This is what starring in a sitcom with Bill Cosby does to a girl.
Continuing with the (young) Mickey Rourke + ’80s movies kick I’ve been on, this week we revisit Angel Heart.
The 1987 movie, based on the novel Fallen Angel by William Hjortsberg, stars a Rourke just starting to go to seed (also released that year: Barfly. After that, the highlights of the actor’s IMDB portfolio are basically Wild Orchid until Sin City in 2005. And let’s face it, even that was a piece of shit.) and Robert DeNiro.
The less said about the plot the better – not because it’s bad, but you’ll enjoy the movie more the less you know. Suffice it to say, we almost always know more than Harry Angel, Rourke’s private detective character, who is continually playing catch-up with the plot. DeNiro plays a not-very-mysterious-but-still-kind-of-scary character named “Louis Cypher” (think about it. But not too hard).
Also in the movie: Charlotte Rampling in a thankless role as a fortune teller and Lisa Bonet, desperately trying to escape her Cosby Show image by showing her boobs and messing around with a chicken.
In fact, there’s a good drinking game to be had during Angel Heart – take a gulp every time someone says “chicken.” You will be drunk by the end of it.
Anyway, Angel Heart - which I’d seen only once, around the time of its release – holds up well, even in a post-Sixth Sense world. Alan Parker (Midnight Express, Mississippi Burning among many others) directs the mix of supernatural and film noir/detective elements to the point just before the whole thing bubbles over into camp (although the movie comes dangerously close towards the end). I wouldn’t call Angel Heart scary but it is effectively spooky and the unraveling of the mystery is quite expertly done.
The movie does get under your skin, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Elizabeth Whitcraft has a brief roll as Harry Angel’s helper.
Mariel Hemingway and Eric Roberts in Star 80 (1983).
On Aug 14, 1980, Paul Snider shot and killed 20-year-old Dorothy Stratten. He then turned the shotgun on himself.
The murder-suicide did not go unnoticed; Stratten was Playboy’s Playmate of the Year for 1980, after all.
Two movies were spun from the tragedy—a TV-movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and Star 80 (in 1983).
As part of my ’80s movies retrospective, Star 80 was a logical next step following The Pope of Greenwich Village (watched earlier this week, but which I haven’t had a chance to blog about). Both feature star-making performances by Eric Roberts (brother of Julia).
In Star 80, he stars as Paul Snider opposite Mariel Hemingway as Stratten. It’s another great performance as Roberts gets under the skin of the oily Snider, but also finds the thin wire of humanity that still exists in his grasping frame.
Hemingway too is wonderful, but in a Mariel Hemingway-esque way—she brings the same vulnerability to the role as she did to her character in Woody Allen‘s Manhattan.
In fact, Hemingway is brilliantly cast as the Vancouver-born-and-raised beauty. Her Dorothy is a lot more sympathetic than the Stratten who appears in this clip from The Tonight Show:
One of the things that I really enjoyed about Star 80 was the Vancouver references. When I first saw it on its release 30 years ago, the city meant nothing to me—I was 18 years old and living in Winnipeg. Now that I live in Vancouver, though, it came alive for me in a whole new way, from the title card reading “Vancouver, B.C.” that introduces the first part of the story, to scenes shot in Vancouver, including a shot of Snider being dangled outside a top-floor window of the Blue Horizon Hotel on Robson and Snider and Stratten’s sister visiting the PNE.
There’s also a line in the movie: “You know what, you’re not that girl from Vancouver anymore.” As my girlfriend pointed out, this took place pre-Expo 86, when the city was still a town, or regarded as such.
The movie was partly based on “Death of a Playmate”, a story that ran in the Village Voice in Nov 1980. Written by Teresa Carpenter, the story is the worst kind of yellow journalism, using conjecture (no sources are cited) to fill in the gaps between facts and taking on a self-serving, judgmental tone.
Even worse, Carpenter gets facts wrong. It’s obvious she never came to Vancouver to research the story. Here’s this farcical statement: “Snider grew up in Vancouver’s East End, a tough area steeped in machismo.” Well, for starters, it’s the “East Side”, and unless he grew up around Main and Hastings, lady, you’re just talking out of your ass.
Carpenter also quotes an unnamed source who is apparently one of a gang called the “Rounder Crowd”: “‘He never touched [the drug trade],’ said one Rounder who knew him then.” Give me a break.
Unbelievably, Carpenter wasn’t bounced out of the publishing industry after this piece of shit writing. In fact, she won a Pulitzer Prize. Check out her Wiki page if you don’t believe me.
However, Star 80 is an excellent, affecting film. For his last movie, writer/director Bob Fosse (All That Jazz, Cabaret) managed to turn a sensational story into a sympathetic portrait of both Stratten and even of Snider, without ever letting the latter off the hook. In Star 80, Snider has no back-story; with Roberts in the role, he doesn’t need one.
The story doesn’t end there, not quite.
Director Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon; also an actor, a psychologist in The Sopranos, among other roles) cast Stratten in his movie They All Laughed (1981). During filming he hooked up with her, and after her death even wrote a book, The Killing of the Unicorn (“a bizarre, unclassifiable book,” according to one goodreads.com reviewer). He went on to marry Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise Stratten. A sometime-actress, Louise’s most recent role was as a saloon girl in Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained.
While researching this story, I also dug up some interesting info on one of the photographers whose pics of Stratten attracted Hugh Hefner‘s attention. Vancouver photog Alex Waterhouse-Hayward wrote this blog post about Ken Honey, who was basically the Vancouver stringer for Playboy and helped discover Pamela Anderson and future Mrs. Hefner, Kimberley Conrad. In this blog post about Honey, you can see a photo of Stratten with Vancouver music potentate Bruce Allen (Bryan Adams‘ manager).
Recently, I’ve been revisiting movies from the ’80s, an undervalued cinematic decade, I believe.
A flick I loved as a kid—I was probably 15 or 16 when I saw it the first time—is Atlantic City.
I hadn’t seen it for years if not decades, but watching it again last week I was happy to see that it’s stood the test of time.
Burt Lancaster plays Lou, a washed-up bag-man for the mob; Susan Sarandon is Sally, the neighbour he spies on (never mind the fact that, though they’re shown to live side-by-side in an apartment building, they somehow have windows that look in on each other’s kitchens) watches her rub lemons on her breasts to get the fish smell out (she works at an oyster bar in a casino while she’s learning to be a dealer).
When Lou falls into a cache of mob-money thanks to Sally’s no-good ex-husband (Robert Joy), Atlantic City takes a turn for the desperate as the two go on the lam from a threatening Moses Znaimer and his silent, menacing goon. The plotline is decent but Atlantic City shines in the performances, especially Lancaster and Kate Reid, who plays the ex-mob wife whom Lou looks after.
Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City (1980).
Louis Malle, who directed, finds the burnished soul of the city; there’s a great cameo by Robert Goulet. Speaking of cameos, that’s Wallace Shawn (credited as “Wally Shawn”) as a waiter in a later scene.
Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City (1980).
What is perhaps most curious about seeing the movie 30+ years later, is the weird Canadian component, something I didn’t pick up on the first time(s) I watched it.
The movie is a France-Canada co-production (hence Malle directing). This means that there are plenty of Canadian actors (Ried, Joy, Al “King of Kensington” Waxman), that Sarandon’s Sally is learning French, and there are lots of references to her hometown of Moosejaw (“It’s near Medicine Hat” she says at one point). Needless to say, she’s determined not to go back to Saskatchewan, a motivation that drives the plot somewhat.
Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City.
It’s a cliché to say this is the kind of movie that couldn’t be made today, but in the quirkiness of its co-production requirement and the attention paid to character development in the screenplay (by John Guare) and direction, Atlantic City really is a gem from another era of filmmaking. In heart and soul it’s more of a ’70s movie, but it helped usher in a decade that included some pretty great movies as well.
I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Patton Oswalt as one of my least favourite interview subjects ever, only slightly better than David Cross but worse than just about any other comedian I’ve ever interviewed.
Anyway, this past week the AV Club posted an interview with the stand-up comic/actor about the various roles, from cameo to supporting to lead, he’s played over the years. The exceptionally long interview’s notable for about two things—the way Oswalt justifies his paycheck for Two and a Half Men, and what he has to say about Vancouver, where he filmed Blade: Trinity(2004):
“…it was a very troubled production. Wesley [Snipes] was just fucking crazy in a hilarious way. He wouldn’t come out of his trailer, and he would smoke weed all day. Which is fine with me, because I had all these DVDs that I wanted to catch up on. We were in Vancouver, and it was always raining. I kept the door to my trailer open to smell the evening rain while I was watching a movie…
“And he tried to strangle the director, David Goyer. So later that night, Ron Perlman was in the city. Everyone who makes movies in Vancouver stays in the same hotel [probably the Sutton Place Hotel-SC]. It’s like an episode of The Love Boat. Every time the elevator stops, you’ve got a different celebrity getting on. Like, [announcer voice] ‘Hey, now we’ve got Danny Glover!’ So we went out that night to some strip club [most likely Brandi's-SC], and we were all drinking. And there were a bunch of bikers there, so David says to them, ‘I’ll pay for all your drinks if you show up to set tomorrow and pretend to be my security.’ Wesley freaked out and went back to his trailer. [Laughs.] And the next day, Wesley sat down with David and was like, ‘I think you need to quit. You’re detrimental to this movie.’ And David was like, ‘Why don’t you quit? We’ve got all your close-ups, and we could shoot the rest with your stand-in.’ And that freaked Wesley out so much that, for the rest of the production, he would only communicate with the director through Post-it notes. And he would sign each Post-it note ‘From Blade.’ [Laughs]“
“Dude, people love ‘Grown Ups.’ I don’t care what the critics say. Who won the Academy Award this year? ‘The Artist’? Hey, ‘The Artist’ was great. ‘Grown Ups’ is better than ‘The Artist,’ and it’s better than ‘The Artist’ ’cause the audience says so. No film critic is going to say it, but ‘Madagascar 3′ is better than ‘The Artist,’ and it’s better because it makes people feel better.”
- Chris Rock in The New York Times, Sunday Aug 5, 2012 (when asked about his decision to make Grown Ups 2)
He’s gotta be kidding! Multi-millionaire comedian so beyond selling out that he’s defending his 2010 Adam Sandler ensemble comedy. Why not admit he did it for the cash? Worse, actually declaring it better than The Artist, an homage to silent film that won the Academy Award for best film! How dare he!
That was my first reaction. Then I realized, hey – I haven’t seen either of them. So who am I to judge?
So I rented both and watched them on the B.C. Day long weekend with my long-suffering girlfriend. We watched Grown Ups first.
The movie starts with a high school basketball game. We get to see all the future millionaire comedians as teenage actors who look a little like them. Game ends. Cut to 30 years later. Coach Buzz or Buzzer or Buzz Lightyear, whatever, has died. They gather in their hometown to commemorate the coach. They book a weekend stay at some lakeside resort they used to stay in.
Cut to 90 minutes of millionaire comedians sitting in lawnchairs trading insults and ogling a young actress who is supposed to be the daughter of Rob Schneider‘s character.
Did I mention Rob Schneider’s in it?
Also David Spade.
Kevin James.
Rock.
Sandler.
Oh yeah, Colin Quinn needed work, so he’s here too.
Steve Buscemi lost a bet. Even though he’s in a full-body cast for most of the movie, he still escapes with more dignity intact than Salma Hayek. She plays the wife of Sandler’s character, a casting decision which at a stroke places Grown Ups firmly in the category of science fiction (if not science fiction horror).
Sandler’s character is a Hollywood agent. This earns him the nickname “Hollywood” when he returns to his hometown.
There is so much wrong with Grown Ups that it’s difficult to know where to even begin. At what point, I wanted to know, did Sandler and his writing partner decide that the script was finished? When they nailed that fifth fart joke?
Who came up with the “Saskatchatoon” joke, and can that person be injected with SARS?
How many more reaction shots can they have of these rich assholes laughing at their own jokes?
In the end what’s most offensive about Grown Ups is how cynical, arrogant and meanspirited it is. The only reason this movie exists is so Sandler’s buddies could collect some big paychecks, even if it means the Hollywood equivalent of stealing TVs off the back of a truck. Sandler is like the Tony Soprano of former SNL cast members.
There’s not much to say about The Artist, except that it’s everything Grown Ups is not. Purely for its cinematography, it is a much, much superior movie experience than Grown Ups. It also has a story that proceeds from A to B with logic and narrative precision. It also has likable characters, enjoyable period music (the soundtrack for Grown Ups features Triumph’s “Lay It On the Line”), some funny scenes, and frequent and clever visual gags.
I came away from The Artist wanting to know more about the movie, about the people who made it and the people in it, with a renewed appreciation for the mythmaking possibilities of motion pictures. Grown Ups made me want to hit someone with a hammer.
It’s two days after the advance screening of The Amazing Spider-Man, and I’m still angry.
I went in actually expecting it to be good, or at least decent. What I got was over two hours of flaccid storytelling, cynical casting, and video-game action scenes.
I know, I know, it’s my own fault for thinking it would be anything other than a sticky-fingered ploy to dip into our wallets. The odds were against it from the beginning – Sony Pictures decided to tell the same old boring story about how Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man, so already your brain is halfway out the door before the movie even begins.
But there is just something so stupid about casting Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone as teenagers – why not make the story interesting, and have them play characters closer to their own ages (29 and 24, respectively) who have to deal with all the spider-nonsense?
The Amazing Spider-Man doesn’t even really begin as a movie until an hour into it, but director Marc Webb and whatever lawyers made all the decisions fumble the ball in the last half, too.
In the comics, The Lizard is a well-meaning scientist who injects himself with a serum and, well, turns into a lizard-man. He’s human-sized, though, and in a nice if ridiculous touch wears a lab coat.
One of the first early issues of Spider-Man I ever bought!
Now, I can understand how modern movie audiences might snicker at a lizard-man wearing a lab coat, which is fine. But instead of a human-size bad guy, The Amazing Spider-Man‘s lizard is this huge CGI monster, as big as the Hulk but without the personality (and that’s saying something). This gives the action sequences about as much heft as a video game fight. (I would post an image of the movie Lizard but can’t find a good one.)
It all wraps up in an epic battle atop a very tall building; it’s the same phallic denouement as The Avengers, actually, down to the rippling-sky effects. But one thing The Avengers accomplished that The Amazing Spider-Man doesn’t; at the end of the screening I saw of that movie, people actually applauded. At the end of The Amazing Spider-Man, we breathed a collective sigh of relief that it was over.
Well, there’s one more epic superhero blockbuster to come this summer (and many, many more in summers to come, if The Avengers‘ box-office take has any influence on Hollywood decision-making): The Dark Knight Rises. I’m one of the few who actually doesn’t think that much of Christopher Nolan‘s Batman movies (as with Tim Burton, the vision is much better than the story), but The Amazing Spider-Man lowers the bar considerably. Dark Knight Rises can’t be worse, even if it ends in an epic fight atop a big building.
Shawn Conner is a freelance journalist and copywriter with a passion for pop culture. He is currently at the Vancouver Sun, where he writes on arts, entertainment, health, business and marshmallows. Previous credits include the Georgia Straight, the Globe and Mail and the Comics Journal. For fun and bankruptcy he also edits and publishes the online Vancouver arts and entertainment magazine The Snipe News (http://www.thesnipenews.com/). He lives in East Vancouver with his girlfriend Robyn and two grey cats.
