Fear and Romance The Hard Way

I'm slowly trying to make this blog more focused and professional looking and I hope to starting adding things like videos soon, but for now I want to get my thoughts on two recent movies out of the way. I recently found the local Blockbuster so I can get in the habit of seeing more recent films again. Both of the first two films I rented featured John Turturro in some regard but not at his best.

FEAR X

This was supposed to be the big American crossover success for Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn who had previously made a really good thriller in his home country called "Pusher". Needless to say things didn't work out that way and watching Fear X I understand why.

John Turturro stars in this movie as a mall security guard obsessed with finding the mysterious person who shot and killed his wife in a parking lot. There was such an ominous, hallucinatory atmosphere throughout this picture that I was afraid they were going to end it with the predictable twist of Turturro himself turning out to be the killer. Thankfully they didn't go that route but the plot that did unfold was an underwhelming X-Files / Twin Peaks hybrid involving vigilante cops. It all turned out to be much more vague and unsatisfying than it needed to be with low-lit sinister tableaux that seemed to be imitations of much better and more original works. Watching Turturro creep around dark red hotel corridors flashed me back to "Barton Fink". I kept expecting John Goodman to run down the hall carrying a shotgun and screaming "I'll show you the life of the mind!".

When Turturro was playing the part of a blocked writer in "Barton Fink" it turns out he actually did begin working on a screenplay. That screenplay became the second film I saw:

ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES

Turturro both wrote and directed this tongue-in-cheek musical about a steelworker with a wife and three grown daughters who is having a torrid affair with another woman. You could actually believe the Barton Fink character wrote this. It's pretentious, obvious and silly, a movie that takes its cues from ironic works by the likes of Godard, Truffaut, Fassbinder and Dennis Potter but doesn't do anything that hasn't been many times before. Just like in Potter's "Pennies From Heaven" the characters express themselves by singing along to pop songs, this time including "Piece Of My Heart", "A Man Without Love" and "Delilah" but there's no surprise to it especially when there are so many familiar faces in the cast.

Turturro seems to have gotten all of his New York area acting buddies like James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon and Steve Buscemi into this but not given them anything new to do. Buscemi plays a typical Steve Buscemi role. Christopher Walken plays a typical Christopher Walken role, including dancing, and Gandolfini even does his entire role in his Tony Soprano voice. It's a cute idea to cast Mandy Moore, Mary Louise Parker and Aida Turturro as Gandolfini's punk rocker daughters (even though two of them are close to his age) but they have nothing to do except stand around the edges and complain. Kate Winslet's foul mouthed Molly Bloom take as the other woman would have been more memorable in a better movie.

The cast may be attractive but this is really a massive piece of self indulgence that was probably a lot more fun to make than it is to watch.

Nostalgia Is Overrated

I should stay away from the Ain't It Cool News website but I still look at it regularly. I read something there today that shows it's not meant for me. There was a comment by one of the regular writers on a Talkback that This Week's Summer Blockbuster, "Speed Racer" was a wonderful trip back to your childhood and that anyone who didn't like it was just being a "Too Cool For The Room" hater.

That bothered me. If somebody else loves this movie, fine. I didn't care about the cartoon Speed Racer and I could care less about this movie but I really get depressed by the constant gushing by adults in their 20's and 30's who think reliving your childhood is the greatest thing imaginable. They never think that some people have no desire to go back to their childhoods. I was miserable as a kid. I was picked on in school and didn't think my parents cared about me. Why the hell should I want to go back to that? There were cartoon shows I liked then and that I still like now but I like them because they are genuinely funny not because they send me on some Proustian nostalgia kick . I was never too much into drooling over Summer Movies and I especially avoid the ones that are rehashes of thirty year old kiddie entertainment.

Pool Hustlers and Life

Okay, over the next few weeks I'm going to start commenting on my favorite movies as I watch them again and refresh my memories of them. Unfortunately I probably won't get around to Celine And Julie Go Boating any time soon because it's not on DVD. Other than that I'll start with my all-time favorite:


THE HUSTLER

It's been said before but when Paul Newman won his only Best Actor Oscar for playing Fast Eddie Felson in The Color Of Money, he won for the right role but the wrong movie. His Fast Eddie in The Hustler is the center of an incredible film, a fable about ambition, greed, life, death and love told in the story of a pool hustler whose overarching ambition is to be called the greatest pool player of all time.
This movie is most famous for its pool scenes but it has so much more especially in the scenes between Fast Eddie and his sad, alcoholic girlfriend played by Piper Laurie. A beautiful, tragic love story emerges as they go from being two sordid losers screwing and drinking like hermits in their apartment, become more of a normal young couple in love after Eddie breaks his thumbs and temporarily cannot play pool and spiral back down to disaster after the slimy Bert Gordon, played brilliantly by George C. Scott, becomes Eddie's manager.
The blowaway ending of the film is not the final pool game where Eddie finally beats Minnesota Fats. It's the beautiful sequence immediately after when he confronts Bert, realizing that the tragedy that destroyed his girlfriend killed him inside and that he has sacrified his humanity to become the "winner" he always wanted to be. It's a perfect example of "Be careful what you wish for."
Watching the film again I noticed the homosexual subtext for the first time, that Bert, in essence pimps out Eddie, especially in setting up a match for him with an effeminate billiards player at the Kentucky Derby played by Murray Hamilton. Eddie looks so disheveled and disgusted at the end of that scene you wonder if they were doing something else besides playing billiards.
There's also the amazing subtlety in the first marathon pool sequence where little is said but characters are delineated and the story told all through posture and looks. Watching the faces of Bert, Eddie, Fats and Eddie's manager, Charlie, tells you all you need to know. I also picked up on how uniformly great the acting is in this movie. Newman, Scott, Laurie, Jackie Gleason and Myron McCormick in his few scenes as Charlie are all outstanding. I feel drained every time I finish watching this movie. It's like watching a man descend into Hell.

Clearing The Decks...

I'm going to try to take this thing more seriously and do essays on my favorite movies in the next few weeks but first I want to catch up on a couple of recent views.

WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE

This was one of the last films of Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura. The Imamura films I've seen before like "Pigs And Battleships" and "The Pornographers" had a black comic, earthy view of the world that was pretty out there. "Warm Water" was still strange but had a more whimsical tone. It was essentially one of those "Local Hero" type films where an uptight businessman visits some remote village and learns to how to really live from the locals, including the inevitable beautiful girl that he falls in love with. Being Japanese it had its own wacko twists, the biggest being the heroine literally spurting like a geyser when she has sex.


IN HER LINE OF FIRE

I should have known better. Making the hero of a generic action movie a lesbian does not make it a better movie. This was typical cheap stuff about a Secret Service agent saving the Vice-President from mercenaries while shipwrecked on a remote island. The only twist was Mariel Hemingway played the Secret Service agent and she had the usual sexual tension going with a pretty reporter. The strange thing is Hemingway has played a straight version of this part in two previous direct to cable movies. She's also played bisexual or gay characters in several movies before this, not just "Personal Best". Anyway it was by the numbers cheapness that at least moved fast and didn't last too long. You still noticed all the low budget signs though, like "mercenaries" and "revolutionaries" who all had the same New Zealand accent and two people talking in a room standing for all of official Washington's concern about this crisis.

Thinking Pink

I recently went through the third disc of the Pink Panther Cartoon DVD collection and I was a touch flummoxed by what I saw. The cartoons all looked beautiful from a drawing standpoint but the cartoons themselves varied wildly in quality. Some were funny and some were just odd with a lot of random visual gags that had no flow or internal logic.

After a little Internet digging, I discovered I was watching the last few theatrical cartoons in the series from 1969 and a bunch of the early made-for-TV ones which started up two years later. These were all produced by Friz Freling's company, De Patie-Freling, so it was no surprise that a lot of old Warner Brothers hands like Art Davis, Hawley Pratt and even Robert McKimson, directed these but honestly, the humor sometimes felt like the crappy Warners cartoons of the Sixties. There were oddities like the Panther being a stowaway on board a cruise ship and running away from an attacking deck chair or his taking a pet fish for a walk (!). I'm still interested to see how the series was in its celebrated early days so I put the first disc in the series into my Netflix queue. Friz himself even directed some of those. Hopefully they'll be more coherent.

Pure Pleasure

I finally admit it. One of the most enjoyable things in the world to me is browsing in an honest-to-God record store, one that is full of CDs of every genre both new and old. I didn't realize how good I had it when there was a Tower Records only four blocks from where I worked and I could stop in any time I wanted just to roam around. Now Tower has been gone for a year and a half and I really miss the place.
Fortunately there is still one full to the gills store in town, Melody Records. It isn't close to me and I don't get there very often but I finally got back up there Saturday and I was in heaven, rows and rows of wonderful rare and cool stuff in jazz, folk, classical, electronic and rock among other categories. I had planned to buy only two or three discs so naturally I walked out with four: "The Time Has Come" by Anne Briggs, "Sunshine Of My Soul" by Jaki Byard, "Boss" byMagik Markers and a twofer of The Impressions' "This Is My Country" and "The Young Mod's Forgotten Story". And all the stuff still there for future visits: Max Roach, Pentangle, Cecil Taylor, Carla Bozulich, The Move, The Electric Flag, Kevin Ayers, Philip Glass. That just scratches the surface. I don't care how geeky it makes me look. I love spending hours in a store like that.

Reopening The Crypt

Well, I have something of a legitimate reason for stopping for so long. I moved again. I moved out of the isolated, depressing situation I was living in and into a better and more close in neighborhood in Bethesda, and my landlord is an old acquaintance to boot. There are drawbacks to this place mainly that I have a lot less storage room and had to get rid of all my albums and a bunch of CDs, DVDs and books to boot. I still have a lot of stuff though I have no clue as to exactly what. I found some software, Music Collector, that will let me properly catalog all my CDs and that has become a slow, ongoing project.

Culturally I'm still relying heavily on Netflix. I can't get WGN from here so no more "Corner Gas" but the DVD sets are supposed to be getting an American release soon. I did stumble across a disc of another amazing Canadian series, "Robson Arms", that features a couple of the "Corner Gas" actors. Hopefully I'll get around to talking about the few other DVDs I've seen that I think are worth discussing, Hallelujah, The Fugitive and The Pink Panther Cartoon Collection.

Canadian Prairie Humor

I've got a lot of things to catch up on talking about like The L Word, Puppets Who Kill and Looney Tunes Volume Four, but I've got to start somewhere and I might as well start with a Canadian TV sitcom called Corner Gas.

When you think about SCTV, Jim Carrey and all the people who have come out of Saturday Night Live, you realize a lot of funny people have come out of Canada in the last thirty years. When you watch some Canadian TV comedies though you start to think they've kept the best stuff for themselves. I'm thinking of The Red Green Show, Puppets Who Kill and especially Corner Gas.

The setup for this show is incredibly basic. It's basically about a man who runs a gas station in a small town called Dog River out on the western Canadian prairie and his circle, the woman who works for him at the station, his parents, his best friend, the woman who runs the diner next door and the town's two-man police force. The show is built on simple premises like the arivall of the town's first ATM machine, a lost American tourist, a curling competition and tearing down a barn. Yet this show is very funny. The writers fit the dialogue together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle so that one conversation can forward three plots and still be funny. It's also refreshing to see a comedy that isn't all about fat guys trying to get laid or adult guys trying to act like teenagers. All the characters here are at different levels of dumb or quirky so you don't feel like you're watching the same viewpoint coming out of four or five people's mouths. Also it doesn't hurt that the cast includes one stone cold hottie, Gabrielle Miller, the woman on the left in the picture, who plays Lacey, the owner of the diner.