Cecil B. DeMented
The Cell
The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Forbidden Planet
Getting to Know You
Girl on the Bridge
Hollow Man
It
Kiss Me Kate
Nashville
Once Upon a Time in the West
Psych-Out
The Replacements
Space Cowboys
The Tao of Steve
Trapeze
Two-Lane Blacktop
The Woman Chaser
Wonderland
Friday, August 4, 2000 I saw The Woman Chaser at 12:25 at the Lumiere, Space Cowboys at 3:30 at the Coronet and Two Lane Blacktop at the Castro. Thursday, August 3, 2000 I saw Forbidden Planet at the Castro and The Eyes of Tammy Faye at the Embarcadero.
Let's start at the beginning. The Eyes of Tammy Faye was good and funny if a little claustrophobic at 1 hour 19 minutes. It was a documentary, half tongue in cheek and half serious about Tammy Faye. Interviews with Jim Bakker, their son, daughter and her new husband Roe Messner. She's not as awful as you might think. In fact, she's a lot better person than, say, my friend Pete. Plus preview of the Juliette Binoche film!!! Alice et Martin coming soon!!
Forbidden Planet was never better. I'd seen it twice in thirty years. But I hadn't remembered it very well. It's great fun in the packed Castro. It is one of the great and most important of the 1950s sci-fi films. Rank with The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Although this one is campier than those three films. A starship crew goes to investigate the silence of a planet's colony only to find two survivors and a deadly secret that one of them has. To quote someone at imdb, "undiluted pulp science fiction on the big screen."
Leslie Nielsen is the captain, Warren Stevens, Richard Anderson, Jack Kelly and Earl Holliman are shipmates with Holliman having quite a penchant for booze. Walter Pidgeon is the mad doctor and Anne Francis is his young, nubile daughter who is taught how to kiss by Nielsen and his crew. Lots of fun. Widescreen, Eastmancolor, co-starring George Wallace, James Drury, James Best, Marvin Miller as the voice of Robby the Robot and Les Tremayne as the Narrator.
Interesting note: a retarded man in line in front of me just started talking to me about the movie, I humored him, nodded and stuff and finally he started the same bit with the couple in front of me. They humored him too. "Um, um, um, did you know that Leslie Nielen was in this?" "Uh huh" "Um, um, yeah, this was when he was still a straight actor" "Uh huh" "He was in the Naked Gun movies" "Uh huh" "He started in I think Police Squad, no wait Airplane. And he kept saying 'we're all counting on you' -- that was funny." "And: uh huh."
Got up early Friday morning (10:30) because I had gone to bed early Thursday night (11:30) because I was sad and lonely and depressed feeling. But Patrick Warburton changed that, baby! Patrick Warburton was Elaine's nutty boyfriend, David Puddy, on Seinfeld. Then earlier this year he was wonderful and hilarious in Scream 3. Anyway, The Woman Chaser is a fun, black and white, "new millenium noir" version of Charles Willeford's "psycho pulp classic." Eugene Roche is billed third and gets his name on the poster, but he has only one brief scene. I know Roche from the old days.
Born September 22, 1928 in Boston, Massachusetts I first noticed Roche on TV's Soap. Partial Filmography: Executive Decision (1996), When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), Oh, God! You Devil (1984 and starring Ted Wass, also from Soap), Corvette Summer (1978), Foul Play (1978) as the Archbishop, The Late Show (1977), Mr. Ricco (1975) with Dean Martin, Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), They Might Be Giants (1971), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and The Happening (1967), his first film.
At 3:30, Friday, I saw Space Cowboys at the soon-to-be-closing Coronet on Geary. Opening day saw a relatively crowded theatre. Space Cowboys is Clint and co. in space. You know what it is going in, but that aside it is great fun, and though 2 hours 15 minutes, doesn't drag. As such, it's one of the best films of this summer. The great cast includes: Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, Donald Sutherland, James Cromwell, Loren Dean, Courtney B. Vance, William Devane, Marcia Gay Harden, Rade Serbedzija, Blair Brown, Barbara Babcock, Chris Wylde and Anne Stedman.
Of trivial information: Eastwood and Sutherland made Kelly's Heroes 30 years ago, in 1970. Cromwell and Eastwood made Pink Cadillac in 1989. Cromwell and Garner made Tank 16 years ago in 1984. Garner plays "Tank" in Space Cowboys. Jones and Cromwell did The Rainmaker for TV 18 years ago in 1982. Sutherland and Jones were both in JFK in 1991. Garner is 72 and looks at least that, Clint is 70, Sutherland is 66, Cromwell is 60, Jones is 55.
And now we move on to the big guns. The best of these five movies: Monte Hellman's cult classic Two Lane Blacktop. It didn't hurt to see it at the Castro. And to see it with well salted popcorn, a Coke and a big soft cookie! And it didn't hurt to see it with a nice, medium-sized crowd. And it sure as hell didn't hurt when Warren Oates' name appeared in the credits and there was raucous applause -- by me included!
I'd seen the movie once years and years ago on video, but didn't remember much about it. James Taylor (yes that James Taylor) is a car driver who drives around the country with his mechanic buddy in the early 70s. They pick up eating and tune-up money in races in small southern towns. They pick up a girl. They run into the slightly naive and slightly wacky Oates. They plan a race. It's very leisurely paced, with not a lot of dialog. Co-starring Laurie Bird, Dennis Wilson, Rudy Wurlitzer, Jaclyn Hellman, Harry Dean Stanton, Melissa Hellman and James Mitchum. Written by Rudy Wurlitzer who wrote Peckinpah's masterpiece Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.
It really takes you to that time. Small town life in the early 70s. It made me want to get on my motorcycle and ride down to New Mexico or Arizona or maybe Mexico. And just keep on riding...
I finally saw Nashville on Saturday. I know, I know. It's weird. Ted's seen everything, surely he's seen Nashville. Well, I hadn't. But the Castro showed it today and I went, and it was pretty good. I am a fan of Altman's. I liked M*A*S*H, The Player, Shortcuts, Cookie's Fortune, I think The Gingerbread Man is the best Grisham adaptation yet (thank God they appear to be over), and I even liked Pret-a-Porter.
So, what's the deal, why wait until now to see Nashville? Because I know I'd have had trouble sitting through a rented, pan and scan, version on video at 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Anyway, Nashville is about a long weekend in the country music capital. Henry Gibson, Michael Murphy, Lily Tomlin, Karen Black, Elliott Gould, Ned Beatty, Scott Glenn, Keenan Wynn, Shelley Duvall, Barbara Harris, Ronee Blakley, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Allen Garfield, Cristina Raines, Bert Remsen, Gwen Welles and Julie Christie. Intertwining lives of the many characters. Sex, relationships, drama, comedy, music, mayhem.
And Sunday I saw another British indie pic (why do I keep doing this to myself?) at the Lumiere. More dismal, dull, depressing lives of the losers in the UK and Ireland. No offense, most of my ancestors came from there, but still. God damn potato farmers and drunks. Bad teeth, Labor parties. How depressing.
It was called Wonderland, a Michael Winterbottom film. Sort of a duller, more depressing -- and most importantly -- not funny, version of Happiness. But it wasn't as bad as Metroland. Unhappily married parents in their sixties, they have four kids. One is lonely, one is pregnant and her husband just quit his job, one is a single mom who smokes incessantly. She's got an ex-husband and a kid.
Starring Gina McKee from The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), as the woman in the wheelchair in Notting Hill (1999), as Kelly MacDonald's mom in The Loss of Sexual Innocence (1999), Croupier (1998), Naked (1993), The Rachel Papers (1989) and The Lair of the White Worm (1988); and Ian Hart from The End of the Affair (1999), Enemy of the State (1998), The Butcher Boy (1997), The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995), and as John Lennon in Backbeat (1993).
Monday, August 7 I saw one of the all-time great westerns at the Castro. 8pm. The theatre was pretty crowded; nicely so. The film is Sergio Leone's 1969 classic, Once Upon a Time in the West.
The film opens with three gunmen waiting to meet the train. The gunmen are legends Woody Strode and Jack Elam, and another guy who is not a legend (Al Mulock, who committed suicide on the set!). They lock the ticket seller in the closet and slam the door, black screen, and the credits begin. The credits run over the first 14 minutes of the film.
Raucous applause for the cast (Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Woody Strode) and crew (Leone, Ennio Morricone, Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci -- the last two as co-writers).
A long, stylish wait and Bronson shows up. "And Frank?" "Frank sent us." "You bring a horse for me?" "(laughs) Looks like we're, looks like we're shy one horse." "You brought two too many." Bronson kills them all of course, with three shots. The great man, Woody Strode gets Charlie in the arm before his towering body hits the planks of the train station.
Anyway, 2 hours and 45 minutes of operatic, widescreen movie making; a marvelous, emotional score by Ennio Morricone (Morricone composed the musical score to the original screenplay by Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. Reportedly, the plot was subsequently changed, and in many places, Leone directed the film to the existing musical score); Henry Fonda's all-time best performance; and much more!
When originally released the film bombed in the US, probably largely due to Paramount's insisting on cutting the film down to 2 hours. But in Europe it was huge. It played in one theatre in Paris for four years. The long duster coats that Cheyenne's (Jason Robards) men wear became extremely fashionable there too.
Once Upon a Time in the West is an homage, really, to all of the great Hollywood westerns. From the opening sequences, and their balletic re-mixes of moments from High Noon, Shane, Pursued and The Searchers, to the climax inspired by John Ford's The Iron Horse. Leone had made A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly previously, all with Clint Eastwood.
The film is a masterpiece, although my friend Benita hated it. But we're still friends. She's not really a film person.
In case you're interested, the other greatest westerns of all time include: Rio Bravo & Red River; The Searchers & The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Shane; Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, The Wild Bunch & Ride the High Country; Day of the Outlaw; the Scott-Boetticher films; and the Stewart-Mann films.
Early in the day I was down in Palo Alto. First I stopped at the Borders Books store and looked around for a while. I bought Delta of Venus by Anais Nin, Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Murder Down Under by Arthur W. Upfield and Fodor's 2000 Arizona.
The Shirley Jackson book is supposed to be mystery/horror and I'm hoping it's more exciting than her The Haunting of Hill House. Haven't ever read any Anais Nin before. Discovered Upfield in the mystery section. An Australian writer who wrote mysteries in the 30, 40s, 50s. So I bought what was the first one originally published of the four they had.
As far as Arizona goes, I've never been there before, and if my jury duty ends on the day it begins (the 21st) I will have through Labor Day until my fall classes start. I was thinking of riding my motorcycle down through the blazing heat of the Southwest. Who knows? Nothing keeping me here. Until September 5th anyway.
After the bookstore, I went to the Peninsula Fountain & Grill. I had a bottle of Calistoga sparkling water, a peppermint milkshake, a cheeseburger and fries. Delicious. Then I went over to the Stanford Theatre and saw Clara Bow in It. After the success and popularity of this film (released in 1927) Clara became known as "The It Girl."
David Thomson called her "the first mass-market sex symbol." He also says she was the first actress intent on arousing sexual excitement who is not ridiculous. She was huge, but bourgeois hypocrisy killed her in 1930.
Not "killed" killed, just her career. If I get a chance later, I will quote David Thomson's complete essay on her. It's quite good and interesting. Did she fuck the entire USC football team?
08.10.00: Today I saw Hollow Man at the Presidio. It was seriously flawed in the sense-making department, but it was mindless fun in the horror/suspense vein. There is a real sense of "movie" about it, which for some films would be wrong, but here it works. Colorful, rich cinematography; good effects, though minor mistakes.
Elisabeth Shue is wonderful, Bacon is fine as the mad scientist made even madder by the invisibility serum and the rest of the cast is fine: Bill Devane, Josh Brolin, Joey Slotnick, Greg Grunberg and Kim Dickens. Not nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be.
At 7 I saw Trapeze at the Castro. Directed by Carol Reed, and beautifully and excitingly photographed by Robert Krasker (who won an Oscar for Reed's brilliant The Third Man). A love triangle thrown in among the geometrics of tightropes and triples. Burt Lancaster, Gina Lollobrigida and Tony Curtis star, with Katy Jurado, Thomas Gomez and Sidney James.
I saw Cecil B. DeMented at the Bridge on Saturday (08.12.00), and it was Waters. It was lamely plotted nonsense, but there were funny parts. It just sort of kept going until it ran out of steam, with no real plot. But Stephen Dorff and Melanie Griffith were both very good, and there were some funny parts. Very over-the-top stuff, as usual from Waters.
Dorff and company kidnap Hollywood celeb Griffith and force her (at gun -- and cattle prod -- point) to star in their fringe, independent film. Co-starring Alicia Witt, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Adrian Grenier (in a role reminiscent of Lloyd Bridges in Airplane), Jack Noseworthy, Mink Stole, Ricki Lake, Eric Roberts and Patty Hearst (life imitating art?).
Sunday (08.13.00) I saw Getting to Know You at the Roxie. It was about this girl (Heather Matarazzo from Scream 3 and Welcome to the Dollhouse) and her brother waiting in a train station. She meets another kid and they trade stories, and flashbacks ensue about Matarazzo and her brother's home life with their pathetic, abusive, alcoholic parents (great performances by Bebe Neuwirth and Mark Blum). It's very funny, and very sad, and very touching. Directed by Lisanne Skyler, who also wrote the screenplay based on Joyce Carol Oates stories. The great cast also includes Zach Braff, Michael Weston, Tristine Skyler, Christopher Noth (from Sex in the City and Law & Order), Mary McCormack, Celia Weston -- and Bo Hopkins and Richard Bright, both old time Peckinpah actors.
Hopkins' first film was 1969s The Wild Bunch, he and Bright were both in The Getaway. Hopkins also appeared in Peckinpah's The Killer Elite. Hopkins is a good old boy (born in Greenville, South Carolina, February 2, 1942) with lots of stories and he does a great Steve McQueen impression. His films include The Newton Boys (1998), Phantoms (1998), U Turn (1997), Radioland Murders (1994), The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), Inside Monkey Zetterland (1992), Midnight Express (1978), The Day of the Locust (1975), Posse (1975), American Graffiti (1973), and Monte Walsh (1970).
Richard Bright was in Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and played Al Neri in all three Godfather films. He plays Detective Stransky on HBO's Oz. His other films include: Night Falls on Manhattan (1997), Beautiful Girls (1996) The Ref (1994), Who's the Man? (1993), Red Heat (1988), Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), The Idolmaker (1980), Hair (1979), Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), Marathon Man (1976), Rancho Deluxe (1975), The Panic in Needle Park (1971) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959).
Both are little guys and great character actors. Bright (born Brooklyn, June, 28, 1937) has looked like Death warmed over for the last few years, and he's been playing characters that are pretty out of it. These days, every time I see Bo Hopkins show up in something I can't help smiling. There's just something about him.
I have a lot of Sinatra albums, CDs rather. I have one 20 CD set which is everything at the label he founded, Reprise, from 1960-1988. Which is, I think, everything he did from 1960 until his death except for those tacky Duets albums when his voice was really shot anyway.
On one of the discs is this song with Frank, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis called We Open In Venice. I love this song, it's very short and very fun with a lot of ad-libbing.
Well, I didn't know where it came from until I saw Kiss Me Kate tonight (08.17.00) at the Castro -- in 3D yet. All of a sudden I recognized it even before they started to sing the words. It was fun comparing it the version Frank, Dean and Sams did.
Other than that, Kiss Me Kate was just another musical. I don't really like musicals. There's the ones from the 30s with Dick Powell or Ruby Keeler, Goldiggers of 1932, 1935, 1937, whatever. The Astaire-Rogers ones. The MGM ones of the 50s. The dregs: Grease, Grease 2, Xanadu.
Don't get me wrong, I love Dick Powell, but for the noir and the comedies he finally got himself into in the mid 40s. And at times you're watching Astaire and you really do have to marvel. And there's moments. But the stories and the characters and the situations are all the same, they write songs and build some silly story around the songs. And usually there's 2 or 3 really good songs in the movie. So it's a lot of wasted time.
Howard Keel gets his ex-wife, Kathryn Grayson, to co-star with him in Cole Porter's new musical on broadway. There's Ann Miller, who I cannot stand, she's like a female Milton Berle. She dances a lot and makes comic faces. She's not attractive so she goes for corn. Yet characters in the movie seem to think she's attractive. Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore play Runyonesque gangsters for comic relief. A couple of good songs. I had a medium popcorn and a medium Coke. Tried to doze through the last parts of it, but with no success.
The day before (08.16.00) I rode over to Berkeley to see Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Dean Stockwell and Susan Strasberg in the 60s drug culture cult film Psych-Out. It was fun, but got a little old. It's all about peace and love, man. Nicholson and his buddies live in a big wherehouse building with a lot of other transient hippy types. Free clothes, free drugs, free love. Dean Stockwell plays an even more gonzo hippy pseudo-god and has some pretty funny anti-man lines: "It's all just one big plastic hassle."
And then on Friday (08.18.00), I went to see The Cell at the Vogue on Sacramento. I also saw another Jennifer Lopez movie at that theatre, called Out of Sight.
The Cell was okay. It was a regular serial killer movie, laden with your usual cliches, but then some fancy MTV video style dream sequences. Good cast includes Vince Vaughn, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dylan Baker, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Jake Weber.
And then it was Sunday (08.20.00), and I saw The Tao of Steve and Girl on the Bridge. Or was it Saturday? I walked down to the Embarcadero to see an afternoon showing of The Tao of Steve with my friend Jenny Raymond. It was good. We both thought so. It was a comedy/romance. This fat guy gets all the girls because he has this theory (which is true), where if you act like you're not interested in a girl you are interested in she will come to you. It's somewhat complicated, but basically sound. Girls say they want a certain type of caring thoughtful man, but they really don't. They use those guys as friends. For sexual/physical interest there has to be mystery. Danger. Take it from me. I have 87 women friends. Anyway, the guy realizes that he's in love with this one girl and has to rethink his strategy. When you're really in love with someone, then you can go ahead and be a little more thoughtful. But that's way into a relationship.
In re Girl on the Bridge: I saw what might be the best film of the year last weekend. It's called Girl on the Bridge and it is playing at the Clay Theatre in San Francisco. It's at the Albany Twin in Albany/Berkeley. At other theatres in other cities. It's sort of a quirky comedy-romance from France. So, it's subtitled and it's shot in high contrast black and white and it's beautiful. I recommend it to all. Please see it.
It stars Daniel Auteuil and Vanessa Paradis (currently Johnny Depp's girlfriend I hear, she's a singer/actress from France). Auteuil is an aging knife thrower who looks for suicidal girls on bridges to be the target in his act. He figures that if they were going to kill themselves anyway, maybe they'd like to go out with a bang. Anyway, he finds Vanessa and they have a couple of adventures...
See it!
And then on Tuesday, August 22, 2000, I rode over to Cinema 21 and saw The Replacements. Much better than I was led to believe. Old story about old sports guys given one more chance and bla bla bla, but a good cast, and keeping itself from getting bogged down in seriousness helped it out.
Pros on strike. Everyday guys get to play. A comedy based on the 1987 professional football players' strike. Reeves and Hackman really help anchor this movie. Wonderful new presence by female lead Brooke Langton. Supporting players include: Orlando Jones and Jon Favreau; Jack Warden is the owner; John Madden and Pat Summerall play themselves.