Cookie's Fortune
Drama, according to my high school junior English teacher, is conflict. These days, of course, man against man is the most common type, although on occasion we encounter vampire against man, sinister outer space zombie strippers against man, and even the infrequent subhuman man against man. There are even the often tantalizing cases of inner man against outer man. In a Robert Altman movie experience, however, the nature of the conflict is often more linear, more multi-dimensional, perhaps even more cosmic. I suspect that must be one powerhouse reason why many viewers, including myself, are delighted to disregard the lesser Altman trademarks, such as the humor being cued by strands of music, or the invariable quiet weirdness of some of the more feminine characters, and instead we just lay back and allow our minds to groove on the strands of humanity amid the characterizations. Altman's genius (as tired and unworthy an appellation to burden a genius with as can be found) rests in large part upon his ability to get relatively large casts of characters to form an individuality within a collective sameness. InM*A*S*H we saw often outrageous--yet somehow appropriate--individuality within the framework of an Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. In Nashville, twenty-four characters traversed a series of stages, each of whom screaming--however quietly or shrilly--his or her own version of the year in which they lived within the framework of the title city's musical establishment. In The Player, the framework was a Hollywood movie studio, while the individuals staying alive within it were decision makers, writers, and an assortment of clerical and support staff.
In Cookie's Fortune (1999), scenarist Anne Rapp and director Robert Altman venture into the micro-cosmic village of Holly Springs, Mississippi, a town with no particular central leadership, yet one populated with infinitely believable people who share connections often in spite of themselves. Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) lost her husband Buck two years prior and has never spent a day since without wishing he were still there with her in that big old house. She possesses considerable verbal skill, suggesting an education worthy of her presumed financial status. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close) is Cookie's sister, cousin, niece--it's often hard to be sure which, but that's part of the plot--something of a sympathetic yet hatefully disconnected case who dominates everyone merely because she intuits that the people she rules would run into stone walls without her constant guidance. Her sister (or daughter, or niece--again, it services the plot) Cora Duvall (Julianne Moore) remains Camille's puppet to the end, even when an ironic twist blows apart any hope Camille grasps of having the freedom she herself demands. In one especially humorous scene, Cora has been told to "tick a lock" by Camille and cannot even bring herself to open her mouth to speak when a Sheriff's Deputy tries to make small talk about the shooting death of Cookie.
Most everybody in town liked Cookie very much. After all, she was old, a bit on the decrepit side, but not without charm. She smoked a series of lady's pipes, kept her late-husband's extensive gun collection in a cabinet that wouldn't quite close, and had one hell of a nice garden through which she kept an eye on the precocious neighbor boy who was always stealing her croquet balls.
We know where we are throughout every instant of this movie, a fact that reinforces the often fictionalized feel of the small southern fishing town. From the first shots of the crumbled tin walls that house the local bar to the rapturous holiness of deputies talking about fishing, from the absurdity of the Church's Easter play being Salome (written, the marque informs us, by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon) to Manny (Lyle Lovett) with his outre creepy lust for Emma (Liv Tyler) (Cora's daughter, sister, niece, etc), and especially from Lester (Ned Beatty) second in command in the Sheriff's office and his peaceful relationship with Willis Richland (Charles S. Dutton). These two men amplify every scene they are in together, even when the presence of one is only referenced by the other, as when Willis finds himself charged with Cookie's murder and Lester states with calm certainty that he is innocent because "I've gone fishing with the man."
Most of us--especially those who grew up in small towns and moved to bigger cities--want very much to believe that this is pretty much the way things play out in small towns with a major industry being the selling of catfish. The authenticity is not for one second in question here, even as we watch with mounting anger as Camille violates the sanctity of Cookie's suicide by poking her body with a jabbing finger, rearranging the death scene to look like a murder, and insisting that respectable people do not commit suicide. The irony of this and other magnificently staged scenes is so multi-tiered that it may take some serious afterthought to catch them all. Here's Camille, the most burlesque version of the southern belle since Scarlett O'Hare, attempting to redefine protocol into every place she marches her self-important bodice. If her own sense of propriety requires that Willis be charged with the murder of his friend (and possible relative), then so be it. If her version of comfort dictates that Emma has to go back to living in a van instead of in a big old roomy house, that must be God's will. And if Cookie's will needs to be destroyed to safeguard her own concept of an appropriate lifestyle denied her by her own mother, well then it might have behooved her to find that last will and testament in the cookie jar before the lawyer, Jack Palmer (Donald Moffat) beat her to it.
It would be stupid to ignore the theme of miscegenation in this movie. Altman sets us up from the beginning to misinterpret the relationship Willis has with almost everyone, but especially with Cookie. When we meet him, he is tossing back shots of Wild Turkey in his friend's bar. We watch him apparently steal a bottle of hooch on his way out. From there he stops by Emma's van to tap on the glass. We surmise that the glass may not be the only thing he hopes to tap that Good Friday evening. We follow him to Cookie's home where he walks up to the gun case and begins to remove the valuable armaments.
Our evaluations in the above three scenes is by large part influenced by the fact of Willis being black. Surprise! Surprise! We may just have it wrong. It turns out that Willis was not so much stealing the whiskey as borrowing it. The next day he brings back a half bottle to replace the one he took, a common unspoken routine between the customer and his bartender. His stopping by Emma's van was merely to check in with the young lady to see if she would have Easter dinner with him and Cookie. And the reason he removed the guns from their display was because he had promised Cookie he would clean them as a favor to her before the night was over.
This would be a very sub-O. Henry series of twists were it not for the fact of Willis's relationship to the town and particularly to Cookie and Emma. The latter asks him about his childhood and he talks about his grandfather who had thirty-four grandchildren. "Thirty-four!" she says, astonished. "How'd he tell you all apart?"
"Well, eighteen of them were girls and sixteen boys, so that helped. And among us boys, some of them were white and some of us were black. I was the blackest of them all."
A kind of meta-brilliance with Cookie's Fortune is the freedom Altman gives the support characters, a freedom which allows them to aid in the strength of the central actors. Courtney B. Vance as Inspector Otis Tucker is so free in this movie that we could never mistake him for the role he played in TV's "Law and Order: Criminal Intent." The normally cosmetic Chris Dutton as officer Jason Brown allows his character to be simultaneously bumbling yet identifiable because of the sheer enthusiasm he brings to his small town world. And Donald Moffat, not exactly the most household name in Hollywood (a fact that is Hollywood's loss and not ours), positively incinerates all levels of other people's pomposity with a richness of character that crumples every starched pleat in town.
About halfway through this movie, I thought to myself, "Hey, this is very nice. There'll be no need to watch it a second time, but it's still pleasant." By the end of the film, an extended moment that stretches for generations, I knew just how wrong I was to be so dismissive. This film contains a tangible holiness that an earlier Altman might have considered worth gently mocking. That his intent remains entirely respectful of good and bad folks alike remains the most cosmic irony of all. I wish my high school English teacher was around to give me an "amen."
In Cookie's Fortune (1999), scenarist Anne Rapp and director Robert Altman venture into the micro-cosmic village of Holly Springs, Mississippi, a town with no particular central leadership, yet one populated with infinitely believable people who share connections often in spite of themselves. Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) lost her husband Buck two years prior and has never spent a day since without wishing he were still there with her in that big old house. She possesses considerable verbal skill, suggesting an education worthy of her presumed financial status. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close) is Cookie's sister, cousin, niece--it's often hard to be sure which, but that's part of the plot--something of a sympathetic yet hatefully disconnected case who dominates everyone merely because she intuits that the people she rules would run into stone walls without her constant guidance. Her sister (or daughter, or niece--again, it services the plot) Cora Duvall (Julianne Moore) remains Camille's puppet to the end, even when an ironic twist blows apart any hope Camille grasps of having the freedom she herself demands. In one especially humorous scene, Cora has been told to "tick a lock" by Camille and cannot even bring herself to open her mouth to speak when a Sheriff's Deputy tries to make small talk about the shooting death of Cookie.
Most everybody in town liked Cookie very much. After all, she was old, a bit on the decrepit side, but not without charm. She smoked a series of lady's pipes, kept her late-husband's extensive gun collection in a cabinet that wouldn't quite close, and had one hell of a nice garden through which she kept an eye on the precocious neighbor boy who was always stealing her croquet balls.
We know where we are throughout every instant of this movie, a fact that reinforces the often fictionalized feel of the small southern fishing town. From the first shots of the crumbled tin walls that house the local bar to the rapturous holiness of deputies talking about fishing, from the absurdity of the Church's Easter play being Salome (written, the marque informs us, by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon) to Manny (Lyle Lovett) with his outre creepy lust for Emma (Liv Tyler) (Cora's daughter, sister, niece, etc), and especially from Lester (Ned Beatty) second in command in the Sheriff's office and his peaceful relationship with Willis Richland (Charles S. Dutton). These two men amplify every scene they are in together, even when the presence of one is only referenced by the other, as when Willis finds himself charged with Cookie's murder and Lester states with calm certainty that he is innocent because "I've gone fishing with the man."
Most of us--especially those who grew up in small towns and moved to bigger cities--want very much to believe that this is pretty much the way things play out in small towns with a major industry being the selling of catfish. The authenticity is not for one second in question here, even as we watch with mounting anger as Camille violates the sanctity of Cookie's suicide by poking her body with a jabbing finger, rearranging the death scene to look like a murder, and insisting that respectable people do not commit suicide. The irony of this and other magnificently staged scenes is so multi-tiered that it may take some serious afterthought to catch them all. Here's Camille, the most burlesque version of the southern belle since Scarlett O'Hare, attempting to redefine protocol into every place she marches her self-important bodice. If her own sense of propriety requires that Willis be charged with the murder of his friend (and possible relative), then so be it. If her version of comfort dictates that Emma has to go back to living in a van instead of in a big old roomy house, that must be God's will. And if Cookie's will needs to be destroyed to safeguard her own concept of an appropriate lifestyle denied her by her own mother, well then it might have behooved her to find that last will and testament in the cookie jar before the lawyer, Jack Palmer (Donald Moffat) beat her to it.
It would be stupid to ignore the theme of miscegenation in this movie. Altman sets us up from the beginning to misinterpret the relationship Willis has with almost everyone, but especially with Cookie. When we meet him, he is tossing back shots of Wild Turkey in his friend's bar. We watch him apparently steal a bottle of hooch on his way out. From there he stops by Emma's van to tap on the glass. We surmise that the glass may not be the only thing he hopes to tap that Good Friday evening. We follow him to Cookie's home where he walks up to the gun case and begins to remove the valuable armaments.
Our evaluations in the above three scenes is by large part influenced by the fact of Willis being black. Surprise! Surprise! We may just have it wrong. It turns out that Willis was not so much stealing the whiskey as borrowing it. The next day he brings back a half bottle to replace the one he took, a common unspoken routine between the customer and his bartender. His stopping by Emma's van was merely to check in with the young lady to see if she would have Easter dinner with him and Cookie. And the reason he removed the guns from their display was because he had promised Cookie he would clean them as a favor to her before the night was over.
This would be a very sub-O. Henry series of twists were it not for the fact of Willis's relationship to the town and particularly to Cookie and Emma. The latter asks him about his childhood and he talks about his grandfather who had thirty-four grandchildren. "Thirty-four!" she says, astonished. "How'd he tell you all apart?"
"Well, eighteen of them were girls and sixteen boys, so that helped. And among us boys, some of them were white and some of us were black. I was the blackest of them all."
A kind of meta-brilliance with Cookie's Fortune is the freedom Altman gives the support characters, a freedom which allows them to aid in the strength of the central actors. Courtney B. Vance as Inspector Otis Tucker is so free in this movie that we could never mistake him for the role he played in TV's "Law and Order: Criminal Intent." The normally cosmetic Chris Dutton as officer Jason Brown allows his character to be simultaneously bumbling yet identifiable because of the sheer enthusiasm he brings to his small town world. And Donald Moffat, not exactly the most household name in Hollywood (a fact that is Hollywood's loss and not ours), positively incinerates all levels of other people's pomposity with a richness of character that crumples every starched pleat in town.
About halfway through this movie, I thought to myself, "Hey, this is very nice. There'll be no need to watch it a second time, but it's still pleasant." By the end of the film, an extended moment that stretches for generations, I knew just how wrong I was to be so dismissive. This film contains a tangible holiness that an earlier Altman might have considered worth gently mocking. That his intent remains entirely respectful of good and bad folks alike remains the most cosmic irony of all. I wish my high school English teacher was around to give me an "amen."
Arachnophobia
"If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read 'President can't swim.'"
--Lyndon Johnson
Steven Spielberg served as the uncredited second unit director, the man responsible for shooting stunts, establishing shots, inserts and cutaways. Uncredited or not, his prints glow on Arachnophobia (1990), which is one of the sources for the expression "The Spielberg glow." In movies such as E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this appeal to wholesome mischief is appropriate. In a movie about spiders--specifically bad spiders--the glow gets in the way.
The idea for the story is as old as horror movies themselves. Jeff Daniels plays a doctor who moves his family to the country to escape the pressures of city living only to find an insidious trail of monsters awaiting him, threatening the very sanctity he so desperately wants. Okay, so there's only so many plotlines in the world and as such things go, that one stinks less than most.
Dan Jacoby, Al Williams, and Wesley Strick came up with the story, which Pauline Kael referred to as resembling a Boy Scout remaking Jaws. That's a funny line, Pauline, and I've always wanted to work it into a review of my own and if you weren't already deceased, I'd be worried about lifting it in such a shameless manner.
But back to Spielberg, first-time director Frank Marshall ground bones with the Spiel Man on Back to the Future, Poltergeist, Raiders of the Lost Ark and other glowing balls of good clean fun that eschewed logic for brain drain. But influence does not equal exchange just as correlation fails to equal causation. For instance, in the aforementioned Jaws, the title character is the emotional focus of the film, the vortex around which the personal relationships in the story spin. In Arachnophobia, the monster is a transplanted tarantula that sets up a kingdom in Jeff Daniels' barn. Yet the monster does not dominate the attention of the audience. That honor goes to John Goodman, in the guise of the perfectly named Delbert McClintock, the town exterminator. We welcome his intrusions into the prefabricated anxiety we keep expecting to feel from the platoon of killer spiders. We want Goodman to argue with Daniels, to seduce Daniels' wife, to haul out the blowtorches and napalm the barn in order to save it--something, anything! As the only person in the movie who swings emotional content, we virtually yearn for Goodman to save the picture. But that would shift the glow from E.T. to Animal House, something the Spielberg folks--who are more terrified of chaos than any other major filmmakers--simply could never endure. So instead of Goodman doing what we can see he wants to do, we get impotent attempts at humor such as this:
Molly Jennings (the wife): Why is all the wood rotting?
Delbert: I'll tell you why. Bad wood.
Molly: So what do we do?
Delbert: Tear out bad wood. Put in good wood.
Or. . .
Delbert: Would anyone object if I tore this floor out?
Molly: I would.
Delbert: False alarm then. Lead on.
As a result, people filing out of the theater say things like, "That was cute" rather than saying "That thing scared me to death!"
I imagine Spielberg must occasionally feel akin to Lyndon Johnson. Here is a man who has created the cinematic equivalents of Medicare, The Voting Act and the Civil Rights Act and yet people just can't quite get over that darned Vietnam thing.
--Lyndon Johnson
Steven Spielberg served as the uncredited second unit director, the man responsible for shooting stunts, establishing shots, inserts and cutaways. Uncredited or not, his prints glow on Arachnophobia (1990), which is one of the sources for the expression "The Spielberg glow." In movies such as E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this appeal to wholesome mischief is appropriate. In a movie about spiders--specifically bad spiders--the glow gets in the way.
The idea for the story is as old as horror movies themselves. Jeff Daniels plays a doctor who moves his family to the country to escape the pressures of city living only to find an insidious trail of monsters awaiting him, threatening the very sanctity he so desperately wants. Okay, so there's only so many plotlines in the world and as such things go, that one stinks less than most.
Dan Jacoby, Al Williams, and Wesley Strick came up with the story, which Pauline Kael referred to as resembling a Boy Scout remaking Jaws. That's a funny line, Pauline, and I've always wanted to work it into a review of my own and if you weren't already deceased, I'd be worried about lifting it in such a shameless manner.
But back to Spielberg, first-time director Frank Marshall ground bones with the Spiel Man on Back to the Future, Poltergeist, Raiders of the Lost Ark and other glowing balls of good clean fun that eschewed logic for brain drain. But influence does not equal exchange just as correlation fails to equal causation. For instance, in the aforementioned Jaws, the title character is the emotional focus of the film, the vortex around which the personal relationships in the story spin. In Arachnophobia, the monster is a transplanted tarantula that sets up a kingdom in Jeff Daniels' barn. Yet the monster does not dominate the attention of the audience. That honor goes to John Goodman, in the guise of the perfectly named Delbert McClintock, the town exterminator. We welcome his intrusions into the prefabricated anxiety we keep expecting to feel from the platoon of killer spiders. We want Goodman to argue with Daniels, to seduce Daniels' wife, to haul out the blowtorches and napalm the barn in order to save it--something, anything! As the only person in the movie who swings emotional content, we virtually yearn for Goodman to save the picture. But that would shift the glow from E.T. to Animal House, something the Spielberg folks--who are more terrified of chaos than any other major filmmakers--simply could never endure. So instead of Goodman doing what we can see he wants to do, we get impotent attempts at humor such as this:
Molly Jennings (the wife): Why is all the wood rotting?
Delbert: I'll tell you why. Bad wood.
Molly: So what do we do?
Delbert: Tear out bad wood. Put in good wood.
Or. . .
Delbert: Would anyone object if I tore this floor out?
Molly: I would.
Delbert: False alarm then. Lead on.
As a result, people filing out of the theater say things like, "That was cute" rather than saying "That thing scared me to death!"
I imagine Spielberg must occasionally feel akin to Lyndon Johnson. Here is a man who has created the cinematic equivalents of Medicare, The Voting Act and the Civil Rights Act and yet people just can't quite get over that darned Vietnam thing.
The Rainmaker
Sometimes I like having a movie this obvious and contrived making its points right in my face. The Rainmaker (1997) posits director Francis Coppola [1], [2], [3] alongside a sharp cast and a script inspired by novelist John Grisham. What would be diseased proselytizing in the hands of almost anyone else comes across as something more than mere entertainment. The Rainmaker is that rare film that gets you feeling good by presenting you with the dignity of hard realities.
An insurance company operating in poor sections of Memphis and elsewhere routinely denies all claims made for medical procedures. Donny Ray needs a bone marrow transplant to save him from leukemia. The insurance company says no on eight separate occasions. Donny Ray dies.
Fresh out of law school, Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon) itches to kick some corporate ass, so he links up with a law firm owner named Bruiser (Mickey Rourke) who hooks him up with an assistant named Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito). Rudy embodies jaded optimism while Deck exemplifies utopian cynicism. Their would-be foil is the insurance company's legal team, headed by Leo Drummond (Jon Voight). Leo tries to play Rudy like a violin, but Rudy doesn't like being played and fights back. A lot of that fight comes from the off-screen narration, a tact that's easy to abuse, yet Coppola never allows a flicker of unease.
Rudy
Sworn in by a fool and vouched for by a scoundrel. I'm a lawyer at last.
Or:
Rudy
My dad hated lawyers. You might think I became one just to piss him off, but you'd be wrong. Did piss him off so much though that when he heard he fell off a ladder and didn't know who to sue first.
Plot may be the guiding light of most movies. It is just short of irrelevant here. The beauty lies in the way the characterizations elicit the social forces that have created the people struggling for a place in a world they did not create. Danny Glover as the trial judge makes no effort to disguise his contempt for the insurance company. DeVito as the paralegal is righteously offended at the suggestion that there's anything wrong with being an ambulance chaser. Claire Danes, who plays Rudy's love interest, meets her salvation while in the hospital from a beating delivered by her husband and his aluminum baseball bat; her performance is so understated that we cannot help but feel every bruise and shattered bone she endures. Chain smoking Mary Kay Place, as Danny Ray's mother (and wife to a shell-shocked Korean War veteran), makes us lean forward to catch every subtle nuance of speech and facial expression. Having met all these people, our fists clinch when the big dollar legal team strolls up to their house to take a deposition, feigning unawareness of the run down neighborhood, barking dog, dozens of stray cats living in the junked car in the front yard. We can see who the bad guys are, we can identify the victims, and we intuit that the heroes are those on the side of young Danny Ray.
If you live long enough, someone will eventually tell you that there is no such thing as either black or white--there's only shades of gray. What I tell people who say that is that gray happens when people don't have enough insight or information to sort out the real situation. Granted, gray can appear more multi-dimensional than black and white. Gray gives the false impression of complexity, confusion, layers of depth. The Godfather was gray, for instance. It was a movie about people who did some very bad things presented from their own point of view. We might not want Al Pacino to have the Pope killed, but we also don't want the head of the crime family getting shot. In The Rainmaker, the only gray character is Bruiser. He's a big time crook who flees the country under criminal indictment, yet when we find him lapping up the sunshine on a tropical island, we don't really mind at all. In that sense, Rourke's character deserved more screen time than he received.
Through its obvious tendencies, through its contrivances, Coppola's movie shakes the charcoal and separates good from evil. This filmmaker shows that he understands a motion picture to be a means of telling a story and that a story is capable of having a child-like simplicity without once being false.
An insurance company operating in poor sections of Memphis and elsewhere routinely denies all claims made for medical procedures. Donny Ray needs a bone marrow transplant to save him from leukemia. The insurance company says no on eight separate occasions. Donny Ray dies.
Fresh out of law school, Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon) itches to kick some corporate ass, so he links up with a law firm owner named Bruiser (Mickey Rourke) who hooks him up with an assistant named Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito). Rudy embodies jaded optimism while Deck exemplifies utopian cynicism. Their would-be foil is the insurance company's legal team, headed by Leo Drummond (Jon Voight). Leo tries to play Rudy like a violin, but Rudy doesn't like being played and fights back. A lot of that fight comes from the off-screen narration, a tact that's easy to abuse, yet Coppola never allows a flicker of unease.
Rudy
Sworn in by a fool and vouched for by a scoundrel. I'm a lawyer at last.
Or:
Rudy
My dad hated lawyers. You might think I became one just to piss him off, but you'd be wrong. Did piss him off so much though that when he heard he fell off a ladder and didn't know who to sue first.
Plot may be the guiding light of most movies. It is just short of irrelevant here. The beauty lies in the way the characterizations elicit the social forces that have created the people struggling for a place in a world they did not create. Danny Glover as the trial judge makes no effort to disguise his contempt for the insurance company. DeVito as the paralegal is righteously offended at the suggestion that there's anything wrong with being an ambulance chaser. Claire Danes, who plays Rudy's love interest, meets her salvation while in the hospital from a beating delivered by her husband and his aluminum baseball bat; her performance is so understated that we cannot help but feel every bruise and shattered bone she endures. Chain smoking Mary Kay Place, as Danny Ray's mother (and wife to a shell-shocked Korean War veteran), makes us lean forward to catch every subtle nuance of speech and facial expression. Having met all these people, our fists clinch when the big dollar legal team strolls up to their house to take a deposition, feigning unawareness of the run down neighborhood, barking dog, dozens of stray cats living in the junked car in the front yard. We can see who the bad guys are, we can identify the victims, and we intuit that the heroes are those on the side of young Danny Ray.
If you live long enough, someone will eventually tell you that there is no such thing as either black or white--there's only shades of gray. What I tell people who say that is that gray happens when people don't have enough insight or information to sort out the real situation. Granted, gray can appear more multi-dimensional than black and white. Gray gives the false impression of complexity, confusion, layers of depth. The Godfather was gray, for instance. It was a movie about people who did some very bad things presented from their own point of view. We might not want Al Pacino to have the Pope killed, but we also don't want the head of the crime family getting shot. In The Rainmaker, the only gray character is Bruiser. He's a big time crook who flees the country under criminal indictment, yet when we find him lapping up the sunshine on a tropical island, we don't really mind at all. In that sense, Rourke's character deserved more screen time than he received.
Through its obvious tendencies, through its contrivances, Coppola's movie shakes the charcoal and separates good from evil. This filmmaker shows that he understands a motion picture to be a means of telling a story and that a story is capable of having a child-like simplicity without once being false.
Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story
During the winter of 1972-73, hundreds of Oglala Sioux commemorated the massacre at Wounded Knee by staging the second siege at the Pine Ridge Reservation. Adding to the pre-existing militancy of the Oglala Sioux was the behavior of a tribal leader picked for them by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This leader, Dick Wilson, was a law and order enthusiast who was determined to keep the peace no matter who got hurt. Into this political fray marched the American Indian Movement, the members of which had a few years earlier led an occupation of the island of Alcatraz and in 1972 had initiated the takeover of the BIA offices in Washington. At Pine Ridge, the Oglala Sioux invited AIM to join them.
In retaliation, the FBI, federal marshals, state troopers, BIA police, and the U.S. military occupied the reservation, demanding that AIM surrender. The Native Americans responded that they wanted public hearings on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, a probe of the BIA, and criminal indictments brought against Wilson. The Nixon government made a counter offer: the freedom fighters at Pine Ridge could lay down their weapons and surrender and nobody would get hurt. When this proved unacceptable, Nixon ordered his troops to withdraw, knowing that without confrontation, the media would soon depart.
Leonard Peltier, in 1977, was improperly and inexcusably convicted of the shooting deaths of two FBI agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler.
Peltier is not a saint, at least not yet. That is only because he is still alive, despite the United States government's best attempts in securing his ruination. He was extradited from Canada with perjured affidavits. Witnesses were bought and intimidated into testifying against him, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations has mounted an unending campaign to coerce a number of U.S. presidents into denying him clemency.
Okay. With that out of the way, we enter the 1992 documentary filmIncident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story, a movie in part financed and certainly narrated by Robert Redford. You know that when Bob comes to the defense of someone, that someone has to be a deserving sort of guy. I'm being sarcastic, but in this case, Redford's support could hardly hurt matters.
Except--
The most persuasive parts of this documentary come from Peltier himself during prison interviews and from attorney William Kunstler, regrettably deceased.
If someone wanted to make a persuasive case for Leonard's release--which most recently was scheduled for 2040; his next parole hearing doesn't come around until 2024--it might be good to place the incidents occurring between 1972 and 1977 in something of an historic context and then argue that even if Leonard did shoot the two agents--which no one can reasonably concede at this point, but we're just supposing here--then a fine defense of that action would be the one that was offered for the original two defendants in this investigation, Robert Ribideau and Dino Butler, that being the defense of self-protection. Peltier has admitted that he returned fire at the two agents, although he maintains that he was not responsible for the close-range head shots that actually killed the two men.
Was Nat Turner a murderer? Was John Brown? Or were they men who saw and felt the institutionalized hatred and racism against a holy people and decided to become instruments in the hands of God? If the latter, that kind of deeply held belief is one reason I'm an agnostic. But I believe Turner and Brown believed it.
Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story is a story that deserves, at a minimum, an updating, one that places the events stipulated by both prosecution and defense into an accurate historical context. The Redford project is not that movie for the same reason that any number of documentaries have tried and failed: it does not aim high enough. It is much easier to admire a cinematic failure for being too ambitious than for not being ambitious enough.
In retaliation, the FBI, federal marshals, state troopers, BIA police, and the U.S. military occupied the reservation, demanding that AIM surrender. The Native Americans responded that they wanted public hearings on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, a probe of the BIA, and criminal indictments brought against Wilson. The Nixon government made a counter offer: the freedom fighters at Pine Ridge could lay down their weapons and surrender and nobody would get hurt. When this proved unacceptable, Nixon ordered his troops to withdraw, knowing that without confrontation, the media would soon depart.
Leonard Peltier, in 1977, was improperly and inexcusably convicted of the shooting deaths of two FBI agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler.
Peltier is not a saint, at least not yet. That is only because he is still alive, despite the United States government's best attempts in securing his ruination. He was extradited from Canada with perjured affidavits. Witnesses were bought and intimidated into testifying against him, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations has mounted an unending campaign to coerce a number of U.S. presidents into denying him clemency.
Okay. With that out of the way, we enter the 1992 documentary filmIncident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story, a movie in part financed and certainly narrated by Robert Redford. You know that when Bob comes to the defense of someone, that someone has to be a deserving sort of guy. I'm being sarcastic, but in this case, Redford's support could hardly hurt matters.
Except--
The most persuasive parts of this documentary come from Peltier himself during prison interviews and from attorney William Kunstler, regrettably deceased.
If someone wanted to make a persuasive case for Leonard's release--which most recently was scheduled for 2040; his next parole hearing doesn't come around until 2024--it might be good to place the incidents occurring between 1972 and 1977 in something of an historic context and then argue that even if Leonard did shoot the two agents--which no one can reasonably concede at this point, but we're just supposing here--then a fine defense of that action would be the one that was offered for the original two defendants in this investigation, Robert Ribideau and Dino Butler, that being the defense of self-protection. Peltier has admitted that he returned fire at the two agents, although he maintains that he was not responsible for the close-range head shots that actually killed the two men.
Was Nat Turner a murderer? Was John Brown? Or were they men who saw and felt the institutionalized hatred and racism against a holy people and decided to become instruments in the hands of God? If the latter, that kind of deeply held belief is one reason I'm an agnostic. But I believe Turner and Brown believed it.
Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story is a story that deserves, at a minimum, an updating, one that places the events stipulated by both prosecution and defense into an accurate historical context. The Redford project is not that movie for the same reason that any number of documentaries have tried and failed: it does not aim high enough. It is much easier to admire a cinematic failure for being too ambitious than for not being ambitious enough.
Glengarry Glen Ross and The Big Kahuna
The addition of the Blake character to the script of the original play by David Mamet substantially alters the thrust of the movie Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Audiences enjoy the Alec Baldwin role of Blake, as the guy sent by Mitch and Murray to come in and shake things up a bit in the sales room of the hokey real estate office. The character intensifies the motivation of desperate Shelley "The Machine" Levene (Jack Lemmon) and compounds the frustration of conniving Moss and confused Aaronow (Ed Harris and Alan Arkin). His impact on the coldly pragmatic and petty Williamson (Kevin Spacey), the office manager, is negligible, as it is on Ricky Roma (Al Pacino), the top producer and favored son in the shop. However, Blake changed forever the way the script would be experienced by audiences because the original Mamet script would never have been used as a training tool for salespeople in the way the movie has been. That such a brilliant appeal to the sensitivities of a system rigged against not only the customers but against the employees as well should turn out to be embraced by those employees says more about the sorry condition of the American workplace than it does about this movie, which is patently brilliant from start to finish.
I have attended championship boxing matches and viewed televised UFC competitions that were less masculine than the tenor of this film. Indeed, Tyson biting off part of Holyfield's ear rings rather soft compared to the penis-thumping and simultaneous emasculations that make up the day-to-day lives of these salesmen. "You think this is abuse?" screams Blake into the back of the head of Aaronow. "You cocksucker! If you think this is abuse, how are you going to handle abuse on a sit?" Later he points out that "It takes [brass balls] to sell real estate."
Audiences laugh at what they perceive to be the over-the-top outrage of the bully Blake, just as audiences chuckle nervously at the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. Marines in the crowds at the latter film knew better than to laugh. They'd experienced precisely the "abuse" the drilling instructor was dishing out, just as anyone who has survived his time selling time shares, alarm systems, home-based businesses or light bulbs has endured the emotional raping these men get as a send-off on their work day evenings.
The system is rigged, as Levene points out. How is a man supposed to rise above a certain level if he never gets the premium leads, the Glengarry leads? Ah, but those leads are only for closers. To give the good leads to a poor performer would be to waste them. The only way to rise above and get up to where the oxygen is kept, of course, is to cheat. And cheat they do. There are blocks of ten to fifteen minute segments in this film where absolutely nothing anyone says bears any resemblance to the truth. This carries on so adeptly that after a while we find ourselves actually pulling for these men--who after all, maintain the moral center of the film--and even hurt for the fate of the man who commits a crime that may, for a few seconds, imperil the entire office.
Glengarry Glen Ross is a school for actors. Each "star" plays many roles within roles throughout this motion picture and anyone of a certain age or older will be able to recognize someone he loves and hates.
The Big Kahuna (1999), a different film entirely, stars Spacey and Danny DeVito as co-salesmen and friends in town to sell industrial lubricants to a man who may not necessarily give a damn. Unlike its predecessor, this movie offers Bob, played by Peter Facinelli, who prefers to sell his own faith instead. Perhaps the greatest line in the movie comes as a part of DeVito's wrenching monologue, near the end, where he tries to explain to Bob the difference between being blunt and being honest. "It doesn't matter whether you're selling Jesus or Buddha or civil rights or 'How to Make Money in Real Estate With No Money Down.' That doesn't make you a human being; it makes you a marketing rep."
Will either of these heavily masculine and emasculating movies make you a better salesman? I don't think so. Oh, they may inspire you with a winning attitude, help you get over some emotional stumbles, or even provide you with some amazing lines to use as part of your pitch. Ultimately, the best thing these two beautiful motion pictures can do is to slip you some great motivation at becoming a better human being. And even if they fail at that, you'll have a wonderful time trying.
I have attended championship boxing matches and viewed televised UFC competitions that were less masculine than the tenor of this film. Indeed, Tyson biting off part of Holyfield's ear rings rather soft compared to the penis-thumping and simultaneous emasculations that make up the day-to-day lives of these salesmen. "You think this is abuse?" screams Blake into the back of the head of Aaronow. "You cocksucker! If you think this is abuse, how are you going to handle abuse on a sit?" Later he points out that "It takes [brass balls] to sell real estate."
Audiences laugh at what they perceive to be the over-the-top outrage of the bully Blake, just as audiences chuckle nervously at the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. Marines in the crowds at the latter film knew better than to laugh. They'd experienced precisely the "abuse" the drilling instructor was dishing out, just as anyone who has survived his time selling time shares, alarm systems, home-based businesses or light bulbs has endured the emotional raping these men get as a send-off on their work day evenings.
The system is rigged, as Levene points out. How is a man supposed to rise above a certain level if he never gets the premium leads, the Glengarry leads? Ah, but those leads are only for closers. To give the good leads to a poor performer would be to waste them. The only way to rise above and get up to where the oxygen is kept, of course, is to cheat. And cheat they do. There are blocks of ten to fifteen minute segments in this film where absolutely nothing anyone says bears any resemblance to the truth. This carries on so adeptly that after a while we find ourselves actually pulling for these men--who after all, maintain the moral center of the film--and even hurt for the fate of the man who commits a crime that may, for a few seconds, imperil the entire office.
Glengarry Glen Ross is a school for actors. Each "star" plays many roles within roles throughout this motion picture and anyone of a certain age or older will be able to recognize someone he loves and hates.
The Big Kahuna (1999), a different film entirely, stars Spacey and Danny DeVito as co-salesmen and friends in town to sell industrial lubricants to a man who may not necessarily give a damn. Unlike its predecessor, this movie offers Bob, played by Peter Facinelli, who prefers to sell his own faith instead. Perhaps the greatest line in the movie comes as a part of DeVito's wrenching monologue, near the end, where he tries to explain to Bob the difference between being blunt and being honest. "It doesn't matter whether you're selling Jesus or Buddha or civil rights or 'How to Make Money in Real Estate With No Money Down.' That doesn't make you a human being; it makes you a marketing rep."
Will either of these heavily masculine and emasculating movies make you a better salesman? I don't think so. Oh, they may inspire you with a winning attitude, help you get over some emotional stumbles, or even provide you with some amazing lines to use as part of your pitch. Ultimately, the best thing these two beautiful motion pictures can do is to slip you some great motivation at becoming a better human being. And even if they fail at that, you'll have a wonderful time trying.
Hoffa
They tell me I'll be one hundred next February. Hey, who am I to say how old I am? It's only my life, right? Bitter? You wanna know if I'm bitter? They wanna know, huh? Hell no, I'm not bitter. I'm talking here about the movie. Maybe you saw it. This little big guy directed it, whatever that means. Calls himself DeVito. That's okay with me. You know why? Why is because the name of the movie is Hoffa. That's right. Just like me.
You're saying, I'll bet, that I took my own sweet time getting around to talking about a movie that came out almost twenty years back. Wrong, my friend. Where I am, we get everything at least twenty years behind the times, so the fact that this came to me only a little over nineteen years later is the same as me seeing it on opening night. Walk it off, you don't like it, see?
Is there any truth to it? I gotta say no. Now, do not get me wrong. The writer guy, David Mamet, he's one hell of a scribe, boy, let me tell you. Hey, I laughed out loud when that Bobby Cairo character shoved that piece up against the wop's head and marched into the gangster's VIP room. That's right. I damned near pissed myself when that fucker highway cop dickhead pulled Cairo over for doing ninety on the expressway. Funny? Fuck right, it was funny. Did either thing ever happen? Shit, no. Does it matter? Not a goddamned bit. Why not? I'll tell you, sugar plum. The thing is, you see, it could have happened. Here's what I know about the truth and I think that you should write this down, buddy, because the guy who played me in that movie, that Nicholson character, he was in another movie about the same time where he was yelling that some young punk couldn't handle the truth. You know what I say? I say the truth ain't something that gets handled. The truth is just something that kind of just is. See, by the time I was growing up, we had that World War II thing, so I'll use that as a for instance. Supposing some writer guy says that he was at Pearl Harbor with the Americans when the Japs bombed the shit out of everybody and, hey, he says it didn't bother him much. Even if the facts of that story turned out to be right, it still ain't true because it's something nobody could connect with, like on an emotional level, you see what I'm saying? Other hand, some other writer, he wasn't in Poland during the war, but that don't stop him. He says he was there when they rolled back the walls and peeled them poor Jews out of the boxes and this writer says it changed the way he felt about humanity forever. Even if the guy was making it up, it's stilltrue because a decent guy can understand what he's talking about. Well, that's a long way around the point of saying why I liked the movie about me: it told the truth even if they did fudge some of the details.
One thing nobody ever said to my face--I'm giving you an example here--was nobody ever called me short. Okay, look, I stood five feet five inches and unless you're some naked bow and arrow boy in the outback of Australia, that's usually taken as kind of small. But by God I stood with giants in real life and I stand with them in this here movie. This DeVito guy, kind of short himself, he loaded the picture with all these impressive overhead shots of fights and bombs and shit, most of which I can't say I remember happening quite that way but it don't matter because what we're really talking about is the spirit of the labor movement. Nothing I've ever seen gets any bigger than that, my friend.
It's ants at a picnic is what it is. You got this great big meal being served by the black tie bastards who stole the food right out of some old lady's kitchen. When the ants come around marching up to get their share, what do the black tie people do? They scream about how unfair it is that what they stole gets eaten by those ants. Fuck them black tie sons of bitches. They ain't got no right to that food and they damned well know it.
the only real problem I had with the movie is how it didn't quite speak to the point of how that cocksucker Chuck Colson fucked over the labor movement. See, these gangster politicians--I ain't naming names, but you know who I'm talking about--they don't mind somebody asking real nice and polite for a share of the pie. But when my men and boys and I slam our fists on the table and say we're taking that pie because that old lady the black ties stole it from is our mother--well, hey, that gets people killed, my friend. And the labor movement today doesn't want to get its hands dirty. The damned thing just makes me want to cry to watch it. You got people asking for written permission to go on a march. Fuck that shit. You need a note, you ain't striking for anything. You're defeated before you line up. Hoffa, this movie, it just kind of pays no attention to the big changes that happened after the fucking Kennedys and Nixon locked me up. But, hey, my mother, God bless her, she always said, you lay down in mud, you wake up with pigs. That's the biggest regret I have. Sure, I entangled myself with criminals. Shit, it's no secret that's why what happened to me July 30, 1975 actually happened. I screwed around with the wrong crowd. But I did what I thought I had to do. Maybe it was wrong. I don't think so, but maybe it was. All I know is I never shirked my responsibilities to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. If it meant taking a glass bottle up against my head, that's what I done. If it meant pulling a gun on a cop, I was there. If it meant getting control back of my union--of our union--well, my friend, nobody lives forever, am I right?
So now I can sleep a little easier. I'd seen the shit movie with Robert Blake playing me like I was some fucking Kennedy-killer back in the seventies. Like shit I was. I seen people saying I linked up with Trafficante and Giancana and them boys and it was all a load of dung. All the same, I did know some bad guys and some of those bad guys was thought of as very good guys by the American people when it was in the interests of the American people to think so. Like I say, truth has to connect on an emotional level, am I right?
So go see this thing. I hear you all got computers or something these days. Shit, you don't know who makes half of what you buy. Time was, my friend, when your computer would have traveled to a store on a union truck. Nowadays it comes from fucking China.
You're saying, I'll bet, that I took my own sweet time getting around to talking about a movie that came out almost twenty years back. Wrong, my friend. Where I am, we get everything at least twenty years behind the times, so the fact that this came to me only a little over nineteen years later is the same as me seeing it on opening night. Walk it off, you don't like it, see?
Is there any truth to it? I gotta say no. Now, do not get me wrong. The writer guy, David Mamet, he's one hell of a scribe, boy, let me tell you. Hey, I laughed out loud when that Bobby Cairo character shoved that piece up against the wop's head and marched into the gangster's VIP room. That's right. I damned near pissed myself when that fucker highway cop dickhead pulled Cairo over for doing ninety on the expressway. Funny? Fuck right, it was funny. Did either thing ever happen? Shit, no. Does it matter? Not a goddamned bit. Why not? I'll tell you, sugar plum. The thing is, you see, it could have happened. Here's what I know about the truth and I think that you should write this down, buddy, because the guy who played me in that movie, that Nicholson character, he was in another movie about the same time where he was yelling that some young punk couldn't handle the truth. You know what I say? I say the truth ain't something that gets handled. The truth is just something that kind of just is. See, by the time I was growing up, we had that World War II thing, so I'll use that as a for instance. Supposing some writer guy says that he was at Pearl Harbor with the Americans when the Japs bombed the shit out of everybody and, hey, he says it didn't bother him much. Even if the facts of that story turned out to be right, it still ain't true because it's something nobody could connect with, like on an emotional level, you see what I'm saying? Other hand, some other writer, he wasn't in Poland during the war, but that don't stop him. He says he was there when they rolled back the walls and peeled them poor Jews out of the boxes and this writer says it changed the way he felt about humanity forever. Even if the guy was making it up, it's stilltrue because a decent guy can understand what he's talking about. Well, that's a long way around the point of saying why I liked the movie about me: it told the truth even if they did fudge some of the details.
One thing nobody ever said to my face--I'm giving you an example here--was nobody ever called me short. Okay, look, I stood five feet five inches and unless you're some naked bow and arrow boy in the outback of Australia, that's usually taken as kind of small. But by God I stood with giants in real life and I stand with them in this here movie. This DeVito guy, kind of short himself, he loaded the picture with all these impressive overhead shots of fights and bombs and shit, most of which I can't say I remember happening quite that way but it don't matter because what we're really talking about is the spirit of the labor movement. Nothing I've ever seen gets any bigger than that, my friend.
It's ants at a picnic is what it is. You got this great big meal being served by the black tie bastards who stole the food right out of some old lady's kitchen. When the ants come around marching up to get their share, what do the black tie people do? They scream about how unfair it is that what they stole gets eaten by those ants. Fuck them black tie sons of bitches. They ain't got no right to that food and they damned well know it.
the only real problem I had with the movie is how it didn't quite speak to the point of how that cocksucker Chuck Colson fucked over the labor movement. See, these gangster politicians--I ain't naming names, but you know who I'm talking about--they don't mind somebody asking real nice and polite for a share of the pie. But when my men and boys and I slam our fists on the table and say we're taking that pie because that old lady the black ties stole it from is our mother--well, hey, that gets people killed, my friend. And the labor movement today doesn't want to get its hands dirty. The damned thing just makes me want to cry to watch it. You got people asking for written permission to go on a march. Fuck that shit. You need a note, you ain't striking for anything. You're defeated before you line up. Hoffa, this movie, it just kind of pays no attention to the big changes that happened after the fucking Kennedys and Nixon locked me up. But, hey, my mother, God bless her, she always said, you lay down in mud, you wake up with pigs. That's the biggest regret I have. Sure, I entangled myself with criminals. Shit, it's no secret that's why what happened to me July 30, 1975 actually happened. I screwed around with the wrong crowd. But I did what I thought I had to do. Maybe it was wrong. I don't think so, but maybe it was. All I know is I never shirked my responsibilities to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. If it meant taking a glass bottle up against my head, that's what I done. If it meant pulling a gun on a cop, I was there. If it meant getting control back of my union--of our union--well, my friend, nobody lives forever, am I right?
So now I can sleep a little easier. I'd seen the shit movie with Robert Blake playing me like I was some fucking Kennedy-killer back in the seventies. Like shit I was. I seen people saying I linked up with Trafficante and Giancana and them boys and it was all a load of dung. All the same, I did know some bad guys and some of those bad guys was thought of as very good guys by the American people when it was in the interests of the American people to think so. Like I say, truth has to connect on an emotional level, am I right?
So go see this thing. I hear you all got computers or something these days. Shit, you don't know who makes half of what you buy. Time was, my friend, when your computer would have traveled to a store on a union truck. Nowadays it comes from fucking China.
Pi
Made for only thirty thousand dollars, Pi (1998) takes on some mighty big issues, such as the notion that mathematics can reveal the patterns of life, that a 216-digit number reveals the true name of God, and that even a genius needs a vacation once in a while. Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) seeks what he wants and risks losing what he needs. To that end, this is the same old appliance, a fight for math and science, meaning we've seen the ideas before; that is, we've seen them if we've ever watched any horror movies made prior to the 1970s. Maybe that's why director Darren Aronofsky shot the picture in black and white. That decision certainly did not come with sensuality in mind because the filmmaker eschews such sensations at every turn. And that is ultimately why I have to reject Pi, however much I would have loved to love it, baby.
The stale electronic music contributes a certain emotional vacuity. The performance of Mark Margolis as the wise and retired Sol accomplishes the same. This film is so devoid of anything approximating soul that when a villainous Wall Street type played by Pamela Hart comes rushing in to rob Max of his mind, we sort of hope she'll at least be good enough to fuck him in return. Ah, but no such luck.
I know for a fact that certain wonderful people of my acquaintance swear by this movie, in part because it plays to their intellect and in part because it strokes their paranoia. The movie earns its few good points for both these achievements. But if you're going to steal and update the work of French new wave movie-makers, the least you could do is try to imbue your characters with enough subtlety to be something other than purely annoying. Even the ending, which regrettably we can see coming far in advance, remains a cheat because the genius only gets happiness after brutally harming himself. The suggestion that smart people are too stupid to see the variations for the decimal points may be true, but I'll take my doses of morality from Dr. Suess rather than these guys.
The stale electronic music contributes a certain emotional vacuity. The performance of Mark Margolis as the wise and retired Sol accomplishes the same. This film is so devoid of anything approximating soul that when a villainous Wall Street type played by Pamela Hart comes rushing in to rob Max of his mind, we sort of hope she'll at least be good enough to fuck him in return. Ah, but no such luck.
I know for a fact that certain wonderful people of my acquaintance swear by this movie, in part because it plays to their intellect and in part because it strokes their paranoia. The movie earns its few good points for both these achievements. But if you're going to steal and update the work of French new wave movie-makers, the least you could do is try to imbue your characters with enough subtlety to be something other than purely annoying. Even the ending, which regrettably we can see coming far in advance, remains a cheat because the genius only gets happiness after brutally harming himself. The suggestion that smart people are too stupid to see the variations for the decimal points may be true, but I'll take my doses of morality from Dr. Suess rather than these guys.
Reservoir Dogs
Quentin Tarantino made his fame with Pulp Fiction in 1994. Yet the first I'd ever heard of him was as a screenwriter just a bit later that same year. He'd come up with the story for what turned out to be the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers. I remember being in the theatre and feeling a little amazed as some people walked out during the first ten minutes. In NBK, the concept of "gratuitous" violence loses all context as the camera follows a spinning butcher knife in slow motion while it crashes through a diner window and slices deeply into the back of a fleeing cowboy. The camera hovers directly behind a discharged bullet that spins in mid air before accelerating into the brain of a waitress. Woody Harrelson slashes off an old man's finger and tells him that it isn't nice to point. Everyone in the audience, I feel safe in saying, was disturbed by this seemingly cavalier, mocking attitude toward severe cruelty. Some people decided not to endorse the concepts by sticking around for them. My friend Barb Carlton and I did stick around. After the movie we went to a diner and talked about the film for at least two hours. The movie was saying something about violence, we assured one another. The nasty real life media used sensational scenes from horrific circumstances to feed junk food to the brain and Tarantino and Stone were bashing the media's balls with bricks. That's what Barb and I decided.
What I decided, on my own, slowly and with time, is that Tarantino, however much he denies plagiarism and however much he insists that what he does is to pay homage, what he actually is is a very smart guy who has been absorbing cinematic influences his entire life and the sponge which is his brain soaked up most of its influences from the 1970s. Now, here's the thing: Everybody steals ideas from anybody whose ideas are worth stealing. As Michelangelo is reported to have said, "Where I steal, I leave a knife." I'm not comparing the writer-director of Reservoir Dogs to the painter of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But I am saying that whatever thievery we may suspect Tarantino has had a hand in, most of the time he has excelled where those to whom he "pays homage" have merely tinkered.
I give you The Killing, by Stanley Kubrick, a movie to which Reservoir Dogs is often quite properly compared. The former film came out in 1956 and good as the movie was, Kubrick was still learning his craft at that point and it would be four more years before he actually came out with his first great film, Spartacus. If Tarantino lifted ideas from The Killing, he did more with them than his predecessor.
One of the things that sets Tarantino apart from hack writer-directors is that he has ideas and he knows how to convey them. The story forDogs is not that complex. What is complex is the telling of it. To offer an example of the brilliance: Tim Roth plays an undercover cop. He is learning how to do this job from his supervisor. The supervisor tells him that he needs to learn how to tell a "commode story." We follow Roth around while he practices working up the story that he will eventually use to convince the bad guys that he is as legitimately crooked as they are. He practices the story until he can do it like a man telling a favorite joke. Then, even though the joke is just a big lie, we follow Roth into the bathroom where the nonexistent story never really happened. That idea, my friends, has genius just sweating rivers off it.
The storytelling in Reservoir Dogs is what they like to call nonlinear. That means that it jumps around a bit and doesn't hang on sequencing. Sometimes the film goes off in one direction and lingers there for far longer than we've been conditioned to expect. This idea is right out of the 1970s. I'm thinking particularly of the Woody Allen film Annie Hall. In fact, I could go on all night about all the different influences from the 1970s that help make up this movie and if you've seen the referent points there's a good chance you would agree with me. However, it might be more interesting to look at things a little differently. For example, just the idea of having the villains be the focal point of the movie goes right back to some of the original blaxploitation flicks, such as Superfly and Sweet Badass. That's a little ironic considering the racism of the white guys in Dogs.
The 1970s kicked down the door in introducing streams of endless profanity, horrible violence, anti-heroes, and classical conditioning. Tarantino nicely lifts the fallen door back onto its rusty hinges and then blasts the fucker to smithereens with a rocket launcher.
Excuse me? What did I mean by my reference to classical conditioning? Oh, I'll be happy to explain. Remember how in A Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick (again, I know, again) has Alex the anti-hero condition the writer whose wife is raped to have painful flashbacks whenever he hears the song "Singing in the Rain"? Well, the audience gets conditioned the same way. I guarantee you that anyone who ever saw Clockwork thinks of it when they hear the Gene Kelly tune. So guess what? Yep. Tarantino pulls a real Kubrick on the audience by staging some kind of linking device through the scenes in the form of a 1970s flashback radio station that plays hits from that decade. So whenever we hear "Stuck in the Middle with You" today, we flash on the torture scene in the warehouse. And that's not an accident and it isn't paying homage to anybody. It's a thievery and a damned imaginative thievery at that.
What I decided, on my own, slowly and with time, is that Tarantino, however much he denies plagiarism and however much he insists that what he does is to pay homage, what he actually is is a very smart guy who has been absorbing cinematic influences his entire life and the sponge which is his brain soaked up most of its influences from the 1970s. Now, here's the thing: Everybody steals ideas from anybody whose ideas are worth stealing. As Michelangelo is reported to have said, "Where I steal, I leave a knife." I'm not comparing the writer-director of Reservoir Dogs to the painter of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But I am saying that whatever thievery we may suspect Tarantino has had a hand in, most of the time he has excelled where those to whom he "pays homage" have merely tinkered.
I give you The Killing, by Stanley Kubrick, a movie to which Reservoir Dogs is often quite properly compared. The former film came out in 1956 and good as the movie was, Kubrick was still learning his craft at that point and it would be four more years before he actually came out with his first great film, Spartacus. If Tarantino lifted ideas from The Killing, he did more with them than his predecessor.
One of the things that sets Tarantino apart from hack writer-directors is that he has ideas and he knows how to convey them. The story forDogs is not that complex. What is complex is the telling of it. To offer an example of the brilliance: Tim Roth plays an undercover cop. He is learning how to do this job from his supervisor. The supervisor tells him that he needs to learn how to tell a "commode story." We follow Roth around while he practices working up the story that he will eventually use to convince the bad guys that he is as legitimately crooked as they are. He practices the story until he can do it like a man telling a favorite joke. Then, even though the joke is just a big lie, we follow Roth into the bathroom where the nonexistent story never really happened. That idea, my friends, has genius just sweating rivers off it.
The storytelling in Reservoir Dogs is what they like to call nonlinear. That means that it jumps around a bit and doesn't hang on sequencing. Sometimes the film goes off in one direction and lingers there for far longer than we've been conditioned to expect. This idea is right out of the 1970s. I'm thinking particularly of the Woody Allen film Annie Hall. In fact, I could go on all night about all the different influences from the 1970s that help make up this movie and if you've seen the referent points there's a good chance you would agree with me. However, it might be more interesting to look at things a little differently. For example, just the idea of having the villains be the focal point of the movie goes right back to some of the original blaxploitation flicks, such as Superfly and Sweet Badass. That's a little ironic considering the racism of the white guys in Dogs.
The 1970s kicked down the door in introducing streams of endless profanity, horrible violence, anti-heroes, and classical conditioning. Tarantino nicely lifts the fallen door back onto its rusty hinges and then blasts the fucker to smithereens with a rocket launcher.
Excuse me? What did I mean by my reference to classical conditioning? Oh, I'll be happy to explain. Remember how in A Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick (again, I know, again) has Alex the anti-hero condition the writer whose wife is raped to have painful flashbacks whenever he hears the song "Singing in the Rain"? Well, the audience gets conditioned the same way. I guarantee you that anyone who ever saw Clockwork thinks of it when they hear the Gene Kelly tune. So guess what? Yep. Tarantino pulls a real Kubrick on the audience by staging some kind of linking device through the scenes in the form of a 1970s flashback radio station that plays hits from that decade. So whenever we hear "Stuck in the Middle with You" today, we flash on the torture scene in the warehouse. And that's not an accident and it isn't paying homage to anybody. It's a thievery and a damned imaginative thievery at that.
I am absolutely not here to act as an apologist for Quentin Tarantino. Neither am I here to make his case for sainthood. I am here to say that with Reservoir Dogs (1992), his first major film, he offered audiences something that had been missing from American movies for more than a while. He made them visually compelling. He made them emotionally exciting. And he made them smart. When Messers White and Pink are arguing about what went wrong during the jewel heist, they speak as men who possess a type of surprising street sophistication regarding their chosen occupation. It doesn't matter whether a gang of jewel thieves could actually be this analytic. What matters is that the gang in this movie is.
I think what bothered some people (Roger Ebert comes to mind) about this movie is not so much that Tarantino went over the line with the profanity and the violence. Clearly he did and in the process created a profane and violent gem. What bothers some critics, I think, is their fear that unscrupulous hacks will come along and snatch up influences from Tarantino the way Tarantino did from directors such as Kubrick and DePalma, the latter having stolen his entire oeuvre from Alfred Hitchcock. Well, people are going to do that and I'm sure they have. But the good news is that somewhere there was a kid who watched Reservoir Dogs when it came out on DVD and started really thinking about the ideas of this movie. A kid with talent. A kid who works in a video store. Or for Netflix. And he has this idea. . .
I think what bothered some people (Roger Ebert comes to mind) about this movie is not so much that Tarantino went over the line with the profanity and the violence. Clearly he did and in the process created a profane and violent gem. What bothers some critics, I think, is their fear that unscrupulous hacks will come along and snatch up influences from Tarantino the way Tarantino did from directors such as Kubrick and DePalma, the latter having stolen his entire oeuvre from Alfred Hitchcock. Well, people are going to do that and I'm sure they have. But the good news is that somewhere there was a kid who watched Reservoir Dogs when it came out on DVD and started really thinking about the ideas of this movie. A kid with talent. A kid who works in a video store. Or for Netflix. And he has this idea. . .
Bugsy
One of the true facts about a great movie is that these things tend to focus on a specific person who might be considered anti-social in some circles while the delivery of the film itself whispers theories about a certain kind of society, past or present. If you can live with that criteria, then Bugsy (1991) qualifies as a great movie.
Director Barry Levinson and writers James Toback and Dean Jennings prove themselves to be dreamers not all that unlike the focus of this biopic. Levinson typically aims for the big message, just as he may be expected to do with his forthcoming film about Phil Spector. It isn't easy making a guy who does bad things seem good, as with Benjamin Siegel, any more than it will be to make a guy who did good things appear bad, as with Spector the record producer. But because Levinson worked with two writers who knew their material and because he had Beatty's financial support, he pulled off the surmountable task of portraying a man who boasted of twelve murders to come off as an eccentric many of us might have even liked to have known. By the time the nine bullets burst through the Los Angeles home near the picture's end, we feel as if we know him quite well, despite the movie's focus on the gangster's interest in Las Vegas.
Warren Beatty in the starring role embodies Siegel the dreamer, a man who cares very little for money--the reason all the other mobsters are in the business--but cares tremendously for his friends and even more for "building something," as Ben Kingsley as Meyer Lanskey puts it. What he built, or caused to be built, was Las Vegas, a city that I personally have never cared much for, and yet watching Siegel sweat out the details of the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, you can't help but hope that he manages to swindle all the wise guys necessary just to get the freaking place up and running. A few of the film's details are fudged, but not many, and those that are--the hotel opened the day after Christmas rather than Christmas day itself, and the opening date was changed many times; quite a few celebrities attended the bash and hundreds of townsfolk came out rather than the disappointing turnout featured in the film--those that are, I say, are necessary to move the story along, and this story movies just like any old time gangster picture to which grandpa ever thrilled.
Director Barry Levinson and writers James Toback and Dean Jennings prove themselves to be dreamers not all that unlike the focus of this biopic. Levinson typically aims for the big message, just as he may be expected to do with his forthcoming film about Phil Spector. It isn't easy making a guy who does bad things seem good, as with Benjamin Siegel, any more than it will be to make a guy who did good things appear bad, as with Spector the record producer. But because Levinson worked with two writers who knew their material and because he had Beatty's financial support, he pulled off the surmountable task of portraying a man who boasted of twelve murders to come off as an eccentric many of us might have even liked to have known. By the time the nine bullets burst through the Los Angeles home near the picture's end, we feel as if we know him quite well, despite the movie's focus on the gangster's interest in Las Vegas.
Warren Beatty in the starring role embodies Siegel the dreamer, a man who cares very little for money--the reason all the other mobsters are in the business--but cares tremendously for his friends and even more for "building something," as Ben Kingsley as Meyer Lanskey puts it. What he built, or caused to be built, was Las Vegas, a city that I personally have never cared much for, and yet watching Siegel sweat out the details of the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, you can't help but hope that he manages to swindle all the wise guys necessary just to get the freaking place up and running. A few of the film's details are fudged, but not many, and those that are--the hotel opened the day after Christmas rather than Christmas day itself, and the opening date was changed many times; quite a few celebrities attended the bash and hundreds of townsfolk came out rather than the disappointing turnout featured in the film--those that are, I say, are necessary to move the story along, and this story movies just like any old time gangster picture to which grandpa ever thrilled.
Annette Bening, as Virginia Hill, the gangster's girlfriend, damn near steals the lens in every scene where she appears. Early on she trades lines with Beatty and both of them sound like the cheap Hollywood characters they apparently admire. By the middle of the film, however, this brand of mutual courtship and resistance has faded to black and we find ourselves not caring all that much about the wife and kids back home, a subject that brings us to the only real problem with Bugsy.
Most biographers imply or come right out and say that Benjamin Siegel, for all his charm and panache, was a wild-eyed sociopathic killer. Levinson gets the charm down and he captures the sociopathy well enough. But as seasoned audience members, we tend to prefer that our anti-heroes not come across as clowns. And Beatty breathes very close to Bozo Land on occasion, especially during a long scene at home while he and the wife, Esta (played with painful authenicity by Wendy Phillips), prepare for their daughter's birthday party when who should drop by but Ben Kingsley and a whole bunch of gangsters to whom Bugsy must convince in financing his desert-into-casino idea. Wearing a chef's hat and running or dancing throughout the house, answering phone calls and putting off his little girl, Beatty seems like a skillful buffoon rather than a mad man with a big dream. The scene throws off the darkest shadows of the movie, almost urging us to revisit those sinister moments in a lighter way. Levinson might say he did it that way on purpose. If he did, the effect is less than he might have hoped.
Otherwise, though, Bugsy shines, especially as the title character interacts with not only Bening but with Elliott Gould, playing an old friend named Harry Greenberg who has ratted out many mobsters, although not Siegel himself. When Siegel takes both Greenberg and Virginia Hill for a little ride, we can believe, love and fear every second of the entire Bugsy myth.
Most biographers imply or come right out and say that Benjamin Siegel, for all his charm and panache, was a wild-eyed sociopathic killer. Levinson gets the charm down and he captures the sociopathy well enough. But as seasoned audience members, we tend to prefer that our anti-heroes not come across as clowns. And Beatty breathes very close to Bozo Land on occasion, especially during a long scene at home while he and the wife, Esta (played with painful authenicity by Wendy Phillips), prepare for their daughter's birthday party when who should drop by but Ben Kingsley and a whole bunch of gangsters to whom Bugsy must convince in financing his desert-into-casino idea. Wearing a chef's hat and running or dancing throughout the house, answering phone calls and putting off his little girl, Beatty seems like a skillful buffoon rather than a mad man with a big dream. The scene throws off the darkest shadows of the movie, almost urging us to revisit those sinister moments in a lighter way. Levinson might say he did it that way on purpose. If he did, the effect is less than he might have hoped.
Otherwise, though, Bugsy shines, especially as the title character interacts with not only Bening but with Elliott Gould, playing an old friend named Harry Greenberg who has ratted out many mobsters, although not Siegel himself. When Siegel takes both Greenberg and Virginia Hill for a little ride, we can believe, love and fear every second of the entire Bugsy myth.
The Crossing Guard
Nothing pleases me more than to have been wrong about the work of an actor whose performances I either misjudged or who has a rare moment of inspiration and leaves mute any argument as to his or her talent. David Morse is one such actor and his performance in the 1995 Sean Penn-directed movie The Crossing Guard is the proof.
The movie itself is exploitive as hell and cannot seem to make up its mind between pandering to the intrigue of naked ladies and tawdry sentiment while at the same time demanding to be taken seriously as a contemplative exploration of the terrible and real pain that happens when some schmo blows his mind on alcohol and kills a child in a hit and run moment. These are the kind of moments that not only take the lives of the innocent; they mutilate the lives of the murderers and the loved ones left behind, scrambling up the survivor's emotions like eggs in a blender, so that every kindness is perceived as an attack, every wink is a lascivious grin, everything that used to be genuine is for suckers and nothing matters and what if it did.
Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston, as the parents of the murdered child, act their brains out, as we've come to expect. Their every move in this movie is a study in the skill they bring to their craft. We care about them and even hurt for what they've endured. But it is the character of John Booth (whose name is that of an assassin, of course) as played to the hilt by David Morse who not only steals the show but wraps it up in a bag, throws it in the trunk and drives it across the state line. Morse is the master of the stoic, introspective, slightly bemused stare, a technique we've seen him use endlessly and to lesser effect on television. But here it not only works; it virtually transforms this well-intentioned movie into something more than good intentions themselves can earn.
The other thing that saves this movie from the slag heap is the writer-director's attention to ideas. Penn rubs our noses in the idea that even the killer gets transmogrified by his own actions and that justice isn't necessarily the important thing to seek out in a stupid situation such as driving blind and killing someone. He tells his temporary love interest, played by Robin Wright, that when he got out of his car and saw the little girl in the crosswalk, that she was trying to say something. He moves closer to her and learns to his horror that she was apologizing to him for not looking both ways before crossing the street. Booth then tells that he got in his car and drove until he ran out of gas.
This scene is not only real, it is better than real. It is accurate, which is hardly the same thing. That is precisely what an inherently decent and otherwise uninteresting person in that situation would do, or would want to do, and Morse's hazy obedience to his own instincts fit this concept to perfection.
The bad news is that, for some reason, songwriter-guitarist Robbie Robertson appears in the movie as the new husband. The other bad news is that some of the supporting characters do not get enough to do in The Crossing Guard. Booth's parents feel as if they were added in at the last minute, although the exquisite Piper Laurie and nearly exquisite Richard Bradford do as much as possible with the minute and a half screen time they are allotted. And Robin Wright, as the badly needed love interest, simply has nothing to do but act indifferent to all the turmoil around her.
Funny enough, its the ubiquitous strippers who actually come in a close second to Morse's knack for scene stealing, and not for the reasons you might expect. Kari Wuhrer, Jennifer Leigh Warren and Kellita Smith are the farthest thing from being the cartoon characters with which many films pad their celluloid. As a matter of fact, they add a nice contrast to the repressed and explosive Nicholson. These women convey an unspoken loyalty and--yes, say it--humanity to the movie that can only be summarized by the word sweet. Nicholson gets into a fight with some burly loser in a nice restaurant and two of his female companions actually spur him on while the other shrinks from embarrassment, a stylistic move that makes us laugh while getting us to feel what it must be like to know someone like the dead girl's father.
Will you like this movie? That's hard to say. If you like acting that will often leave you catching your breath and that is enough for you, then yes, yes you will. If you like to be challenged by a filmmaker who places ideas ahead of plot, then certainly this one will encourage you to think hard about the points its raises. But if you're looking for a movie that merges the engaging aspects of entertainment with concerns about a pressing social issue, then you will need to look elsewhere.
The movie itself is exploitive as hell and cannot seem to make up its mind between pandering to the intrigue of naked ladies and tawdry sentiment while at the same time demanding to be taken seriously as a contemplative exploration of the terrible and real pain that happens when some schmo blows his mind on alcohol and kills a child in a hit and run moment. These are the kind of moments that not only take the lives of the innocent; they mutilate the lives of the murderers and the loved ones left behind, scrambling up the survivor's emotions like eggs in a blender, so that every kindness is perceived as an attack, every wink is a lascivious grin, everything that used to be genuine is for suckers and nothing matters and what if it did.
Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston, as the parents of the murdered child, act their brains out, as we've come to expect. Their every move in this movie is a study in the skill they bring to their craft. We care about them and even hurt for what they've endured. But it is the character of John Booth (whose name is that of an assassin, of course) as played to the hilt by David Morse who not only steals the show but wraps it up in a bag, throws it in the trunk and drives it across the state line. Morse is the master of the stoic, introspective, slightly bemused stare, a technique we've seen him use endlessly and to lesser effect on television. But here it not only works; it virtually transforms this well-intentioned movie into something more than good intentions themselves can earn.
The other thing that saves this movie from the slag heap is the writer-director's attention to ideas. Penn rubs our noses in the idea that even the killer gets transmogrified by his own actions and that justice isn't necessarily the important thing to seek out in a stupid situation such as driving blind and killing someone. He tells his temporary love interest, played by Robin Wright, that when he got out of his car and saw the little girl in the crosswalk, that she was trying to say something. He moves closer to her and learns to his horror that she was apologizing to him for not looking both ways before crossing the street. Booth then tells that he got in his car and drove until he ran out of gas.
This scene is not only real, it is better than real. It is accurate, which is hardly the same thing. That is precisely what an inherently decent and otherwise uninteresting person in that situation would do, or would want to do, and Morse's hazy obedience to his own instincts fit this concept to perfection.
The bad news is that, for some reason, songwriter-guitarist Robbie Robertson appears in the movie as the new husband. The other bad news is that some of the supporting characters do not get enough to do in The Crossing Guard. Booth's parents feel as if they were added in at the last minute, although the exquisite Piper Laurie and nearly exquisite Richard Bradford do as much as possible with the minute and a half screen time they are allotted. And Robin Wright, as the badly needed love interest, simply has nothing to do but act indifferent to all the turmoil around her.
Funny enough, its the ubiquitous strippers who actually come in a close second to Morse's knack for scene stealing, and not for the reasons you might expect. Kari Wuhrer, Jennifer Leigh Warren and Kellita Smith are the farthest thing from being the cartoon characters with which many films pad their celluloid. As a matter of fact, they add a nice contrast to the repressed and explosive Nicholson. These women convey an unspoken loyalty and--yes, say it--humanity to the movie that can only be summarized by the word sweet. Nicholson gets into a fight with some burly loser in a nice restaurant and two of his female companions actually spur him on while the other shrinks from embarrassment, a stylistic move that makes us laugh while getting us to feel what it must be like to know someone like the dead girl's father.
Will you like this movie? That's hard to say. If you like acting that will often leave you catching your breath and that is enough for you, then yes, yes you will. If you like to be challenged by a filmmaker who places ideas ahead of plot, then certainly this one will encourage you to think hard about the points its raises. But if you're looking for a movie that merges the engaging aspects of entertainment with concerns about a pressing social issue, then you will need to look elsewhere.
Donnie Brasco
Donnie Brasco (1997) is something of an unusual buddy film in the sense that Al Pacino plays a gangster (What?!? Who would of thunk it?) and Johnny Depp plays the undercover FBI agent who infiltrates the mob and ends up developing some genuine fondness for the hit man, Lefty Ruggiero. The film was based on a book the real life Joseph Pistone wrote about his years in undercover. Paul Attanasio wrote the screenplay. If you don't know Attanasio, you should. He was responsible for developing several excellent television series, including "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "House." Normally, pointing out a writer's connection to TV shows wouldn't be especially relevant. In this case, however, it feels crucial to preparing oneself for this movie.
This should have been a made-for-TV movie, one that would have been at home, as it were, on HBO. That's not a criticism, at least not necessarily. What I mean by that is that the movie hits all the right buttons, just the way we've come to expect on a television show. Depp works deep undercover, although we never really find out what his specific objectives are and I suppose we are not really intended to wonder. All the buddy film cliches are present and accounted for, from the amazing Anne Heche as Pistone's wife Maggie, freaking out over her husband never being home, to the couple's kids growing annoyed with their father for the same reason. Meanwhile, this time out, Pacino's character Lefty is a hired killer with twenty-six hits under his belt, now finding himself reduced to cracking open parking meters to arrange for his tribute to the Brooklyn gang. Depp, of course, has a male shrew for a boss's boss. All of these cliches serve to drive Depp and Pacino together and it must be admitted that we in the audience are unquestionably pulling for these two to stay friends for life. Their chemistry works remarkably well as the fallen patriarch vouches for the new guy.
Because it is a gangster movie, after all, we have to take in some brutality from the hoodlums and frigidity from the law enforcement officers.
Yet I cannot recommend this movie enough for one of the most unexpected of reasons: Actor Michael Madsen, who plays skipper Sonny Black. Madsen does what he usually does--that is, he plays a sociopathic, amoral violence freak. But this time out he really steals every scene in which he appears because he actually believes himself to be Sonny Black. He obviously is in the right company, with both Pacino and Depp being among the two greatest practitioners of method acting. But the beautiful thing about watching Madsen is that, when the camera is on him, we cannot tell what his character is thinking--and that worries the hell out of us because he is such a potentially dangerous guy. Lefty is a killer who is also a dedicated family man. Pistone is a cop who pretends to be a hoodlum. And Sonny Black is a bitter power freak who is doomed to stay in the low ranks of mob activity and resents the hell out of it, as does Lefty, as do all the other gangsters in their crew.
This is a fine movie and God knows it did well at the box office, with world gross of $125 million. I just can't help thinking it would have made a better TV show.
Because it is a gangster movie, after all, we have to take in some brutality from the hoodlums and frigidity from the law enforcement officers.
Yet I cannot recommend this movie enough for one of the most unexpected of reasons: Actor Michael Madsen, who plays skipper Sonny Black. Madsen does what he usually does--that is, he plays a sociopathic, amoral violence freak. But this time out he really steals every scene in which he appears because he actually believes himself to be Sonny Black. He obviously is in the right company, with both Pacino and Depp being among the two greatest practitioners of method acting. But the beautiful thing about watching Madsen is that, when the camera is on him, we cannot tell what his character is thinking--and that worries the hell out of us because he is such a potentially dangerous guy. Lefty is a killer who is also a dedicated family man. Pistone is a cop who pretends to be a hoodlum. And Sonny Black is a bitter power freak who is doomed to stay in the low ranks of mob activity and resents the hell out of it, as does Lefty, as do all the other gangsters in their crew.
This is a fine movie and God knows it did well at the box office, with world gross of $125 million. I just can't help thinking it would have made a better TV show.
Stephen King's Thinner
Because I have spent the last couple days recovering from the experience of watching the movie Stephen King's Thinner (1996), the only way I'm going to get over it is to write it out of my system by way of an overview of the movies that have been made from the writings of our Mr. King and with luck tie the whole matter together by eviscerating the specific film in question, while in the process offering praise where such is due.
Subtracting the short films as well as the portions of his works that were anthologized, we are left with fifty-two motion pictures, most of which were originally displayed in cinema theaters, the rest either going straight to DVD/Netflix or being aired originally on that newfangled device known as the TEE-vee.
First, we have the A-List.
Carrie (1976). No less a personage than the glorious Pauline Kael interpreted the Brian DePalma movie of King's book as something of a dark comedy. I can't agree with that assessment--at least not totally--because I found the movie's overwhelming accuracy in its psychological understanding of adolescence to be painful and mesmerizing, two absolute criteria for a perfect horror film.
The Shining (1980). The novelist and some among his stone fans disapproved in the strongest terms this outstanding Stanley Kubrick film. From occasional flairs of Jungian imagery to false suspense (as when we follow the child up and down the halls on his Big Wheel, expecting the worst, and nothing happens--until it does), this is Kubrick's all-time best movie and often pushes the notion of the horror movie into completely new terrain.
Cat's Eye (1985). Three stories drawn together by the adventures of a tabby. James Wood was never better than as the man who quits smoking. The "message" of this film confused certain filmmakers into believing you could make a scary film without a good-guy protagonist, when in reality there were good guys a-plenty here. They simply weren't perfect. And that made them real.
Silver Bullet (1985). Gary Busey played the perfect drunken, good-natured, cynical uncle and even though this was mostly a kid's movie, it still packed enough verisimilitude to work on multiple levels.
Stand By Me (1986). It's hard to believe such an excellent movie is more than twenty-five years old since this Rob Reiner creation remains as fresh as the day it was released. Four boys on a journey that is as wide and as deep as that of life itself, in this case, a life that has been snuffed out and left to be displayed. Amazing.
Misery (1990). Another gem from Reiner, this being one of the rare cases where the movie stands superior to the novel that inspired it. Kathy Lee Bates was thoroughly convincing as the deranged fan and even James Caan came across as the perfect victim-foil.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994). King's best book has always been Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas. "Rita Hayworth and the Shankshaw Redemption" was the story that made this brilliant movie possible. The movie may have been low on logic, but it made up for that and more with the unflinching emotional courage as conveyed to perfection by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, as well as by a formidable list of support players.
The Green Mile (1999). As difficult as it is for me to sit down and praise a film that stars Tom Hanks, I must admit that director Frank Darabont transformed his own screenplay into a project that worked. It worked, essentially, because of the tragic performance of the late Michael Clarke Duncan.
Now let's look at the B-list.
Salem's Lot (1979). There was only one thing wrong with this otherwise marvelous Tobe Hooper-directed film, but that one thing was enough to banish it to permanent B-film status. The problem was in the casting. James Mason, outstanding as he was, could not carry a four-hour movie all by himself. With Lance Kerwin as the kid and David Soul (of "Starsky and Hutch") as Ben Mears, the adaptation of this scariest of all Stephen King books became a major disappointment for that nation of fans.
Cujo; Christine (1983).
Firestarter (1984).
Maximum Overdrive (1986).
All four of the above movies have something going for them, although we can rule out good acting, smart screenplays, and competent editing. I suppose the main feature--and this is true of all King product that works--is the acknowledgement of the essential nature of friendship, be it between two high school friends, a mother and son, a father and daughter, or a pair of teenage misfit lovers.
Needful Things (1993). Any movie that features both Ed Harris and the late J.T. Walsh has to be at least good enough to make the B-list. Max von Sydow is fair enough as the villain and the plot works--even though far too much of the secondary characters are missing from the novel. But Harris and Walsh are really all that's happening here.
Hearts in Atlantis (2001). There was nothing essential wrong about this movie. Anthony Hopkins carried the day and William Goldman was his usual brilliant self with a commercial screenplay. That's about all that can be said.
The C-List are films that don't really warrant any special comment, a fact which, paradoxically, is why these movies are listed here. Suffice it to say, one can at least endure these movies and possibly even find a few brief moments in which to enjoy them. But that's about all.
Creepshow (1982).
The Dead Zone (1983). [And it kills me, you should pardon the expression, because the novel was amazing!]
The Running Man (1987).
It (1990).
The Stand (1994).
Dolores Claiborne (1995).
The Mist (2007).
The D-List? There's no such thing as a D movie.
The F-List bears some explanation. Many of these movies came and went so fast at the cinema--if they appeared there at all--that most people never really got a look at them in their early days. It is fair to say, however, that none of these have improved with age. Ripened, they may have done, to the extent that without exception, each of these movies stinks to hell.
Children of the Corn (1984). The Ishtar of horror films. When a movie starts out with children in a small town diner slicing open the throats of the adults in the room, a facet the camera sees fit to linger upon in the way that pictures are taken prior to an autopsy, then things are not likely to lift off well from there. They do not. This is the absolute worst of the bunch. And that is really saying something.
Creepshow 2 (1987). I know! Let's pay homage to the great George A. Romero by having him write--but not direct--this collection of three stories that didn't even work all that well on the printed page. That way we can show all those hoity-toity big shot real film school directors how things can be done. Or, maybe we should just flush this rancid bit of gross-out back down the cesspool where it came from.
A Return to Salem's Lot (1987). Once again we have TV actors appearing outside their natural medium and once again the product reeks of arrogance without a cause. Michael Moriarty (who actually is a fine thespian) simply couldn't hold the story together, despite his superhuman attempts to do so. The real abomination here is the disservice done to Tobe Hooper's admirable adaptation of King's wondrous novel.
Pet Sematary (1989). The release of the novel that inspired this dreck was the beginning of a long downward slope for the writing of Mr. King. Not even the music of The Ramones could shake the dirt off this corpse.
The Tommyknockers (1993). The problem with the novel was that just about every time the writer brought a character along far enough to make that person interesting--even compelling--the subject got changed and when we next encountered that character, he or she had lost all the pizzazz. The movie can't even lay claim to being that good. The acting was tolerable, but the storyline about UFOs commanding people to build projects and power them from batteries, coupled with a soundtrack that I imagine was intended to distract the audience from the nonsensical storyline--well, let's just say that television may not be the proper venue for a movie this bad. Perhaps the garbage disposal?
The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999). Answers the musical question: Whatever happened to Sue Snell, one of the survivors of the original movie? Answer: She made the mistake of getting hooked up with director Katt Shea, the latter being the mind behind such twists of fate as Stripped To Kill, Stripped To Kill II (Live Girls), and Dance of the Damned. The only significance of this film is that it furthered the trend of omitting any characteristics with which an audience member (at least the ones who are not sociopaths) could identify favorably. A piece of shit is what this is. And so it shall remain.
I can make no comment as to the merits or lack of same regarding any other Stephen King-cinema-related product because I have either forgotten everything about them or apparently neglected to see them.
There is one exception to the above statement. That exception is the original reason for this over-long piece. That movie is a bit of nastiness called Stephen King's Thinner. It is a movie I very much wish I could forget.
I can think of no better scene than to display just what a lousy job of acting goes on in this movie. If you have ever seen a high school play, then this will look familiar.
Subtracting the short films as well as the portions of his works that were anthologized, we are left with fifty-two motion pictures, most of which were originally displayed in cinema theaters, the rest either going straight to DVD/Netflix or being aired originally on that newfangled device known as the TEE-vee.
First, we have the A-List.
Carrie (1976). No less a personage than the glorious Pauline Kael interpreted the Brian DePalma movie of King's book as something of a dark comedy. I can't agree with that assessment--at least not totally--because I found the movie's overwhelming accuracy in its psychological understanding of adolescence to be painful and mesmerizing, two absolute criteria for a perfect horror film.
The Shining (1980). The novelist and some among his stone fans disapproved in the strongest terms this outstanding Stanley Kubrick film. From occasional flairs of Jungian imagery to false suspense (as when we follow the child up and down the halls on his Big Wheel, expecting the worst, and nothing happens--until it does), this is Kubrick's all-time best movie and often pushes the notion of the horror movie into completely new terrain.
Cat's Eye (1985). Three stories drawn together by the adventures of a tabby. James Wood was never better than as the man who quits smoking. The "message" of this film confused certain filmmakers into believing you could make a scary film without a good-guy protagonist, when in reality there were good guys a-plenty here. They simply weren't perfect. And that made them real.
Silver Bullet (1985). Gary Busey played the perfect drunken, good-natured, cynical uncle and even though this was mostly a kid's movie, it still packed enough verisimilitude to work on multiple levels.
Stand By Me (1986). It's hard to believe such an excellent movie is more than twenty-five years old since this Rob Reiner creation remains as fresh as the day it was released. Four boys on a journey that is as wide and as deep as that of life itself, in this case, a life that has been snuffed out and left to be displayed. Amazing.
Misery (1990). Another gem from Reiner, this being one of the rare cases where the movie stands superior to the novel that inspired it. Kathy Lee Bates was thoroughly convincing as the deranged fan and even James Caan came across as the perfect victim-foil.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994). King's best book has always been Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas. "Rita Hayworth and the Shankshaw Redemption" was the story that made this brilliant movie possible. The movie may have been low on logic, but it made up for that and more with the unflinching emotional courage as conveyed to perfection by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, as well as by a formidable list of support players.
The Green Mile (1999). As difficult as it is for me to sit down and praise a film that stars Tom Hanks, I must admit that director Frank Darabont transformed his own screenplay into a project that worked. It worked, essentially, because of the tragic performance of the late Michael Clarke Duncan.
Now let's look at the B-list.
Salem's Lot (1979). There was only one thing wrong with this otherwise marvelous Tobe Hooper-directed film, but that one thing was enough to banish it to permanent B-film status. The problem was in the casting. James Mason, outstanding as he was, could not carry a four-hour movie all by himself. With Lance Kerwin as the kid and David Soul (of "Starsky and Hutch") as Ben Mears, the adaptation of this scariest of all Stephen King books became a major disappointment for that nation of fans.
Cujo; Christine (1983).
Firestarter (1984).
Maximum Overdrive (1986).
All four of the above movies have something going for them, although we can rule out good acting, smart screenplays, and competent editing. I suppose the main feature--and this is true of all King product that works--is the acknowledgement of the essential nature of friendship, be it between two high school friends, a mother and son, a father and daughter, or a pair of teenage misfit lovers.
Needful Things (1993). Any movie that features both Ed Harris and the late J.T. Walsh has to be at least good enough to make the B-list. Max von Sydow is fair enough as the villain and the plot works--even though far too much of the secondary characters are missing from the novel. But Harris and Walsh are really all that's happening here.
Hearts in Atlantis (2001). There was nothing essential wrong about this movie. Anthony Hopkins carried the day and William Goldman was his usual brilliant self with a commercial screenplay. That's about all that can be said.
The C-List are films that don't really warrant any special comment, a fact which, paradoxically, is why these movies are listed here. Suffice it to say, one can at least endure these movies and possibly even find a few brief moments in which to enjoy them. But that's about all.
Creepshow (1982).
The Dead Zone (1983). [And it kills me, you should pardon the expression, because the novel was amazing!]
The Running Man (1987).
It (1990).
The Stand (1994).
Dolores Claiborne (1995).
The Mist (2007).
The D-List? There's no such thing as a D movie.
The F-List bears some explanation. Many of these movies came and went so fast at the cinema--if they appeared there at all--that most people never really got a look at them in their early days. It is fair to say, however, that none of these have improved with age. Ripened, they may have done, to the extent that without exception, each of these movies stinks to hell.
Children of the Corn (1984). The Ishtar of horror films. When a movie starts out with children in a small town diner slicing open the throats of the adults in the room, a facet the camera sees fit to linger upon in the way that pictures are taken prior to an autopsy, then things are not likely to lift off well from there. They do not. This is the absolute worst of the bunch. And that is really saying something.
Creepshow 2 (1987). I know! Let's pay homage to the great George A. Romero by having him write--but not direct--this collection of three stories that didn't even work all that well on the printed page. That way we can show all those hoity-toity big shot real film school directors how things can be done. Or, maybe we should just flush this rancid bit of gross-out back down the cesspool where it came from.
A Return to Salem's Lot (1987). Once again we have TV actors appearing outside their natural medium and once again the product reeks of arrogance without a cause. Michael Moriarty (who actually is a fine thespian) simply couldn't hold the story together, despite his superhuman attempts to do so. The real abomination here is the disservice done to Tobe Hooper's admirable adaptation of King's wondrous novel.
Pet Sematary (1989). The release of the novel that inspired this dreck was the beginning of a long downward slope for the writing of Mr. King. Not even the music of The Ramones could shake the dirt off this corpse.
The Tommyknockers (1993). The problem with the novel was that just about every time the writer brought a character along far enough to make that person interesting--even compelling--the subject got changed and when we next encountered that character, he or she had lost all the pizzazz. The movie can't even lay claim to being that good. The acting was tolerable, but the storyline about UFOs commanding people to build projects and power them from batteries, coupled with a soundtrack that I imagine was intended to distract the audience from the nonsensical storyline--well, let's just say that television may not be the proper venue for a movie this bad. Perhaps the garbage disposal?
The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999). Answers the musical question: Whatever happened to Sue Snell, one of the survivors of the original movie? Answer: She made the mistake of getting hooked up with director Katt Shea, the latter being the mind behind such twists of fate as Stripped To Kill, Stripped To Kill II (Live Girls), and Dance of the Damned. The only significance of this film is that it furthered the trend of omitting any characteristics with which an audience member (at least the ones who are not sociopaths) could identify favorably. A piece of shit is what this is. And so it shall remain.
I can make no comment as to the merits or lack of same regarding any other Stephen King-cinema-related product because I have either forgotten everything about them or apparently neglected to see them.
There is one exception to the above statement. That exception is the original reason for this over-long piece. That movie is a bit of nastiness called Stephen King's Thinner. It is a movie I very much wish I could forget.
I can think of no better scene than to display just what a lousy job of acting goes on in this movie. If you have ever seen a high school play, then this will look familiar.
Everyone in this movie is an evil layer of rancid detritus. In some movies--even bad ones--a neutral person will become tragic or a good person will weaken or a bad person will turn good. But in Thinner, everyone is rotten from the get-go and they only become worse as time drags on.
A lawyer gets a professional criminal off on a murder rap. After celebrating this victory, the lawyer runs down an old gypsy woman, killing her. We don't care about the lawyer because he's rotten. We don't much like the criminal, except that he's Joe Montegna. The gypsies, led by Michael Constantine, are an arrogant and tortuous bunch, so we don't sympathize much when the old lady bites it. After the coroner's inquest--a fixed affair--the lawyer gets off and Michael Constantine puts a curse on him, causing the obese attorney to lose thirty-to-forty pounds a week--forever.
So we have a stinking lawyer, the lawyer's adulterous wife, an adulterous personal physician who is banging the wife, a corrupt sheriff, a nasty mob boss, a lecherous law partner, a young gypsy woman who has no mercy for anyone, her mother (who gets offed before we find out what kind of person she is), a murderous 106-year-old king who threatens to die with the curse still in his mouth, and the lawyer's kid, the latter being the only remotely likable person in the film and we can't even be sure of that because she is, after all, the lawyer's kid.
When the only way for an a member of the audience to enjoy a movie is to relish in the suffering and cruelty of the actors on screen, then what we have is an inherently evil movie. Not since I Spit On Your Grave (1978) or maybe Caligula (1979) have I seen a movie with such monumentally horrid acting, idiotic storyline, and inherent evilness.
Director Tom Holland's movie should be kept in a transparent time-capsule and set on display at the Center for Science and Industry as a permanent example of just how unrepentantly obnoxious white people can be when they try.
A lawyer gets a professional criminal off on a murder rap. After celebrating this victory, the lawyer runs down an old gypsy woman, killing her. We don't care about the lawyer because he's rotten. We don't much like the criminal, except that he's Joe Montegna. The gypsies, led by Michael Constantine, are an arrogant and tortuous bunch, so we don't sympathize much when the old lady bites it. After the coroner's inquest--a fixed affair--the lawyer gets off and Michael Constantine puts a curse on him, causing the obese attorney to lose thirty-to-forty pounds a week--forever.
So we have a stinking lawyer, the lawyer's adulterous wife, an adulterous personal physician who is banging the wife, a corrupt sheriff, a nasty mob boss, a lecherous law partner, a young gypsy woman who has no mercy for anyone, her mother (who gets offed before we find out what kind of person she is), a murderous 106-year-old king who threatens to die with the curse still in his mouth, and the lawyer's kid, the latter being the only remotely likable person in the film and we can't even be sure of that because she is, after all, the lawyer's kid.
When the only way for an a member of the audience to enjoy a movie is to relish in the suffering and cruelty of the actors on screen, then what we have is an inherently evil movie. Not since I Spit On Your Grave (1978) or maybe Caligula (1979) have I seen a movie with such monumentally horrid acting, idiotic storyline, and inherent evilness.
Director Tom Holland's movie should be kept in a transparent time-capsule and set on display at the Center for Science and Industry as a permanent example of just how unrepentantly obnoxious white people can be when they try.