"...everyone knows, when you make an assumption, you make an ass out of "u" and "umption".

August 1, 2017

I have been fascinated by cult films for a long time. The Danny Peary books really turned my head, and my movie hunger, on to some movies I would have never seen otherwise. Since then, I have kept my ear to the ground on movies that develop a following, even though they may not have done diddly at the box office. Have no fear, some of these will be discussed later on in the 365 Degrees, I am sure. Hey, I actually plotted out a course to several of them, just to be positive I got to talk about them.

Knightriders was one of those. A film nobody really saw at first, until it hit the realm of Blockbuster Video ( yeah, remember them?). 

One, though, I stumbled into because I had four hours to kill before catching a plane from Orlando to Atlanta. If you know anything about me, you know waiting is NOT one of my good traits. My patience level has waned rapidly since the age of… oh… nine? It’s not about instant gratification, not at all. It’s more about the fact that, if I have to wait for any length of time, my mind wanders, sometimes in ways it shouldn’t. I start thinking things like, “That door says, ‘Do Not Enter Under Penalty of Law.’ I wonder what would happen if I opened it, but didn’t ACTUALLY enter…”

But I digress…

I had had a great week in Orlando, my plane didn’t leave until 5 pm, but I had to be out of my hotel by noon. Not enough time to squeeze another theme park in, I didn’t want to hit the outlet mall for the Disney Warehouse Store again, and I damn sure didn’t want to hang out in an airport bar for four hours. So I started driving around in my Dodge Daytona rental (lemme tell you, don’t ever think that was a cool car, no matter how much you love Daytona Beach…), and I found a movie theatre on International Boulevard. A double-screen place, showing two movies. The Glimmer Man, which I refused to see because there is only so much Steven Seagal one man can take in a lifetime, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, which starred Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson. I took the latter choice. Thankfully…

The story is about a schoolteacher named Samantha Caine (Geena Davis.). She lives in a storybook little town in Pennsylvania with her boyfriend, Tom, and her daughter, Caitlin. Samantha was found eight years prior, washed up on a New Jersey beach, pregnant, and totally amnesiac as to her identity. Having never remembered her real name or any sort of detail about her former life, she has hired a number of private detectives to find some answers about her.

During the Christmas holidays, she has a car accident, hitting a deer on a back road. She takes a tremendous blow to the head during the accident. She crawls out of the car and breaks the deer’s neck in a mercy killing, then realizes she had no idea how to do that before. Later, after a brief stay in the hospital, she demonstrates an incredible mastery of knife skills while cooking supper for her family. Obviously, the blow to the head has awakened some part of her previous life, but she has no idea exactly what part. Some time later, a man known as “One-Eyed Jack” breaks out of prison after seeing Samantha on the news, and attacks her in her home. Samantha somehow subdues him with a pie (yes, a pie), and breaks his neck the same way she did with the deer.

Enter Mitch Hennessy (Samuel L. Jackson), one of the many private detectives Sam has hired. He is the first to have found any sort of items or contacts about Sam’s previous life. Sam, being frightened by her prowess in the art of killing, decides to leave with Mitch to explore these contacts, mainly so she will not scare her daughter any more. Mitch gives her a suitcase that was found nearby where she was found in New Jersey. Among the items in the case is a note from a Dr. Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox, our Hannibal Lektor from last night’s movie, and yes, I know it’s spelled different – read yesterday’s post!) Mitch and Sam agree to meet Dr. Waldman in a train station, but en route to the station, Sam finds a disassembled sniper rifle hidden under a false bottom of the suitcase, a rifle she somehow knows how to assemble perfectly and without instruction.

At the station, they are attacked by a number of agents, whom Samantha easily kills. The doctor reveals that Samantha is actually an expert CIA assassin named Charlene “Charly” Baltimore, an agent who disappeared eight years ago. Not knowing if they can trust Waldman, they incapacitate him and take off to find a man named in another note, a man named Luke (David Morse), who, in the note, is called Charly’s “engagement”. As it turns out, though, “engagement,” in this case, does not mean he was Charly’s fiancé. Instead, we find out “engagement” means he was Charly’s last assassination target, a target known as “Daedelus.” Luke kills Waldman and tortures Charly, trying to find out what she knows and where she has been for the past eight years. Instead, the torture flips the last switch on Charly’s personality, and awakens the pure assassin she once was.

Cue the killing on a grand scale, the blood on an even grander scale, and the insane violence on the grandest scale. Charly and Mitch end up trying to stop a plot to set off a nuclear bomb near Niagara Falls, while saving her daughter, Caitlin, from the terrorists who have kidnapped her as a way of making Charly back away. Spoiler alert – it don’t work at all…

I bet, right now, you are sitting there saying, “Damn, that took a lot of time to describe that plot!” Well, when you talk about a script by Shane Black, it is never as easy as 1, 2, 3. Shane Black, whose work I respect like hell, has a knack for weaving the most bizarre plots, with more twists and turns than a corkscrew factory, but, amazingly, they always work! Director Renny Harlin, who was married at the time to Geena Davis, really puts his beautiful bride through all manner of hell in this movie. Suppoosedly, Harlin had Davis force herself to hold her breath underwater for up to five minutes so she could perform her own stunts during the torture sequences. And that’s the tamest thing Davis goes through in this movie.

It has been said that this movie performed so poorly at the box office on its initial run because, while Black had written the script specifically for Harlin to direct and Davis to star in, they were contractually obligated to do Cutthroat Island first, a pirate movie featuring Davis as a swashbuckling pirate queen. When Cutthroat Island bombed horribly, both Davis and Harlin’s stock dropped just as fast as their movie bombed. Nobody wanted to see them teamed  up again, and thus, The Long Kiss Goodnight didn’t make nearly the money it had been projected to make.

It only started to make money when the publicity campaign was retooled to feature Samuel L. Jackson on the posters. Jackson was fresh off his triumphant performance as Jules Winfield in Pulp Fiction, and he was hotter than a two-dollar pistol in box office draws. Once the movie hit pay-tv and the home video market, it took off. People loved the movie, and its reputation grew. People quickly forgot about Cutthroat Island (which is a good thing, because it really sucks…), and Davis and Harlin were forgiven. For a while, at least.

There is so much to love about this movie. If you are a fan of stunt work, you will wet yourself over some of the crazy fight scenes and shootouts. Craig Beirko, who plays the agent who thought he killed Charly eight years ago, is fun to watch. He is just as sarcastic as Charly is serious, and watching him get madder and madder as he continues to fail to kill her is great fun. But the most fun comes when watching Geena Davis lose her cute, quaint schoolteacher persona and morph into her previous persona of Charly Baltimore. Davis’ trademark smile fades from her face and is replaced by a badass scowl. Layers of eyeliner and a bad blonde dye job change her whole appearance from clean-cut and wholesome to a woman you would be scared to ask for a dime, much less a favor.

And, hey, let’s face it, this is Samuel L. Jackson still in Pulp Fiction mode. He’s oddly philosophical about his life, yet he has no qualms about calling himself a ‘bad mother*cker.” Here, though, he finds an even more comical version of his bad MF persona as he is the unwilling straight man to Davis’ freaky transformation. He is often left staring at her in complete shock as she wields some weapon or pulls off some incredible hack job on a bad guy. At times, the only thing that seems to be missing is a good Lou Costello double-take before he runs offscreen.

If you’re looking for a movie you haven’t seen, and really want to enjoy, look no further than The Long Kiss Goodnight. It’s a great script, and a great action movie. And, really, this was the precursor to so many movies now that put a female in the lead of an action movie. Who woulda thought Geena Davis could be an unfeeling killing machine long before Charlize Theron or Scarlett Johansson? And, you know what, she pulls it off in a major way. Give it a shot, you won’t be sorry!

We tried sodium amatol on him three years ago to find where he buried a Princeton student; he gave 'em a recipe for potato chip dip...

July 31, 2017

It has been said by many writers, “If my browser history is ever seen by the police, they will have me in custody within one hour… how many normal human beings have so many serial killer profiles bookmarked?” I for one, would fit the category, hands down. Being a psychology/theatre double major in college, and having degrees in both, trust me, I have studied crazy folks for years. On one rather troubling paper for Abnormal Psych, I had the opportunity to listen to tapes made of Ted Bundy’s interrogations by Florida police. I still get chills thinking about his utter lack of emotion as he described, in great detail, how he systematically raped and murdered young women…

Okay, I had to walk away from the keyboard due to a chilling flashback…

But, all that aside, I will read any book or watch any movie about serial killers, if they are done right, because criminal profiling is fascinating to me. At one point, I wanted to go into the field myself, but, to be honest, I decided I did not want to “get inside” the minds of people like Bundy, because I was leery of not being able to get back out again.

Which brings us to tonight’s movie, Michael Mann’s Manhunter.

In the movie, based on the Thomas Harris book, “Red Dragon,” former FBI profiler Will Graham is living a quiet life in Florida with his wife and son. Then, one day, he gets a visit from his old boss, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina, from last night’s movie). Crawford needs Graham to come back to the job because he has a series of grisly murders to solve, and the FBI cannot find any logical link to any suspect, or even how the murders might be linked, other than by their precise execution.

Graham retired from the job after solving a certain case, one involving a certain genius psychiatrist who was murdering and eating his victims. You may recognize the name – Dr. Hannibal Lektor (yes, I know the spelling is different, we will talk about that momentarily…). Graham solved the case, but not before Lektor sliced him from hip to shoulder trying to escape. A very sleazy reporter named Freddy Lounds (the always watchable Stephen Lang) snuck into Graham’s hospital room , pulled the sheets back, and took photographs for his even sleazier tabloid, "The National Tattler."

Graham accepts the job, tracking down the killer the press have dubbed “The Tooth Fairy,” Studying all the details of the two families who have been slaughtered by The Tooth Fairy, getting into the mindset of the killer, even paying a visit to his old nemesis, Lektor, drives Graham to a mania, one he  recognizes all too well. But, with The Tooth Fairy’s pattern of killing under the full moon, he is on the clock to stop The Tooth Fairy before he can strike again.

I will stop there, aside from a few scenes we will discuss later…

I know, this all sounds very familiar, and it should, because Edward Norton and Anthony Hopkins remade the film to feed all the Hopkins “Hannibal Lecter” fans. Rather, they “rebooted” the film based on the book. It’s hard to call it a remake because this version only has one scene with “Lektor” and it only lasts about five minutes. But, trivia note, when it came time to make Silence of the Lambs, director Jonathan Demme went to Brian Cox to hire him to play Lecter once more time, and Cox was booked solid. But he  did recommend a friend of his for the role, Sir Anthony Hopkins. And a legend was born…

Our film, though, was made in 1986, deep in the heart of Miami Vice and the MTV world, back when MTV actually showed music videos and not incredibly stupid “reality programming.” Indeed, Michael Mann, the director, was the creator and producer of Miami Vice. This movie has all sorts of proof of this, if you needed proof. The colors are very vivid and neon-looking. The soundtrack is very 80’s, when techno was just coming into vogue. You would think this would be a bad thing, but, truthfully, it makes the whole movie seem more… real… somehow. It cuts into your vision and leaves images that stick in your mind long after. The music is understated, yet it seems to set your nerves on edge during the suspenseful scenes.

William Petersen, who was just coming into his own as an actor, long before CSI: Crime Scene Investigation made him a household name, plays Will Graham, and he plays the HELL out of the character. You see the almost direct line he drew, going from this character to Gil Grissom on CSI. He’s calm, he is logical, yet he always seems like he will erupt at any moment. He’s almost Spock-like in his profiling ability, walking around a crime scene at night, with only a flashlight, because that’s how the murderer did it, talking into a tape recorder, sometimes in the second person, as if narrating the murders as they occur. It’s really a chilling thing to witness. Mann directs these scenes very carefully, the camera following Graham at a distance, slowly creeping up to him as he gets deeper into the mindset of The Tooth Fairy, like the camera is readying to pounce like a hidden killer.

Another actor to watch in this is Joan Allen. Now, yes, she is an Oscar-nominated actress with all sorts of acting credentials, but in Manhunter, she was also working in her first major role on film. She plays Reba McClane, a young blind woman who finds herself in a relationship with The Tooth Fairy, not realizing who or what he really is until it is too late. Not to spoil any of the details of the mystery, The Tooth Fairy is a photographer of sorts, in that he enjoys taking photos of his victims in very gruesome poses. To cover his need for low-light photography film (yes, this is back when cameras used film…), he is a regular visitor to the local zoo, where he takes photos of nocturnal animals. Through these connections, he takes Reba to the zoo to witness a Bengal tiger that it under sedation for dental surgery. Reba has never been so close to any sort of wild animal, so she willingly goes. When the veterinarian suggests she touch the beautiful, large creature, she does so. Watching this scene, at only about three minutes in length, it starts innocently. But, through Mann’s direction, it becomes a scene of magnificent sexual tension. Reba’s hands move slowly over the creature as she traces every inch of it, making a mental image of a thing she cannot see. She listens to the heartbeat, she feels the sharp teeth, feels the breath on her fingertips, all the while, The Tooth Fairy stands, watching, longing to be that creature being touched, caressed, fondled. It is an amazing scene, one that plays into the plot later when Reba realizes she has also touched another creature, this one, a deranged homicidal maniac.

When you watch Manhunter, you see a lot of things that were carried over into Silence of the Lambs. Nobody has any real clue why Mann jacked up the spelling of Hannibal Lecter’s name, other than the aesthetic look of the K stuck in the middle of it. Yes, I am one of those people who find names to have a certain look to them… sue me. I love the fact that Frankie Faison is in the movie, because, from Silence on, he was the orderly Barney, the only orderly Lecter seemed to respect (or, at least, didn’t try to take a bite out of) at the mental hospital he was sentenced to. Faison played Barney in every Lecter movie after that. Brian Cox’s Lecter has the same twisted sense of humor, but it is much more freely delivered here, where Hopkins’ Lecter is more malevolent.

If you are a fan of CSI, or Lecter movies, or both, Manhunter is a great watch. If you aren’t, you will be after you see the birth of Gus Grissom and Hannibal Lecter all at once. It seems odd to say, but you might even find yourself looking for the soundtrack for your collection, because it is a tight collection of music, some instrumental, some with lyrics, but all with a sense of calm dread about them.

Go find Manhunter and settle in for a hell of a movie. You might want to keep a light or two on, though. And, let’s just say, you may never feel good about having your pictures developed again…

You two are the dumbest bounty hunters I have ever seen! You couldn't even deliver a bottle of milk!

July 30, 2017

First off… yes… this is late… I fell asleep last night sitting in my office chair, hands on the keyboard… when I woke up, I had typed 80 pages of the letters “S” and “K”… I hate it when I do that stupid kinda stuff. But, when I woke up, I was instantly reminded of a buddy of mine from way back. Brad Moore… he was my running buddy and partner in crime.

One night, after a night of, shall we say, overusing the products of the Jose Cuervo company, I woke up laying across the fork of a tree in his front yard. I somehow had found my way off his front porch, and apparently thought the fork looked like a nice place to rest. To my credit, though, I was the lucky one… Brad was asleep on his front steps, his head on the concrete. He had “road rash” on his forehead for three days…

But, one of the best times we had was when we sat together, sharing another bottle of that evil Mexican cactus juice, watching a movie called Midnight Run.

In the movie, Jack Walsh (Robert DeNiro) is an ex-cop out of Chicago, now based in L.A. as a bounty hunter. He left Chicago after being run out of town by a mobster named Jimmy Serrano, played by the perfectly-cast Dennis Farina. Jack was investigating Serrano, and got framed for drug possession. He left town rather than try to fight the charges. He hates being a bounty hunter, though, but, what else is an ex-cop gonna do? Jack works for a low-life bail bondsman named Eddie Moscone (Joe Pantoliano). In a really bad case of decision-making, Eddie put up the bail for an accountant named Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukis (Charles Grodin), without knowing Mardukis worked for Serrano and had embezzled $15 million from him. Now, Mardukis has jumped bail and has not been seen since. Eddie works out a lucrative contract with Jack to bring The Duke back to L.A., a deal which will give Jack enough money to get out of the bounty hunting business and start a coffee shop, a dream he has had for years. Eddie tells Jack that this will be a “midnight run,” a cinch to complete and boom, it’s done.

Jack finds Mardukis quick enough, trailing him back to his home in New York City. But, getting him back to L.A. becomes a comedy of errors. Plane, train, various cars, a brief stint hobo-ing on a freight train, you name it, Jack and Mardukis try it. It does not help that Moscone’s assistant, Jerry (played by Jack Kehoe, who was Hooker’s friend, Erie Kid in last night’s The Sting), is constantly phoning updates to Serrano, or that FBI agent Alonzo Mosely (the great Yaphet Kotto) wants to find Mardukis and force him to testify against Serrano. Oh, yeah, and Moscone has put Jack’s biggest rival in bounty hunting, Marvin Dorffler (John Ashton), on the case, promising him a pittance of what he was promising Jack.

There is so much to love about this movie. Director Martin Brest took George Gallo’s script and let the script do the talking. The dialogue in Midnight Run is slick and conversational, from Jack and Mardukis and their constant arguments, to the hilarious tirades of Jimmy Serrano to his lawyers and his two goons. And even so, now and then, we get actual moments of emotion and even tenderness, especially in  the scene when Jack, stranded with The Duke in Chicago, has to confront his ex-wife for a loan, and sees his beautiful young daughter for the first time in years.

I mean, look, it almost goes without saying that DeNiro can work a script like Michelangelo worked a slab of marble. But this was one of the first times he had been in a true madcap comedy. Pairing his gruff guy stereotype with Grodin’s dryer-than the-Mojave delivery of almost every line was a moment of genius. The madder Jack gets at The Duke, the more sarcastic The Duke gets, which only makes Jack madder still, which, in turn… well, you get the picture.

When the film’s major storylines all come together, Serrano hunting The Duke, the FBI hunting The Duke, Jack wanting to take Serrano down, and Eddie about to lose everything because Jack has not turned The Duke in yet, it’s really a tight suspenseful scene. You find yourself leaning forward in your seat, ready for anything to happen. And, folks, that is good filmmaking.

I want to put an added bonus props out to John Ashton in this movie. I know, you may remember him from the Beverly Hills Cop movies as Taggart, but in this movie, he really shines as a comedic actor. I have seen him do some very understated work in movies like Some Kind of Wonderful and, lately, in Gone Baby Gone, but he is a top-notch comedian in this movie, from slapstick to the almost Howard Hawks-type flying dialogue, like we were given in the near-perfect His Girl Friday. I would love to see him work in a Barry Sonnenfeld movie, where he could do both the physical comedy and the tight dialogue. Hey, Barry, take note!!!

Run to your Netflix or Amazon Prime and put Midnight Run on your list. Be careful of what you put in your mouth during the movie, though, because it will probably end up all over your TV screen… 

You have to keep this con even after you take his money. He can't know you took him...

July 29, 2017

When I was around ten years old, and had just started my addiction to everything about movies, my father dropped his newspaper one night and said, “Come on, get in the car.” Well, me, being me, was certain I was being driven somewhere to be sold to the Gypsies or taken to a place who punished acts better than parents. But I got in the beloved family station wagon (don’t get me started…) and we left the house. I relaxed tremendously when my father stopped downtown at the world-famous-all-over-my-hometown Alamo Theater. I looked up at the marquee and saw the weirdest title of a movie I had seen up to that time.

My father had taken me to a re-release of The Sting.

If I had only been a rookie movie fanatic before, I became a lifelong movie addict after that night...

The story is, on the surface, a simple one. Johnny Hooker, played by Robert Redford, accidentally pulls a big-money con on Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw). Lonnegan is a hardcase Irish crime boss, and he is rather ticked off that his money got stolen by anyone, much less a small-time grifter. He sets out to get rid of the man who wronged him. When Luther (Robert Earl Jones, the father of James Earl Jones), one of Hooker’s partners is beaten to death, Hooker gets the hell out of town and heads for Chicago. Luther has told Johnny that he is ready for the big time, and had given him the name of the best con man in the world, a man known as Henry Gondorff.

Gondorff (Paul Newman) has been in hiding since pulling a major real estate scam on some heavy-hitting politicians, but, out of respect for Luther, he partners up with Hooker to take Lonnegan down once and for all. He gathers up all of his old team, including the wonderful Eileen Brennan as Billie, a small-time madam and con artist in her own right, Ray Walston as J.J., the fastest talking con man ever, and Harold Gould as Kid Twist, the most dapper grifter known to man. The team sets out on a broad con job, but things get complicated when Lt. Snyder, a Joliet, IL police lieutenant (played by Charles Durning, from last night’s movie) who has been after Hooker for years, shows up. But, Gondorff figures out a way to take both Snyder and Lonnegan down, and making it away scot-free. 

Or so they think…

Lord, where to begin with this movie. ..

The casting was a re-pairing of Newman and Redford, who had struck gold together in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Director George Roy Hill had directed the two in Butch and Sundance, and knew how well they worked together. When David. S. Ward’s script fell into their hands, angels from Heaven played the Hallelujah Chorus on their harps. Okay, I went a bit overboard there… but it was, indeed, the perfect mix of talent, all coming together at once. When Robert Shaw was added to the mix, well, that was the cherry on the top of the beautiful cake…

The decision to use Scott Joplin’s ragtime music, as adapted by Marvin Hamlisch, was a stroke of genius, even though the music predates the date in the film by almost 25 years. Joplin’s music captures the t secret about the soundtrack, though. While most everyone knows “The Entertainer” is, basically, the theme song for The Sting, there is a piece of music that is a real heart-grabber on this soundtrack that few people pay attention to. It is called “Solace,” and, as arranged by Hamlisch, it is just… damn… I mean, it does not let you go. (It turns up in the videogame Bioshock, too… surprise!!!). I don’t normally add a link to music in these midnight writings, but, in this case… enjoy…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOwachalNNw

For reasons of spoiler-ship, I will not discuss the last half-hour or so of the movie, except to say this – When David S. Ward first started pitching the script for The Sting around Hollywood, he refused to tell the studio bosses how the movie ended, unless they promised to read the entire script. When they argued, he told them, quite bluntly, that, should his ending show up in any way, shape, or form in any other movie made in the next three years, he would sue them so hard their studio name would be Ward Studios before the last gavel rang down. Three studios threw him out of their offices. Universal, however, promised. Producer Tony Bill, who you may remember as studio boss Terry Hawthorne in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and his partner, producer Julia Phillips, jumped on the script and hid as many details as possible from the Hollywood press, so as to keep the secret. And, folks, when that secret ending hit screens, people actually yelled out in surprise in the audiences. How often has that happened since 1973? That being said, yes, it IS that great a plot twist…

Because I love this movie so very much, I am gonna throw a few little trivia tidbits at you. Feel free to use them at the water cooler, the bar trivia contest, or to win a few bets…

One – the diner used in the movie, where Hooker meets up with Lonnegan, is on the Universal backlot. If it looks vaguely familiar when you watch the movie, you might know it as the same diner where Marty McFly meets his 50’s-era father, George McFly in Back To the Future...

Two – in numerous scenes, Robert Redford uses his right hand very awkwardly. One notable instance comes when he is eating lunch in a diner, and holds his fork with four fingers and his thumb stuck straight out. Some thought it was a Redford character bit, showing Hooker didn’t have the class or manners of his other con men. In actuality, Redford had broken his right thumb in a skiing accident a couple of months before, and was supposed to be in a cast. When necessary, he had the cast sawed off and used the hand as best he could, and once the scene was over, an on-set doctor would recast the hand until it was needed again…

Three – Actor Sterling Hayden had been the first actor offered the role of Doyle Lonnegan. He turned it down because he didn’t want to shave his beard off. As a result, Robert Shaw was offered the role. Two years later, Sterling Hayden was offered the role of Quint in Jaws, and, because of financial complications (he owed a ton of money to the IRS), he turned the role down. Again, Robert Shaw was offered the role…

Look, I can’t imagine anyone who reads blogs about movies having not already seen The Sting at least once. But, do yourself a favor. As the weekend approaches, set aside a couple of hours and watch The Sting again. You will find yourself lost in the story within 15 minutes, and you won’t move until the end credits roll… 

... and you want to know the worst part? You're from out of state...

July 28, 2017

I’m gonna tell you a story. When I was a young high school student, I had the opportunity to go to a movie premiere. It was going to be held at The Fox Theatre, the beautiful old movie palace in Atlanta. The Fox was fresh off a multi-million dollar renovation, and the movie premiere was going to be a star-studded event. But, as fate would have it, my high school was in the playoffs for the AAAA Division Championship. They had pulled out a couple of miracles, and were set to go all the way. Wanna guess what night the game was to be played?

You guessed it. The same night as the movie premiere. Well, this writer flat-out said he was going to the movie premiere, and damn any high school football game. Well, lemme tell you, you woulda thought I had spit on the American flag, burned a Bible, and took a dump on an apple pie. My friends were FURIOUS with me for choosing a stupid movie over “COUGAR PRIDE!!!!”  So, bowing to peer pressure, I let my seat go at the premiere, and went to the game.

My team lost 42 – 12 in a freezing sleet storm… and I missed going to the world premiere of Sharky’s Machine.

Yeah, some things stick with you. That one feels like it is branded to my forehead…

Sharky’s Machine, based on the book by William Diehl, stars Burt Reynolds, who also directed the movie. He plays Thomas Sharky, a narcotics cop in Atlanta who is demoted to the Vice Squad after his incredibly stupid buddy blows a major bust, the results of which gets a couple of people killed. He accepts the demotion, but he damn sure ain’t happy about it.

He quickly finds himself involved in an investigation of a high-priced prostitution ring, run by a mysterious man only known as “Victor.” He gets his other vice cops behind him, forming a team (the title-mentioned “machine”) to crack the case. His team is made up of a grizzled old veteran cop named Poppa (the always-wonderful Brian Keith), a very metaphysical cop named Arch (Bernie Casey), the head of the vice division, Lt. Friscoe (Charles Durning), and Sharky’s friend Nosh, an expert in electronic surveillance (played by Richard Libertini, from last night’s movie). Along the way, they are joined by forensics expert Barrett, played by John Fiedler.

When they manage to capture one of the prostitute’s murder on film, the case becomes much more intriguing than they counted on. Adding to this intrigue are the governor of the state, Donald Hoskins (Earl Holliman), a gorgeous lady of the evening named Dominoe (yes, the spelling is important…), played by the simply beautiful Rachel Ward, and a sincerely drugged-up hit man named Billy, played by the always evil-looking Henry Silva. And did I mention Rachel Ward pretty much defines "breathtaking" in this movie? 

Many people scoffed when it was announced that Reynolds was going to direct himself, especially in a tough, no-nonsense crime thriller like this. Reynolds was at the peak of his career, one built on movies like Smokey And The Bandit, Hooper, White Lightning, and (one of my personal favorites of his) The Longest Yard. All were box office hits, and Reynolds was the number one star in the world. Why would he even think of leaving the formula of all his hits to not only star in, but direct himself, in a gritty crime drama where he can’t flash is magazine-cover smile and give his trademark laugh?

Well, I’m here to tell you, folks, Reynolds directed himself in one of his best performances, and also directed one hell of a good movie. There are no hiccups here, no crappy casting decisions, and no self-adoration shots of himself looking studly. Instead, he almost steps back and becomes the straight man to his other actors, letting them have the humorous scenes while he stands back and does reaction shots. One scene in particular, he and Bernie Casey are standing in a window, observing a prostitute’s apartment across the street, talking about this and that. The subject comes up about being shot at, and Casey starts telling a story about a time when a perp pulled a gun on him and fired, but somehow missed every shot. Casey gets all Buddhist and mystical, talking about how he felt himself vanish and move behind the perp, away from the shooting, and re-appearing behind him. While this goes on, Reynolds, who could have easily dome some facial mugging and stolen the scene, simply stands there, occasionally glancing over at Casey with a “what the hell are you talking about” look on his face. When the story is over, he allows himself an eyebrow raise and a quick one-liner, but that’s it. It’s a very disciplined move for Reynolds to make, given his recent roles as “funny clown.”

I have to dance around a major plot point, for fear of spoiling a major twist. Let’s say it this way. Sharky ends up in a plotline much like the film Laura, the classic film directed by Otto Preminger. While many view Sharky’s Machine as “Dirty Harry Goes to Atlanta,” Reynolds allows himself to show a deep amount of emotion, something sadly missing from most of his other movie roles, through this plotline. Again, it’s a brave decision, to show his character as simply human rather than a super-cop who feels nothing other than the need to blow criminals away and holster his gun with some silly one-liner. And did I mention Rachel Ward is gorgeous? Oh... sorry... 

A side note… while I did miss going to the premiere, I did get to see the final stunt, a record-breaking (at the time) fall from the Hyatt Regency Downtown. It took two hours of waiting behind barricades to legendary stuntman Dar Robinson come crashing out of a window some 200 feet up and fall to street level and hit a huge airbag. I have been fascinated by stunt work ever since, and think it is a crime that there is not an Oscar category for Best Stuntwork. Here endeth the soapbox preaching…

A second side note… very few movies these days have a soundtrack like Sharky’s Machine did. From the opening scene, with Randy Crawford and the Crusaders’ “Street Life” to the Julie London recording of “My Funny Valentine,” and from Doc Severinsen’s incredible trumpet work on “High Energy” to the INCREDIBLE Joe Williams’ “8 to 5 I Lose,” every song fits each scene it is intended to like a glove. If you can find this soundtrack, buy it. I guarantee you it will become a regular run on your playlists.

I know I am not telling a lot of details in this, but, honestly, I can’t. I have sworn myself not to be a spoiler, and I will not start now. Instead, go find Sharky’s Machine and watch it for yourself. If you are a fan of well-made police dramas, crime thrillers, or both, you will be beyond satisfied. Reynolds was never as good in a movie again, until Boogie Nights finally earned him the Oscar nod he should have gotten for Sharky’s Machine. Yes, I said it… and I meant it… 

SERPENTINE!! SERPENTINE, SHELLY!!!

July 27, 2017

Tonight, we are going to talk about genius. It happens rarely in film, when every moment of a movie clicks into place, like a celluloid jigsaw puzzle, and the final picture is a masterpiece. Sure, it happens with drama. It happens in westerns, in film noir, in suspense. But, in comedy? It’s often an “almost but no cigar.” But in 1979, when Arthur Hiller decided to direct Andrew Bergman’s screenplay for The In-Laws, there was a star in the east, and the cries of “Eureka!” were heard throughout the land

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Okay… I got a bit carried away, but The In-Laws is quite possibly the most perfect madcap comedy since Chaplin put his derby on and picked up his bamboo cane.

The story begins as respected New York dentist Sheldon Kornpett, played by Alan Arkin, readies himself for his daughter’s wedding. It’s almost the wedding day, and the Kornpetts have yet to meet the father of the groom. A dinner party is set for the two sets of parents. And we are introduced to Vince Ricardo, played by Peter Falk. Vince claims to be a travel agent. He has stories that are so incredibly unbelievable, though, that it quickly becomes obvious that even his own family has no real idea what Vince does for a living. I mean, the man tells stories about tsetse flies, with beaks, no less, large enough to carry off small children??? What damn travel agent would be caught dead in a place like that???

Sheldon immediately decides his daughter is NOT marrying into a family like that, but, reason takes over, and he acquiesces. He agrees to be friendly with Vince. When Vince shows up at Sheldon’s office, asking if Sheldon might do him a small favor, “just fifteen minutes, tops,” Sheldon leaves with Vince. Within minutes, he is breaking into Vince’s office, being shot at by black-suited thugs, chased down a fire escape, and hiding behind a taxi cab while the thugs continue to shoot at him. It turns out Vince is a CIA agent who may or not be on a rogue mission to help a Central American despot ruin the world’s financial markets. All in a day’s work, huh?

Sheldon and Vince end up taking a charter flight with Vince’s buddies, Billy and Bing Wong. One of the funnier moments of the movie occurs when Bing Wong, played by James Hong (last night’s David Lo Pan, the villain from Big Trouble in Little China), goes through the entire pre-flight safety lecture in Chinese, while Sheldon simply stares at him, not understanding a word of it. They end up in a small Central American dictatorship, where they are to meet Senator Jesus Braunschweiger, who is immediately gunned down, leaving Sheldon and Vince to flee in his BMW with four flat tires.

I will leave the rest of the story to your pleasure. You will thank me later…

The immediate detail you will notice upon watching this movie is the fantastic job Alan Arkin does at playing the straight man to Peter Falk. Falk almost never stops talking, whether it be to Arkin, a lunch counter waitress, a cab driver, or even himself. Arkin’s job is to simply react to the insanity going on around him and repeat what Falk says when Falk goes over the top. Arkin is a master at facial expressions in comedy, but here, he earns his doctorate. That being said, Falk earns the same degree, but in a different category. His doctorate comes in the field of… well… never giving a damn. Vince Ricardo lives in a world of chaos, a chaos he often causes, but he never gets upset, or crazy, or even stressed about it. The world is crashing down around him constantly in this movie, but rather than worry about it, he asks a lunch counter waitress if “this coffee is freeze-dried, because it is wonderful.” Sheldon is completely losing his mind about the possibility of being killed, and Vince assures him that, once they get to the dictator’s palace, they will have the honored state dish of some sort of chicken sandwich, and goes into great (and reportedly improvised) detail about how they prepare the chicken, what spices they use, the bread the sandwich is made with. All the while, Sheldon is staring at him, wondering how in the hell he wound up in this situation to begin with.

The other incredible performance comes from Richard Libertini, who plays dictator General Garcia. For lack of a better way of stating it, General Garcia is whacked out. I mean,  Garcia is nuts, completely nuts. He collects “art,” in the form of black velvet paintings. He has redesigned the flag of the country, adding his image and that of a naked prostitute, who is supposed to represent ‘the oppressed masses.” His great contribution to his country’s arts is his hand puppetry. Hand puppetry, in that he has conversations with his hand, on which he has drawn eyes and a mouth. According to Vince, his people adore the routine. Sheldon simply stares at the general, his hands covering his mouth in order not to either laugh out loud or scream in terror.

This movie starts off with a bang (literally), and it really never stops. You may get a calm minute or two, but the movie is only resting, gathering its breath for the next manic sprint. As we near the end of the movie, you are offered a detail (which I will not offer), a detail that sets your mind to wondering exactly why it occurs. When you find out why, you suddenly realize that Vince might just not be as crazy as he seems. A method in the madness, as it were. That payoff works so brilliantly you almost want to sit back and sigh once the movie is over, not unlike after, shall we say, a moment of passion.

It has been said that Brando was such a fan of this movie, he would call Arkin up late at night and do Sheldon’s lines back to Arkin over the phone. He also swore that, if he ever got a chance, he would work with Bergman on any script he was offered. The story goes that Bergman found out about this, and began work on a script that would become The Freshman, in which Brando did, indeed, play the lead, playing a very comedic send-up of his Godfather role of Vito Corleone. In this case, the Mafia boss was Carmine Sabatini, also known as “Jimmy the Toucan.” That film, by the way, is also damn near perfect…

Find The In-Laws and watch it immediately. Do NOT get suckered in and watch the horrific remake starring Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas. If you need to know how bad the remake was, supposedly, Alan Arkin and Peter Falk met in a bar and got rip-roaring drunk, laughing about the reviews of the remake, and celebrating the fact that the reviews said more about how wonderful THEIR original movie was than about how bad the remake was…

Throw The In-Laws in the player and sit back and enjoy. If you’ve never spent two hours laughing so hard you weep, you are in for a treat. And, for the record, you will find the word “SERPENTINE!!!” becoming a part of your vocabulary for the rest of your life…

It's all in the reflexes...

July 26, 2017

You didn’t honestly think today’s movie was gonna be linked by anyone else other than Kurt Russell, did you? I mean, I have never made a secret of my man-crush on Kurt Russell’s INCREDIBLE head of hair. I envy the man his coiffure. I mean, even in Backdraft, he was working a damn CREW CUT and it looked perfect on his head. And when he grows facial hair for a movie, IT IS ALWAYS THE COOLEST LOOK on him… no matter what version he has. It’s enough to make a ginger like me want to spit…

I will admit, it was a challenge, though, trying to decide which Kurt Russell movie to talk about. After much consideration, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I decided to go with Big Trouble in Little China.

I mean, let’s face it. It don’t get much better than Jack Burton and the Pork Chop Express…

Russell plays Jack Burton, a ne’er-do-well truck driver, a regular guy who spends most of his time on his CB radio, spouting out platitudes on life to whomever is listening. He heads into Chinatown to spend an evening with his buddy, Wang, whose father runs a restaurant. Wang asks Jack to drive him to the airport to pick up his bride-to-be, a gorgeous young Chinese girl with even more gorgeous green eyes. At the airport, though, she is kidnapped by a gang of Chinese hoods. Jack tells Wang he will help get her back.

Enter Gracie Law, a young lawyer who does a lot of immigration work in Chinatown. She was at the airport picking up a young woman, new to this country. She witnessed the entire event, and wants to help. Oh, did I mention she also has gorgeous green eyes?

Jack and Wang, in Jack’s big rig truck, “The Pork Chop Express,” find themselves slap damn in the middle of a gang war, stuck in an alley while two bands of Chinese warriors duke it out with all manner of weapons. Suddenly, a very duded-up man in full Chinese lord attire appears, along with three of his henchmen, and all hell breaks loose.

Turns out that the Chinese lord is David Lo Pan, an ancient warrior from  the ‘motherland,” who needs the blood of a green-eyed woman to bring him back from the ethereal plain and make him human again. If this occurs, he can use the power of his evil magic to take over the planet. And it’s up to Jack Burton to save the world. God help us…

It would be a week’s worth of writing to try and say why this movie has become such a worldwide phenomenon. It didn’t do much at the box office, but, thanks to the world of home video and HBO, it caught on and became a cult sensation. It’s funny, it’s got action, it’s got a smart-ass hero, I mean, what more could you possibly want??

Director John Carpenter was just coming off his huge box office triumph, his remake of The Thing, his second outing with Kurt. Carpenter had written the screenplay for Big Trouble as a western, but quickly adapted it to the modern-day, and Russell signed on to play Jack. As we know now, the combo of Carpenter and Russell was a perfect blend, no matter what the genre was. Russell has said in interviews that, when he works with Carpenter, he feels like he is playing John Carpenter on screen. That feeling seems to be mutual, because the two have made great films together. If Russell feels like he is playing Carpenter, Carpenter must feel like he is just directing himself. In any case, it works damn well.  Starting with Carpenter’s masterful TV-movie Elvis, with Russell in the title role, they seem to work flawlessly as a team.

The script is full of one-liners that only make Jack Burton look, by turn, heroic, triumphant, dumber than hell, and scared to death. When an old Chinese magician named Egg Chen, played by Victor Wong, convinces Jack that his destiny lies in this adventure, the look on Jack’s face goes from confidence to confusion to “where the hell is the door” in moments. Yet, Jack stubbornly joins in the fight, if only to get his truck back from the “little guy with the yellow eyes.”

This is also one of Kim Cattrall’s first movies. Well, one of the first where she didn’t have to strip and howl like a dog while she has sex, like she did as the female gym teacher in Porky’s. She shows some great delivery of her lines and a perfect sense of timing, firing off insults at Jack, while trying desperately hard to NOT show her attraction to him.

After multiple viewings of this film, it finally dawned on me why the character of Jack Burton hooked so many people on this film. Jack is me. He is you. He is the regular guy, thrown into a ridiculously strange situation, and he reacts to the insanity like we do. He doesn’t grit his teeth and just do heroic stuff. He freely looks at others around him and says, “What the hell is that??” and “Aww, come on, seriously?” as magic lightning bolts and whirling floating eyeballs fly by him. While Egg Chen and his band of fighters just accept what is going on, Jack looks over at Wang, as if to say, “I am going to kill you for getting me into this shit.”

I do want to throw out a special kudo to James Hong. He plays David Lo Pan, the mystical ancient warrior. He does not play him like a monster, but, rather, like Carpenter says in the special edition commentary of the movie, like he is having the time of his life. And that is easy to see in Hong’s performance. Everybody in this movie looks like they are having fun, but Wong, playing the villain, could have played it all Bond-Bad-Guy and super-serious. But even he has some great comedic moments, whether it’s giggling like mad when he gets his first taste of green-eyes-woman blood, or trying to be cool once he has his human form, talking smack to Jack Burton. During his epic magic duel with Egg Chen, he makes some of the funniest sounds as his force moments, the way Bruce Lee would scream out as he punched. Wong, however, does not scream. Instead, he makes these… noises… well, I will let you see and hear them for yourself. Safe to say, it ain’t Bruce Lee.

I don’t usually recommend a specific version of a movie when I do recommend a movie, but, in this case, find the DVD or Blu Ray that has the special commentary by Russell and Carpenter. Watch the film itself first, then watch it with their commentary going. Why? There are some nice insights here and there, but mainly, listen to the two of them enjoying the hell out of their movie. Russell’s infectious laugh as Carpenter tells some little tidbit of trivia, while they are watching the film is almost more fun than the movie itself.

No matter what, though, watch this movie. If you’ve seen it before, see it again If you’ve never seen it before, shame on you. You have missed a true cult classic, and you will become one of the cult after one viewing.

That sure looks like a mile of cars to me...

July 25, 2017

Let’s talk politics tonight. Just a little. No Donald the Hutt, I promise. Instead, let’s talk other celebrities running for office. I’ve seen Fred Grandy from Love Boat end up in the US Senate, along with Sonny Bono. I’ve seen Ronald Reagan in the White House. I’ve seen Al Franken go from Saturday Night Live to grilling a certain unnamed orange president’s cabinet appointees like a cook at a busy Waffle House. But, despite all those guys, the one I would have voted for in a New York minute was Kurt Russell as Rudy Russo in Used Cars.

Rudy Russo is a used car sales man, working for a very nice guy named Luke Fuchs, played by Jack Warden. Rudy needs money for a run at the State Senate, so he asks Luke for $10,000 to get into the election. Luke agrees to lend him the money, but, before he can actually give it to him, Luke’s brother, Roy L. Fuchs, also played by Warden, arranges an “accident” to get Luke’s bad heart to finally give up on him. It seems Roy L., who is Luke’s main competition in the used car business has his lot directly across the highway from Luke. Roy L. has found out that the new interstate is going in, and the mayor has forewarned Roy L. that it will be cutting right through his property. Roy L. needs Luke out of the way so he can inherit Luke’s car lot and move his much more successful business onto Luke’s property, so he can catch all the interstate traffic.

Rudy and his co-workers find Luke’s dead body, and, to keep Roy L. from taking over, they hide the body and tell Roy L. that Luke went off on a fishing trip. When Luke’s estranged daughter shows up, though, things go from panic to manic. She finds out the truth, and fires Rudy and his friends. She tries to make the lot a go of it, but Roy L. steps in and has her first commercial edited to become a case of false advertising. It is up to Rudy and his pals to save the car lot and put Roy L. out of business.

This movie was written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the duo who would later go on to write Back To the Future. It was also directed by Zemeckis, only his second feature as a director after I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Steven Spielberg acted as the executive producer for both films, and has since been very cooperative with Zemeckis productions. I say that, though, to say this – this is as far removed from a stereotypical Spielberg movie as you can get. It is rude, crude, vulgar, and it is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen.

Russell was just breaking the final ties to his Disney film career when he made Used Cars. And Russell makes the most of it here. He ain’t squeaky clean Dexter Riley anymore, folks. He smokes, he is foul-mouthed, he is conniving, he is greedy as hell, and he will do whatever it takes to get this $50,000 to bribe his way into the State Senate election, even if it takes hijacking a Presidential Address broadcast for one of the most outrageous used car ads in television history. One great moment comes as he works the lot at opening time, going from customer to customer, introducing himself after asking the customer their name. When he learns their name, he immediately adopts a last name to match the ethnicity of the customer. In one 60-second period, he changes his own last name to O’Brien, Garcia, and, the best, after meeting an African-American couple, Rudy Russo becomes Rudy Washington Carver. 

Besides Jack Warden being superb as Roy L. and his dead brother Luke, the rest of the supporting cast is top-notch. Frank McHugh, who was one of the homeless guys living in Cannery Row, is hysterical as Jim the Mechanic, a crude, foul-mouthed, but lovable goof. Deborah Harmon, as Luke’s estranged daughter, Barbara, is fun to watch as she struggles to stay honest in one of the most dishonest careers known to man. Look for Laverne and Shirley’s “Lenny and Squiggy” as Freddie and Eddie, the two guys who help Rudy hijack the airwaves for the most politically incorrect TV commercials ever made. And look for Al Lewis, Grandpa Munster himself, as the judge who has to decide if Barbara’s lame attempt at advertising is a ‘blatant claim of false advertising ever.”

While I love Kurt Russell in this movie, he almost has the film stolen from him by the amazing Gerrit Graham. Graham plays Jeff, the most incredibly superstitious car salesman on the planet. He carries a key chain with a hundred good luck charms on it. He thinks red cars are the ultimate jinx. He plans his life around luck. One of his best scenes in the movie occurs after Jeff, Rudy, and Jim have been fired by Barbara. Rudy is still short on his political bribe money, so Jeff gives him a hot tip on a football game, one based on his crazy superstitions. Rudy bets everything he has against the team, knowing Jeff’s losing record at picking winners. This time, though, Jeff seems to have chosen the winning team. As Jeff, Rudy, and Jim watch the game in a bar, and watch Rudy’s chances at becoming a senator slowly fade away, it occurs to Jim that, in order for Rudy to win, Jeff has to lose. Graham proceeds to do every “bad luck” thing he can do to change the outcome of the game’s last thirty seconds. As he runs around the bar, opening umbrellas, turning over salt shakers, and trying to crawl under a ladder, sure enough, his team begins to play horribly. Graham is so insanely funny in this scene, it almost eclipses his triumph over his own fear at the end of the movie. And no, I will not spoil it for you. You will be glad I didn’t…

Find Used Cars and watch it. Seeing Russell enter his badass phase is fun, and you cannot help but laugh yourself silly at some of the ridiculous jokes. It’s a great way to spend two hours. And, as Rudy loves to say, trust me…

Cannery Row has never been like anywhere else...

July 24, 2017

There are movies that stay with you from the first time you see them. The classics, yes. But some will never be considered classics, yet they just hide deep in your brain, and peek out from time to time, bringing a smile to your face that nobody will ever understand. For me, Cannery Row is one of those movies.

I mean, look. It’s based on a Steinbeck book. That alone hooked me because I had just fallen into the worlds of Steinbeck and I’ve never looked for an exit. There are hundreds of self-declared critics that say Cannery Row is a bastardization of Steinbeck’s work. I disagree, though, because, when all is said and done, Steinbeck wrote about the human condition he saw in America. Right, wrong, funny, sad, he captured the true human spirit better than almost anyone to put pen to paper. And THAT, folks, is what you see in Cannery Row. A group of extraordinary people in a quaint little community. No superheroes, no psychic warriors or sparkling vampires or serial killers, just people trying to get by in post-Depression Monterey, California.

The movie takes place in a little corner of Monterey known (obviously) as Cannery Row. All of the fish canneries in the area have closed, but people still live there.  They are all primarily down and out, but they don’t want to leave. The most upstanding member of the community is Doc, played by Nick Nolte. Doc is a marine biologist who makes his living by collecting marine specimens for research. Even he, though, is running from his past. He has spent the past few years trying to make up for a tragic mistake in his past.

Enter Debra Winger as Suzy DeSoto, another lost soul with few job skills. She reluctantly takes as a “floozy” in the local whorehouse, a job her openly headstrong demeanor makes her completely wrong for. She and Doc find an immediate attraction, but their personalities clash so hard they can barely speak to one another. The other citizens of Cannery Row do whatever they can to help Doc and Suzy get together, but when all is said and done, Suzy and Doc have to find their own way before they can commit to someone else, be it one another or anyone else.

There is so much in this movie, from the narration by Oscar-winning director John Huston, to the performances of the entire supporting cast, that can be called “perfect.” The supporting cast almost overshadows very good and understated work from Nick Nolte and Debra Winger. I will be the first one to say that it is a rare moment when you can use the word “understated” when you speak of Nolte, but he is brilliant here. His rough voice and gruff exterior work well to show how Doc just wants to be left alone, but, dammit, his Doc is so subtly warm-hearted, you just want to buy him a beer and say, “You wanna talk about it, buddy?”

I have never been a fan of most of Winger’s work on screen. Her breakout role as John Travolta’s love interest in Urban Cowboy makes me wish he didn’t apologize for hitting her at the end of the film. The small town I live in had only two movie theatres when I was a vibrant teenager, and in 1983, one of the theatres held Terms of Endearment over for 10 weeks. That was TEN WEEKENDS of dating life, and you either went to see Terms of Endearment over and over again, or you went to the other theatre and spent more time looking for the mice you could hear in the walls than watching the movie. By the end of those ten weeks, I would cheer loudly when Winger’s character died, I was so tired of that movie. An Officer and a Gentleman, she was okay in, but, again, you find yourself hoping Richard Gere would just dump her and go off to Pensacola alone. All that aside, though, Debra Winger is wonderful in Cannery Row. Everything you don’t like about her in other movies works perfectly in this one. Her abrasiveness elsewhere makes Suzy DeSoto exactly what a Steinbeck woman would be like.

The stellar supporting cast features Audra Lindley, known primarily at the time as “Mrs. Roper” in TV’s Three’s Company, playing Fauna, the madam of the whorehouse. The group of what we would call today “homeless people” features M. Emmett Walsh and Frank McHugh, two of the most underrated supporting actors in movie history. Walsh earned his own “rule” in the late, great Roger Ebert’s “Little Movie Rule Book,” which declares as a rule that “no movie can be considered completely bad if it features M. Emmett Walsh.” (This rule was amended a few years later to add Harry Dean Stanton.)

Now that I have built Cannery Row up to the level of genius, let me tell you this – it used to be damned hard to find this movie on DVD. You either had to buy it on VHS or pray it popped up on HBO. Thankfully, though, the brain trust at MGM finally realized people wanted to own this movie and released it. It is long-overdue for a Blu Ray release, but until MGM wakes up and listens to the fans again, the plain old DVD will have to do.

You are not going to get a history lesson out of Cannery Row. I freely admit, it is not Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind. And, honestly, this is a good thing. Cannery Row does not need to have any legends about its making or casting. It does not need to make any AFI top ten lists. It’s not an epic of biblical proportions. It is just a very well-made movie, directed by David Ward, who is much better known for writing the screenplay for The Sting.

Give it a look on a rainy afternoon. As I said at the start, that one look will stay with you. It will stay with you in the best way possible. 

Throw-away people, recycled into new lives...

July 23, 2017

As the weekend falls upon it, let’s talk about a movie that, on the surface, should have never become as critically-acclaimed as it was. It was about prisons, theatre, dreams, not the trifecta for success, as you can imagine. The movie is called Weeds.

Nick Nolte plays Lee Umsetter, a small-time crook who has pretty much been a whole lot of nothing his whole life. He has managed to get himself the Big Ride – a life sentence. Within the first ten minutes of the movie, we see Lee try to kill himself twice. He can’t even do that right, though. After being saved from hanging himself, he wanders into the prison library and asks for a book, any book. The librarian slams a copy of War and Peace on the counter, and Lee takes it back to his cell.

We see Lee working his way through the classics, trudging through Dostoevsky, Nietzche, Shakespeare, down through the works of Jacqueline Susann, a rather nifty little riff on how good and bad self-education can be. But Lee is on fire after finding the world through literature. A visiting theatre troupe puts on a production of Waiting For Godot, and Lee’s mind explodes, creatively, of course. Suddenly, the lifetime loser has found a calling. He writes a play about being a prisoner, forms a company of his fellow inmates, and stages the play for the prison population.

Needless to say, the play goes over well for its audience. After all, it’s about prison life and the innermost faults of prison life. But when a San Francisco drama critic, played by Rita Taggert, sees it, she is impressed enough by the play and its author to begin a campaign for Lee’s release. Once out of prison, Lee sets out to find the members of his prison theatre group so they can take his show all the way to New York and the Great White Way.

The story itself is based on the experience of former convict Rick Cluchey, who founded the San Quentin drama group that toured with Cluchey’s play The Cage. The movie blends the craziness of a theatre company on the road with the harshly real traumas of ex-cons trying to adjust to life on the streets again. We see these guys trying their best to get back to living, but being drawn back into the very lifestyles that got them time behind bars. It’s Lee who offers a  way to something better.

I’ll be straight with you. It’s a heavy combination, but man, does it work. Yes, every now and then, it gets hung up between the slapstick and the gritty realism, but it finds its way back to its main story. One of the best moments in the movie is when an outsider, a “real actor” joins the troupe to take the place of one of the former convicts after a horrible accident. The actor, played by Joe Mantegna, has to take part in an after-show Q&A session about prison life. Of course, the actor has never even stepped foot in a police station, much less a prison, so the convicts dream up a criminal record for him to brag about. It’s such a surreal moment, each convict making up a crime for this lightweight, and each one gets more horrific than the one before, that you HAVE to know that it actually happened at some point during Cluchey’s tour.

Along with Mantegna, you get to see some real talent within the cast. Lane Smith, probably best known as the prosecutor in My Cousin Vinny, plays the stage manager, a tight-assed convict who is as much concerned about the show running smooth as he is about his ill-fitting toupee staying in place. William Forsythe, who you may remember best from being John Goodman’s brother in Raising Arizona, is a genuinely stupid convict whose very lack of intelligence makes his “stage role” perfectly believable.

I bet, by now, you are wondering how this movie links to yesterday’s. The wonderful Anne Ramsey is the key. She plays a small role as Lee’s mother. When the troupe finally does make it to Off-Broadway, they have an opening night party at Sardi’s. When Lee walks in, he finds that the drama critic, who is also now Lee’s lover, has arranged for Lee’s parents to be there. When he sees his mother, you see his world fall away, and he is suddenly just a boy again. His mother has written him off as a lost cause years ago. But, now, in this moment, they embrace, and the look on Ramsey’s hard-chiseled face is honestly a wonder to behold. She is a mother who has been given new life and new hope because her son has finally amounted to something more than a career criminal. Ramsey may have never been what we know as a ‘beauty queen,’ by any stretch of the imagination, but in this scene, she is as lovely as the Pieta.

Weeds is a movie you might have to flat-out buy in order to see. It rarely makes the rounds on the the various pay-TV channels, and it’s even more rare to catch it in an edited form on a basic cable channel. But, if you want to see Nolte when he seemed to give a damn about acting rather than being bombastic (a period of his career that has only just ended with his performance in A Walk In The Woods), throw the price of a standard movie ticket price at this movie. You won’t be disappointed at all. In fact, you might actually wipe your cheek a time or two. I hate it when it gets dusty while you watch a movie, don’t you?