As we muddle through the current lockdown,
Doug Harris, president of the Houston Film Critics Society, has been lifting
his and other people’s spirits by hanging on his balcony banners emblazoned
with quotes from classic movies. He’s also been encouraging fellow HFCS members
to post reviews of spirit-lifting movies available for streaming. Therefore, suitably
inspired by my favorite currently sitting president: Here is my original 1989
review of Bill & Ted’s Excellent
Adventure. Totally, just as it appeared back in the day in The Houston
Post.
How far can a comedy get on a single joke?
Just about 90 minutes, judging from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, an
exuberantly goofy farce sprinkled with moments of inspired silliness.
The plot is simple, if not simplistic: Two
chuckleheaded teen-agers, Bill and Ted, are given a magical telephone booth
that allows them to travel back and forth in time. The gift arrives at a
fortuitous moment — the boys are in danger of flunking a history class, and
they need some impressive exhibits to ace their final exam. So off to the past
they go, to corral Napoleon, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Billy the Kid and
assorted other “personages of historical significance.”
Scriptwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon
obviously are fans of Fast Times at
Ridgemont High, and fondly recall the scene where an awesomely stoned surfer
(played by Sean Penn) took a make-up test in American history. Bill & Ted offers two Valley Guy
students instead of one, and allows them unrestricted use of an amusingly
polysyllabic vocabulary: “Ted, it’s pointless to have a triumphant video until
we have decent instruments!” “We are about to fail most egregiously, Bill!”
Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are
the heroes of the piece, would-be rock musicians who react with amazing
sang-froid when a futuristic visitor (George Carlin) makes the past available
to them. Occasionally, the boys are slightly rattled by what they encounter in
their time-travels. (“Whoa! Check it out! We're in the middle of a war, dude!”)
More often, though, Bill and Ted are highly entertained, if not noticeably
educated, by their first-hand research.
Under the energetic direction of Stephen Herek
(Critters), Bill & Ted gets by on high spirits even when its invention
flags. There is a very funny sequence that places the “historical personages”
in a shopping mall — Joan of Arc joins an aerobics class, Beethoven tickles the
ivories at a music store, Billy the Kid and Socrates try to pick up girls. The
finale, staged very much like a heavy metal concert, is guaranteed to please
the party animals in the audience when Bill
& Ted makes its inevitable debut on the midnight movie circuit.
To be sure, there are a few slow stretches
where time is marked and patience is tested. Overall, though, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is
an exceedingly pleasant surprise. And the best moments are those where our
heroes try to interpret history in their own terms. Socrates, they figure,
lived in ancient Athens, “when most of the world looked like the cover of the
Led Zeppelin album, Houses of the Holy.”
I once joked
with Brian Dennehy that we had him to blame for the whole Rambo franchise. After all, if his small-town lawman hadn’t pushed
Sylvester Stallone’s troubled Vietnam vet to the brink during the original First Blood (1982), John Rambo wouldn’t
have gone on the rampage in the first place.
“Yeah,”
Dennehy responded with a wolfish grin, “they’ll probably wind up putting that
on my tombstone: ‘He Pushed John Rambo Too Far!’”
But, then
again, maybe not. By the time of his passing Wednesday evening at age 81 — a
good 30 years after we shared that exchange at the New York press junket for Presumed Innocent — Dennehy had amassed
an amazing number of impressively diverse stage and screen credits, most of
them dutifully noted in my Variety colleague Carmel Dagan’s obituary tribute. To
put it simple and gratefully: He was too prolific and prodigious to ever be name-checked
for a single role.
The first time I spoke with the late, great actor was at the
1987 Cannes Film Festival, shortly after the world premiere of Peter Greenaway’s
The Belly of an Architect. I am posting this interview, which originally
appeared in a slightly different form in The Houston Post several weeks before
that movie’s U.S. release, not because of his extraordinary performance in that
drama, but rather because of what Dennehy revealed about what acting meant to
him. I’d be willing to bet he always had that same fire burning inside him.
Brian Dennehy, character
actor extraordinaire, currently can be seen as a part-time author and full-time
cop in Best Seller, an offbeat
thriller in which he co-stars with his friend James Woods. Next year, he’ll be seen
in The Return of the Man from Snowy River,
in a role Kirk Douglas played in the first Snowy
River adventure. “Kirk’s cleft fell out,” Dennehy jokes in his
typically gregarious
fashion, “and they had to replace it. So I’m filling in for him.”
But during interviews at
film festivals in Cannes and Toronto this year, Dennehy spent most of his time
talking about a far more esoteric project: The
Belly of an Architect, Peter Greenaway’s bizarrely stylized drama about a middle-aged
American architect who loses his dignity, his sense of purpose and his much
younger wife while overseeing an exhibition in Rome.
Dennehy stars in the film,
which will be released later this year, as Stourley Kracklite, the architect
who comes to question the value of everything, and everyone, he has held dear.
It’s a character Dennehy could identify with very easily.
“When I read this script a
year and a half ago,” he told me at Cannes, “I was going through a period —
which I'm still going through, to a certain extent — of trying to deal with the
fact of being 48, of having achieved a certain success, a certain celebrity.
And having to come to terms with the fact, which everyone has to come to
terms with, that's it's all bullshit. It doesn’t really mean anything.
“In other words, you spend
20 years of your life saying, ‘If I ever get to this place, if I ever get what
I want, I'll be happy. All the mysteries of the world will be solved, and I
will know what’s right.’ Well, you get that. And then you say to yourself, ‘You
know something? The mysteries are not all solved. And I’m not particularly
happy. And it really doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference that you get what
you want.’”
Not that Brian Dennehy is
a bitter man. Not at all. He ppreciates the respect and acclaim he has earned
in such high-profile supporting roles as the friendly alien in Cocoon, the cheerfully corrupt sheriff
in Silverado, and the hard-charging
New York cop in F/X. And he is extremely grateful to director Peter Greenaway for
casting him in Architect, the first
movie where he has received top billing.
But for Dennehy, there's
something more important than the billing, the good reviews and the public
recognition. For him, the most important thing is simply acting.
“The first thing I noticed
about Kracklite is, Kracklite is a man who is obsessed. And I am obsessed — I
am obsessed with acting. I'm obsessed with what I do. And I have come to terms
with that. There was a time, four or five years ago, when people would say to
me, ‘You’ve got to find something else. Get yourself a nice
girlfriend, get on your sailboat and sail away, find something else. You can’t just
care about this one thing.’ But eventually, I got to the point where I figured,
‘This is the only thing I care about. This is the only thing that interests me.
Yes, I am obsessed with it.’
“If you're really lucky,
after going to a psychiatrist three times a week for 20 years, the psychiatrist
says, ‘You're not changed, but now you know what you are, you know how you are.
And you can live with that.’ Well, that’s the way I feel.”
Throughout the final quarter-century of her life, in countless
feature films, TV dramas and talk-show appearances, Bette Davis (1908-89) went
out of her way to sustain a self-satirizing image as a bug-eyed, raspy-voiced,
age-ravaged eccentric. For movie buffs who came of age in the wake of What
Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), the career-reviving gothic-camp
extravaganza that permanently recast her as a cantankerous harpy, it may
sometimes come as a shock to be reminded of the unconventionally beautiful and
uniquely charismatic superstar that Davis was in her prime.
Fortunately, film is a medium that ensures even the dearly
departed are always in the present tense, at their very best. In Dark
Victory, the must-see 1939 tearjerker directed by Edmond Goulding (Grand
Hotel), Davis continues to delight and dazzle in a role that she ranked
among her favorites. And despite the passing of years — not to mention the
abundance of remakes, rip-offs and spot-on parodies — the movie itself still
packs a potent emotional wallop.
Davis earned her third Academy Award nomination for her cunningly
dynamic portrayal of Judith Traherne, a fast-living, hard-drinking Long Island
socialite who lives her life as one long New Year's Eve party until she
realizes her occasional dizzy spells and blurred vision can’t be blamed on
hangovers. Dedicated surgeon Frederick Steele (George Brent) — who, not
surprisingly, falls in love with Judith – identifies her malady as a brain
tumor. But, of course, the audience knows better: Judith has Old Movie Disease,
a humbling affliction that strikes only carefree and capricious leading ladies.
Victims become progressively more beautiful, and increasingly less
self-absorbed, as they stoically approach a peaceful quietus. (Sporadic spasms
of kookiness are common symptoms.)
For no very good reason, her doctor and her best friend (Geraldine
Fitzgerald) opt to keep Judith blissfully ignorant of her death sentence. When
she inadvertently learns the truth, she turns against her confidants, and
resumes her wastrel ways with bad influences. (Chief among the latter: a
pre-Presidential Ronald Reagan, who’s unsettlingly convincing as a party-hearty
libertine.) Ultimately, however, Judith decides to spend her final months as a
supportive wife for Frederick. During the profoundly affecting final scenes,
she refuses to tell him of her abruptly fading eyesight – the telltale sign,
alas, of a rapidly approaching demise. Instead, she sends him off to an
important medical conference, so she can die alone — to the accompaniment of
Max Steiner's heart-wrenching musical score — in bed.
Dark Victory is a textbook example of the
glossy Hollywood product that rolled off dream factory assembly lines during
the heyday of the studio era. And like most similar product – especially the
brand produced by Warner Bros. – it features a strong supporting cast of
contract players. Brent, an actor best remembered for providing handsome window
dressing in movies built around remarkable leading ladies, is impeccably noble as
Frederick. Fitzgerald makes the most of a largely thankless part, while Reagan
is amusingly lightweight as Alec, a feckless fellow who spends most of the
movie in various stages of inebriation. And third-billed Humphrey Bogart
struggles manfully with an on-again, off-again Irish accent as Michael O’Leary,
a virile horse trainer who’d like to corral Judith.
The main attraction, though, is Bette Davis. Whether Judith is
gliding coquettishly through a country-club gathering, or bravely comforting a
weepy buddy before striding off to her solitary destiny, Davis demonstrates
just what being a gloriously larger-than-life movie icon is all about. An
under-rated element of her timeless appeal: She’s not afraid to appear
infuriatingly selfish, if not aggressively unlikable, when a scene calls for
potentially off-putting extremes. That alone is sufficient to set her far apart
from most image-conscious stars of any era. If they don't make movies like Dark
Victory anymore, maybe it’s because there’s no one like Davis — this
Davis, the luminous immortal of 1939 — to star in them.
And by the way: Never argue with a star who has a sharp eye for
spiffy vehicles. Bette Davis saw Dark Victory on the stage, and pressed
mogul Jack L. Warner to buy screen rights for her. Warner reluctantly agreed,
even though he famously groused: “Who wants to see a dame go blind?”
Today I
received an advance copy of the May/June Cowboys
& Indians magazine featuring my cover-story interview with Robert
Duvall. And I must admit: When I opened the FedEx envelope, I felt at once extremely
happy and unspeakably melancholy.
I felt
happy, of course, because I always enjoy interviewing Robert Duvall — and not
just because he always insists on my calling him “Bobby.” (Which I do, even
though I cannot help thinking: “I am not worthy! I am not worthy!”) And seeing
the cover reminded me of our most recent conversation, when we talked about everything
from his plans to attend the Western Heritage Awards celebration at the
National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City — where he was
slated to receive a lifetime achievement honor — to his experiences working
with director Steve McQueen on 2018’s Widows. (“He’s
a terrific director — one of the best I've ever worked with! I love working
with that guy!”)
But I also felt sad when I remembered
that we’d had that conversation before the full fury of COVID-19 began to be
felt in this country — and, indeed, before the Western Heritage Awards had to
be cancelled because, as long as we’re stuck in this Brave New World of The New
Normal, such events are being postponed indefinitely, if not cancelled
altogether.
So my mind started to wander. And I
couldn’t help thinking of something I wrote about my favorite Robert Duvall movie
of all time — Tender Mercies, the
1983 drama that earned Academy Awards for Duvall’s lead performance and Horton
Foote’s original screenplay — just three years before Foote’s death in 2009.
“Several
years ago, a colleague at the now-defunct Houston Post wrote a story about
movies that some people – celebrities, mostly – like to watch over and over and
over again on videocassette. (Hey, I told you this was several years ago.) When he ran out
of really well-known folks to interview, he collared me in the newsroom and
asked: ‘What movie do you watch
repeatedly?’ And so I told him: ‘There’s something about Tender Mercies that deeply and profoundly affects me on so many
levels that, yes, I’m addicted to
watching it. Whenever I get depressed, I want to pop the tape into the VCR, and
hear Robert Duvall say: “I don’t trust happiness. I never did, and I never did,
never will.” God, I know exactly how he feels.’
“Flash-forward a few weeks: I am at Houston’s Stages Theatre for the opening
night performance of Talking Pictures,
a play by the great Horton Foote, the Oscar-winning scriptwriter of Tender Mercies (and To Kill a Mockingbird). There’s a
post-performance party, and I’m off in a corner, munching on fried chicken I
obtained from the bountiful buffet, when I spot Foote — who I’ve met maybe once
or twice before that evening —across a crowded room. I nod, give him a thumb’s
up — the play actually was quite good, and deserves to be revived — and go back
to eating. Much to my surprise, however, Foote cuts short a conversation he’s
having with someone, walks across the crowded room, makes his way over to me
and, without a hint of irony, says: ‘Oh, Joe, I’m so
sorry you get depressed…’”
To this day,
I cannot understand why I didn’t break down crying right on the spot.
Masterfully directed by Bruce Beresford, Tender
Mercies is a spare, subtle film that speaks in a quiet yet compelling voice
about faith and despair, regret and redemption, lower depths and second
chances, while considering the restorative potential of human and divine love.
Duvall is absolutely heart-wrenching in his portrayal of Mac Sledge, a
down-and-out country singer who’s redeemed by the love a good woman (Tess
Harper), then pushed back to the brink by a devastating tragedy.
But as much as
I admire his performance, and the movie that contains it, I’m not sure I can
watch Tender Mercies again anytime
soon. (And I am pretty damn certain I can't watch 1918, the 1985 film version of Foote's play that deals in part with the Spanish Flu epidemic.) Because, really, it’s no longer a matter of not trusting happiness. Rather,
it’s a question of: When are we going to be happy, really happy, again?
No, it’s not an April Fool: Turner Classic Movies really is celebrating the centennial of Toshiro Mifune’s birth Wednesday
with an all-day, all-night marathon of the iconic Japanese actor’s
collaborations with the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. There are ten
titles in total — I wish they’d had room for The Bad Sleep Well, but let’s not
be greedy — and here is a guide to my five favorites in the lineup.
THE
HIDDEN FORTRESS (1959) — At once a
straight-faced spectacle and a mischievously sly put-on, The Hidden Fortress follows a fugitive princess (Misa Uehara) and
her loyal general (Toshiro Mifune) as they maneuver through enemy territory
during the civil wars of the 1500s. Skillfully employing wide-screen
compositions for the first time in his career, Kurosawa alternates between
elaborate set pieces — a slave revolt, chases on horseback, fire-festival
celebrations, hairbreadth escapes —and broadly played comic relief. Much of the
latter is provided by two bickering bumpkins (Minoru Chiaki, Kamatari Fujiwara)
who go along for the ride without knowing the princess’ true identity — and who
greedily plot to steal the gold hidden
among the firewood transported by the general.
George Lucas has made no secret ofhis drawing upon Hidden Fortress as an inspiration for Star Wars. The bumpkins, of course, are precursors of R2D2 and
C3PO, just as the headstrong heroine — who looks like a rough draft for Lara
Croft ofTomb Raider fame — is the model for the feisty Princess Leia. (It
requires a bit of stretch to see Mifune’s general as Han Solo, but never mind.)
Lucas learned some important lessons from the master, enabling him to create
his own masterwork. But as critic David Ehrenstein has reminds movie buffs in home-video
liner notes, Hidden Fortress stands
on its own merits as a rousing adventure set “a long time ago’ in a land “far,
far away.” (10 am ET/9 am CT)
HIGH AND LOW (1963) —
After finding inspiration in the classics of Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky,
Kurosawa turned to a decidedly more contemporary source: King’s Ransom, Ed McBain's 87th
Precinct thriller about the kidnapping of a Manhattan businessman’s young
son. With the aid of three co-screenwriters, Kurosawa transferred the story to
Japan, and infused it with his vision of a modern society undermined by the
erosion of traditional values. But even while the film can be appreciated as an
absorbing morality play, High and Low
also can be enjoyed as a first-rate, noir-flavored police procedural.
The astoundingly versatile Toshiro
Mifune is Kingo Gondo, a lordly shoe-company executive who mortgages everything
he owns to launch a hostile takeover of his own firm. Pride, not greed, his
motive — he’s determined to defeat rival
board members who want to produce cheaper shoes for higher profits. But before
he can complete his risky stock deal, Gondo gets a call from a stranger who
claims he has kidnapped the businessman’s only son. The good news: The
kidnapper mistakenly abducted the son of Gondo’s chauffeur. The bad news: He
demands a 30-million-yen ransom anyway. “You're a fool to pay,” he cruelly taunts
the bound-by-honor Gondo. “But you will.” And he’s right.
Kurosawa skillfully intensifies the
tension inside Gondo’s lavishly-appointed mansion by evoking a sense of
claustrophobia. Some individual widescreen shots are framed so that even while
other characters — policemen, the anxious chauffeur, Gondo’s loyal wife —
circle the businessman, he remains apart in the terrible isolation of his moral
dilemma. When Gondo finally leaves his home to deliver the ransom, the movie
switches gears to become a visually eloquent and dramatically gripping account
of the manhunt for the kidnapper, an embittered medical student who views his
crime as fair play in class warfare. Ginji Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki), the
villain of the piece, remains a baffling enigma until his climactic
confrontation with Gondo. Takeuchi made a conscious decision to commit evil, he
tells the businessman he has bankrupted, because he felt he already was living
in hell. In the end, nothing — not his eminent execution — terrifies him as
much as the possibility that he was mistaken. (5:30 pm ET/4:30 pm CT)
SEVEN
SAMURAI (1956) — Kurosawa’s
stunning epic is one of those rare indispensable films that practically
everyone has heard about, regardless of whether they've actually seen it.Indeed, even if you haven't, you may think you've seen it, given its strong
influence on so many other films and filmmakers. Directors ranging from John
Sturges(who remade it as The Magnificent Seven) to John Sayles
(who borrowed the basic plotwhile
writing a cult-fave Roger Corman B-movie called Battle Beyond the Stars) have drawn from this tale of honor among
warriors in 16th-century Japan.
By turns sage and savage, avuncular and
authoritarian, Takashi Shimura is Kambei, an unemployed samurai who agrees to
help peasants defend their village against marauding bandits. Even though the
pay is meager — a few handfuls of rice — Kambei is able to recruit other hired
swords who have little else to do after being cast adrift by the lords they
once served. By appealing to their pride and sense of justice, he attracts such
tough customers as Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi), a taciturn professional who never
wastes a word or gesture, and Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a bearish hot-head
who takes great pains to hide his less-than-noble ancestry.
Seven Samurai shows
Kurosawa at the top of his form, demonstrating an absolute mastery of his
medium with an inspired balance of formal precision and kinetic exuberance. His
epic opens with fast pans of bandits riding over hills, and climaxes with the
chaos of a rain-soaked, mud-and-blood battle. In between, there is scarcely a
single shot that does not contain motion. Even when people within the frame are
stationary, the camera itself glides, thrusts and recoils. More than a
half-centuryyears after its initial
release, Seven Samurai makes most
other action movies seem positively pokey. (8 pm ET/7 pm CT)
RASHOMON (1950) — A bandit subdues a nobleman in
a secluded woodland, and forces himself on the nobleman's beautiful wife. The
nobleman dies, the wife flees, the bandit is captured -- and everything else in
Rashomon remains open to conjecture.
Decades before The Usual Suspects warned
moviegoers not to accept subjective testimony as verifiable fact, Kurosawa’s
breakthrough masterpiece suggested that no eyewitness can be entirely trusted,
that truth itself may be forever elusive.
Four different accounts of the crime —
including one offered by the late nobleman through a court-ordered medium — are
considered by three strangers stranded under the Rashomon gate by a raging
thunderstorm. Was the nobleman truly a man of honor? Is his wife an innocent victim or a guilty
participant? Could the bandit (Toshiro Mifune at his most swaggeringly
uninhibited) be twisting the truth for a selfless reason? The possibilities are
perplexing. Each testimony is dramatized in flashback, and none seems more
credible than the others.Indeed,
Kurosawa strongly hints that all four stories are, to varying degrees, deceptions
born of self-delusion. “Human beings,” he wrote in his memoir, “are unable to
be honest with themselves about themselves.”
Rashomon has
spawned many imitators, including director Martin Ritt’s 1964 Americanized
remake, The Outrage, a Westernwith Paul Newman filling in for Mifune
as a Mexican outlaw. But Kurosawa’s film continues to be paradigm for this sort
ofbeguilingly simple but provocatively
complex drama. Even now, the title is used to describe anything from Senate
hearings to Seinfeld episodes in
which a story is told from multiple — and often contradictory — points of view.
(11:45 pm ET/10:45 pm CT)
YOJIMBO (1961) — The steely-eyed stranger rides
into a lawless town where bad men rule, loyalty is bought and sold, and the
coffin-maker never sleeps. With equal measures of ruthless cunning and lethal
proficiency, he cuts a bloody swath through the corruption. In the end, as he
prepares to ride off to another adventure, he takes a moment to appreciate his
handiwork: “Now it will be quiet in this town.” No kidding: Thanks to the
stranger, just about everyone who once lived there is dead.
Yojimbo,
Kurosawa's darkly comical Samurai Western, takes the hard-boiled premise of
Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest —
a tarnished hero encourages two rival gangs to destroy each other — and outfits
it with the trappings of traditionally Japanese jidai-geki. But there is nothing traditional about the cynical tone
or the sardonic humor of this gleefully savage self-parody.Sanjuro, the sword-slinging anti-hero played
by Toshiro Mifune, is prepared for the worst upon his arrival, when he sees a
stray dog trotting down the dusty street with a human hand in its mouth. Later,
after he temporarily signs on as a yojimbo
(bodyguard) for one of the town’s two warring clan leaders, he overhears the
leader’s shrewish wife urging her feckless son to kill Sanjuro: “Do it from
behind, and it’ll be quite easy enough!” When Sanjuro finally gets around to
pitting one clan against the other, he isn’t motivated by moral outrage.
Rather, he simply delights in exploiting the villainy of lesser men to produce
an amusing spectacle. The one time Sanjuro performs a selfless act — he
reunites an enslaved woman with her husband and young son — he pays dearly for
generosity.
Yojimbo has
been remade twice, with Clint Eastwood (A
Fistful of Dollars) and Bruce Willis (Last
Man Standing) filling in for Mifune as the impassive protagonist. But even
though each of the recyclings has something to recommend, the original remains
in a class by itself as an exuberantly misanthropic masterpiece. And by the
way: Yes, this is the movie that Kevin Costner takes Whitney Houston to see in 1992’s
The Bodyguard. (1:30 am ET/12:30 pm
CT)
The folks at
KUHF-FM’s Houston Matters invited me today
to phone in a few suggestions for movies and television shows to watch during
The Great Shutdown. Host Michael Hagerty and I covered a lot of ground in a
short period as we discussed, among other things, the joys of binging on the Rocky and Fast and Furious franchises; watching some of the Westerns I’ve
been recommending on the Cowboys &Indians Magazine website; setting up your own compare-and-contrast double
bills (like Rear Window and Number 37); using social media for
virtual group viewings of everything from Airplane!
to Citizen Kane; and tracking down
obscure TV series — like Raines, the
short-lived, intriguingly quirky cop show starring Jeff Goldblum (pictured
above) — on Amazon Prime and NBC.com.
And yes, we
did mention, briefly, Contagion and Outbreak — and recalled a scene from the
latter film that was spooky even before the COVID-19 outbreak. Here's the audio.
Talking with Roger Corman about Edgar Allan Poe, Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, taking "a nice trip," and missing the chance to direct Orson Welles. (Of course, I look so huge here, he must have thought his dream finally came true.) The last time I had so much fun, I was interviewing Corman at the Bahamas International Film Festival for Variety.
When I was asked by my Variety editor
to contribute a blurb about one of the best films I saw at SXSW 2019, I had
this to say about Tread:
“Paul
Solet’s remarkably absorbing and suspenseful documentary plays like the flip
side of some 1970s rural revenge movie — think Jonathan Kaplan’s White Line Fever, or Jonathan Demme’s Fighting Mad — in which a besieged
protagonist turns the tools of his trade into weaponry while battling
oppressors. But Marvin Heemeyer, the vindictive welder at the heart of this
true-life drama, gradually comes into focus as a delusional sociopath, not a
plucky underdog, as he uses a steel-and-concrete-armored bulldozer to cause
damage and settle scores in a Colorado mountain town during a 2004 rampage.”
It will be my privilege to introduce the Houston premire of Tread at 7:15 pm Tuesday, Feb. 25, at the Alamo Drafthouse LaCenterra. But wait, there’s more: After the film, director Paul Solet will join us via Skype for a Q&A. Check out my full Variety review, check out the trailer -- and then
check out the movie.
“No matter
how fast you run,” chrome-domed Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) says at one point
in this super-amped trailer for F9, “no one outruns their past.” Maybe so. But
really, these guys don’t even appear to be trying very hard, right?
Not that I’m
complaining, you understand. I’ve seen all the other flicks in the Fast and
Furious franchise. So I’m sure I’ll be in line when the latest one opens May
22.
It will be my pleasure and
privilege to conduct a Q&A with the legendary Roger Corman on Friday, Jan. 3, following the 7 pm screening of his classic Masque of the Red Death at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. And I’m
even happier to report this will occur just one night after the Houston Film
Critics Society — of which I am a founding member — honors Corman with a special
lifetime achievement tribute during HFCA’s annual awards show at MFAH.
You can purchase tickets for
both the awards show and the Masque of
the Red Death screening at the MFAH website. Or you can opt not to attend
either event, and spend the rest of your life tortured by gnawing regret. The
choice is yours.
For the benefit of those who
tuned in late…
(Cue the cut-and-pastings
from the mini-bio I have prepared for my film studies students.)
Roger Corman has earned millions and entertained millions more throughout his decades-long
career as a director, producer and/or distributor of over 300 highly successful
small-budget, high-concept films, and continues to regale audiences with a
steady output of similar fare for theatrical, home video, streaming and cable
platforms. Indeed, just three weeks ago, the remarkably spry 93-year-old legend
presented his latest effort as an executive producer, the sci-fi
action-thriller Abduction, at the
Bahamas International Film Festival — where, not incidentally, he and his wife, producer
Julie Corman, conducted mentoring sessions with budding screenwriters.
The titles of many of Corman's 1950s films -- The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955),
It Conquered the World (1956),
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957),
War of the Satellites (1958) and A Bucket of Blood (1959) --
indicate why he earned early on the nickname “King of the Drive-in.” (In 1960,
he produced and directed the cult classic Little Shop of Horrors, which reportedly was shot in two days
and one night on a leftover set).
During the 1960s, however, he began to attract serious
critical attention, domestically as well as internationally, as the auteur of several stylishly gothic
horror films based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), and, of
course, The Masque of the Red Death (1964),
featuring such established actors as Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Boris
Karloff, Ray Milland, and Peter Lorre. (If you are of a certain age, these
films are more likely than all the English classes in the world to have sparked
any interest you’ve ever had in Poe’s literary output.) But Corman is equally
proud of The Intruder (1962), his
socially conscious indie drama about a charismatic demagogue (brilliantly
played by a young William Shatner) who stokes racial tensions in a small
Southern town. The movie was boldly progressive for its time, and remains, in
the words of critic-historian Wheeler Winston Dixon, “one of the most brutal, honest, and unflinching
examinations of American racism in cinema history.”
In 1970, Corman formed New World Pictures, an
independent mini-major that produced the work of such up-and-comers as John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante,
Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, and Peter Bogdanovich. New World's first
film, The Student Nurses (1970),
was shot in three weeks for $150,000 and grossed more than $1 million. Other
early New World releases included horror, biker, and women-in-prison films. The
profits from these low-budget features allowed Corman to act as the American
distributor for a number of prestigious foreign films. In a 10-year period, New
World released three Academy Award winners in the Foreign Language Film
category: Federico Fellini's Amarcord
(1974), Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu
Uzala (1975) andVolker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum (1979).
It should be noted that when Corman told Ingmar Bergman that he had attempted
to expand the potential audience for the latter’s 1972 masterwork Cries and Whispers by releasing it
in some drive-ins, Bergman approved.
Corman’s influence on American cinema has been incalculably
enormous, both as a filmmaker — his Poe films continue to inspire many
directors of gothic horror movies — and as a nurturer of up-and-coming, destined-for-prominence
actors, screenwriters and directors. (In addition to those previously
mentioned, Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Fonda, Sylvester
Stallone, Pam Grier, Bruce Dern, Gale Ann Hurd, Ron Howard and Robert Towne are
among the luminaries he gave significant early-career boosts.) In 2009, the
Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors voted to give Corman an honorary Oscar “for his unparalleled ability to nurture aspiring filmmakers by providing
an environment that no film school could match.”
In short: Roger Corman has made an immeasurable impact
on American movies — on movies, period — as a maverick and a mentor. And I
would venture to say the secret of his success has been his savvy as an
entertainer. He has always known that audiences will respond to a wide variety
of films — everything from low-budget horror flicks to socially conscious
dramas to slam-bang B-movies to challenging art-house fare — if they have access
to, and are encouraged to sample, the full scope of that variety. To paraphrase
Walt Whitman, Roger Corman understands and appreciates that cinema is large —
it contains multitudes.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is the leader of the pack — but Noah
Baumbach’s Marriage Story is not too
far behind as they head toward the homestretch .
That’s the takeaway for anyone handicapping the 13th
annual awards of the Houston Film Critic Society. Nominations for the
organization’s accolades were announced late Sunday evening, with winners to be
revealed during a Jan. 2 extravaganza at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Tarantino’s
audaciously entertaining and wish-fulfilling comedy-drama picked up a total of
seven nominations — including one in the HFCS’s Best Movie Poster Art Category
— while Baumbach’s intimate view of marital discord scored six nods. Both films
have been nominated for Best Picture, along with 1917, The Farewell, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Knives Out, Parasite, and Uncut Gems.
“We’re
a passionate, adventurous group,” says HFCS president Doug Harris. “This list
of nominees represents the thousands of screening hours our members have
devoted to uncovering the year’s most distinctive films so that we can bring
the best of cinema from around the world to the audiences we serve.”
Johansson is
also up for Best Supporting Actress for Jojo
Rabbit, along with Kathy Bates, Richard Jewell;
Laura Dern, Marriage Story; Florence
Pugh, Little Women; Margot Robbie, Bombshell; and Zhao Shuzhen, The Farewell.
Best
Actor nominees include Leonardo DiCaprio for Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Adam Driver for Marriage Story, Eddie Murphy for Dolemite is My Name, Joaquin Phoenix for
Joker, and Adam Sandler for Uncut Gems.
Earlier
this month, the HFCS announced its nominees for the Texas Independent Film
Awards which honor films made in Texas: Bull,
Building the American Dream, Nothing Stays the Same: The Story of the Saxon
Pub, Seadrift and Sleeping in Plastic.
Winners
in 18 categories will be presented at the Jan. 2 event. But wait, there’s
more: Legendary producer, director and talent nurturer Roger Corman will be on
hand to receive a lifetime achievement
award. (The following evening, Jan 3, Corman will return to MFAH for a screening of his 1964 classic The Masque of the Death, and a post-screening Q&A conducted by... by... well, actually, by me.) And Ellyn Needham, wife of the late movie stunts pioneer Hal Needham, will
present the HFCS’s inaugural award for Best Stunt Coordination Team.
Tickets
for the 13th annual HFCS Awards can be purchased on the MFAH website.
Ticketholders will be invited to attend, at no additional charge, an after party
across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston at the Ultimate Ransom
Room at the Hotel ZaZa Houston Museum District.
The
Houston Film Critics Society’s 13th Annual Movie Awards are
underwritten in part by Leonard Courtright and the Keystone Family of Companies,
with additional support provided by Balcones Distilling.
2019
Houston Film Critics Society Nominations
Best
Picture
1917; The Farewell; The Irishman; Jojo Rabbit; Joker; Knives Out;
Marriage Story; Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood; Parasite; Uncut Gems
Best
Director
Bong
Joon Ho, Parasite; Sam Mendes, 1917; Martin Scorsese, The Irishman; Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood; Lulu
Wang, The Farewell
Best
Actor
Leonardo
DiCaprio, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood;
Adam Driver, Marriage Story; Eddie
Murphy, Dolemite is My Name; Joaquin
Phoenix, Joker; Adam Sandler, Uncut Gems
Willem
Dafoe, The Lighthouse; Anthony
Hopkins, The Two Popes; Al Pacino, The Irishman; Joe Pesci, The Irishman; Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
Best
Supporting Actress
Kathy Bates, Richard Jewell;
Laura Dern, Marriage Story; Scarlett
Johansson, Jojo Rabbit; Florence
Pugh, Little Women; Margot Robbie, Bombshell; Zhao Shuzhen, The Farewell
Best
Screenplay
Knives Out; Marriage
Story; Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood; Parasite; The Farewell
Best
Cinematography
1917; The Irishman;
The Joker; Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood; Parasite
Best
Animated Feature
Frozen II; How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World; I Lost My
Body; Missing Link; Toy Story 4
Best
Original Score
1917; Joker; Little
Women; Marriage Story; Us
Best
Original Song
Glasgow,
Wild Rose; Home to You, The Aeronauts; I Punched Keanu Reeves, Always Be My Maybe; (I’m Gonna) Love Me
Again, Rocketman; Into the Unknown, Frozen II; Stand Up, Harriet
Best
Foreign Language Film
Atlantics; Corpus Christi; Les Miserables; Monos; Pain
and Glory; Parasite
Best
Documentary Feature
American Factory; Apollo 11; Biggest Little Farm; For
Sama; Hail Satan; They Shall Not Grow Old
Texas
Independent Film Award
Bull; Building the American Dream;
Nothing Stays the Same: The Story of the Saxon Bar; Seadrift; Sleeping in
Plastic
Visual
Effects
1917; Ad Astra; Avengers: Endgame
Best Stunt Coordination Team
Crawl; Ford v Ferrari; Furie; John
Wick: Chapter 3 Parabellum; Shadow
Best
Movie Poster Art
Birds of Passage; John Wick: Chapter 3 Parabellum; Once Upon a
Time… in Hollywood; Parasite; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; The Last Black Man in
San Francisco.
I have not
yet seen the new Black Christmas — curiously enough, it was not programmed for
the Bahamas Film Festival, which I am currently attending — but I can only
hope, for the sake of those who do see it, that it is better than the version I
reviewed for Variety before reporting on that unpleasant task back on Christmas Day 2006.
As
a tribute to Robert Evans, who passed away Saturday at age 89, I offer this
2002 interview, which I wrote prior to the theatrical of The Kid Stays in the Picture, the documentary film adapted from his
best-selling autobiography.
“OK,” says I, lapsing into my best approximation of a Hollywood
hard-sell tone, “there are these teen-agers at this posh British boarding
school, and they're feeling rebellious in regard to their oppressive teachers
and their bullying classmates, and so they fantasize about getting these
automatic weapons and blowing people away on graduation day, only maybe they're
not fantasizing because we've blurred the line between fantasy and reality, you
know what I mean?”
Robert Evans smiles, his eyes fairly twinkling behind his
trademark tinted, oversized glasses as he relaxes in his condo at the 2002
Sundance Film Festival. He knows exactly what I mean, because the movie I'm
pretending to pitch, If…, was one of
many outstanding films released by Paramount Pictures during his storied tenure
as head of production in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
In its time, this particular movie — a remarkably lyrical yet
darkly troubling fantasia by the late, great Lindsay Anderson — was hailed as a
visionary masterwork, and earned top honors at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.
Better still, from Evans’ point of few, it earned a tidy sum for Paramount.
But what would happen if I would pitch If… today?
“You'd be stopped before you’d finish the sentence,” Evans says in
his raspy, rumbling baritone. “And the meeting would be over. Immediately.
“And you never get another meeting. At Paramount or anywhere else.”
.
Which should tell you all you need to know about the difference
between the take-no-chances timidity of today’s corporate-micromanaged
moviemaking by committee, and the go-for-broke venturesomeness that fueled the
filmmaking machinery — and even infused
Hollywood studio decision-makers — during Evans’ heyday three decades ago.
“But If… isn't the only
one,” Evans says. “How about Harold and
Maude, eh? An 18-year-old boy falls in love with an 80-year-old woman. I
actually had to keep that a secret from (Charles Bludhorn, head of Gulf +
Western, then owner of Paramount). I just told him it was a love story.
“And then there was Medium
Cool,” Haskell Wexler’s audacious semi-documentary drama about political
protests and anti-war activism at the 1968 Democratic convention. Evans may
have been a close buddy of Presidential advisor Henry Kissinger, but he didn’t
let friendship — or the angry response of board members at Gulf + Western — get
in the way of his dropping the hot-potato picture into theaters and drive-ins
everywhere.
“I even tried to bring Henry Miller to the screen, in 1970. You
ever see Tropic of Cancer, with Rip
Torn? You did? Well, then you're the only one at this festival who ever had, I’ll
bet. It was a half-assed film, I admit. But it was exciting to try it.”
Evans described many highlights of '70s moviemaking in general,
and his Paramount output in particular, in The
Kid Stays in the Picture, his best-selling 1994 autobiography that has been
turned into a uniquely candid and captivating documentary film.
Of course, Evans also wrote about the many women he has wooed, wed
or otherwise encountered, and catalogued several misadventures involving
chemically-enhanced activity, and that helped to broaden the appeal of his book
beyond movie buffs and film historians. (The audio version of the book, read by
Evans himself, became a cult item and popular Christmas gift among Hollywood
insiders and up-and-comers.)
But his first-hand accounts of green-lighting productions during
his Paramount regime —Rosemary's Baby,
Chinatown, The Conversation, Serpico,
Harold and Maude and the first two Godfather epics, among others — are what
really make the book required reading for anyone who's serious about cinema as
art and entertainment. More important, those stories, and those experiences,
are what continue to make the 72-year-old Evans such an influential figure and
sought-after adviser in the eyes of much-younger moviemakers in the New
Hollywood of the 21st century.
“You go over to Bob's house in Beverly Hills any evening,” says
Nannette Burstein, co-director of Kid
Stays in the Picture, “and you're likely to find people like Wes Anderson
or David O. Russell there, asking questions or just hanging out. Because he
made a lot of the movies that we watched while we were growing up, that made us
want to become filmmakers.”
Co-director Brett Morgan is even more hyperbolic: “Bob Evans is
one of the most fascinating men who ever lived in the 20th century.
Without a question. And the more time I’ve spent with him, the more confidant I
am to make that statement.”
Robert Evans came to Paramount in 1966 best known as a
semi-successful businessman — “I was into women's pants,” he says, jokingly
referring to his family’s fashion business — and failed actor. (The title of
the book and movie come from producer Darryl Zanuck’s angry response when Evans’
director and co-stars tried to get him booted from a key role in the 1957 film
version of The Sun Also Rises.) At
the time, little was expected of him because Paramount, then a minor,
money-hemorrhaging property of Gulf + Western, was dead last among Hollywood
studios. He was dealt a free hand. And with extraordinary frequency, he came up
aces.
“Bob was there,” says Morgan, “during a period between the studio
system and the corporate conglomerates. It was like the Wild West.”
“It wasn't a multi-billion-dollar business at that time,” says
Burstein. “When Robert came into Paramount, is was like, ‘OK, this company is
about to go into the graveyard — let’s make some movies, and try not to lose
too much on our stock value.’ The thing
is, Robert turned it around, and they ended becoming fiscally sound. And a
result — and this happened at a lot of other studios as well — the movie
business became very important, very profitable. So it became very corporately
run.”
Evans eventually stepped down as Paramount chief to work as an
independent producer. But he fell out of favor in Hollywood during the 1980s
after his arrest for cocaine possession — with typical shrewdness, he avoided
jail time by producing a prime-time TV anti-drug extravaganza — and his
innocent-bystander involvement with a highly-publicized murder. (He has nothing
to with the killing of Roy Radin, a potential investor in The Cotton Club, but he was linked to the crime by newspapers, and
endured guilt-by-association consequences.) He began to make a comeback in the
1990s, but was sidelined by a 1998 stroke.
“My right side was totally paralyzed,” Evans says. “But you know
what? Now I can play tennis. The doctors thought I’d never be able to walk again
without a cane. But I can.”
And so he’s back in the game, planning new films to produce,
working on another book – and, yes, he frankly admits, basking in the adulation
he’s receiving for the film based on his autobiography.
Evans received a standing ovation after the Sundance premiere of The Kid Stays the Picture. During a
post-screening Q&A session, when someone asked if there’s anything he would
change about his life, he replied: “The second half.” But, then again, maybe
not. Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose The
Great Gatsby he brought to the screen during his Paramount era, Evans
believes there really are second acts in American lives.
“We're in a world of three-act plays now, that's the difference,”
Evans says. “You know, at one point, I wanted Warren Beatty to star in The Great Gatsby, and he said, ‘No, I’ll
direct it — and you'll play Jay Gatsby.’ Maybe he was right.
