with me? Antonio Banderas plays a student who starts confessing to the murders committed by both the matador and the lawyer, despite the latter’s penchant for stabbing huge hairpins into the necks of her male lovers. Is she a distant relative of the aforementioned killer sex women from Species or Def? Or did Almodóvar see that horrible Tom Selleck vehicle, Lassiter, made two years earlier and featuring a similar scene between Lauren Hutton and an unlucky guy?
No matter. Those Spanish directors sure are freaky. Eventually the two killers find each other and you can just imagine what transpires. Meanwhile, in our other feature, Jamon, Jamon, director Bigas Luna gives us two Oscar nominees (Almodóvar favorite Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem) in an overheated melodrama about an underwear factory, a well-endowed underwear model, class warfare, naked bullfighting, brutal death by ham, a sign shaped like a bull with big testicles, and a sexy parrot. More on the sexy parrot and the naked matadors in a second; you don’t wanna know what happens to that bull sign.
Unlike most people, I think Penelope Cruz can be a fine actress provided she doesn’t speak English. Jamon gives us the uber-hot Cruz at 17, gladly offering up her ample naked bosom to hungry men lucky enough to bury their face in it. In fact, everybody seems to be having sex with somebody in this film; it got so complicated I actually had to stop the video and draw a chart so I could keep track. Cruz plays the daughter of the local prostitute (or la hija de puta as the credits on IMDB tell us) who’s impregnated by Manuel, the son of underwear factory owner Carmen (Stefina Sandrelli). Carmen is outraged that Manuel is going to marry below his station, so she hires her underwear model (Bardem) to seduce la hija de puta away from Manuel. Bardem’s character isn’t known for his brain; in Spain you need, um, qualifications to be an underwear model, especially if the underwear company is called Samson.
The MPAA shit on itself when it got a look at Bardem and his equally naked pal using unconventional means to incite the bulls during a late night bullfight. That’s self explanatory; the Spaniards aren’t afraid of full frontal male nudity. This is the most penis-obsessed movie I have ever seen. What confuses me to no end is the “sex scene” in the brothel between the guy, Cruz’s mom (la madre puta, according to that profane IMDB), and a parrot. If someone can explain to me what this scene is supposed to mean, I’ll be a better man for it.
Closing Night: Mad Musicals
Shameful Movies: The First Nudie Musical and Cottonpickin’ Chickenpickers
Just like last year, SMOOP closes with musicals. Where last year’s festival ended with the best film in the series, this year ends with the worst. I freely admit to cheating a tad regarding the latter title up there — I didn’t like the movie that much; I liked making fun of it. I watched it twice, but I couldn’t commit to liking the whole as much as the parts.
It’s great when movies live up to their titles. The First Nudie Musical is the movie Rodgers and Hammerstein would have made if they were perverted cheap musical hacks. A film studio is on the verge of going under, so a director and his assistant (played by Shirley herself, Cindy Williams!!!) decide to put on a show, as Rooney and Garland used to do in those old movies, to save their jobs. Except this show has naked tap dancing, '70s nudity, and a scene where the male actors dress as giant vibrators with buttons across their crotches — buttons the actresses eagerly push. How can any trash lover dislike a movie with a truly inspired rendition of the piano “Scales” and with lyrics like “I’m not blind, and I’m not cripple, won’t you let me do your nipple?” Shockingly, this was released by Paramount Pictures and was promoted by the studio in 1977.
Last, but certainly not least, is Cottonpickin’ Chickenpickers, a movie that must have been made to cash in on the Hee-Haw craze. Of all the films on this list, this one comes closest to the true grindhouse experience. The video I saw was made from a horribly dated print full of scratches and fading colors. The continuity errors were enormous, the boom mike made cameo appearances, and the car chases went past the same scenery about 800 times, like on The Flintstones.
What makes this a classic bad movie and a worthy addition to SMOOP’s festival roster are the musical numbers. The plot is simple: it’s about cottonpickin’ chickenpickers, or chicken thieves. Imagine the country and western songs you can get from that plot, then include a theme song with the titular words. As a whole, the movie didn’t make me like it enough to recommend on shame factor, but I did love several scenes. My favorite three are a musical number where the singer is playing a guitar with no musical accompaniment, but seven instruments are playing on the soundtrack, the car chase, and the “You Dirty Ol’ Egg Sucking Dog” number. You will not be able to get this song out of your head, except by force. “Stop stealin’ mah chickens, You Dirty Ol’ Egg Suckin’ Dog! Egggggg Suuuu-Ken Dawg!” sings the guy with such earnestness that you want to join hands with him and sing along. Now that’s how a trashy movie should make you feel.
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After the success of last year's Shameful Movies of Odie's Past Film Festival (henceforth known as SMOOP), I decided to make it an annual tradition. The rules can be found at the above link, but to recap, every showing at SMOOP is a double feature of films that I should be ashamed for liking, but am not. Each double feature has a title and a theme, though the movies may not be related thematically.
Last year, however, several people took me to task for selecting movies that were not shameful enough. This presented a wonderful yet expected challenge for me. Sequels are bigger, noisier, and worse than their predecessors, so I expected nothing less than to go back and revisit some tackier fare. We got it all: pimps, hos, car crashes, chicks in chains, and very strange foreign movies with sex scenes I hope someone will be able to explain to me.
Quentin and Robert aren't the only guys who spent time at grindhouses. I grew up with the 42nd Street theaters, which smelled like pee and had posters in their windows that advertised the kind of sin and degradation that earned you a one way ticket to the home of Linda Blair's possessor. Some of the films below I actually saw on 42nd Street; others fill that crazy desire of SMOOP's programmer, a guy with a love for gory horror movies, gratuitous nudity and musicals. In honor of the Trashy Movie Blog-a-thon and the release of Grindhouse, I give you SMOOP II: Electric Boogaloo. Bigger, badder, and with even more shame!
Shameful movies: Willie Dynamite and Black Mama, White Mama
When Three-6 Mafia wrote the Oscar-winning “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp,” they must have been thinking about 1975’s Willie Dynamite. The titular pimp has plenty of problems. His theme song sounds like a commercial for a Blaxploitation soft drink (“Will-ayyyyy! Oh-ohhh Willl-eee Deeee! Will-ay D!”). His bitches keep getting arrested and/or sliced up by razors. His pimpmobile can’t stay away from tow-away zones. Rival pimps keep pressuring him to join their punany-pushers union; and his stable is repeatedly threatened by the self-proclaimed “Ralph Nader for hookers,” a former prostitute who tries to talk the girls out of walking for Willie or, at the very least, becoming their own bosses. Worst of all, by day Willie D. has to deal with an “8-foot yellow turkey” and the trash can-living grouch who hates him. That’s right, Willie Dynamite’s alter ego is Gordon (Roscoe Orman) on Sesame Street! When he wasn’t also bitchslapping Donna all over Locust Street on All My Children, Orman was teaching kids like us our ABC’s. “A is for ass, B is for bottom bitches…”
Despite my seeing this on a 42nd Street double bill in 1977, Willie Dynamite isn’t as trashy as most grindhouse fare. The actors, especially the late Diana Sands as Ho Ralph Nader, give fairly decent performances. There is very little nudity and, apart from a rather vicious throat-slashing, very little violence. What elevates this to trash-status is the sheer audacity of the screenplay. It thinks it’s a respectable expose on pimpdom, yet it absurdly demands you feel sorry for its hero — and not just because he’s wearing dead animals disguised as fur hats on his head. Willie D is compulsively watchable and fun because its big studio producers, Richard Zanuck and David Brown, are terrified to plumb the depths Roger Corman would have gone to had he made this film. It’s an ABC Afterschool Special on pimping. Toss in bad '70s fashion, a family dinner where Willie’s Mom thinks he’s an Amway salesperson (or something like that) and scenes that remind us what 42nd Street was like before Disney destroyed it, and you have the makings of an unintentionally hilarious cautionary tale/trash classic. This is the original Hustle and Flow.
Special mention goes to the “villain” of the piece, Diana Sands, who sadly died way too early from cancer. She manages to infuse with gravity the lousy dialogue and situations she’s given, which is no easy task. She’s even “conflicted” when she realizes how ruined Willie D’s career winds up being. Her last scene with Willie has a poignant quality that had me scratching my head, yet I couldn’t stop watching her.
Far more appropriate for SMOOP is the movie that filled the aforementioned double bill with Willie D, Black Mama, White Mama. Whaddaya get when you cross a chicks-in-chains movie with The Defiant Ones? You get a Black chick and a White chick chained together, on the run from a Philippine prison, “learnin’ ‘bout each other while they do their thing.” Unlike Willie D., however, there’s no pretense behind the message of Ebony and Ivory female empowerment; the filmmakers just want to show you some tits.
Co-written by Jonathan Demme, who cut his teeth on prison movies such as this and Caged Heat, Black Mama, White Mama chains Pam Grier to her three-time co-star Margaret Markov, and welds a women’s prison movie to the equally popular jungle revolutionary movie. Poitier and Curtis, I mean Grier and Markov, escape from one of those women’s jungle penitentiaries so popular in the early '70s, and while on the run have more catfights than Joan Collins while successfully falling out of their tops. Markov and Grier are both tough chicks, and neither is hard on the eyes nor are they shy about giving you what you paid to see.
All the requisites of both film genres are in abundance: there are grungy guys with guns shooting people for their cause AND a multi-culti shower scene, complete with a masturbating female guard peering through a hole in the shower wall. “Did you enjoy yourself?” asks another guard after busting her overheated colleague. “Hell yes!” said a voice that sounded like me.
Shameful Movies: Species and Def By Temptation
Guys, ever have one of those nights when, smack dab in the middle of some super-hot first date sex, your date turns into an alien or the Devil? Stuff like that really crushes one’s ego. “Did you hear?” the gossipmongers would whisper, “he was so bad in bed, the girl turned into Satan and killed his ass.”
Both Species and Def By Temptation use gore, nudity and violence to remind you that Jesus doesn’t like it if you bump uglies before marriage. They played together here at SMOOP to illustrate that old Eddie Murphy comedy routine about the difference between Black people and White people in horror movies. No matter the color, the dudes put their dongs where they don’t belong and die; it’s what happens when they deduce they are doomed that’s different.
Species tells the heartwarming story of an alien named Sil whose race sends instructions on how to create a human/alien mutation. The scientists create a female named Sil, unaware that the alien DNA comes with a case of that disease Christina Ricci has in Black Snake Moan. Sil escapes, heading into the night to breed a race of superaliens the old fashioned way. It’s easy for Sil to find volunteers for her sex-o-rama—she looks like model Natasha Henstridge. Men mistake her immediate demands for sex as a stroke of good luck, and pay dearly for it. Nothing’s free in this world, ESPECIALLY not hot sex with models.
Chasing Sil amongst the broken bodies of her victims (she pulls one female rival’s spine out) are Oscar winners Ben Kingsley and Forest Whitaker, Virginia Madsen’s bro, Doctor Octopus and that chick from CSI. One of those people satisfies the hottie the way most men wish they could, and gets killed anyway, proving that there’s just no pleasing women in bed. Showing that he was an equal opportunity offender, screenwriter Dennis Feldman wrote a sequel where the primary alien looking for love in all the wrong places is male. Avoid that one.
Ernest Dickerson’s cin-tog livens up Def by Temptation, a Troma release that features writer-director James Bond the Third as a divinity student in the big city. Temptation appears in the guise of Cynthia Bond, a demon/vampire/succubus who crawls the bars in Black neighborhoods looking for guys out for an easy score. She takes them home and gives the gossipmongers grist for the mill when she turns into the kind of nasty girl Vanity wasn’t singing about in that song. Blood and gore ensues as she gives the guys an AIDS metaphor.
Chasing Ms. Bond is the unrelated Bond the Third, Dwayne Wayne from A Different World, Radio Raheem, and Samuel L. Jackson who, if memory serves me, isn’t even allowed to say his favorite 12-letter word. Dickerson’s camerawork adds atmosphere and a few surprises, including the scene that proves Murphy’s point that Black people DO act differently in horror movies. When bartender John Canada Terrell realizes the woman he’s banging in the shower is Old Scratch, the next shot is a skewed camera perspective of him running, full frontal nude, directly at the audience. No towel, no drawers, nothing. He was willing to run down the street like that to escape the date from Hell. Ms. Bond gets him anyway (the shot of that is creepily effective), but still. He ran without asking why. Nobody in Species even thinks to run away before Sil kills them. "Push that bitch offa you and run!" one patron yelled at the screening I attended. Men. They never listen.
Shameful Movies: Death Race 2000 and Psychomania
It’s fun when we get to the year depicted in futuristic movies and books, because we get to see if they were eerily prescient. Unless you lived near Queens Boulevard, Death Race 2000 was thankfully erroneous in its depiction of Y2K. In DR2K, people compete in a sporting event that involves running people over with your car. Different types of hit people earn different types of points. Manning the wheels are David Carradine (who also starred in the pseudo sequel Deathsport, which I saw on the Forty-Deuce) and Rocky Balboa, Mr. Sylvester Stallone.
QT certainly saw Death Race 2000 before he made Death Proof, his section of Grindhouse. This Roger Corman quickie, directed by Paul Bartel and featuring his Eating Raoul cohort Mary Woronov, has car crashes and pedestrian pummeling galore. Years before I saw this film, my uncle Chris told me this film was “very nasty” and he was right. With a low budget, filmmakers have to be a little less subtle and a lot more offensive with their satirical points, so Bartel and company resort to such scenes as rolling old people in wheelchairs out into the middle of the road so that cars may forcibly remove them from it (this doesn’t go as you may expect). Roger Corman knows how to stroke our baser instincts, which explains why the legend is he has never lost money on a production.
All About Eve is my favorite movie, and I should have been brutally distressed to see George Sanders in a Satanic biker movie. But I found it easy to believe Addison DeWitt would engage in a ritual that turns a woman into a frog in exchange for sending the bikers back to Hell. Psychomania is a confused biker movie that scared the ever-loving shit out of me as a kid, but is tame enough for a PG. A biker gang called The Living Dead make a deal with the Devil to become just that — the living dead. After a ludicrously funny mass suicide and return, they wreak “havoc” on a California town. Havoc includes knocking over a baby carriage and making loads and loads of donuts in the dust. They hook up with a girl hot for trouble, and eventually return to Hell via the aforementioned reverse Frog Prince deal. The movie does not make one lick of sense, but it’s fun to watch and would make a damn fine drinking game. Every time these hell’s angels rev their engines, take a drink. You’ll be dead.
Shameful Movies: Jamon, Jamon and Matador
SMOOP goes international, and la fiesta está caliente! You may think I’m cheating by selecting a film by Oscar winner Pedro Almodóvar, but back then, he wasn’t known as the guy who directed Todo Sobre Mi Madre. He was the sick bastard who made candy-colored Spanish movies that gave the MPAA fits when they came to this country. Matador is old-fashioned Almodóvar, full of what made grindhouse movies famous: envelope pushing sex and violence. A gored bullfighter (Nacho Martinez) gets off while watching people get murdered and/or murdering people while a criminal lawyer gets off on killing people while getting off on them. Still with me? Antonio Banderas plays a student who starts confessing to the murders committed by both the matador and the lawyer, despite the latter’s penchant for stabbing huge hairpins into the necks of her male lovers. Is she a distant relative of the aforementioned killer sex women from Species or Def? Or did Almodóvar see that horrible Tom Selleck vehicle, Lassiter, made two years earlier and featuring a similar scene between Lauren Hutton and an unlucky guy?
No matter. Those Spanish directors sure are freaky. Eventually the two killers find each other and you can just imagine what transpires. Meanwhile, in our other feature, Jamon, Jamon, director Bigas Luna gives us two Oscar nominees (Almodóvar favorite Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem) in an overheated melodrama about an underwear factory, a well-endowed underwear model, class warfare, naked bullfighting, brutal death by ham, a sign shaped like a bull with big testicles, and a sexy parrot. More on the sexy parrot and the naked matadors in a second; you don’t wanna know what happens to that bull sign.
Unlike most people, I think Penelope Cruz can be a fine actress provided she doesn’t speak English. Jamon gives us the uber-hot Cruz at 17, gladly offering up her ample naked bosom to hungry men lucky enough to bury their face in it. In fact, everybody seems to be having sex with somebody in this film; it got so complicated I actually had to stop the video and draw a chart so I could keep track. Cruz plays the daughter of the local prostitute (or la hija de puta as the credits on IMDB tell us) who’s impregnated by Manuel, the son of underwear factory owner Carmen (Stefina Sandrelli). Carmen is outraged that Manuel is going to marry below his station, so she hires her underwear model (Bardem) to seduce la hija de puta away from Manuel. Bardem’s character isn’t known for his brain; in Spain you need, um, qualifications to be an underwear model, especially if the underwear company is called Samson.
The MPAA shit on itself when it got a look at Bardem and his equally naked pal using unconventional means to incite the bulls during a late night bullfight. That’s self explanatory; the Spaniards aren’t afraid of full frontal male nudity. This is the most penis-obsessed movie I have ever seen. What confuses me to no end is the “sex scene” in the brothel between the guy, Cruz’s mom (la madre puta, according to that profane IMDB), and a parrot. If someone can explain to me what this scene is supposed to mean, I’ll be a better man for it.
Shameful Movies: The First Nudie Musical and Cottonpickin’ Chickenpickers
Just like last year, SMOOP closes with musicals. Where last year’s festival ended with the best film in the series, this year ends with the worst. I freely admit to cheating a tad regarding the latter title up there — I didn’t like the movie that much; I liked making fun of it. I watched it twice, but I couldn’t commit to liking the whole as much as the parts.
It’s great when movies live up to their titles. The First Nudie Musical is the movie Rodgers and Hammerstein would have made if they were perverted cheap musical hacks. A film studio is on the verge of going under, so a director and his assistant (played by Shirley herself, Cindy Williams!!!) decide to put on a show, as Rooney and Garland used to do in those old movies, to save their jobs. Except this show has naked tap dancing, '70s nudity, and a scene where the male actors dress as giant vibrators with buttons across their crotches — buttons the actresses eagerly push. How can any trash lover dislike a movie with a truly inspired rendition of the piano “Scales” and with lyrics like “I’m not blind, and I’m not cripple, won’t you let me do your nipple?” Shockingly, this was released by Paramount Pictures and was promoted by the studio in 1977.
Last, but certainly not least, is Cottonpickin’ Chickenpickers, a movie that must have been made to cash in on the Hee-Haw craze. Of all the films on this list, this one comes closest to the true grindhouse experience. The video I saw was made from a horribly dated print full of scratches and fading colors. The continuity errors were enormous, the boom mike made cameo appearances, and the car chases went past the same scenery about 800 times, like on The Flintstones.
What makes this a classic bad movie and a worthy addition to SMOOP’s festival roster are the musical numbers. The plot is simple: it’s about cottonpickin’ chickenpickers, or chicken thieves. Imagine the country and western songs you can get from that plot, then include a theme song with the titular words. As a whole, the movie didn’t make me like it enough to recommend on shame factor, but I did love several scenes. My favorite three are a musical number where the singer is playing a guitar with no musical accompaniment, but seven instruments are playing on the soundtrack, the car chase, and the “You Dirty Ol’ Egg Sucking Dog” number. You will not be able to get this song out of your head, except by force. “Stop stealin’ mah chickens, You Dirty Ol’ Egg Suckin’ Dog! Egggggg Suuuu-Ken Dawg!” sings the guy with such earnestness that you want to join hands with him and sing along. Now that’s how a trashy movie should make you feel.
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Labels: Almodóvar, Banderas, Bardem, Blog-a-thons, Corman, Demme, Eddie Murphy, Garland, Hammerstein, Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, Rodgers, Samuel L. Jackson, Stallone, Tarantino
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Thursday, February 22, 2007
The performances Oscar forgot
By Odienator
Since there are only five spots to be had for each acting category at the Oscars, names are bound to be missing come nomination day. Every year the battle rages over who got snubbed. Sometimes Oscar “rights these wrongs” by nominating the snubbed person for a lesser performance the following year, as it did with Bette Davis and Paul Giamatti. Other times, folks are just outta luck. Today, I salute some of the outta luck folks, people who should have heard their names on nomination morning.
Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter
Mitchum, with his hooded eyelids, velvety voice and aura of menace, assays the iconic image of evil in Charles Laughton’s creepy, ethereal fable. Mitchum’s preacher is suave enough to seduce Shelley Winters yet fake enough for her kids to see through his musings on right and wrong. The entire film is purposefully fake, but Mitchum’s menace is still jarring; he’s a big bad wolf threatening to leap off the screen and blow down the viewer’s house. The preacher shows us the tattooed hands bearing the words love and hate, but we know which hand we’re being dealt.
Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction
Fiorentino's fiery femme fatale "Wendy Kroy" appeared on HBO before being released theatrically, which caused the Academy to disqualify the best female performance of 1994 from best actress consideration. Fiorentino is fearless, exposing her hot body and her cold heart as she leads man after man by his dong to his doom. Her performance shows Wendy thinking quickly on (and off) her feet, scheming, plotting, and most importantly, getting away with murder. Barbara Stanwyck would be proud.
Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and wins the filibuster but loses the Oscar, so they gave it to him one year later for getting drunk. Meanwhile, Cary Grant gives a charming, comic performance, stealing the film from both Stewart and Katharine Hepburn. The real story behind The Philadelphia Story is that the wrong actor got the gold. Cary, you wuz robbed.
Debbi Morgan in Eve's Bayou
This Southern Gothic benefits from fine performances all around, including a surprisingly erotic Samuel L. Jackson, but Angie Hubbard from All My Children leaves a lasting impression as a clairvoyant whose bad luck with men is comical yet deadly. The scene that always sticks with me is her soliloquy where, while describing the fate of one of her husbands, she steps into a mirror and into her past. Later, she has one of those scenes of quiet devastation, the type of scene I love so much when an actor nails it. Had the Academy seen this film, I'm sure she, and the sweltering cinematography, would have gotten a nod.
Steve Buscemi in Fargo
The Coens love to cast, then abuse, Steve Buscemi. In Fargo, he suffers perhaps their cruelest fate, but before he does, his frustrated, hapless performance leaps from slapstick to smarminess to sadism without missing a beat. Buscemi never shuts up, and seems to wear his socks in every scene, even during sex. The Coens' constant focus on those socks pays off in the most revoltingly funny scene of the film, and one is almost sad to see Buscemi go. For an extra Oscar omission, see Buscemi in an even better performance in Ghost World.
Irma P. Hall in A Family Thing
The Coens misuse Hall in The LadyKillers, but this performance is probably what made them cast her in the first place. A fine example of what a supporting performance is supposed to be, Hall's blind Aunt Tee is an amusing adviser to lead actor Robert Duvall. Her hilarious dialogue, by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, sounds real, down to the Southern Black cadences and phrases. When Duvall, while looking at pictures of a young Hall says "you were beautiful back then," Hall snaps back "ain't nothing wrong with me now!" Apparently Oscar thought differently.
Robin Williams in Awakenings
I once wrote "Robin Williams has appeared on my ten worst lists more than the numbers 1 through 10." And he has. Awakenings is the good movie where he plays a doctor (please don't make me invoke the name of the bad one) and if the Academy saw fit to nominate De Niro, they should have nominated the other half of his performance as well.
Jennifer Jason Leigh in Georgia
Mare Winningham got the Oscar nod, which seems appropriate considering the luck of Leigh's character in this film. The movie is named after Winningham's character, but it's about Leigh's self-destructive Sadie. Sadie lives in her sister Georgia's shadow, refusing to believe that Georgia is the more talented singer. Anyone who has siblings can relate to the rivalry, but Sadie brings far too much upon herself to be truly forgiven. Leigh has been accused of being grating, and here she pushes the envelope of audience endurance with a horrible 9 minute rendition of a Van Morrison tune, a scene that either pulls you in sympathy toward Sadie or pushes you away from her forever. Either way, it's sheer bravery, and Leigh's bloody, open wound of a performance went unrewarded by an Academy that obviously saw the movie.
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Since there are only five spots to be had for each acting category at the Oscars, names are bound to be missing come nomination day. Every year the battle rages over who got snubbed. Sometimes Oscar “rights these wrongs” by nominating the snubbed person for a lesser performance the following year, as it did with Bette Davis and Paul Giamatti. Other times, folks are just outta luck. Today, I salute some of the outta luck folks, people who should have heard their names on nomination morning.
Mitchum, with his hooded eyelids, velvety voice and aura of menace, assays the iconic image of evil in Charles Laughton’s creepy, ethereal fable. Mitchum’s preacher is suave enough to seduce Shelley Winters yet fake enough for her kids to see through his musings on right and wrong. The entire film is purposefully fake, but Mitchum’s menace is still jarring; he’s a big bad wolf threatening to leap off the screen and blow down the viewer’s house. The preacher shows us the tattooed hands bearing the words love and hate, but we know which hand we’re being dealt.
Fiorentino's fiery femme fatale "Wendy Kroy" appeared on HBO before being released theatrically, which caused the Academy to disqualify the best female performance of 1994 from best actress consideration. Fiorentino is fearless, exposing her hot body and her cold heart as she leads man after man by his dong to his doom. Her performance shows Wendy thinking quickly on (and off) her feet, scheming, plotting, and most importantly, getting away with murder. Barbara Stanwyck would be proud.
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and wins the filibuster but loses the Oscar, so they gave it to him one year later for getting drunk. Meanwhile, Cary Grant gives a charming, comic performance, stealing the film from both Stewart and Katharine Hepburn. The real story behind The Philadelphia Story is that the wrong actor got the gold. Cary, you wuz robbed.
This Southern Gothic benefits from fine performances all around, including a surprisingly erotic Samuel L. Jackson, but Angie Hubbard from All My Children leaves a lasting impression as a clairvoyant whose bad luck with men is comical yet deadly. The scene that always sticks with me is her soliloquy where, while describing the fate of one of her husbands, she steps into a mirror and into her past. Later, she has one of those scenes of quiet devastation, the type of scene I love so much when an actor nails it. Had the Academy seen this film, I'm sure she, and the sweltering cinematography, would have gotten a nod.
The Coens love to cast, then abuse, Steve Buscemi. In Fargo, he suffers perhaps their cruelest fate, but before he does, his frustrated, hapless performance leaps from slapstick to smarminess to sadism without missing a beat. Buscemi never shuts up, and seems to wear his socks in every scene, even during sex. The Coens' constant focus on those socks pays off in the most revoltingly funny scene of the film, and one is almost sad to see Buscemi go. For an extra Oscar omission, see Buscemi in an even better performance in Ghost World.
The Coens misuse Hall in The LadyKillers, but this performance is probably what made them cast her in the first place. A fine example of what a supporting performance is supposed to be, Hall's blind Aunt Tee is an amusing adviser to lead actor Robert Duvall. Her hilarious dialogue, by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, sounds real, down to the Southern Black cadences and phrases. When Duvall, while looking at pictures of a young Hall says "you were beautiful back then," Hall snaps back "ain't nothing wrong with me now!" Apparently Oscar thought differently.
I once wrote "Robin Williams has appeared on my ten worst lists more than the numbers 1 through 10." And he has. Awakenings is the good movie where he plays a doctor (please don't make me invoke the name of the bad one) and if the Academy saw fit to nominate De Niro, they should have nominated the other half of his performance as well.
Mare Winningham got the Oscar nod, which seems appropriate considering the luck of Leigh's character in this film. The movie is named after Winningham's character, but it's about Leigh's self-destructive Sadie. Sadie lives in her sister Georgia's shadow, refusing to believe that Georgia is the more talented singer. Anyone who has siblings can relate to the rivalry, but Sadie brings far too much upon herself to be truly forgiven. Leigh has been accused of being grating, and here she pushes the envelope of audience endurance with a horrible 9 minute rendition of a Van Morrison tune, a scene that either pulls you in sympathy toward Sadie or pushes you away from her forever. Either way, it's sheer bravery, and Leigh's bloody, open wound of a performance went unrewarded by an Academy that obviously saw the movie.
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Labels: Bette, Buscemi, Cary, Coens, De Niro, Duvall, Giamatti, J.J. Leigh, K. Hepburn, Mitchum, Oscars, Robin, Samuel L. Jackson, Shelley Winters, Stanwyck
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Friday, December 02, 2005
From the Vault: Jungle Fever
From the moment the opening credits begin, with its flying signposts and bouncy Stevie Wonder title song, the audience knows it's in the hands of a talented filmmaker.
Spike Lee scores again, continuing his record of making a successful film every other time, with Jungle Fever, though it doesn't equal his incomparable Do the Right Thing.
The film is being sold as the story of an interracial romance between a married architect (Wesley Snipes) and his Italian temporary secretary (Annabella Sciorra). However, Lee seems to lose interest in this story thread once it has served its purpose as a catalyst for the other characters in the film.
Essentially, the film focuses on race, taking themes Lee didn't develop well enough in School Daze and presenting them in an entertaining and thought-provoking manner. The film works best displaying microcosms of both African- and Italian-American communities.
Where the film comes up short is by failing to create a definable relationship between Snipes and Sciorra. Both actors are good, but the film doesn't make the effort to create a legitimate romance or a curiosity-seeking romp.
What Lee's film does do well is showing the reaction of the families to the affair, from Snipes' father, a defrocked preacher (Ossie Davis) who delivers a powerful speech about race-mixing to Sciorra's racists father and brothers, two-thirds of whom got whacked by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.
John Turturro's character of Sciorra's fiance provides another nice element. His sweetness and earnestness shine brightly against the harsh bigotry that surrounds him. After playing the racist son in Do the Right Thing, Lee presents Turturro with a wonderful contrast and gets Turturro's best performance to date as a result.
The single most memorable performance belongs to Samuel L. Jackson as Gator, Snipes' crack-addicted brother. Jackson makes Gator humorous, pathetic and frightening and leads the film into its most harrowing sequence inside a crackhouse.
Lee directs as well as he ever has, but he still encounters trouble with his script. If he hones his narrative skills, this major talent could join the leagues of Martin Scorsese among great American filmmakers. In a summer filled with big-budget action and lame-brained comedies, Jungle Fever, despite its script flaws, deliver a welcome breath of fresh air.
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Labels: 90s, John Turturro, Pesci, Samuel L. Jackson, Scorsese, Spike Lee, Zemeckis
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