Thoughts on Walk on the Wild Side

On Criterion, I watched a movie from 1962 called Walk on the Wild Side, directed by Edward Dymtryk, this melodrama set in the Depression (but a lot of the young women look like 1960s fashion models) in which Laurence Harvey, an English actor doing a decent Texan accent, is trekking from Texas to New Orleans to find his lost love Capucine (who looked glamorous but was a bore to watch), who is working in a brothel under the eye of Barbara Stanwyck, the madam who holds an obsession with her and won’t let her go. It was nice seeing Stanwyck in a much later role, being all buttoned-up and stern, as well as her playing one of film’s early lesbian characters, even if it’s more subtext than text, as she just seems more possessive of Capucine than anything resembling love.

A young Jane Fonda was the real highlight of this movie, a young woman (who is later revealed to be an underage minor, but I didn’t believe it) who is a hustler and a thief and tags along with Harvey, later working at the brothel. She just shined with so much spunkiness and charisma and sexuality, and I wanted to see more of her than Capucine trying to be melodramatic in a Garbo way and just dragging the film down. Even the way she tries to flop onto a couch by tossing her hair as she falls, I thought “That was a choice.” Fonda was just cute and funny and had a lot of screen presence so early in her career in this campy drama.

Having Anne Baxter play a Mexican woman was a questionable choice, but I at least appreciated that she didn’t play her as a racist caricature, she really gave a heartfelt and great performance as an outsider just trying to run her cafe alone and getting pulled into other people’s messy drama.

So this was better than I expected, since I’m not usually into melodramas. I just liked the variety of actress performances, good and bad, and the fun unintentional anachronisms of a Depression-set story still having a 1960s fashion to it.

Thoughts on Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

 A few nights ago I watched on Criterion the 1999 film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, directed by Jim Jarmusch. I hadn’t seen it in years, and it still held up pretty well. It’s an odd film, a slow-paced crime drama that mixes in old Italian mob guys that watch old kids’ cartoons, a laid-back hip-hop score by the RZA, Forest Whitaker as a quiet and remote assassin who follows a samurai code from an old book, Issach de Bankole as a talkative French-speaking ice cream man who is Ghost Dog’s best friend despite that they don’t speak the same language, and Camille Winbush (of The Bernie Mac Show) as an inquisitive little girl who carries her novels around in a lunchbox.

It feels like a fairly unique movie, that combines being a mob movie with a hip-hop vibe. I like the little moments in it. Like when a little red bird just randomly perched on Ghost Dog’s sniper rifle while he’s got a bead on mobsters and he just looks so happy and charmed by it. The instrumental of Raekwon’s “Ice Cream” playing in the park as the ice cream man is introduced and protégés of the Wu-Tang Clan are freestyling. The incredulous reactions of the mobsters hearing about the unconventional methods that Ghost Dog goes by (“He only wants to be paid once a year on the first day of autumn? OK, we’ll get back to that . . . He sends his messages by fucking bird?!”). How Whitaker was perfect for this role because in interviews, he comes off as very soft-spoken and a slow talker, and how it’s a contrast that works well with de Bankole’s energetic fast-talking, and the warmth that the two best friends have, who just get each other as outsiders on an unspoken level.

I know that Jarmusch’s slower pace in his films isn’t for everyone, but between this and Paterson, I generally find these movies to be peaceful and relaxing, it’s comforting and I feel more still and can breathe more easily when watching chilled-out movies like those.

Thoughts on One False Move

On Criterion I watched a 1992 thriller called One False Move, in which Ray (Billy Bob Thornton) and Pluto (Michael Beach) are two drug dealers who murder several people in a house in L.A. and run off with Ray’s accomplice girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams), aka Lila, going to her Arkansas hometown, where two L.A. cops and Hurricane (Bill Paxton), a local sheriff, are waiting to catch them.

It’s a really tense thriller, as Thornton plays this easily paranoid tweaker with a bad ponytail who goes off at any second, while Beach is quiet and bespectacled, but can quickly get stabby without warning. The murder scenes are quick but pretty brutal to watch. Lila goes ahead of them to her hometown, in part to see her five-year old son and confront Hurricane, who is small-time but eagerly sees this case as his big score to bust some real criminals. He’s also casually racist, which gets pretty awful when he has this likable charm then just drops a racial slur that kills it immediately. And as Lila is Black, it does bring up some dynamics between them where she does outright call him out on his racism, as deservedly so.

I re-listened to the podcast Switchblade Sisters, which talked about this movie in 2019, and it brought up more interesting points about the film, namely the character of Fantasia/Lila, and how she starts off the film as seemingly the passive girlfriend (it took me a little time to realize she was Ray’s girlfriend and not a hostage from the mass murder), but gains more agency in her character arc, quietly manipulating her boyfriend to get ahead and complete her own business, and is a much stronger heroine in the end, who morally is a lot more innocent and good than her co-horts are. I’m trying not to give away too much, but her confrontation with Hurricane about past events and his racist attitudes cut deep, and I loved that she is blunt and unafraid of him, and he comes off as more cowardly in her presence.

I thought Cynda Williams did well in this film, especially in that sequence with Paxton, but feel like a stronger actress could have made more of a presence in the film. Not as a typical noir heroine, because she isn’t, she comes off as quiet for most of the film. But just as someone who could have made a bigger impression in an underrated film. I just realized that I was praising the male actors mostly before her, and wanted to give her more acknowledgment.

I was pleasantly surprised that this got on Criterion, because I just heard of it last year from a film podcast, and it seemed like a really hard to find movie that likely didn’t do well at the time of release and didn’t get much play. It’s a really well-acted and uncomfortable film to watch, as you can just feel like any of the characters will snap and panic and get violent at any trigger. Fun trivia fact: Thornton and Williams were married after the film wrapped in 1990, but were divorced by the time it came out in 1992.

Thoughts on Promising Young Woman

I really liked Promising Young Woman, directed by Emerald Fennell (of Killing Eve) and starring Carey Mulligan as Cassie, who plays a game of sorts of pretending to be intoxicated in clubs so that “nice guys” will try to rescue her, take her home, and when they get close to assaulting her, she snaps back into being sober and terrifying them.

She had dropped out of med school following her best friend Nina, who had been raped and later died by suicide. She is living with her parents, working as a barista by day and hunting dweebs at night, and exacts a very meticulous revenge plot against all who were complicit in discrediting her friend and allowing her rapist to go free, including building up to punishing the rapist himself. It’s an interesting journey she goes on, though I felt like the film pulled some punches in order to still make her character sympathetic to the audience, I was a little more interested in her being a lot more heartless and less likable.

I liked the contrast of the bright candy color motif of the film, like her long blonde hair with bangs, gingham dresses, Hard Candy-style pastel nail polish, and her parents’ plastic-covered dinner table, against the dark and seemingly sociopathic vibe of her hit list against those who set her friend’s fate to ruin, turning the tables on them in awful but fitting ways.

I could figure out a reveal in the ending that seemed a little too perfect, as the planets had to align for this to all happen in sync. And I was a little frustrated in how things ended up for her. And I did like that this didn’t feel like a typical rape revenge movie, as I realized that what I was expecting would be a little too predictable. This isn’t Ms. 45, as I had assumed, but more calculating than that. So I’m glad I watched it, after having seen the trailer for it a year ago and it only just hit streaming a few weeks ago.

Thoughts on Boogie Nights

I woke up really early in the morning, so I decided to watch Boogie Nights on Hulu, I hadn’t seen it in years. It’s still a fantastic film, and I’m amazed that Paul Thomas Anderson was just 26 when he made it. It has incredible cinematography, a lot of one-shot pans and long tracking shots, and a really stellar cast that I’m surprised he was able to get for his second feature.

There were minor parts that I had forgotten about and thought was hilarious, like Dirk’s terrible singing on the song that in the real world was in the 1980s Transformers film, and the guy freaking out over the girl who O.D’d: “This is twice in two days that a chick has O.D’d on me!.” There are so many needle drop moments with the music, like shifting between four pop song classics in the Alfred Molina scene alone.

I liked how a lot of the main characters were generally the same in the end as they were in the beginning. Dirk definitely went through a major transformation from naive innocent to hardened and empty, but still seemed like a dumb person without much skills outside of his work. Some age and wisdom, like with Rollergirl and Buck, but generally the same. I noticed that Jack never indulged in cocaine himself, largely keeping it around for others’ enjoyment.

I was mixed between feeling bad for Little Bill and his troubled marriage, while also thinking he should have just gotten a divorce instead of how he chose to resolve the situation. It makes for an incredible sequence in the film, I just thought about it later and realized my sympathies with him were misplaced.

I looked up the IMDB trivia, and the alternate choices for casting would have worked just as well for this film: Leonardo DiCaprio for Dirk, Marisa Tomei for Amber, Jack Black for Scotty, and Warren Beatty for Jack. I can see all of that working for an alternate version of the film.

I don’t know how known Thomas Jane was in 1997, but he is a total scene stealer. His character is a coked-up idiot who devises a plan to trick a psychotic drug dealer into buying a kilo of baking soda under the guise of it being cocaine, and gets way too greedy and dumb in the moment. There was no question as to how his story was going to end, but I thought he was really great in his handful of scenes.

I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I liked that Anderson chose to give Nicole Ari Parker’s character a happy ending of a marriage to a regular guy, rather than his original idea of having the husband become jealous and abusive over her pornography past, I would have hated more of that ugliness in addition to everyone else’s lives being destroyed by drugs.

I really should know more of Melora Walters’ work, she’s a fantastic character actress who played Jessie, Buck’s wife, and was so sweet and cute. I had previously raved about her in my review of Twenty Bucks.

It was fun revisiting this and noticing a lot of small moments I had overlooked before.

Thoughts on The Apartment and Dumb: The Story of Big Brother Magazine

The Apartment, a classic romantic comedy with a somber vibe from 1960 in which Jack Lemmon is a put-upon underling at a big company who is pressured by his supervisors to let them use his apartment to screw their mistresses while he has to kill time outside. Shirley MacLaine is the elevator operator that he falls for who ends up being one of the mistresses, who is in a miserable secret relationship with Fred McMurray, knowing he will never leave his wife for her, and her performance is so sweet and heartbreaking. I forgot how cute MacLaine was as a very young actress, and how she brought such an endearing care to this ordinary character. Lemmon was also sweet and funny too, especially as someone who was really sick of being used as a sap by his bosses, but I was just more touched by MacLaine’s performance. This won five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and Lemmon and MacLaine were both nominated.

Dumb: The Story of Big Brother Magazine, is a Hulu documentary from 2017 about the 90s skateboarding magazine Big Brother, where the origins of the Jackass creators and stunt team came from. It was decent, pretty much a lot of overgrown skater dudes with a teenage mentality in their twenties making a skateboarding magazine that had a lot of boobs and dicks and off-color ad jokes in it, wanting to be the rougher side of skate culture. It definitely felt like a boys’ club to me, especially a lot of young white guys with dumb humor who had very few women or BIPOC in their staff, so it felt more insular to me. I did think it was funny that when they got bought by Larry Flynt, the magazine got a lot more tamer, because Flynt didn’t want more pornography magazines, and the corporate culture took away the scratchy DIY thing they had going on. It was fun to watch, as someone who watched a lot of Jackass when I was younger, but I also did think a lot of their humor was pretty dumb and trying too hard to shock, which it easily did with suburban parents that went on the news complaining about it, which now seems quaint in comparison to Internet accessibility to porn.

Thoughts on Assorted Films

I watched various movies on Criterion and Hulu last month.

Bell, Book, and Candle, a light 1958 romantic comedy where Kim Novak is a witch who casts a love spell on James Stewart to break up his engagement, and feels remorse about it. It was cute, I liked the Greenwich Village setting, seeing Elsa Lanchester (aka the Bride of Frankenstein) in a later role as a charming and quirky older witch, and a young Jack Lemmon as an adorable warlock. It was like the alternate version of Vertigo in which it isn’t a tragic mindmelt of a movie.

The Quiet Family, a Korean dark comedy from 1998 about a family running an inn whose guests keep dying in macabre ways and they are trying to cover it up and panicking. It was silly and fun, with some future Korean movie stars who would be in Oldboy and Thirst.

You Cannot Kill David Arquette, a 2019 documentary in which the actor David Arquette is trying to make up for being shunned by the wrestling community after he won a belt while promoting Ready to Rumble in 2000, as because he’s not an actual wrestler that it shouldn’t count. So he decides to go back into wrestling, but training for real, and digging his way up through backyard wrestling and lucha libre. I liked his enthusiasm and genuine interest in making amends to earn the respect of the industry, and was surprised that for being out of shape at 46 in the beginning, he quickly took to doing stunts in the ring and got into it quickly. There’s also a sweet tribute to Luke Perry at the end, with David and Luke’s son, the AEW wrestler Jungle Boy. Also, his current wife looks like a younger version of his ex Courteney Cox, it was pretty funny to me.

Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a 2017 documentary about the early years of Basquiat, in which his friends mostly talk about him as a funny and quiet artist who crashed around their places, was an incorrigible flirt, played in a band with Vincent Gallo, and how he developed his artistry and broke into the art industry as a young man of color. It was pretty cool, and I always like learning about the artsy scenes of past New York City that were before my time.

Broken Arrow, a 1996 action film by John Woo in which John Travolta and Christian Slater are Air Force pilots in Utah, then Travolta goes rogue and turns on everyone and is selling nukes, and Slater and park ranger Samantha Mathis have to stop him. It was decent, nice seeing a role reversal with the actors against typecasting, and it felt like a warm-up for Face/Off, with Travolta clearly having fun playing the villain even if he does overact his line delivery a lot. I especially liked the train finale, I thought it was one of the best sequences of the movie.

The Naked Kiss, a 1964 noir by Samuel Fuller that I hadn’t seen in years, that still held up as a great film. Constance Towers is a former sex worker who left her life behind to live in a small town and work as a nurse with children with disabilities, and her past is dogging her, from the head cop being outraged by her former life, to seeing young women get suckered into the sex industry with naive eyes. She’s so headstrong and powerful in this movie, and fantastically blunt about not having regrets about her sex work while being honest about the ugly side of it. This film went a lot further than I expected, especially with her potential new husband, and I was impressed by how much balls this movie had in the 1960s, it still holds up really well as a B-movie noir.

Thoughts on The Villainess and Eve's Bayou

On Hulu I watched The Villainess and Eve’s Bayou, two films I had been meaning to watch for a long time, and really liked them both.

The Villainess is a 2017 Korean action film directed by Jung Byung-gil about a female assassin (Kim Ok-bin) working as a government agent. She’s set up with a new identity in an apartment with her toddler daughter, with a cover as a theatre actress, and the agency is giving her assignments, promising her freedom after ten years of service, as well as having an agent pose as a sweet widowed neighbor to gain her love and keep tabs on her. She also wants to avenge the death of her father, who she saw murdered by a crime boss when she was a child, and it gets more complicated when she realizes who this boss really is.

I liked how it felt like a mix of a stylish Park Chan-Wook action film, like his Vengeance series, mixed in with Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita, and that the film was trying to show a more humanized depiction of a female assassin than just a fantasy of a hot chick with guns and swords. It was really well-crafted, with really sick and intensely choreographed fight sequences using fish-eye lens and hidden cuts in seemingly long takes, and was messy and bloody.

Eve’s Bayou is a 1997 film by Kasi Lemmons that is a Southern Gothic tale of an affluent Black family living in a little bayou town in the 1960s named after an enslaved woman named Eve, whose descendants live there and whom the 10-year old protagonist (Jurnee Smollet) is named after. This was a really intense and heavy family drama that had a slow, dreamlike pace mixed with horror, the shakiness of memories, and Creole culture. Eve witnesses her doctor father (Samuel L. Jackson) cheating on her mother, and is devastated by her idolized father breaking her loving image of him, and is frequently shut down by the adults around her when she tries to tell people what she saw.

It was a really haunting and beautiful film, and I could feel the weight of it when it ended. I’m happy this film got added to the Library of Congress in 2018 as a culturally significant film, it was well deserving for posterity.

Thoughts on Arachnophobia

On New Year's Day, I watched Arachnophobia on Hulu. I hadn’t seen it since I was like 7 or 8, and it freaked me out then. I still found the movie creepy, especially since it was obvious they used real spiders a lot, but really liked it, it held up well as being mostly horror with some ironic humor, with Jeff Daniels having this everyday man affable charm and John Goodman as this exterminator superhero that feels like he’s outside of the movie in a way.

I had misremembered some scenes, like remembering the spiders in the shower scene but thinking the spiders were coming out of the shower head onto the girl, or thinking that John Goodman had blasted spiders with a flamethrower pack, when it was really Jeff Daniels with a makeshift flamethrower using a lighter and wine bottles.

I had recognized the guy who played the medical examiner, but not knowing where from, and it was knawing at me during the movie. I checked it afterwards, and he was in Total Recall as the guy whose sweating convinces Quaid that he’s in the real world and not a Recall fantasy.

I did like reading the IMDB trivia afterwards, like how they used real spiders that look scary but were harmless or non-poisonous, and took safety measures to protect them during the scenes, like having hollowed out shoes or books to keep them safe whenever someone squishes them. And that Steven Spielberg, the producer, hides in the backseat of Goodman’s truck in a scene, as an unseen cameo, that was cute

Thoughts on Heat Vision and Jack

In December, had rewatched the unsold TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack that Ben Stiller and Dan Harmon created around 1999. It’s a mashup of Knight Rider and the Six Million Dollar Man (as well as an unsold 80s TV pilot named Northstar about a guy who has enhanced abilities from a freak accident but burns up if he’s in the sun too long), starring Jack Black as an astronaut who got too close to the sun and now has heightened knowledge from an enlarged brain, and Owen Wilson as his buddy that got fused with Black’s motorcycle due to a ray gun from Ron Silver (playing himself) acting as an agent of N.A.S.A. to capture Black to dissect his brain.

As fun as the pilot was, I’m glad it didn’t become a show. In 1999, Jack Black was just starting to take off as a movie star, and this would’ve held him back a little. Owen Wilson did voice work on the show, but was likely also too busy. And I can’t see Ron Silver being a regular on this parody show. He was excellent on it, with a lot of swagger (especially any scene of his strutting down a hallway in a turtleneck and taking off his shades mid-stride), but he likely would have been too busy playing the villain in action movies and thrillers.

The show wasn’t picked up in part to it being too expensive, and given that one action scene rotates between really famous songs by The Prodigy, Metallica, and Led Zeppelin, yeah, I could see how the song rights would have been really steep. And again, Silver likely would have been too expensive to afford as a regular on this series. So I like it as a fun one-off show that feels more like an Adult Swim sketch than a real show.

Thoughts on Best Films of 2020

Really good list from Vox of some of the best movies of the year. This year I got more into renting films online, as there was a lot of good stuff to find with art house virtual cinemas and VOD. I’m not surprised there aren’t as many Hollywood movies on this list, since a lot of films got pushed back or mainly showed in drive-ins or regular theaters, like Tenet.

The ones I’ve seen on this list that I was really into were First Cow, The Painter and the Thief, Miss Juneteenth, The Assistant, Palm Springs, Bill and Ted Face the Music, The Forty Year Old Version, and Shirley. What was annoying with virtual cinemas was that there would be highly acclaimed movies like Nomadland and Minari that only got a week’s worth of screenings, and online screenings would get sold out quickly due to a lot of early critical buzz. I also didn’t like how new movies were on so many streaming platforms, and I’m only on a couple and didn’t want to sign up for other ones, so I didn’t see On the Rocks and Wolfwalkers, which are on Apple TV. I have wishful thinking that they’ll be put out on DVD, but I know that physical media like that is getting to be more obsolete.

I thought She Dies Tomorrow had a good premise, but a boring and overly slow execution.

I wasn’t into I’m Thinking of Ending Things. I just don’t think it was for me, I found it way too long and it dragged. I liked some of the offbeat and weirder aspects of the movie, but afterwards found that I didn’t really care about the story or characters.

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga was fun, I especially liked Rachel McAdams and the Iceland setting.

House of Hummingbird (not on the list) was one of my favorites, an excellent Korean coming of age movie about an adolescent girl in 1994 Seoul.

The Surrogate was really good, an indie drama-comedy about a young woman who acts as a surrogate for her gay male friends, and them dealing with complicated feelings when they find out the baby will be born with Down’s Syndrome.

Tommaso was a really interesting semi-autobiographical movie starring Willem Dafoe as a blend of himself and director Abel Ferrara, living in Rome with his young wife and daughter, and teaching acting classes, going to AA, and having marital issues.

For Hollywood stuff, I would include Birds of Prey. It was a lot of fun and so colorful and nutty, and was the second to last movie I saw in theaters this year (the last being short films at the Museum of the Moving Image).