Monday, October 11, 2021 Goodbye, Mr. Bond at October 11, 2021

 

Various YouTube channels that I follow have been posting videos lately with some very similar titles.  A whole slew of “Nice knowing you, Bond” and “R.I.P. Bond” posts, all of which being responses to the latest cinematic offering in the venerable franchise, No Time to Die.  These guys and gals are all up in arms at the moment, crying foul about the latest big-budget movie release in a long running series to go full woke and tell an existing fan base to screw in order to appease the Twitter PC gods who now rule the universe.  And while I’m entertained by these creators and would love to join in the chorus, I just have to say…where were you until now?  They've been killing this character for 15 years.

Thanksgiving Day, 2006.  I was in my final semester of college, nearing the end of a period of my life that still qualify as my darkest days.  I remember getting back to where I was living then after a nice turkey lunch and with a long night in front of me, and a light bulb going off in my head when I realized that there was a new James Bond film in theaters.  But not just any new James Bond film.  A new JAMES BOND, period.  Pierce Brosnan was out and Daniel Craig was in, and this was a movie that had some amazing advance buzz conveying that this incredibly prolific, incredibly successful franchise was about to raise the bar even higher.

Those were my expectations when I watched Casino Royale that day.  I expected the best Bond ever, based on everything I had heard.  What I got was something very different from what I expected.  It was certainly a competently made thriller, with nothing to complain about from a scripting or film-making standpoint.  But I remember walking out of the theater that day feeling that something was off.  In the ensuing days, I played the movie over numerous times in my mind, picking up more instances of occasions where the story COULD have given us one of the series’ classic tropes but intentionally chose to go a different direction for no other reason than the fact it could.  Did I…not like this movie?

Want to know something that I can acknowledge as extremely stupid in retrospect?  I was in denial over how I felt about this movie for the next two years.  I couldn’t not like this movie.  I mean, it was Bond!  There were conversations with friends during this time where I would voice some of my critiques of Casino Royale and then rationalize them away, telling myself that this was just the setup movie in a new series that would surely rock my world the next time around.  At one point, there was an honest friend who interrupted one of these soliloquys with “dude, you clearly did not like this movie.  Why are you convincing yourself that you did?”  Once again, I rationalized the astute observation away.

I did a pretty good job of it, too, because I remember that familiar excitement being back in my mind when the follow-up film Quantum of Solace neared its release date.  Surely, this film would tie everything together from the first movie and give us something we all could cheer for.  And it was sitting in the theater watching that film that something inside me finally snapped.  "What the fuck is this?" I thought to myself.  "This isn't James Bond!"  It was drab, it was uninspired, it was filled with uninteresting side characters and villains, it was populated with that ridiculous shaki-cam that all modern action films have fallen in love with.  Oh, and Q and Moneypenny were still nowhere to be found.  I gave this series one more shot in 2012, and while I found Skyfall to be an improvement, I was done watching the mental anguish of a character who was never meant to be anything more than a male projection fantasy.

Ordinarily, this is where I would be posting a movie review.  There will be no review of No Time to Die, and the reason for that is simple.  I refuse to watch it.  And to anybody who wants to stampede in here and call me a raging -istophobe who won't give this movie a chance because it tries to replace Bond with a black chick, I genuinely could not care less about that.  I never watched Spectre, either.  As far as I'm concerned, race- and gender-swapping is the least of the problems when it comes to these films.

We’re seeing a lot of think-piece articles right now on the legacy of the Daniel Craig era of James Bond films.  To me, that legacy will forever be one of betrayal.  I had been a huge Bond fan for many years by the time that Craig came along, watching all of the Connery and Moore classics in middle school, lapping up each Brosnan film at the multiplex on multiple occasions.  Why?  Because these films were FUN, in every sense of the word.  They were funny, both intentionally and unintentionally.  They were preposterous, with their impossibly awe-inspiring world of international espionage and ridiculously hot women who somehow always wound up attached to these major world political situations.  They were memorable, with their over-the-top villains and intricate Q gadgets that 007 got to test out in the field each time out.  More than anything, this character was an unapologetic male icon, one that every guy watching – myself included – could watch and fantasize about what it would be like to have this life.

The Craig films stripped all of that away.  They came along and told us that this guy, this character, was nothing worth getting behind or cheering for.  They took a patriotic, stealthy ladies’ man and turned him into an emo sourpuss.  They made the mantle of James Bond into a curse.  The fun, the humor, the gadgets, the women…yes, they were all gone, but it went deeper than that.  These films subverted your expectations by every definition of that term.  They came, and they perverted the series with laser-like focus, sniping away every franchise hallmark and comforting thing that you had come to expect.  This was clear to me by the time I had finished watching Skyfall.  If this was Bond 2.1, I preferred Bond 1.0.

Inevitably, someone always comes along right about now and says that art needs to evolve and that things can’t stay the same forever.  I agree.  The series had successfully reinvented itself multiple times over before Daniel Craig came along.  Let’s just look at the last great James Bond renaissance, when GoldenEye was released in 1995 after a six-year hiatus.  The film has clever dialogue scenes that comment on Bond’s place in a changing world, how the Cold War is over and the character is a relic of the past, but it presents us with a compelling situation and villain where Bond is needed once again to save the world for free democracy.  Most importantly, the character of Bond himself was unchanged; he still had the funny quips, the cool Q gizmos, and his way with the ladies.  This was how to adapt a familiar property to a new era, and I find no reason why this method could not have been utilized in the mid-‘00s.  James Bond resonates in any era.  Hell, right now, the wiseass, ladykilling James Bond might be needed more than ever.

The world needs escapism.  That is what entertainment is supposed to be, a portal out of the real world and a ticket to something much more interesting and wonderful.  This is what the James Bond films were until 2006.  But it's not even 2006 anymore.  Unfortunately, we live in 2021, where escapism is not allowed.  In 2021, everything must be punishment, and this mindset has taken over every major franchise like a virus.  Terminator, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Star Trek, even the Marvel movies.  In that regard, Casino Royale really was a movie ahead of its time.  Given that the Bond franchise was, at that point, the longest-running stalwart in motion picture history, it really shouldn’t surprise me at all that it was the first target marked for destruction.  Well, they succeeded by every measure.  So I guess what I'm really trying to say is…Goodbye, Mr. Bond.  It was nice knowing you.

Gosford Park (2001) at October 11, 2021

 

Directed by Robert Altman

Starring Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Alan Bates, Charles Dance, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Richard E. Grant, Derek Jacobi, Kelly Macdonald, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Northam, Clive Owen, Ryan Phillippe, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emily Watson

I can enjoy films of any genre.  That much has been established 29 films deep into the project.  I'm a horror fan first and foremost, but I'm also keen on dramas, comedies (back when they were legal), action films (back when they were coherent)...hell, even romances, as established by the previous film In the Mood for Love.  If it has a solid structure, satisfying character arcs and hooks me emotionally, I'm in regardless of what a film set out to accomplish.  Regardless of the genre, however, one type of film has always been a tough sell for me: large cast ensemble pieces.  

Gosford Park was directed by Robert Altman, a man who specialized in films with abnormally large casts of characters.  I've seen a decent number of his greatest hits, and the majority of them share a few common themes.  From M*A*S*H to McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Nashville to even Popeye, the Altman method of making a film is to take a script, casually toss it aside, throw everything up to his actors when it comes to characterization and build a community.  As a result, his films are extremely unconventional and at times even sloppy, but he has a great gift when it comes to creating film characters that stick with you after the ending credits.  Gosford Park is Altman to the letter, with the central plot point of two distinct large groups of characters under one roof and a murder mystery.  As per usual, there is no clear-cut plot beats or traditional character development.  We're thrown in as mere observers, for better or worse.

The setup for Gosford Park is simple.  We are placed in early 1930s England where a group of aristocratic people are gathering at the home of William McCordle (Michael Gambon) and his wife Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas) for a shooting excursion.  The execution of that setup is where the movie becomes an extremely complex, layered tale, with a massive collection of rich folks arriving at the home.  It does me little to no good to list all of their names; I'm not going to go so far as to say that they are interchangeable, but there is a remarkable samey quality to the endless parade of Countesses, Lords and Ladys that populate the film.  The movie saves its deeper traits for the army of servants that the stuffy people bring with them, a number just as big as the first group who are quartered downstairs and not allowed to cross the barrier into the sacred tabernacle of upstairs where their masters sleep.

The movie subverted my expectations with just how LONG it takes to build to the actual murder of William McCordle.  It occurs more than halfway into the film's 137-minute running time, after we have been given a few possible motivations from people who might want McCordle dead.  There is Anthony Meredith (Tom Hollander), who finds himself financially ruined when William withdraws from a business deal.  There is Rupert Standish (Laurence "Based" Fox), boyfriend of the McCordle's certifiably hot daughter (Camilla Rutherford) who is worried that he may not meet the family's stiff standards for a son-in-law.  The other man who stood out to be as a possible suspect to me was Robert Parks (Clive Owen), the films' resident rebel without a cause who has an attitude and a certain moral code.  Since he is also played by the most famous person in the cast at the time this movie was released, that also counts for some points in the killer pool.

Once the mysterious figure has knifed McCordle, the movie becomes a bit more streamlined.  If there is one type of character that the British love, it's bumbling detectives, and Stephen Fry plays a great one here.  For my money, the best scene in the entire film is the introduction of this character, where Sylvia introduces all of the guests to the detective and interrupts him every time he tries to speak.  It's one of those little things that is hard to pick up on, but if you do, it spells out the entire meaning of the film better than any dialogue ever can.  Show, don't tell.  Great stuff.  The investigators uncover that McCordle was actually murdered twice, as it were, being initially poisoned before we see a mysterious figure essentially stab a corpse.  

All of the fun in a movie like this isn't actually in the identities of the killer (or killers, in the case of this film).  It's in the journey to get there, and Gosford Park is a movie that gets stronger as it goes along.  The final 45 minutes concern the economics of the death, with Meredith finding himself ironically saved by the death of his rival and the various plays that are made on Isobel for her inheritance - or lack thereof.  There is a pair of effective scenes as Mary (Kelly Macdonald) deduces the entire plot all by herself.  While there are always things going on in the background, this character is really the centerpiece of the film.  She is the Winston Zeddemore of Gosford Park, the everyperson who takes the audience along for the ride and spells things out.

I'll admit that I spent the early portions of this film desperately trying to think of other things to do.  The group of characters is so large that I gave up very quickly on trying to learn all of their names, their occupations, who was a servant of who and the sexual underpinnings of some of the relationships.  Boredom was creeping in mightily quick, and I already had my synonyms for that word holstered as that description is one that I have virulently tried to avoid using throughout the 30 Flicks.  The narrative was giving me no central protagonist, no hook to bite into as it were.

That changed as soon as the murder took place.  Altman did something very uncharacteristic for him and calmed down.  The constant background conversations muddling the dialogue scenes were dialed back, and I was able to be drawn into this story of class difference and long-standing vengeance.  The film does have likable charcters, first and foremost among them being Mary and Robert.  They are very much a yin-yang duo, two of the people who live below the stairs and have very different outlooks on the people above them.  One is an observer, the other has a very personal stake.  Saying that alone is probably a spoiler, so I apologize, but it's how the film reaches its conclusions about humanity rather than what actions of humanity are presented.  

Rating time: *** out of ****.  Gosford Park starts slow, but give it time and this will be a rewarding watch.  I also wanted to post a video of Ryan Phillippe's horrendous Scottish accent but couldn't find one, so here's Kelly Macdonald and the man who should be hosting The Late Show right now being very, very Scottish:

Sunday, October 10, 2021 In the Mood for Love (2000) at October 10, 2021

 

Directed by Wong Kar-wai

Starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung

I'm...not a fan of romances.  Which is shocking, I know.  You're reading (but probably not) a guy who's written something like 400 reviews of horror movies.  I enjoy romance as a part of other genres, your actions and your dramas and your comedies (except for specifically designed romantic comedies - those things are the spawn of the devil) and even your horrors.  Because The Fly rules!  But the truth remains that I'm unmarried, extremely jaded and extremely unlucky-in-love.  Thus, there's nothing that pisses me off faster than the bad fanfic Twilight and the bad fanfic version of the bad fanfic 50 Shades of Gray.  Ick.  Just keep it away.

So, here we are with a true-blue romantic film.  The first and last of the project, and one of the most praised movies of the 2000s.  Seriously, look up the Rotten Tomatoes page for In the Mood for Love and you'll read some of the most over-the-top fappening of the mouth that you ever done will read.  You can definitely tell that I'm writing this review in a severely sleep-deprived state.  Anyway, this movie was released in 2000, a joint French-Hong Kong production directed by Wong Kar-wai.  Normally, this is the part where I go through the director's filmography and talk about other films that I'd seen of theirs, but in this case, I got nothing.  I did know of this film in a very special way, however, via a book by Mystery Science Theater 3000 producer/writer/puppeteer Kevin Murphy called A Year at the Movies where he recounts his hilarious experience watching this movie, falling asleep three times, and finding the movie so repetitive that he initially thought he'd slept through the whole thing and was watching it again.  That was what I thought I was in for with this flick.  Lo and behold, I actually liked it.

In the Mood for Love is is an exercise in minimalism, a movie where the setup, execution and payoff are all done in a way that wastes as few beats as possible.  There are only two characters of real consequence within the film.  The first one we meet is Su (Maggie Cheung), also known as Mrs. Chan, who has just moved into an apartment with her sometimes heard but never seen husband.  Almost simultaneously, Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) moves into the same complex with his rarely seen and rarely heard wife.  Most romantic films tend to pile on side characters, and this movie has its fair share (coworkers, bosses, neighbors, etc.), but they're all window dressing to Su and Chow.  This movie is all about being lean and mean, and the screenplay trims all the fat around its main story.

The first act of the film is a series of vignettes showing the two characters piecing together that their respective spouses are, in fact, sleeping together.  This leads to the initial conversation between Su and Chow where they do something other than exchange courtly greetings - but not what you think.  One line that I remember vividly from Kevin Murphy's review of this film in his book was that any American movie would have them humping like rabbits at this point, and he's right.  Nothing in this film is quick and easy.

Writer/Director Kar-wai shows great invention at this point with how to present the story he wants to tell.  The most important word in that title is "Mood," and he milks it for all it's worth.  At the beginning of their friendship/romance, Su and Chow act out the parts of their counterparts, performing the scenes that they imagine in their mind as their unseen cheating spouses make their initial moves.  This breaks the ice, and from here the relationship slowly builds to the pair developing a strong bond.  Chow is an aspiring writer who has given up on that dream but enlists Su's help in coming up with a martial arts serial.  They wind up renting a hotel room to write together so as not to rouse the suspicions of their neighbors.  Considering how Maggie Cheung looks in those amazing form-fitting dresses, +2 points to Chow for his sticking to the duo's "we're not going to be like them" moral commitment.

The film continues to pile on the mood, with the characters clearly showing their romantic interest in each other without ever saying a word.  It's all about glances and occasional hand holds - that's how much adherence the script pays to its formula of restraint.  The narrative takes some sudden twists, with Chow getting a job in Singapore and asking Su if she wants to come with him.  Spoiler alert: she doesn't, and the rest of the film deals with this near-miss and what could have been.  The movie flashes forward in time twice, leading up to a conclusion that goes on for eons but serves as a fitting closure to what we've seen for the last 90 minutes.  Su and Chow are the equivalents of two people passing each other in the night.  Heavy-handed, yes, but very effective.

When I was watching this film, I couldn't help but think that a person's enjoyment of a movie depends more heavily on where the viewer is in life than people think.  I can think of no better example than Ju-On, my favorite horror film of all time.  I bought a cheap used DVD of this movie sometime in the winter of 2008, just a few months after my brother passed away, and was blown away by the movie's non-linear storytelling and sad-yet-fun tone.  I watched the sequel the next night, and then repeated the whole process again countless times in the ensuing weeks.  Ju-On got me through some tough times, and because of that, I don't know if I'll ever like another movie as much as that one.  I think that if I saw In the Mood for Love at that same time, I likely would have hated it, viewing it as a maudlin and frustrating story that I wanted no part of.

But this isn't 2008.  It's 2021, where I'm 38, lonely, and feeling some occasional bouts of longing myself.  As a result, this movie connected with me.  This bias was enough to make me look deeper into the film than just its surface level as a romantic film that takes place in 1960s Hong Kong.  I was able to see the wonderful performances by the two leads and the moral and emotional dilemmas that they go through.  The cinematography is also top notch, painting everything in a strangely colorful palette for such a dreary and somber film - first and foremost the floral dresses worn by Cheung.  The film is pleasing to look at, but it goes deeper than surface beauty and makes you want to see what comes next for its main characters.  This is a film that will get you invested.

Rating time: *** out of ****.  This definitely isn't my type of film, and that might be the heaviest praise of all since it was able to hold my interest and get me to care.  Maybe things would have turned out differently for Su and Chow if one of them had broken this out:

Saturday, October 9, 2021 Dark City (1998) at October 09, 2021

 

Directed by Alex Proyas

Starring Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Richard O'Brien, Ian Richardson and William Hurt

I will admit to cheating somewhat with this review.  This was actually my THIRD attempt at watching this film.  It's not like I disliked the flick and gave up on it - far from it.  The first time was during my college years, when I sat down to begin watching it and got called away to go to work.  For whatever reason, I just never came back to it.  Flash forward several years, when I was staying over at a friend's house with the movie on in the background.  I was insanely tired and slept through the entire thing, waking up only to see the movie's finale.  So the film's middle 100 minutes were a complete mystery to me until now.

Dark City is one of the most famous cult movies of all time, a film that garnered a great deal of buzz among my circle of middle school friends when it was released in early 1998 and was promptly in and out of theaters, barely covering its budget at the box office.  It topped Roger Ebert's list of his best films of 1998, and is one of the movies that was probably saved from obscurity due to interference from the eponymous critic.  Such high-profile praise resulted in people slowly picking up on it and the film gradually gaining the following that it enjoys today.  It is the brainchild of writer-director Alex Proyas, the man behind the similarly dark-themed The Crow and I, Robot.  I don't consider Dark City to be a near-perfect film, but it is highly enjoyable, he kind of movie that sticks with you long after the ending credits have rolled.  How so?  Well, allow the Strangers to put you under so I can tell you.

At its core, the movie is a neo-noir film that features that most cherished of all neo-noir mystery tropes - an unnamed protagonist waking up with no memory of who he is.  Our lead character is John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell).  He's in a bathtub, disheveled, and completely unaware of his prior life and what brought him to this particular squalid apartment.  He also discovers a murdered woman in the room and a nearby blade that was no doubt used to do the deed before running off into the night.  It's a trope for a reason, because it generally works.  Discovering who someone is - especially your main character - is a tried-and-true way of getting the audience invested into the action.

Fortunately, it's not just a trope in Dark City.  Memory is the key theme of the film, and all of the craziness that ensues is connected to it somehow.  Murdoch is being trailed by the Strangers, flying super-beings with telekinetic powers who seem to be controlling everything that goes on in the city.  The lead stranger is played by Richard O'Brien, Riff Raff himself from Rocky Horror, and he is a splendid and memorable lead villain.  As John goes on the run and getting to know the other people inhabiting this world, he gleams that no one in town can really remember their past with any detail.  It isn't exactly a leap of faith to figure that the bald black-cloaked bad guys are somehow involved.

While Murdoch makes for an engaging lead, the movie shines with its side characters.  First and foremost among these is Dr. Daniel Schreber, played by Kiefer Sutherland in what I consider to be his best onscreen performance.  Yes, better than Jack Bauer, and I know from experience because I watched the first seven seasons of 24 religiously (I refuse to watch the last, because I'm 100% certain that I will hate how it ends).  He's very reminiscent of Peter Lorre in his mannerisms, speaking in stilted patterns and skulking around like R.N. Renfield as he assists the Strangers while also granting occasional hints to Murdoch about who and where he is.  William Hurt is also great as a police inspector tracking a serial killer who has bumped off several of the city's prostitutes, and believes Murdoch may be the man responsible.  Murdoch's would-be wife Emma is also an interesting character, although I found Jennifer Connelly's performance to be a little underwhelming.  Come to think of it, I'm ALWAYS underwhelmed by Connelly.  While she is strikingly beautiful, she always seems bored and almost annoyed to be acting in movies.  Is it just me?  Probably.

Caution: spoilers ahead.  As the movie progresses, bits and pieces of the mystery are revealed to the audience.  The Strangers are actually extraterrestrial beings who use the bodies of dead humans as their vessels, and the entire city is in fact an experiment to find the individuality of the human spirit.  The sun never comes up in the city, and this is by design.  Every night at midnight, the inhabitants' memories are erased and swapped, with the buildings being altered according to the Strangers' whims as they search for humanity's core.  Murdoch is the Neo of the film, a guy who has acquired the power to be able to resist the changes and must utilize his talents to stop them.  Did The Matrix rip this movie off?  Probably.

The premise demands that almost the entire running time of Dark City takes place at night.  This is a motif that can either work really well to serve a film's atmosphere (Escape from New York) or be a major hindrance (Highlander II).  This movie is an example of the former.  Proyas is a really skilled director, a savant when it comes to the visual style that was looking for with the film, and he creates a world that rivals Tim Burton's Gotham City in terms of sheer atmosphere.  It's a world of shadows and steam that seems to be retrograded to a modernized version of the 1930s, and it is a character in and of itself.  It is broken up only occasionally by some brief bits of bad CGI.  The climax of the film is an epic fight high above the city that should have been thrilling but made my eyes glaze over because what I was watching looked far too much like a modern Marvel film.  Had this scene been done with practical effects, it would have undoubtedly carried more punch.

Everyone in this movie gave it their all, but I walked away from Dark City thinking that this was undoubtedly Sutherland's movie.  Sewell is also interesting as a hero with no actual heroic qualities, as everything that he thinks he remembers could all just be imprinted into his brain.  This guy clearly had the goods to be a much bigger star than he turned out to be.  I can only surmise that it was his name that held him back - Rufus.  It's just a not a cool name, and this is coming from a guy whose last name is Lickness.  If this dude changed his first name to Michael, I'd be willing to bet that he'd own his own solid gold island by now.  Really, though, the characters of the film are secondary to the premise that it throws at you and the world that it creates - but NOT in the way that it overwhelms you with a bunch of senseless gobbledygook.  It knows when to slow down and simplify.  This is the film that Christopher Nolan's films all attempt to be but fail at.

Rating time: *** 1/2 out of ****.  It's occasionally illogical and clunky, but you don't watch a movie like this for biting realism.  This flick has inspiration, creativity, and villains that are almost as creepy as this guy:

Friday, October 8, 2021 Casino (1995) at October 08, 2021

 

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Starring Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, Don Rickles, Kevin Pollak and James Woods

In my review of The Third Man, I briefly talked about the love affair that critics have with crime dramas.  For the life of me, I've never understood why this subgenre gets SUCH praise from the high-minded intelligentsia responsible for those holy Rotten Tomatoes numbers.  I've never understood it and likely never will.  It's strange, in a way, because I'm a huge true crime buff who loves reading about serial killers and the grisly details associated with them.  But yet, films about life in the mafia leave me eternally cold.  In book form, the author can be a partial observer, giving you glimpses into the minds of bad people.  The films, though, come across to me as painful chores.  Film is visual, and watching people make bad choices and do bad things over and over and over until their eventual poetic justice moment is the cinematic equivalent of beating me over the head with a sledgehammer.  

There are no directors who personify this more than Martin Scorsese.  He's considered the greatest living film-maker, and from a technical standpoint I can't debate this very much.  I've seen a decent amount of his films and even enjoyed some of them.  Taxi Driver is undoubtedly my favorite, a movie that presents us with a strangely likable psychopath in Travis Bickle and drops us into his life.  It's one of my favorite movies of all time.  I initially hated Raging Bull, but now appreciate it much more as a character study of a guy who has the ability to do great things and squanders it because of his violent jealousy.  GoodFellas is even good fun for what it is.  The rest I can more or less forget, none moreso than The Last Temptation of Christ, a.k.a. the movie with the unintended hilarity of Harvey Keitel braying out lines as Judas Iscariot with his thick Brooklyn accent.   

Casino - the 1995 film that followed Mean Streets and GoodFellas in his pantheon of movies about the Mafia - is more of the same, a hopelessly repetitive 180-minute slog of bad people doing bad things.  Our lead bad guy here is Sam "Ace" Rothstein, professional gambler and handicapper who is so successful at what he does that the Chicago mob sends him to Vegas to run the newly-opened Tangiers Casino.  If you've seen Robert DeNiro in any mob movie going all the way back to The Godfather Part II, you know what to expect with this character.  He's a hard-nosed dude who expects everyone to worship him for his ability to make money by any means necessary and gets very mad when people don't.  Having said that, no one plays the role better, and I respect the hell out of this guy's acting commitment, no matter how much of an insufferable ivory tower douche he has become in recent years.  Separating the art from the artist has never been harder for me than it is with him, but it can be done.

Casinos are a dirty business.  They're designed by the very laws of probability to take your money, and Sam is all about the money, baby.  The movie throws in additional spice via the two main side characters.  First is Nicky Santoro, with Joe Pesci playing Joe Pesci once again as a short man who can beat up anyone he meets and has a temper that makes Gordon Ramsay envious.  He serves as the muscle to Sam's casino operation, and his criminal activities eventually bring law enforcement to the Tangiers.  The other character is Ginger McKee, played by Sharon Stone in what I found to be a very overblown and melodramatic performance.  She was pitch-perfect in Basic Instinct; I don't understand how this is supposed to be the pinnacle of her acting career.  The character is a hustler who Sam falls in love with and eventually marries, leading to all sorts of wonderful scenes involving domestic squabbles and cocaine use.  Everything eventually builds up to bad news for Sam, who winds up losing everything in his empire.  The end.

When compiling my notes for this review, it occurred to me that it does me no use to talk about the plot of this film and bitch about why I don't like it.  Instead, I'm going to try something different.  I want to dive deep and try to explain WHY critics have such a boner for movies like this.  Why are films like Casino, GoodFellas and The Godfather so highly regarded?  

I can't deny that these films are well-made.  Starting with Francis Ford Coppola's execution of Mario Puzos' source material in The Godfather, the movies are almost universally beautifully shot and executed.  They're also very well-done in the planning stages.  From a screenplay standpoint, the famous crime drama movies have an intricate structure that demands the attention of the viewer, rewarding you for listening intently to the dialogue and picking out the traits of each main character.  Which are usually hot tempers and drug use.  The acting in these films are almost universally wonderful, with Bobby D, Joey P and company diving fully into their Strasberg method manuals and inhabiting the characters that do these bad things.

But they are just SO amazingly redundant, even with what I can acknowledge to be their good qualities.  Let's go through a typical crime drama formula.  We meet an opportunistic character when they are on the borderline of the criminal world and see them get initiated into that world.  The character or characters commit their first bad deeds, maybe even being slightly put off by it but easily seduced by the money and power perks that their new profession provides.  The film's ever-present, grating voice-over introduces us to a vast network of hired goons and professionals associated with the main character as they dive headlong into their new lifestyle, picking up a drug or alcohol habit while also cheating on their spouses and violently threatening anyone who is a minor inconvenience to their position of power.  It is because of these vices that the character is eventually either killed, imprisoned or totally alone, a lesson in the dangers of greed and giving in to your id.

  

That outline, which fits almost every crime drama that I've seen, is Casino.  It hits the beats just like all of the films that came before and after.  They run counter to the traditional hero's journey narrative that most films take, and I can only guess that this is the reason why critics publicly applaud these films to such a degree.  They're different, and when your job is to see as many movies as possible, different must undoubtedly be good.  This mindset is understandable.  And it's for this reason why, for as much as I personally have never been a big fan of Martin Scorsese, I believe that he's totally right about Marvel movies, because every single one of those goddamn things is the same way more than mob movies ever will be.

Rating time: * out of ****.  Casino is wonderfully shot, executed, and acted.  But I just have to ask, what is the value here?  I repeatedly said, out loud, "alright, WE GET IT!" while watching this film.  For the record, this is my least favorite film in the project thus far.

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.