A Unilateral, Concerted, Diplomatic Effort

Just to clarify, I like SWEENEY TODD but it suffers from the same problem each Tim Burton film since MARS ATTACKS! has, namely a total lack of Martians who repeat “ACK ACK ACK ACK!” over and over again. It wasn’t received very well at the time, then a few years later there was a period where the very nature of the film was probably a little too touchy for the real world, but now it seems we’ve come full circle and are more than ready for this jet-black comic world that Tim Burton and company seem more than willing to destroy. It takes a lot to get me to laugh when I’m sitting by myself watching a movie. MARS ATTACKS! has always been able to do it. In many ways, the film is like the culmination of everything Burton had done in film up to this point, the closing of the first chapter of his feature career that started with PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE. Sometimes the look of his films is criticized as appearing too dark and dingy but maybe with this film he was getting using as many colors as physically possible and he’d never have to use any of them ever again.


It’s Burton’s most wickedly funny film, both in love with the characters in the frame and more than willing to treat many of them in as sadistic a manner as possible—much emphasis seems to be placed on how painfully it actually is when the characters are disintegrated by the Martian’s rays. This is the only film on record which puts Jack Black, Joe Don Baker and Sylvia Sidney in the frame at once and there are numerous other such combinations throughout that only add to the fun. As a matter of fact, it’s a flat-out bizarre cast, with other scenes that give us combos of people like Jack Nicholson, Rod Steiger, Pierce Brosnan, Paul Winfield and Martin Short (Martin Short??). Not quite Black, Baker and Sidney, but still pretty impressive.


Maybe it’s arguable, but his films in recent years feel slightly more impersonal than what he directed in his first decade. Whatever their respective sizes, BATMAN RETURNS and ED WOOD feel like they share a very distinct sensibility and MARS ATTACKS! (the screenplay is credited to Jonathan Gems but Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski worked on extensive rewrites as well) may be an outgrowth of that but it’s a baffling one. It almost defies analysis. The BATMAN sequels are about the wearing (and not-wearing) of masks, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS and ED WOOD are explorations of the nature of creativity and how personal that can be. What, then, is MARS ATTACKS? It’s anarchic, yes, maybe taking some of what Joe Dante did in the two GREMLINS films a few steps further but more than anything the answer may simply be that it’s the one true Tim Burton expression of creativity and what he loves about movies, from its rimshot punchlines that end scenes to the wide expansions of its settings to the scattershot idea of who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are. I may identify more with the eagerness of Lukas Haas’s misfit than the self-satisfaction of Michael J. Fox’s reporter, but the thought of swigging martinis in the “Kennedy Room” certainly sounds appealing, especially if it’s scored with the kind of lounge music Danny Elfman provides. I just hope that the company would turn out to be a little more pleasant. The Martian Girl is of course played by Burton’s then-paramour Lisa Marie. here’s very little sexuality present in the film among any of the female characters apart from her and even she is a very bizarre example. The kicker is when her dead body is being examined, Burton stages the scene so someone walks in front just as the top of her dress is being pulled off. He knows that we’re wondering if we’re going to see Martian breasts and he teases us with thinking we’re going to see it until the last possible second. It’s a small touch but one given to us by someone who fondly knows the feeling of hoping for something forbidden in a movie, even though we know that it’s never going to actually happen.


But more than anything is the impression that Burton has taken the gleeful viciousness of how characters were killed off in Irwin Allen movies, tossed in various wicked STRANGELOVE vibes and updated it all to apply to our modern-day world. It’s now more than a decade old, but after various events of the past few years it feels timelier than ever. The simple juxtaposition of the headlines on the New York Times-like paper (“Existence of Interplanetary Life Comfirmed”) and the one on the correctly-named New York Post (“MARTIANS!!!!!”) feels more pointed than anything in all of INDEPENDENCE DAY but the constant scenes of those in power bickering endlessly just seem flat out true today. Maybe that’s why the most ferocious fight between Nicholson’s President and Steiger’s General “(Annihilate! KILL!! KILL!!”) gets me laughing no matter how many times I see it.

Whether this is reading too much into it, I don’t know. But viewing these people of power react in their various ways to the attacking aliens is strangely liberating when the real-world equivalents are doing the things they do. It’s a cheerful apocalypse in MARS ATTACKS! and if that seems a little harsh coming from what should be simply a wacky comedy, it’s hard not to take a look at the headlines of today’s paper and realize just how much the movie gets right. Maybe if there is any message within the anarchy of MARS ATTACKS!, it’s to do what you think is right in this world, rather than what you think you’re supposed to do. Maybe that’s a way to watch films as well.

Different Sides

Serious spy movies from the 60s usually get forgotten on those days when Bond isn’t talked about in the wake of Matt Helm and Derek Flint, but Harry Palmer is known by a few people and thankfully we have the American Cinematheque to fill in a few more of the blanks, like when their Overlooked and Underrated series features such titles as A DANDY IN ASPIC and THE DEADLY AFFAIR. Both serve as very interesting examples of the genre and while each contains the typical plot confusions that you would expect from such films, they deserve to be better known than they are. I want to be careful with plot details, even though both are unavailable on DVD, but there’s also the honest issue that it sometimes takes at least a second viewing with some of these films to sort out every plot point anyway. Still, if this is your sort of thing, then it’s your sort of thing.


A DANDY IN ASPIC stars Laurence Harvey as a British spy who is actually a double agent for the Russians. He’s also desperate to be sent home and his troubles are compounded when he is sent to Berlin to track down and kill the Russian agent who is in fact himself. The film is given the unique plot point of a hero who is desperate to break in to the iron curtain and would make a good Reluctant Spy double feature with THE IPCRESS FILE. In fact, it’s easy to think that IPCRESS, several years old by this point, was a key inspiration in this film’s production. It never goes quite as far as the wacko camera angles that Sidney J. Furies used in the earlier film, but the feel is sometimes there. And to me DANDY seemed to be considerably better than the two Harry Palmer sequels that were made. Dry, very dry, DANDY is just about the cinematic equivalent of the tone of Laurence Harvey’s voice, something which partly makes sense when you consider that Harvey took over direction from credited director Anthony Mann who died during filming. In addition to a very good Tom Courtney, the enjoyably eccentric cast includes Mia Farrow, sporting her short ROSEMARY’S BABY haircut, Lionel Stander as a Russian agent introduced reading a Batman comic and a post-BEDAZZLED Peter Cook, lending the tone just enough of a twist to help ensure that this is more than just a straight spy movie. There’s also very interesting location work in London and Berlin, some very cool Scope use and an evocative credit sequence featuring a marionette, presumably meant to represent Harvey. If it wasn’t for that unfortunate title—which, it should be said, is from the novel it is based on—maybe DANDY would be better known than it is.

THE DEADLY AFFAIR was the second feature and made an interesting comparison. Directed by Sidney Lumet, it’s more serious and also more emotional. Both films share enjoyable supporting performances by Harry Andrews and each contains a score by Quincy Jones. The music for DANDY is more successful as it correctly fits the tone of the IPCRESS approach but the sixties-lounge nature of the music in DEADLY doesn’t really work at all. True, the film offers the rare pleasure of a theme sung by Astrid Gilberto and it would probably work just fine if heard on its own, or with a more appropriate film. But as heard here it unfortunately clashes with the gravely serious tone of the piece. Lumet’s never been very much for using full scores (BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD is a notable exception) and maybe the music for this film is a reason why.


Based on the John le Carré novel “Call for the Dead” the plot of DEADLY tells of British agent Charles Dobbs (played by James Mason—he’s le Carre’s running character George Smiley in the novel) investigating the mysterious suicide of a government official who had just been cleared of an investigation. He’s also dealing with a troubled relationship with his wife (Harriet Andersson in a rare, strangely awkward English-language appearance) and how his visiting friend (an enjoyable Maximillian Schell) fits into that. “Thematically it was a film about life’s disappointments,” wrote Lumet in his book “Making Movies” and that comes through in the utter bleakness of London that we witness but the script by Paul Dehn (who worked on GOLDFINGER and the various PLANET OF THE APES sequels) feels a little too unfocused at times, although certain plot revelations to help earlier sections of the film in retrospect. This sort of thing is why I wish I could see the movie again. Simone Signoret plays the late officer’s wife and there are unusual, enjoyable appearances by Roy Kinnear and Lynn Redgrave as well.

I wish I could see both of these films again to get a better handle on them, but each contains an interesting look at that other, less flashy version of the spy sub-genre from the sixties, one where the different sides become blurred to the point where even the hero doesn’t know what he’s fighting for. For their own reasons, they’re each worth a look if you get the chance.

Dialogue Written By Kafka

Richard Lester directed such films as A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, THE KNACK and PETULIA. They are three films which I can love as much as any film I have ever felt passionate about and all three are a pleasure to revisit multiple times, providing richness and layers, revealing much to say about them. So naturally, I’m choosing to look at another Lester film, the little-seen comedy FINDERS KEEPERS.

Released to little notice in May 1984, FINDERS KEEPERS was discovered by me on cable. Now, I love train movies, which this is a terrific example of and much it is very funny, but I think it was its intricate structure that led to me viewing it multiple times. It received a surprisingly positive review from Vincent Canby in The New York Times, who called it “unexpectedly satisfying,” with a cast that included “as talented group of comic actors as has been collected in an American film since Jonathan Demme’s MELVIN AND HOWARD.” The run in theaters was brief but it remains surprisingly enjoyable and should be a pleasant surprise for anyone out there still interested in Richard Lester.

The tightly-packed plot packs a lot of incident into 96 minutes so any summary might ruin some of the fun but to give it a try: Somewhere near Oakland in 1973, heiress Georgiana Latimer (Pamela Stephenson) fakes her own kidnapping with the help of her cohort/lover (Ed Lauter) while at the same time stealing several million dollars from her father’s safe. They plan to sneak the money out of town on a train in a coffin. Meanwhile, roller-derby manager Michael Rangeloff (Michael O’Keefe) finds himself on the run from the cops--it's too complicated to explain, but it involves the wife of the Chief of Police--and hops a train to get out of town, soon finding himself mixed up with that coffin. Other characters who get involved on or around that train include an actress in the middle of a nervous breakdown named Standish Logan (Beverly D’Angelo), Rangeloff’s con-artist foster father (Louis Gossett Jr.) who is disguised as a priest, an FBI agent (Jack Riley) investigating the kidnapping, an extremely old train conductor (David Wayne) who won’t stop talking about past presidents, a small-town mayor (Brian Dennehy) and a surprising revelation about a soldier who was reported missing in action. Whew.


The script is credited to Ronny Graham, production designer Terence Marsh and Charles Dennis, based on Dennis’s novel “The Next-to-Last Train Ride”. That it’s based on a novel may account for the slightly oddly-jointed structure. It’s rather relaxed for a farce and occasionally pauses for a sepia-toned flashback to Rangeloff as a child being raised by Gossett. These scenes don’t really add much to the story, though they do add some screentime for the Oscar winner who otherwise makes his first appearance rather late, but they do help us get to understand the characters a little more. Much like that other train film SILVER STREAK, FINDERS KEEPERS was primarily shot in Canadian locations, some of which will be familiar from having served as Smallville in Lester’s own SUPERMAN III from the previous year (of course, Pamela Stephenson appears in both films as well). The eccentric group of characters also brings to mind several Preston Sturges films, most particularly HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO and the genuinely funny climax, centered around a house that is being moved, feels like it came from Lester and his love of silent film more than any other part of the movie. There’s clumsiness—the plot really doesn’t kick in correctly until O’Keefe boards the train, a few scenes aren’t as funny as they’d like to be and the use of period songs doesn’t always work but the lightness of its farce overrides any problems I have with it. It makes me wish more comedies like this were attempted these days. I’ll take more train movies, too.


Playing characters working outside of the law O’Keefe and Gossett are so enjoyable to watch that it’s easy to imagine them returning in other adventures. Beverly D’Angelo’s wonderfully named Standish Logan is described as having “the mind of a maniac and the mouth of a longshoreman”, possibly says the word ‘fag’ more than any other screen character I can think of and yet her performance is another reason why I’ve been crazy for Beverly D’Angelo for years now. Almost everyone else in the movie has something to hide except her—she’s a nutcase of a person who just puts everything out there and she’s crazy sexy while doing it. Even Ed Lauter’s nasty bad guy is allowed enough comic moments for me to like him a little as well—after all, he’s caught up in all the same farcical complications that all the other characters are. Brian Dennehy, John Schuck and David Wayne as “the oldest train conductor in the world” are all fantastic in their twisted-authority roles and each is well-used. Jim Carrey turns up as well in his first film and gets several laughs. In her first and last film appearance the strangely funny Barbara Kermode is Dennehy's daugther and I should mention Jack Riley as “Ormond, FBI” who has what is probably the best film role he ever had. Anyone who became more interested because of that sentence should probably seek out FINDERS KEEPERS.

Way back in 1991 the Museum of Modern Art ran a pretty massive “Trains and Film” series and actually showed FINDERS KEEPERS as part of the festival (on a double bill with SILVER STREAK, of course). There was something kind of terrific about hearing the laughter which emanated from the audience during the screening and realizing that I wasn’t alone in my enjoyment of the film. It should in no way be ranked among Lester’s best and even the book of interviews with Steven Soderbergh, “Getting Away With It”, dispenses with the subject in only a sentence or two. It's not even on DVD and I don't expect it to be any time soon. But the off-kilter approach of its farcical structure and likable, eccentric characters continue to make it endearing and if anyone ever enjoys this film because I recommended it then that’s ok with me. And I promise I’ll write about THE KNACK one of these days.

The Other Way Around

Way back in November Jeffrey Wells wrote a post on his Hollywood Elsewhere site, commenting on Harry Knowles’ review of SWEENEY TODD, which at that point Wells had not seen. Noting that Knowles had mentioned Mario Bava as one of the tonal inspirations he picked up on in the film, Wells goes off on a tiny little rant about this. I can’t tell what his ultimate position on Bava is, but he sounds a little dismissive. I don’t want to get into what these guys have to say too much, but I didn’t pick up too much Bava in SWEENEY TODD. To be fair, the Knowles quote isn’t the only thing I pick up when “Sweeney Todd Bava” is googled but certainly the fact that we get gushing blood isn’t in itself the sign of an automatic Bava influence. I honestly got more of a Hammer vibe from the film—weirdly, the London setting confined to ultimately a small amount of locations made me think of DR. JEKYLL & SISTER HYDE more than anything else. Exactly what makes something be considered “Bava-like” is an arguable point considering how such a thing would constitute, for me, more of a mood than anything else. It’s not always something which could be considered entirely tangible. That said, it is something which could be found in SLEEPY HOLLOW perhaps more than SWEENEY TODD, and I have to admit it’s a feeling which strongly came to me even more recently while viewing THE ORPHANAGE as well.


As directed by Juan Antonio Bayona and “presented” by Guillermo del Toro, THE ORPHANAGE tells the story of a woman (Belen Rueda) who returns to the home which served as the orphanage during a period of her childhood to raise the son she and her husband have adopted. Strange occurrences begin and events of the past are questioned, but since the film is best viewed knowing as little as possible ahead of time, I won’t go into too many details. This exploration of certain themes was of course explored by Bava himself in SHOCK aka BEYOND THE DOOR II which he co-directed with his son Lamberto who himself returned to these themes in the recent GHOST SON, which I wrote about in an entry last August. The two films have as many similarities as they do differences, but it’s THE ORPHANAGE which really got under my skin and it’s the one which really seemed to deliver a frisson of dread that reminded me of the elder Bava at his best. It’s anchored by a strong lead performance by Rueda who is enormously effective and should be receiving Oscar buzz right now but naturally isn’t. But it’s also the direction by Bayona and screenplay by Sergio G. Sanchez which reveal them to be students of this genre, filmmakers who have paid a great deal of attention to how this sort of story should be told. The film even brings out what has become one of the most overused shock effects of the past few years—no point in saying what it is—and makes it work. Maybe it doesn’t always work—one section involving the use of technology to investigate certain things (shades of the middle section of POLTERGEIST here) lost me a little bit. But the overriding effect of THE ORPHANAGE is that of a really good cinematic drug and I thrilled in taking a few hits off it. I won’t say that you can’t make this film in America today—it’s that studios simply won’t make this sort of film today, where encroaching dread is discarded in favor of noise, incoherence, lack of thought, shallow one-note actresses in their 20s, listless remakes of J-horror and dull Canadian locations. I haven’t written about ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM and I won’t but simply put, to call that movie garbage is an insult to garbage and a sad indication of how truly low the genre has sunk. It’s just depressing and makes one not want to deal with any of those movies for a long while, so anyone who wants to let me know how ONE MISSED CALL is, please feel free.

THE ORPHANAGE is the official Spanish entry for the Foreign Film Oscar and Jeffrey Wells, who likes the film (points in his favor for that) has more recently run an anonymous comment from an Academy member basically wondering why Spain submitted something which was “just” a horror film. It’s too bad that some people have such blinders on, because what THE ORPHANAGE accomplishes is something which should be applauded, not denigrated. It’s cinematic. It’s effective. And, ultimately, it’s also very moving.

Intolerant Graffiti

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE gets brought out for another viewing every New Year’s Eve and while other considerably better films such as THE APARTMENT have a few scenes set around the holiday it’s a little surprising there haven’t been more attempts at a film with a narrative that counts down to 12:00 AM January 1. If Thanksgiving can have PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES, then a New Year’s movie should really happen. But FOUR ROOMS hasn’t become a perennial. STRANGE DAYS is hurt by being a futuristic film set in 1999, which is now the past—also, it didn’t foresee how much it would rain in L.A. that day. And MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITTI is pretty much forgotten. Having just watched it for the first time in years, I can see why. Arriving in theaters a belated six years after the original, MORE attempts to expand the story of the original, taking us further into its decade and deeper with the characters, something Lucas would actually achieve with THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. This was of course a gamble that the first film’s producer Francis Ford Coppola had already pulled off with his own sequel, THE GODFATHER PART II—another film with a New Year’s section, come to think of it. Coppola was not involved with this film, as he was mired in APOCALYPSE NOW at this point, but his wasn’t the only notable absence. Richard Dreyfuss had just won the Oscar for THE GOODBYE GIRL and declined to return to an ensemble to reprise his role as Curt Henderson. George Lucas, in the wake of STAR WARS, had sworn off directing and served as Executive Producer. It’s interesting that GRAFFITI co-writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who were beginning to make their own films at this point didn’t take over but, as Huyck himself explained in Dale Pollack’s Lucas biography “Skywalking”, “The story, when continued, is sort of sad and awful, and very painful. No way I wanted to get involved with it.” B.W.L. Norton was eventually brought on to write and direct. Several years earlier, Norton had directed CISCO PIKE, a very good movie. There are a number of stylistic elements which help make MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI at least interesting, but ultimately it isn’t a very good movie. It could possibly be considered pretty much a failure.

Presumably taking its inspiration from INTOLERANCE, the film is set in four separate time frames, specifically consecutive New Year’s Eves, going in order from 1964 to 1967. This idea is slightly constricted due to the fact that the end of the first film told us what would become of the four leads, including several tragic ends. So this film has to backtrack a little bit and it’s tempting to point out how it traces a little of the path the sixties took and how quickly things really changed, but it never feels rich enough to earn such commentary. In 1964: John Milner is involved in the stock car racing circuit. 1965: Terry the Toad (Charles Martin Smith) in Vietnam. 1966: Terry’s former girlfriend Debby (Candy Clark) in San Francisco in the age of Haight-Ashbury. 1967: Steve and Laurie (Ron Howard and Cindy Williams) experience troubles in their marriage and get mixed up in campus riots (presumably Berkeley, but I don’t think that’s ever specified). The film follows a strict 1-2-3-4 structure with each of the storylines and never diverges from this pattern. Each of the sections is shot in a distinctive style, with Vietnam looking like 16mm newsreel footage, the Haight-Ashbury section done as split-screen psychedelia, the race-track section in widescreen Panavision and the Steve-Laurie storyline “like a commercial”, according to the original press notes. The nature of this structure feels way too constricting and means that we’re barely engaged in one before it’s one to the next. In some ways it does prefigure pacing that would be the norm for Lucas by the time we’d get to the STAR WARS prequels but in this case it simply never seems to find the appropriate rhythm.


The first film was very obviously autobiographical for its creator and seemed to compress a lifetime’s worth of cruising and chasing girls, and everything that meant to him, into two hours. The whole point of that original was that it was about how things had changed so fast, from that innocent feel of the baby boomer’s youth which ends in the sledgehammer of the final titles. Since that sledgehammer has already come down, there’s seemingly nowhere for this sequel to go and if there is, they never really figured out what that was. John Milner spends a fair chunk of screentime romancing a beautiful Icelandic blonde (Anna Bjorn, who also appeared in Allan Arkush’s underrated GET CRAZY, another rock n’ roll film set around New Years Eve) who doesn’t speak any English. Terry the Toad is stuck in a Vietnam section which plays like third-rate MASH/CATCH 22 leftovers. Mackenzie Phillips, given very little to do, returns and wanders through a few of the sections looking much older than the age she is playing. Debbie tries to convince her boyfriend to marry her and winds up hanging out with a band that plays a country-western bar. None of it resonates. None of it has much point.

A great deal of the problem is that the Dreyfuss character was so much the heart of the first film. He’s the one who spent the film searching for the unattainable blonde, he’s the one who was allowed to experience that moment of transcendence with Wolfman Jack, he’s the one who got the fadeout. And, more than the others, he’s the one who changed. Finding out that in 1973 he was living in Canada said a massive amount in one sentence and his story is the one we want to see. He’s referred to as already being in Canada early in the ’67 section, but while his absence isn’t as huge as, say, making a GODFATHER sequel without Michael Corleone, there’s a hole there which can’t be filled. It’s as if the absence of the Curt Henderson character is somehow representative of Lucas’s lack of involvement. There’s really no film without either of them. It would, however, make a very interesting double bill with Coppola’s own APOCALYPSE NOW, which opened right around the same time and a film the makers of MORE were no doubt very aware of, something very evident when a character named Lance is referred to and somebody replies, “I once knew a surfer named Lance.”

There is some pleasure in watching some of the actors who do appear, especially Candy Clark and Charles Martin Smith. Even though the material they have isn’t very strong, the fact that we never got to see some of these people in as many films as we should have, adds to some of the appeal. Paul LeMat has potentially the weightiest role, considering how his storyline has to end, but it never registers like it should mainly because the bulk of what he has to play isn’t very interesting. Ron Howard, who was probably losing interest in acting by this point, gets a “Special Appearance By” credit and has slightly less screen time than the other leads. Bo Hopkins (reprising his Joe the Pharoah character), Mary Kay Place and Scott Glenn (another APOCALYPSE connection) also have substantial roles and one bar fight has just about the loudest Wilhelm Scream I’ve ever heard. More surprisingly, Harrison Ford reprises his role as Bob Falfa, now a motorcycle cop and this has to be some sort of ringer in any “Name all the roles Harrison Ford played more than once” trivia question. Obviously, the music is pretty terrific and I can’t help but point out that the way the opening notes of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” kick off the end credits is near-identical to how it occurs at the close of I’M NOT THERE.

I can’t seem to locate it right now, but I remember a novelization which combined both films into one giant GODFATHER II-type narrative. The final scene of the book depicted the death of John Milner, having been killed in the crash with the drunk driver. If my recollections are correct, it presents Bob Falfa as actually being there, possibly a passenger in the other car, and the entire GRAFFITI saga ends with Falfa in tears over what has just happened. I don’t know if this originated from anything that was written in the script or even filmed, but it’s an end that has stuck with me, partly because of what a martyr it made the character of John Milner, but also because of how it lent such additional weight to Bob Falfa and to the actor playing him who would become such a major star. It would probably have been too much for the actual film, which can never really decide how serious it should take its serious moments and never knows how to correctly insert the comedy at the times it might be needed. Just a year later, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK would show George Lucas and his collaborators succeeding in what was failed at here. Whether it was ever possible to succeed with this particular sequel is something that we’ll never know. Right now, long after it has been forgotten by people who love the original, MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI survives as little more than a curio.

How Hard You Can Get Hit

It’s now a year since the release of ROCKY BALBOA, the final chapter in the Rocky franchise. I saw the film at a screening several weeks before it was released and as the film played, I found myself getting both surprised and delighted at what I was seeing. A genuinely emotional character arc about letting go of the past and moving on? The return of Paulie? The return of Duke? The return of Spider Rico? The return of Little Marie, even if it was played by a different actress? The overall effect I got from the film was that Sylvester Stallone looked at himself in the mirror, splashed his face with some cold water and realized that this was his last chance to show a little of what he gave us in the original ROCKY, to not make a movie which contained a lot of plot bullshit like brain damage, bankruptcy and Tommy Gunn. Then, when Tony Burton returns to say the immortal line “Now, let’s start building some hurtin’ bombs,” then suddenly out of nowhere the horns kick in with the beginning of “Gonna Fly Now,” it immediately became my favorite screen micro-second of 2006. As this one final training montage continued, I thought, “Don’t tell me you’re going to bring in the voices,” and then came those voices. Then, I thought, “Don’t tell me you’re going to run up the steps,” we saw him running up the steps. I actually found it a little moving. Even in that tiny screening room you could feel a surge going through the audience. He showed, after all these years, that he still we remembered why we still loved this character. Why we still loved him.

Several weeks later, the movie had stuck with me. On New Year’s Day 2007, I went to the Grove to see it a second time. It was the beginning of the New Year, with all of the emotion that comes with that, all the hopes that one has for the coming twelve months. Listening to Rocky talk about how he still has “stuff in the basement”, telling his son that “it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward,” struck this little chord in me about what wanted to get done in the coming year. When that training montage started up again, I felt the tears come, thinking about how long I’d been watching this character and how this was going to be the last time such a scene would occur. And by the time we get to the end, even if Stallone does pilfer the final shot from UNFORGIVEN, I truly responded to the emotion of everything the movie was trying to get across. It’s a genuinely sweet, heartfelt picture, something you don’t often get with a Part Six and that fact alone makes ROCKY BALBOA a tiny little accomplishment.

Now, here it is, one year later and I’m watching these scenes again. I feel proud of some of what I’ve accomplished, but there’s a lot more to do. I have to push myself harder. I know what I want to do next, but it’s going to take some work and I’m the only person who can do it. I’m not faced with the ghosts of my past very much—thoughts of Scarsdale don’t float through my head all that often. But Rocky also says, “If you stay in one place long enough, you become that place.” I don’t know what that says about who I am and where I live, but I know that this is the time to be who I am. I’m a writer. I have to keep writing. After all, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. Happy New Year to all.

I Need The Blood

Sometimes I feel myself becoming less interested in writing about new films at the time of release. Not because of any negative reactions, but simply the feeling that I sometimes need to let these things digest a little to separate the movie from all the hype. After all, I’m not working on a deadline or anything here. There’s also the case of films both good and bad that I simply feel like I don’t have much to say about them. That said, go and see WALK HARD, which is absolutely hysterical and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t understand comedy. As for some of the bad ones, some of them are more mediocre than anything else and spending much time thinking about them isn’t worth the effort. But every now and then there’s a film that can just render you speechless and any insightful commentary seems almost impossible.

I first saw THERE WILL BE BLOOD about three weeks ago and when the closing credits first flashed on screen I felt totally flummoxed. It was as if I had been the subject of an assault in watching this film, but whatever I had just seen couldn’t simply be described. At some point during my second viewing Thursday night, I began to feel this vice-like grip encircling inside of me, and I realized that I had experienced the exact same sensation the first time around. It’s a harsh film, a tough film, a brutal film and this recurring feeling made me realize just how much it was seeping in to me. Naturally, at the very last frame, I couldn’t help but have this enormous, possibly evil, smile on my face. See, THERE WILL BE BLOOD is many things and inspires many thoughts. For starters, it could simply be considered a gangbang between Altman, Cimino, Malick, Ford, Welles and, of course, Kubrick, which results in a child that has been injected with the opinion Paul Thomas Anderson appears to have of humanity. An opinion which may rank somewhere beyond the boundaries of cynicism, but even that doesn’t adequately convey my feelings about it.

I’m going to let this one sit a little longer in me, because throwing around words like “brilliant” and “masterpiece” is too frivolous. It is, in fact, a monumental achievement which cannot be dismissed but it will annoy, perplex and anger as many people as those who become its converts. How much I am one of those converts is something I’m still working out in my own head. There will be further viewings and I anxiously await them. I’m not saying that it’s the best film of the year, because it’s possible that to me it may not be. And I’m not saying that it’s a work without flaws, as it’s possible that even on the film’s own gargantuan terms I’m not certain that maybe I don’t have some issues. However, there are so many things I could list which I love or am disturbed by or feel enlivened by in this film but to do that would rob anyone reading this of the chance to experience those things for themselves. You don’t need me telling you what lies within THERE WILL BE BLOOD ahead of time. For now, I’m finished.

Made For Each Other

It may be one of the best DVD extras ever: the Deleted and Alternate Scenes section of the new, bursting-at-the-seams box set of BLADE RUNNER which, when Play All is selected, reveals itself to be not just a random array of cutting room floor scraps, but a fully edited 45-minute assemblage which covers the narrative scope of the film. In a sense, it could almost be yet another version BLADE RUNNER in addition to the five that already come with the set in its most extensive form. It’s not one that shows it off at its best, of course. For starters, it reveals how much worse the Deckard voiceover could have been and how much more of it could have been in there. The impression given is that they were considering that possibility and some of it is so descriptive in exactly what’s going on that you could imagine it being used in some sort of children’s storybook album of the film or something. Some of it is actually better performed than what was finally used in the theatrical version, but they never did figure out a correct way to do the narration and this is pretty solid evidence of it.


This sort of thing easily inspires daydreams of shorter, alternate versions that could be put together from other favorite movies. What could be assembled from the deleted scenes in THE GODFATHER? What narration for APOCAPLYPSE NOW has never been heard in any version ever released? How would one of the early assemblages of STAR WARS play if we looked at it now? What major subplot cut from a film that we know all too well would forever alter our perception of that film if we were allowed to see it? Of course, BLADE RUNNER is a unique film in this case because we’ve been lucky enough to observe its creative progress over the years. Back in 1999 the famed workprint cut of the film, now available on the 5-disc set, played at the Cinerama Dome for a week. I went twice, thinking I might never get another chance to see it. I wish I’d written down some of my thoughts at the time. BLADE RUNNER is not just a film where we have the chance to explore it in this way, it’s one that lends itself to such examination.


Much of what is here could be considered shoe leather, alterations and extensions to footage we are familiar with. But surprises do turn up. One establishing effects shot with the familiar Off-World blimp uses a matte painting of the cityscape which makes it resemble Gotham City in the 1989 BATMAN. Both scenes where Deckard visits fellow Blade Runner Holden in the hospital are included. One section of Deckard lingering over the photos at his piano has him musing over a shot of him with his ex-wife and the suburban setting of the house resembles the photo of Rachael as a little girl with her mother—production shortcut or a clue to the truth about Deckard? While at the bar at Taffey Lewis’s nightclub Harrison Ford plays a scene with a bartender played by actor Charles Knapp, familiar from his appearance as the morgue attendant in CHINATOWN (“Never better, except for this cough”) and if this scene had been included it certainly would have added to the CHINATOWN allusions already present. The love scene goes on longer as well and includes, it should be noted for the record, an appearance by some Sean Young nudity. There are also two versions of the off-to-the-mountains ending, one with narration but no dialogue and one with dialogue and no narration. The unused helicopter footage (shot by the production, not the stock shots from THE SHINING) show footage of Deckard’s spinner from overhead which make it look a little like the 60s Batmobile, but we do get wider shots of Ford and Young inside (only close-ups were used in the theatrical cut). Maybe it could be argued that no version of this sequence should ever have been a part of BLADE RUNNER, but in all honesty, the last line of Rachael’s—“You know what else I think? That you and I were made for each other.”—is so good and correctly opens up so many possibilities, that it’s a shame that it couldn’t be used somewhere, somehow.

This unusual look between footage we are so familiar with will probably never be the norm for famous films. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It is fascinating, yes, and it does help us to understand even better why certain choices and deletions were made. But there’s the question of how much should we be given to tell us about the making of a film and how much we simply pay attention to the film itself, to study that and ignore everything else? It’s not about getting to see deleted scenes, some of which are legendary to us because they no longer seem to exist. It’s the question of how much attention should we pay to a rough draft of a film or, for that matter, any creative work? It can illuminate, yes, but maybe the final version, the one we know, is the one we should get the most illumination from. Of course, with BLADE RUNNER, there will always be the debate over which version that really is. Sometimes a film is allowed to break those kinds of rules. With this film, the beauty remains unique, in every variant we get to see.

Life's Too Short For Someday

The fact that the Christmastime setting during a portion of ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE is fairly incidental to the plot doesn’t affect the fact that I make it a point to watch it every year during the holiday season. Yes, the mainstays such as IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, A MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL and DIE HARD are viewed as well, but OHMSS always seems a little more special to me. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe the setting high atop a mountain in Switzerland makes it more fanciful to me, even if I have very little use for snow in the real world. Maybe it’s just the dream of Diana Rigg at her most beautiful and alluring in that environment which make it all the more enticing, no matter how many times I’ve seen it. As the end of the year approaches, it’s easy to take stock of certain things and while you can be aware of what is different in your life, some things never change and one of them is how much I love ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE. It’s how it stands apart from other entries in the series, from the casting of George Lazenby to the ending to the cool pulp feel that director Peter Hunt brings to it. I think of the views of people high up in the Alps skiing, living the high life, and it’s hard not to have dreams of that. Plus, in those few seconds when Diana Rigg’s Tracy makes her long-awaited reappearance in the film and gives James Bond that look she gives him, that devastating smile, it’s hard not to believe, if only for a few seconds, that all really is right with the world. I wish everyone reading this Happy Holidays and a Merry Christmas.

Cocktails and Weapons

A few scenes into CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR a character mentions Scarsdale and it was enough to throw me out of the movie for a minute or so. As far as I can tell, this is the first mention Aaron Sorkin has ever made of his hometown in one of his scripts and since it’s my hometown as well, I’ve always felt a little simpatico with the guy. We’ve never met but if we ever do, I hope it’s an ok icebreaker.

It’s a pleasure to hear that familiar Sorkin syntax again, especially since none of it involves a character named ‘Matt Albie’. If I hadn’t known that he had written this script, it wouldn’t have taken me too long to figure it out and that adds to a lot of the enjoyment in CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR. But here’s the thing: When watched now, AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT is like a kind of jazz played by somebody who is good, but not exactly the right person to be playing that particular music. What Sorkin does on the page completely crystallized with SPORTS NIGHT and THE WEST WING, presenting his dialogue rhythms and indeed his entire world view in the exact right way. Now we have CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR, a piece of music played by a master (Mike Nichols) who does a nice enough job playing it, but seems content to simply noodle around with the notes, never really digging in deeper to find what else might be there.


Set back in the dark days of the 1980s, Hanks plays hard-drinking Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, Roberts plays wealthy socialite Joanne Herring, Hoffman plays CIA operative Gust Avrakatos and the film details their unlikely quest to supply the Afghans with weapons to help them fight the invading Soviets. It’s idea with potential to get across ideas both serious and satiric about where we’ve gotten to now in the world, yes. But throughout the movie I found myself sitting there in the middle of all the politics and history and world events it portrays and wondering, ‘What is this movie really about?’ and the best answer I could come up with was that it was about Mike Nichols sitting back and enjoying these three actors (Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, all doing what they do very well. Especially Hoffman.) go through this snappy patter. There are far worse things to see, but there never seems to be any strong point of view about anything. Deep into the movie, there is a series of transition shots which get a particular point across in a visual, cinematic way and I found myself coming alive in my seat as the movie came alive for a brief moment. But just for a moment.

Maybe the movie didn’t want to delve too deeply into the nitty-gritty of the politics. Maybe someone thought that if certain things were said it would alienate a percentage of those buying tickets. Maybe it was the conundrum of making a movie where the people are alive and the tricky legal tightropes which have to be navigated so topics like 9/11 possibly aren’t alluded to as strongly as they should be so the movie feels like it has a purpose. This all comes to a head by the end (no spoilers) which seems to happen in a rather abrupt fashion, when it feels like there should be a drunken monologue by Hanks or something of real weight to cap everything off. I knew the running time was about 100 minutes going in but if I didn’t I’d wonder if we were missing something. So we probably are.


I liked some sections very much, particularly an extended sequence where Hoffman’s CIA man visits Wilson’s office for the first time. The interplay between those two men has more teeth than anything else here. Amy Adams plays Wilson’s chief aide(some nice shades of Josh Lyman and Donna Moss there), helping to prove that putting Amy Adams in your movie is a pretty good way to make it automatically better. And yes, Sorkin’s script does a very good job of getting to the point it needs to get to in scene after scene. It’s what’s missing in CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR that gnaws at me, the places it seems unwilling to go to that make me wonder exactly what the purpose of the movie is. Unless it really is watching the three leads say the snappy patter. It’s entertaining to a point, but I wish there were more to it than that.