Thursday, October 7, 2021 Clueless (1995) at October 07, 2021

 

Directed by Amy Heckerling

Starring Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Dan Hedaya, Wallace Shawn, Donald Faison, Justin Walker, Breckin Meyer and Jeremy Sisto

Teen movies.  When I was a teen - which really doesn't seem like all that long ago, since I'm a member of a generation of overgrown man-children anyway - the cinema landscape was being peppered with these things.  Classic boner comedies like American Pie (cutting out the 17,000 unnecessary sequels and reboots), Road Trip and Eurotrip were always fun destinations for Friday nights at the multiplex.  Overall, I feel that a good film where a group of kids either goes on a cross-country trip or throws a big party is a necessity at least every few years.  So go figure that this is one of the subgenres of film that has more or less completely vanished over the years.  Because they're fun, and fun is something to be ashamed of and feel guilty about in 2021.

It struck me while watching Clueless - amazingly for the first time - that this particular film may have come out just a bit too early in my life.  I wasn't interested in it at all upon release, since all of the resident popular girls in my grade immediately gravitated to it and I wanted nothing to do with anything that they were into.  Yes, my days of being a general social outcast and dickhead go back pretty far.  It's kind of a shame, because I think if I had seen the film in middle school, I likely would have really loved it.  It's got Alicia Silverstone in her prime, and wow was she a looker back in the day.  It's also got the type of dialogue that I can easily commit to memory and a rocking soundtrack of '90s pop rock.

Alas, despite all of those positives, the movie did not quite live up to the lofty expectations I had for it as a curmudgeonly 38-year-old man.  Enough wishwash.  Let's get to the plot.

Clueless is a film that has a very clear protagonist - Cher Horowitz (Silverstone), who might just be onscreen for every scene.  Early on in the film, we learn essentially everything we need to know about this character via a series of comic vignettes that show us the daily life of this Beverly Hills high school student and an omnipresent voice-over that clues us in on all of the rest.  Pun not intended.  The character is a classic valley girl ditz, from the "as if" catchphrases that dot her speech to the very loud mid-'90s fashions.  Her father Mel (Dan Hedaya) is a wealthy litigator, meaning that Cher lives in a gigantic mansion and has a tricked-out Jeep that she drives alone despite only having a learner's permit.  Her best friend Dionne (the incomparably sexy Stacey Dash - and she still is!) is named after a fellow singer who now does infomercials.  Since these are examples of dialogue that I remember after watching the movie, that speaks well for the quality of the conversation scenes.

Cher has a way with talking her way out of situations.  There is an early dilemma in the film where the character receives a low grade that she feels she doesn't deserve.  The script simultaneously shows its invention and contrivance in how she manages to improve the grade as she takes an interest in her unlucky-in-love nerdy teacher (Wallace Shawn, the man who once shared a dinner with Andre).  Discovering that she is adept at playing match-maker, Cher decides to take an interest in some of the other characters in her life.  In between the bouts of walking around, making voice-over quips and going shopping, of course.

First-time viewers initially get the impression that the title of the film comes from the character of Tai Frasier (Brittany Murphy), frumpy new girl at school who becomes Cher's big project to work on.  You know the classic cliche of the makeover montage sequence followed by the recipient of said makeover immediately becoming a knockout that everyone notices?  This would be one of the forefathers of that cliche.  Brittany and Dionne take Tai under her wing, and thus begins a series of romantic interludes as they try to hook Tai up with a popular classmate (Jeremy Sisto) and keep her away from the stereotypical skater boy (Breckin Meyer, an actor who somehow managed to play teens and college kids throughout the entire decade of the '90s) that she seems to match up with much better on paper.  What the title ACTUALLY refers to is Cher herself, as she inserts herself into everybody else's business but has no clue about what she actually wants.  Shakespearian, I tell ya.  In execution, it's a rotating door of party scenes that all kind of feel a bit samey after a while, always accompanied by a catchy musical number designed to help sell that soundtrack album.  

OK, kids, time for a patented Lick Ness Monster side rant.  Whatever happened to soundtrack albums?  And what is the deal with airline food (/Jerry Seinfeld)?  Films used to be much more of an EVENT than they are now, and soundtracks were often a part of the movie experience.  In these times, where 99% of films are referred to as "content," well-thought out soundtracks populated with new songs by current artists designed to be an additional source of revenue are unfortunately a thing of the past.  It's yet another shame of modern cinema, because some of my favorite movies of all time had soundtracks that were a character in and of themselves.  Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, and The Karate Kid are movies that come to mind.  Some films even took the next step, having a single artist do a single album - think Prince's amazing collection of Batman songs and the Dust Brothers' groovy Fight Club industrial score.  The point?  If done right, an enjoyable soundtrack that fits the atmosphere can do wonders to cement a film in the audience's mind, and this one is no different.  Even if I'm not really that into the movie to begin with.  Spoiler alert.

Before I get into my bitching points with Clueless, let's get to what I enjoyed about it (apart from the soundtrack).  The film was written and directed by Amy Heckerling, a gifted comedienne who has produced other things I have enjoyed.  I really like her earlier teen film Fast Times at Ridgemont High with the exception of that weird rape-abortion subplot that is glossed over like it's no big deal and never mentioned again, and she definitely has a gift for writing funny dialogue.  Clueless is filled with it, as characters come up with similes and metaphors that are about 30 IQ points above their heads.  Not that I'm complaining; there's a ton of quotable lines to be had here.  In addition, the acting is amazing with one notable exception.  This was Silverstone's shot at the title in the mid-'90s, coming off a run as the MTV dream girl in Aerosmith's music videos.  For a brief time following this film, she was THE babe of the moment in Hollywood.  Dash is also great as the likable sidekick, as is Donald Faison as her boyfriend and the always aces Dan Hedaya as the father who has the line of the film.  Hey, just because Sammy Davis Jr. died doesn't mean they're looking for a replacement in the Rat Pack.

My main issue with Clueless, as it is with so many of the other films in this project that I haven't been as fond of, is one of structure.  As the movie enters its second half, it veers off in far too many subplots and directions that don't go anywhere.  As Cher looks at her handiwork, all of whom seem to be so much happier than herself, she decides to get in on the action and look for a boyfriend.  This is where we get the aforementioned Rat Pack wannabe, and this character is unnecessarily goofy and over-the-top.  It's also where Paul Rudd becomes much more involved in the film.  I've liked Rudd in other things, especially as the misanthropic asshole in Wet Hot American Summer, but I didn't like him at all here.  Romantically, he also has less than zero chemistry with Silverstone.  Like, we're talking Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman levels of chemistry here.  As a result, the film's ending sequences comes across really flat.  Oh, and the voice-over.  I liked it at first, but the CONSTANT voice-over got grating to me after awhile.  Mall speak tolerance has reached critical mass.

Rating time: ** 1/2 out of ****.  There are parts of Clueless that I simply adored, and lines that I'll remember for the rest of my life.  From a story standpoint, though, it's kind of a mess.  Tighten this script up just a little bit and you've got an A+ film right here.  With a soundtrack album on repeat.

Wednesday, October 6, 2021 The Last Seduction (1994) at October 06, 2021

 

Directed by John Dahl

Starring Linda Fiorentino, Peter Berg and Bill Pullman

There is no subgenre that I miss more dearly than the erotic thriller.  It undoubtedly peaked with 1992's Basic Instinct, one of the most perfectly scripted and executed films of all time for my money, but there are plenty of other movies that fit this bill that qualify as classics.  The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Fatal Attraction, Body Heat...it simply doesn't get any better than this stuff, with Joe Eszterhas penning the script and subverting your expectations better than any hack could hope to do today and a soundtrack of enjoyable Cinemax sex jazz.  

For the life of me, I can't understand why the erotic thriller vanished from the face of the Earth.  Other than maybe the fact that movies with budgets between $5 and $200 million aren't allowed to play in theaters anymore.

The Last Seduction is yet another film that has been on my radar for a long time.  Almost a quarter-century, to be exact, when I first read about it in the Ebert companion.  I've obviously seen star Linda Fiorentino in plenty of other things, and what I'd seen of her was no doubt enticing enough to make me want to see this movie.  I was familiar with director John Dahl, with the 1993 crime film Red Rock West and the 1998 poker epic Rounders being personal favorites.  He's a master of gritty neo-noir, and this film was neo-noir at its almost finest.  Originally airing on HBO, the movie gained enough traction and word-of-mouth goodwill that it was eventually released in theaters, becoming one of the most critically-acclaimed films in the incredibly stacked film year of 1994.  Folks, this was a year where Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Natural Born Killers, The Shawshank Redemption and Hoop Dreams were all released, so competition was fierce.  

The film tells the story of Bridget Gregory, played by Fiorentino in a powerful, intense performance.  And wow, is she sexy!  Everything about her, from her perfectly sculpted face to her slim physique to even her voice and body language, she radiates sex with every beat.  She garnered Oscar talk for the role, but amazingly was disqualified due to the film airing on HBO originally.  As the movie begins, Bridget's husband Clay (Bill Pullman) is selling stolen cocaine in an attempt to pay off a loan shark while Bridget pays the bills with her gig as a hard-assed telemarketing supervisor.  An argument breaks out in their apartment, leading to Clay slapping Bridget and Bridget absconding with $700,000 of Clay's cash.

The majority of the plot takes place in Beston, New York, a small town near Buffalo that serves as Bridget's new base of operations while on the run.  There are "fish out of water" elements here as the New York City female stands out from the pack in Beston.  She does, however, become the object of affection for local Mike Swale (Peter Berg), local boy who is debating with himself whether or not he wants to leave town and is nursing emotional wounds after a marriage gone bad.  In short, this is low-hanging fruit for Bridget, who promptly puts her hooks into Mike for the first in a series of tastefully-done yet titillating sex scenes.  Later, for plot convenience sake, she gets a job with an assumed name at the same insurance company that Mike works at.

Rather than tell its story through a series of twists, The Last Seduction allows the audience to be voyeurs and watch everything unfold through the lens of the Bridget-Mike relationship.  I heard a theory recently that audiences have problems remembering the plot of a film, but they will remember the characters.  Screenwriter Steve Barancik undoubtedly subscribes to this theory and gives us plenty to work with here.  It is helped by fantastic chemistry between Fiorentino and Berg; their interactions and dialogue feel completely natural, with Bridget leading the smitten Mike around and direct him like a puppeteer according to her whims.  The film has also aged very well in this regard.  I've become desensitized completely to movies that require 120 pages of kinetic fight scenes and explosions.  It is very refreshing to see a movie that reveals its tension and plot through dialogue instead of boring action scenes.

What we have here in this film is a parable about making moral choices.  As Clay begins tracking Bridget down and doing his best to recapture his cash, Bridget seems to have an answer at every turn, utilizing every bit of her brains and beauty in the process and making Mike predictably fall into place with the maneuvers that she wants to make.  Characters like this, to me, are much more progressive and feminist than the overpowered superhero chicks we see in movies today.  There is mo power more formidable in the world than the power of sexy.  This reaches its apex in the movie's climax.  The last word of the previous sentence is both figurative and literal, and it gives us the meaning of the film's title.

I will admit that some of what takes place in The Last Seduction is a bit far-fetched from a plot standpoint.  I've talked ad nauseum to people in my real life in the past about how the Joker has psychic abilities in The Dark Knight, to the movie's detriment.  While there isn't anything quite as stark in this film, some of Bridget's schemes just play out a bit TOO perfectly to not make you scratch your head.  She seems to have the ability to predict not only what people will do, but how people will REACT to things and leave her with the exact situation that she had hoped for.  Fortunately, the execution of these schemes is always entertaining, with Dahl never wavering in his focus from Bridget.  Every time this character seems to be softening, we can see from Fiorentino's facial expressions and line delivery that she has not changed at all.  It's fascinating, and it pulls us through the more unrealistic stuff.

The erotic thriller is a film that depends much more on execution than structure.  By their very nature, these neo-noir films aren't big on a typical three-act structure.  The Last Seduction has execution in spades, not only from director Dahl but also the people in front of the camera.  In addition to Fiorentino, both principal males opposite her are pitch-perfect, with Berg getting us on his side as a man who believes he is in love, endlessly frustrated by how Bridget constantly keeps him at an arm's length.  Pullman is also aces in a sleazy bad guy role, especially in a scene where he does a celebratory dance as a private detective attempts to trace a call from his estranged wife.  Great stuff, no dialogue required.  Of course, the movie also does more than hold your attention visually.  From a sex standpoint, the film isn't as exploitative as a Joe Eszterhas epic, but it is undeniably hot.

Rating time: *** 1/2 out of ****.  This isn't QUITE up to the gold standard Basic Instinct level that the erotic thriller has reached, but it is undoubtedly a classic that mystery and noir fans will love.  Check it out.

Tuesday, October 5, 2021 The Adjuster (1991) at October 05, 2021

 

Directed by Atom Egoyan

Starring Elias Koteas, Arsinee Khanjian, Maury Chaykin, Gabrielle Rose, David Hemblen and Jennifer Dale

Here is a review that I struggled mightily coming up with a place to start.  I absorbed the entire 100+ minutes of the film and had no idea how to accurately depict how I felt about it.  This involved an exhaustive research regimen by yours truly where I went online and read a bunch of reviews...none of which seemed especially lengthy.  I even looked up the Roger Ebert review, a modestly positive three-star appraisal that went into the absolute bare bones of what it was about and nothing more.  It was one of the most sparse Ebert summaries I've EVER read, and I think that's telling.  My theory?  There just isn't a whole lot IN The Adjuster, and waxing about it for longer than a couple paragraphs feels like masturbation for masturbation's sake.  Since I'm a masochist who likes punishing people, none of that will stop me from delivering my standard eight paragraphs of (maybe) fun material.

The director in question this time around is Atom Egoyan.  I'm familiar with the name, and in going through his filmography I had seen two of his previous efforts.  1994's Exotica is a pretty damn good experiment in voyeurism and the people involved in the voyeurism trade, helped by a fantastic performance from certified hottie Mia Kirshner.  The 1999 thriller Felicia's Journey is one of the best (and more accurate) depictions of a serial killer I've seen in cinema, with a seemingly nurturing psychopath played by Bob Hoskins who befriends and eventually murders young women.  Spoiler alert on that film.  The point is that I've enjoyed other films I've seen by this guy.  When you follow a film-maker's career trajectory, you can see growth, and since The Adjuster was an early effort from Egoyan I can only conclude that he got better with time.  This 1991 arthouse film left me cold in every way that a film can leave a person cold.  Why?  Read up and find out.

The title character of the film is Noah (Elias Koteas), insurance adjuster for an unnamed agency who shows up to assist clients whose houses have just burned down.  The film takes great pains to show just how much Noah cares about his clients, especially the good-looking women.  He nobly sleeps with all of them, mostly at the dingy hotel where he chooses to house them.  He constantly repeats the mantra of his company, dictating the news to his clients about their always oustanding claims with a sort of calm detachment.  The film's poster promises a heaping helping of eroticism, a recurring theme in Egoyan's work, and the one sex scene in the film between Noah and a client who has just lost her home is done in a way that takes the hotness completely out of the act as they discuss the mundane details of her claim.  In a way, the character serves as a modern stand-in for Robin Hood, which is driven into the audience's skull with his penchant for shooting arrows at a real estate sign located near his home.

The other lead is Hera (Arsinee Khanjian), Noah's wife who works as a censor of pornographic films.  While Koteas does his best with the limited dialogue he is given (and his status in my mind as the forever Casey Jones), I found Khanjian's performance to be very limited, her face going from one level of mild concern to another level of mild concern.  It's really a shame, because there is the potential in this character for some really gripping stuff.  She secretly videotapes the movies that her job requires her to watch and is implied to be turned on by them, no doubt a commentary on the hypocrisy of small boards of people who arbitrarily decide what is suitable for public consumption.  These days, we celebrate these folks and call them corporations.  While watching, I couldn't help but think that a film entirely about this character (with perhaps Jennifer Dale, the actress who played Noah's sex scene recipient, in the lead role) with the satire pumped up to 11 could have been electric.

The film is a three-legged table of story structure, and said third leg comes to us in the form of sex pervert ex-footballer Bubba (Maury Chaykin) and his wife (Gabriella Rose).  They like to act out their fantasies in public, and we get one of the more bizarre scenes I've seen in the project thus far where Rose pretends to be a cheerleader for the high school football team.  You haven't lived until you've seen a 36-year-old woman cavorting around for horny teenagers.  If you want to imagine the exploits of these characters, they're essentially a darker version of this:

The one saving grace of The Adjuster occurs in the film-making aspects rather than the screenplay and story structure.  From a visual standpoint, Egoyan does a good job making everything look stark and gray, granting a decent representation to the humdrum existence of this group of wholly unlikable people.  In addition to Koteas, Maury Chaykin is also aces in his role as the sex pervert.  He has one soliloquy during the film that might be the movie's single best scene; it occurs after the character of Bubba has scouted Noah's house as the location for his next project, and it is one of those scenes that lets you know everything about a character without telling you every single aspect of his past.

No matter what praise I throw at The Adjuster, it is about a group of people that I would never, ever want to know.  I CAN like stories where there are no traditional protagonists; Barry Lyndon from this very project comes to mind.  That film, however, was very entertaining and unfolded in a way that made you want to see what happened next.  I did not care, in the least bit, what happened to any of these people.  The script seems to hold a great deal of regard for Noah, viewing him as an idealistic man who does everything he can to help people through difficult situations, but the execution shows us simply a man who seems to be bored in everything he does.  Every time the movie picks up steam, such as the late scene where a rookie censor comes on to Hera during a film viewing, it pulls back, reverting to each character's default status as a depression factory.

The Adjuster is a maddening film, one that actually does have a lot of potential to be something great in my own mind despite every negative thing I've said about it thus far.  The problem is that it is so uneven and unfocused.  It contains three different stories - an insurance adjuster who sleeps with his clients, a censor who secretly enjoys what she is supposed to decry, and a depraved couple who will do anything for sexual thrills - and muddles them together into a mess that never quite gels.  A movie about any ONE of these three stories has the potential to be something very special, especially the censorship angle.  As it stands, the movie is a black hole of substance.  It tries to say so many things that it winds up essentially saying nothing.

Rating time: * out of ****.  Atom Egoyan would go on to do things that I enjoyed a great deal, but this one...ehhhh.  Call it the Dark Star that would eventually give us Halloween.

Monday, October 4, 2021 Mystery Train (1989) at October 04, 2021

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

Starring Youki Kudoh, Masatoshi Nagase, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Cinque Lee, Nicoletta Braschi, Elizabeth Bracco, Rick Aviles, Joe Strummer and Steve Buscemi

In the summer of 2018, I took a road trip to Memphis.  It was a vacation that I had envisioned in my head for years before actually doing it, owing to my huge early rock n' roll fandom and general Elvis Presley obsession.  I finally decided to take the plunge for a few different reasons; it took place right after I turned 35, and it actually marked the end of my first blog.  I enjoyed everything on the trip, from Graceland to Beale Street, but the thing that I arguably liked the most was sitting in the hotel lobby at night, in a location that seemed far, far away from my small Midwestern hometown watching the traffic go by on the streets below.

This was undoubtedly a very different kind of Memphis than the one depicted in this film.  It's also a very different kind of America than the one that usually gets shown in cinema.  However, it's different in a wonderful way.  I LOVED Mystery Train, one of the early films from director Jim Jarmusch and the first one to be given any kind of significant budget - in this case a little under $3 million, most of which came from JVC electronics.  Based on what I saw, I really need to check out more films by Jarmusch, because he shows a level of invention with a still-very-limited budget and an ear for dialogue that I'll never have.  It's also an anthology film of sorts, telling three different stories with three different groups of characters that all converge in the end, so keep that in mind as we go about expounding on the story.

The first characters we meet are Jun (Masatoshi Nagase) and his girlfriend Mitsuko (Youki Kudoh), teenage tourists from Japan who are out to see all of the standard sights in Memphis as a title card reading "Far From Yokohama" appears on the screen.  A running gag with these characters involves Mitsuko's obsession with Elvis Presley and Jun's insistence that Carl Perkins is the superior performer, an assurance that somehow sneaks up on you at just the right moments.  Early on in this film, we gleam just how REAL the interactions between the characters seem, even when the characters themselves are just a little off and unrealistic.

Story #2 is called, fittingly, "A Ghost."  Italian widow Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi) is stuck in Memphis overnight while transporting her husband's body back to Rome.  She encounters a trio of interesting characters on her night: an unscrupulous magazine salesman, a creepy restaurant patron (played by the always awesome Tom Noonan), and finally down-on-her-luck Deedee (Elizabeth Bracco).  There's one particular bit of dialogue between Luisa and Deedee, with the latter going on and on and on about her life situation and how her boyfriend never talks that hits EXACTLY right, followed by a guest appearance from the man who watches over this entire film like the specter that he is.

Everything comes together in the third story, "Lost in Space," featuring Steve Buscemi as a barber who gets sucked in to a violent crime and its awkward aftermath.  We also become well-acquainted with Deedee's boyfriend Johnny (Joe Strummer), who goes by the nickname of Elvis much to his own chagrin, and their mutual friend Will Robinson (Rick "The Rat Man" Aviles).  One guess as to how this story got its name.  While buying a couple bottles of liquor, Johnny does something incredibly stupid that forces the trio to seek shelter at the run-down Arcade hotel and ride out the storm.

Mystery Train has an excellent framing device that never gets old no matter how many times we come back to it.  The Arcade hotel is actually where ALL of our groups of characters wind up, with a few events being repeated in every story.  There's also some excellent humor provided by the hotel's employees: the very flamboyantly-dressed night clerk portrayed by Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinque Lee's suffering bellhop.  The fun in a film like this generally comes from piecing together what we're given in each new story and wondering how the characters will eventually converge.  This film actually makes a bold leap of NOT having them all meet in a grand chance despite the grand chance of them all showing up at the same hotel on the same night; its finale is satisfying in every way, with the characters remaining separate and facing their own future.

Slight peak behind the curtain: while I watched most of the movies in this marathon in chronological order, I actually skipped ahead and watched this one right after Godzilla to give myself something to look forward to after a film I was dreading.  The move paid off, big time, as Mystery Train is a movie that fires on every cylinder.  Jarmusch's direction is fantastic, showing a desolate, almost ghost-town version of Memphis that seems to welcome each new inhabitant in with the hospitality of an Old West saloon.  The music becomes a character in and of itself, with Elvis' version of "Blue Moon" being one of the repeated motifs that every group of characters encounter on their long night in the city.

A low-budget movie based heavily around dialogue is a dicey proposition for many viewers; it's also a dicey proposition for me, admittedly.  But this is a movie that makes you want to keep watching, engaging you with a stable of characters that come across as quirky without ever veering into the pretentious.  Hell, EVERY main character in this movie is likable.  We leave this movie not knowing where they wind up after leaving Memphis but grateful for the time that we got to spend with them, being allowed a voyeuristic look into their lives.  Now who's sounding pretentious?

Rating time: The Memphis Train is rolling...**** out of ****.  How much did I enjoy this movie?  I ordered the Blu-ray immediately after watching.  Now THAT'S a recommendation!  Oh, and here's Screamin' Jay doing what he does best.

Sunday, October 3, 2021 Five Corners (1987) at October 03, 2021

 

Directed by Tony Bill

Starring Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins, Todd Graff, Elizabeth Berridge and John Turturro

Time for a little inside baseball on the 30 Flicks project.  I initially selected the 1982 film Eating Raoul as one of the films to be viewed.  It was a movie that I knew about for a long time and had been putting off watching it for reasons that I'm not entirely unsure of.  But as time went on and the writing of this here blog ticked by, I became aware that the films that I've liked the best (Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock) fit a similar description.  And True Stories?  As mentioned, I'm a huge Talking Heads fan and had a pretty good idea that I would enjoy it.  Thus, I decided to roll the dice and pick a film that was also in my Criterion Channel watchlist - one that I never even knew existed until August of 2021.

When doing my initial browse through the Criterion Channel, Five Corners seemed like an interesting proposition for several reasons.  It definitely doesn't hurt to have Jodie Foster on your marquee; nobody plays the relatable, likable girl-next-door better than Ms. Foster, even in movies where she is supposed to be a badass feminist.  The description also seemed intriguing, as an anthology film taking place in a small neighborhood is generally a safe bet.  Tonally, the movie is VERY different from what I expected, for better or worse.  Surprise is a good thing.  Five Corners mixes emotionally fulfilling surprises with a somewhat messy story, ultimately converging into a fairly middle-of-the-road experience.  My milquetoast criticism has reached its apex with that previous sentence.  Onto the movie!

Film critics often like films with unconventional structure.  This must be clear to any unfortunate soul who may or may not have read this blog thus far.  On some level, I understand this, as a person whose job description is to see as many movies as possible must get bored with seeing the typical three-act beats over and over again and will grow to appreciate movies that try to break the mold.  Five Corners is one of those films that seems tailor-made for critics.  It essentially tells two very different stories with two different groups of characters, smash cutting between them with the finesse of a penguin on roller skates.  Two events set the stories in motion: the release of lifelong criminal and attempted rapist Heinz (the always awesome John Turturro) from prison, and the murder of a dickhead algebra teacher via bow and arrow.  Points for the accurate movie poster.

Let's talk about Movie A first, since it is by far the more interesting of the two plots.  The film takes place in the Bronx of 1964 in a neighborhood where Heinz has just returned after serving his prison sentence.  He is initially a likable character, more in line with the path that I anticipated the movie would take as a parable of rehabilitation and redemption.  Spoiler alert: it isn't.  His alleged rape victim was Linda (Jodie Foster), tough-yet-sensitive girl who works in a pet store and is still dating the man who tried to stop her attack.  Said man now also walks with a slightly humorous gait due to his ineffectual heroism.  The guy who REALLY saved her ass is Harry (Tim Robbins), who has since recanted his violent ways and is dedicating himself to pacifism and the rising non-violent black rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King.

Without a doubt, the character of Harry is the best thing about the film.  There is a stunningly well-done sequence where he meets with two activists in a diner, offering his services to go to Mississippi and essentially get beat up (and possibly killed) for his cause.  He relays the story of how his policeman father died a hero, and when asked if the killer was black, he states that he doesn't remember.  Great, great stuff that tells us a LOT about this guy without spending five minutes giving the audience boring exposition.  There is a nice little arc that Harry goes through as well, given credence from an early great performance from Robbins.  As much of a condescending douche as I've always thought this guy is in real life, I can't deny that I really enjoy him as an actor.  Separating the art from the artist and all that.

Do I have to talk about Movie B?  Alas, I must.  It begins with the aforementioned teacher taking an arrow to the back, and then Random Greaser Guy driving around at night with two girls in the back seat getting high.  No longer wanting to look at their faces (really), he offers two random high school passer-bys five bucks to take them off of his hands.  Thus begins a day of weird adventures where they share wholly uninteresting conversations, go bowling, and talk some more.  There's also an endless bit in an elevator shaft.  The only other thing worth mentioning about this group of characters is that one of the girls is played by Elizabeth Berridge of Amadeus fame, who has some of the most unreal natural assets that any actress could ask for.  See her in Tobe Hooper's classic slasher flick The Funhouse if you want to know what I mean.

Five Corners is a very uneven film.  The two main stories could not possibly be any more different in terms of tone, made all the more jarring by the film's editing which often smash cuts between them with the finesse of a buffalo on roller skates.  Worst metaphor ever?  Possibly.  The audience generally expects a movie that unfolds in this manner to gradually bring the two stories together, but they never really do.  I mean, they ultimately DO in a rather ham-fisted way in the film's climax, but we never really get that conflagration of events that CLICK.  Also, the third act of the film is shockingly simplistic, turning from a story about people to a rather conventional chase, fight and shootout movie.  Maybe if 30+ years hadn't passed and I hadn't become so bored of chases, fights and shootouts that I could shoot someone myself this wouldn't bother me, but it does.

I went back and forth about my overall enjoyment of this film.  Ultimately, I DID enjoy watching it because the movie has some amazing scenes and performances.  Every time either Turturro or Robbins are onscreen, the movie takes on a whole new life, although the former does eventually become a cartoon character by the end.  Foster is also great, despite her (and several other cast members, in all fairness) horrible Bronx accent.  Director Tony Bill also does a great job evoking the overall mood of life in the 1964 Bronx, painting everything with grays, blacks and muted colors meant to convey the overall grind of daily humdrum existence that gets interrupted by some very unexpected events.  And you've also got to give it to any movie that features a character scooping up an elderly woman and gingerly throwing her out of a window.  Double spoiler alert.

Rating time: Five Corners gets *** out of ****.  It's just enough for a Roger Ebert thumbs-up recommendation.  Still, those shifts man...

Saturday, October 2, 2021 True Stories (1986) at October 02, 2021

 

Directed by David Byrne

Starring John Goodman, Annie McEnroe, Swoosie Kurtz, Spalding Gray, Pop Staples, Tito Larriva, Jo Harvey Allen, John Ingle and David Byrne

Sometimes, an artist or piece of art comes along at exactly the right time in your life.  Such was the case with my discovery of the Talking Heads a scant two years ago.  I certainly knew OF them and had their highlights in my iTunes library.  But when I decided to take the plunge and sample the whole catalogue...I was blown away.  Have you ever had an emotional experience with music?  Songs like "Houses in Motion," "Slippery People" and "Once in a Lifetime" seemed to be speaking directly to me as a late-'30s loser who spends 99% of his free time alone and has no prospects of changing that any time soon.  Make of that what you will.  To cut the superlatives short, these guys (and gals) are incredible, and one of my top five bands ever.

The movie poster was somehow burned into my memory; there's no doubt that I passed by that VHS tape countless times in the various video stores that I frequented over the years.  But I never put the two and two together until I started reading up on the Talking Heads albums via the ever-accurate Wikipedia.  True Stories is the brainchild of the Heads' dynamo frontman David Byrne.  He had total creative control over this project as a result of the success of the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense and, man, did he let that creativity run wild.  The film is a little depressing in that regard; we will never get anything like this again from a big studio, where everything is micromanaged down to the fractional amounts of each ethnic group required in a new project.  The result is a film that was in and out of theaters in nary a month back in 1986, but one that has gained favor from critics and audiences ever since and is now a bona fide cult classic.

To say that this movie is one of a kind is an understatement.  It defies any sort of traditional narrative structure, instead conveying what it wants to convey via a series of very loosely-connected vignettes.  It does have a couple of framing devices: (1) the town of Virgil, Texas, that the entire movie takes place within, and (2) an unnamed visitor to the town who also narrates the film, played by Byrne himself, who makes pithy and witty remarks about the town and its residents all the while.  If you've listened to much Talking Heads music, you know that he has a great ear for humor, and it really shines through in this film.  I have something to say about the difference between American and European cities. But I've forgotten what it is. I have it written down at home somewhere.  Those last three sentences?  Actual lines from the film.

I think that writing a review of this movie actually requires a bit of understanding of the thought process that went into it.  Writer Stephen Tobolowsky (Ned Ryerson himself from Groundhog Day) and his girlfriend once visited David Byrne and saw tabloid headlines taped to the guy's walls.  Byrne asked them how crazy it would be if all these stories turned out to be true.  Eureka moment, this movie was born.  The writers combined it with an idea about a movie set in Texas' real-life upcoming 150th anniversary celebration.  This melding of two different ideas gives us a movie us a funhouse mirror version of small-town living, populating Virgil with some of the weirdest people you'll ever see as they prepare for the town's "Celebration of Specialness."

The closest thing that the film has to a conventional arc comes in the character of Louis Fyne (John Goodman), one of the workers at the town's Varicorp computer factory who longs to find a wife and has designs on being a singer in his spare time.  You would think that those two particular character traits are a pretty slim basis for your protagonist, and you would be right, but the movie stretches the limited confines of this character for all it's worth thanks in no small part to a tour-de-force performance from Goodman.  I don't think I've ever disliked this guy in anything he's in; even in some Coen brothers projects that I'm not a huge fan of, when Goodman shows up, you can be guaranteed that he's going to bring the goods.  Louis' hero's journey, as it were, concludes in the finale of the film where he...what else?...sings a song.

True Stories is jam-packed with a whole heap of memorable characters.  The town's serial liar (Jo Harvey Allen) is a superficial woman who goes off on repeated tirades about the amazing events of her fictional life to anyone who will listen.  These soliloquies are a virtual framing device in and of themselves and never cease to entertain.  There is also preacher (John Ingle) who gives us...some conspiracy theories that don't sound so crazy these days.  His scene also leads to the movie's single best musical sequence for the song "Puzzlin' Evidence."  Lastly, there is a woman who won't get out of bed (Swoosie Kurtz).  She's not sick, she just has enough money that she doesn't have to.  Wouldn't you do the same thing?  Again, actual dialogue from the film.  Amazingly, she still has the presence of mind to get her hair immaculately coiffed despite never leaving the room.

Time to touch on the musical elements in the film, being that this is a movie directed by the lead singer of the Talking Heads.  I already owned the soundtrack to this film.  I didn't consider the True Stories album to be among their best work, but seeing the songs put in motion the way they are in this film gave me a deeper appreciation for them.  The lyrics are usually (but not always) delivered by the characters that populate the landscape rather than Byrne himself, with each one touching on a different aspect of life in Virgil.  In addition to the aforementioned "Puzzlin' Evidence," there's "Dream Operator," accompanied by the strangest fashion show you've ever seen; "Love for Sale," which has a really strong commercial parody montage; and "Radio Head," where an ancillary character talks about how he is able to receive "tones" from people.  It's great stuff, very well-performed and well-staged.

Byrne also works plenty of satire into the film.  His narrator character repeatedly speaks about the various ways that the American small town has changed over the years, with the stretching city limits cutting into the countryside, the shopping mall that serves as the town hub, and the beauty-free modern architecture of all the new buildings.  Now, I don't live in exactly a small town, but it's smallish enough for me to know that it's essentially all true, if not exaggerated.  But hell, everything is exaggerated in a movie called True Stories.  Get it, people?  Irony.  Amazingly, though, Byrne never comes across as mean-spirited with any of it, viewing his people and buildings with a sort of loving voyeurism.  And when the narrator drives off into the distance and puts Virgil behind him, his final lines of the film give the bizarre characters an entirely new meaning.

Rating time: **** out of ****.  I've done my best to explain the appeal of this film, but really, this is one you just have to see to to understand.  Check it out.  Classic scene after classic scene and quotable dialogue for DAYS.

Friday, October 1, 2021 Blood Simple (1984) at October 01, 2021

 

 

1984

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, Samm-Art Williams and M. Emmet Walsh

I've got a long, bloody history with the Coen brothers.  Just as long and bloody as a lot of their films.  There are segments of each one that I've seen that I absolutely love, but most of them seem to have a way of ending in a way that leaves me very cold.  No doubt this is by design, as the theme in a lot of their work seems to be how simple events can set off a wave of murder, robbery and crime, and these situations rarely wrap themselves up in a neat little bow.  Sometimes, it can work out great, as it does with Fargo and the remake of True Grit.  Sometimes it's The Big Lebowski and its cult status that I've never understood or No Country for Old Men, which had me walking out of the theater royally pissed off.

So where does Blood Simple fall on this spectrum?  Well, as the first in what would be a long, storied filmography, it does pretty damn well.  Amazingly this was another film that I remember reading about in Roger Ebert's "13 for Halloween" list, which is yet more proof that this guy did not have the greatest taste when it came to horror movies.  I mean, Halloween?  Seriously?  All of that aside, this is a neo-noir crime film - a genre that I'm not exactly fond of - at its finest.  While it's far from perfect, it does a lot of things right and hits its various story points with occasional laser-like precision.

The movie opens up and immediately establishes the dark mood that will permeate the whole 96-minute running time.  In the pouring rain, bartender Ray (John Getz) is driving Abby (Frances McDormand in her big screen debut) home.  Abby is married to Marty (Dan Hedaya), the owner of the bar that Ray works at.  Suffice to say, the marriage is going through some very rocky times.  So rocky, in fact, that Abby is driven into Ray's metaphorical arms on this drive home and the couple wind up going to a hotel to paw each other.  However, seemy private detective Louis Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) has been hired by Marty to follow them and takes photos of their love-making session.

While Ray and Abby are the characters who get much of the screen time in this film, it's the film's darker characters who really drive the plot forward.  Marty isn't able to accept his wife leaving him so easily, and he decides to hire Visser to kill Ray and Abby.  It turns out to be a mistake that Marty eventually pays for in the most excruciating fashion, as the extremely snakey Visser stages the murders of Ray and Abby before shooting Marty in the chest, planting a gun that he stole from Abby on the scene to frame her for the killing.

The best stuff in the whole movie ensues as Ray arrives at Marty's bar and finds the dead body, believing that his lover was the one who pulled the trigger and hastily cleaning up the crime scene.  It's gut-wrenchingly tense, containing some great acting by Getz in the farthest possible thing from the Stathis Borans character that he would eventually be best-known for in David Cronenberg's The Fly.  We see the close calls at the bar itself as Ray removes Marty from the scene...and then that immortal highway sequence that begins when Ray finds out that Marty isn't quite dead yet.  

The script becomes a little contrived from this point on.  The third act of Blood Simple is based largely around a series of misunderstandings. Like, Three's Company level of misunderstanding, the kind of thing that could have been solved by either Ray or Abby asking one more question of the other.  I'm also a little hazy on why Visser didn't think to look for his doctored photos immediately after shooting Marty; maybe some well-meaning reader can inform me, maybe I missed something, maybe I'm a moron, it's all up in the air.

Alright, so, what works about this film?  It was the launching point for the Coen brothers for a reason, because their execution of this simple setup - an unhappily married woman shacking up with a well-meaning guy - is pretty damn good.  I've completely left out one detail of this movie so far, and that is the Texas setting.  A Coen trademark is amplifying the stereotypes of the locals of whatever film they make, and this is no different, with accents so thick that I actually had to turn on the subtitles.  The mood, atmosphere and even music of the film all amplify that setting, with the oppressive Texas heat, honky tonk bars and back country houses trapping the characters in a vice.  Oh, and M. Emmet Walsh?  What a performance.  This guy is sleazy in the best possible way in this movie, and I love it.

Those strengths are indeed so strong that I can overlook the weaknesses.  Those weaknesses would be the AFOREMENTIONED occasional illogical plot points and a third act that kind of drags before its epic climax.  By the way, said climax isn't shocking if you've seen other Coen brothers movies; I'm sure that it was in 1984, but these siblings made a career out of doing unexpected things.  Thus, unpredictability is often predictable in the Coen brothers canon.  Nevertheless, the final bit of cat-and-mouse contained within Blood Simple is fantastic.

Rating time: *** 1/2 out of ****.  It made GREAT watching on a hot summer night.  But it's the last freakin' thing I would ever dream of popping in on Halloween.  For a true Coen Brothers masterpiece, look no further: