Half-Assed Movie Reviews

December 13, 2008:  Road House

Readers who are new to Half-Assed Movie Reviews might wonder why the hell I would bother with a stupid 20-year-old movie that would be better left in the garbage pile of late-1980s cinema.  Readers who are familiar with my reviews will likely not be surprised.

Road House (1989) was released during the core of the career-high period for Patrick Swayze which spanned from his meteoric rise with Dirty Dancing (1987) through to the second-highest grossing film of 1990, Ghost.  He’d been around for years beforehand (notably as part of the crew of young up-and-comers in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders in 1983), and he’s still around, though he hasn’t worked much in recent years and is unfortunately now in poor health.  But he was, as it were, the “king of the world” for a few years back in the day.

Road House is the story of Dalton (Swayze), a legendary bouncer who is lured from his lucrative gig at a bar/nightclub somewhere in Middle of Nowhere, USA, to become the new head of security at another bar somewhere in the middle of nowhere.  He makes a splash early on, treats his coworkers with respect and starts to turn the place around and make it into a place where people want to go on a Saturday night.  We learn that Dalton the legendary bouncer (actually he calls himself a “cooler”, the guy who cools things down with sharp violence when the bouncers can’t keep things under control in a civilized way) is actually a protege of the totally bad-ass and even more legendary bouncer Garrett (Sam Elliott), who helps Dalton to work through his demons and helps out when he’s outnumbered.

But there’s a major problem with Road House.  It is only 1/3 of an awesome movie.  Everything I just described is executed beautifully, it’s energetic and crackling and takes advantage of Swayze’s talents and those of the supporting cast, it fits into the 1980s aesthetic, and we’re invested in what happens.  I’m talking about most of the first act of the movie, and other bits sprinkled throughout.

But 1/3 of a story does not a feature film make.

So, we get another 1/6 of the movie spent on a dull and completely unbelievable romantic side story with the ever-wooden Kelly Lynch.  And 1/2 of the movie is concerned with the main source of conflict, a cartoonish local gangster who is extorting money from pretty much every business in town and cutting off their supplies or torching their places of business when they don’t cooperate.  This is all just dumb and, aside from a few funny scenes, unwatchable.  It also results in Dalton’s apparent complete abandonment of his principles as soon as the going gets rough, and they’re back to destroying all the furniture and glassware in the bar by fighting every night instead of doing something more effective about defeating this local thug.  Of course, we need conflict in the movie, but this is totally not the way to do it.

So I found myself wanting to re-watch Road House, only to find myself disappointed after half an hour and wondering what ever made me think this was a good idea.  But here lies one of the keys to watching movies in the modern-day home setting.  You don’t need to watch the whole movie.  Ever.  I can pick and choose the parts I want, skip over parts I hate, and re-watch the scenes I love.  So for anyone who recalls Road House being a waste of time, you’re probably right overall, but I encourage you instead to revisit just 1/3 of the movie, and be happier that you’re seeing an incomplete story than if you had to sit through the whole thing.

December 11, 2008:  Black Christmas

The late Canadian director Bob Clark made his name in the 1970s, perhaps most famously with the low-budget and influential horror classic Black Christmas (1974).  He went on to direct the popular and much-reviled though in my opinion underrated Porky’s in 1982, and the 1983 cult favourite A Christmas Story (the movie about the kid who wants a BB gun for Christmas).  He never really hit it big again after that, largely directing for television in his later years, and was unfortunately killed in a car crash a couple of years ago.

Of course I’ve been familiar with Porky’s for several years, finding the titillating TV commercials for the film appealing even as a young boy.  I had heard a lot about A Christmas Story for years but as of this point I had never seen it and resolved to remedy that with my family this Christmas season.  And I had never bothered to watch Black Christmas, despite my interest in the roots of horror films and how they have all borrowed techniques from one another through the decades.  It was time to finally to see what this one is all about.

Black Christmas occurs at a sorority house one evening around Christmas.  The young ladies are being terrorized by a strange person repeatedly phoning them and threatening them.  One by one, they start to disappear, and the police try to help but are baffled when they can’t figure out how the caller is involved.  Eventually we’re left with just one young woman being chased through the house as the cops figure out what’s actually been going on through the evening.  Lots of people are killed, but one escapes and survives.  Sound familiar?

Well, it wasn’t quite so familiar back in the day.  This film is acknowledged as being part of the inspiration for Halloween and other films following a similar pattern.  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was also released in 1974 and ends up following a similar pattern of members of the group disappearing one by one until just one young woman remains and is rescued.  We’re witnessing the birth of the modern horror film.

I suppose in a certain way it’s perverse that I was playing a video game, namely one of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, while watching this movie.  They say that violence in movies and video games turns people violent these days.  Maybe two wrongs make a right?  At the very least, it may contribute to a lack of attention span, as might be observed in this review up to this point.

Worth noting is the cast of this film.  There’s a small but notable very early role for Margot Kidder, who later became well-known on the big screen as Lois Lane in the Superman movies.  Andrea Martin, later of the SCTV television spinoff from the Second City sketch comedy troupe, cut her teeth on 1970s grungy Canadian B-movies, having appeared the previous year with Eugene Levy in Cannibal Girls.  And Olivia Hussey is the lone girl at the end.  It seems to be that I’ve always liked her, yet I can’t remember her from anything other than the 1968 Franco Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet, but she brought such an innocent, fresh-faced energy to that role, I guess it left an impression.  It was great to see her again here in Black Christmas.

Speaking of Cannibal Girls, another thing it shares in common with Black Christmas is that they were both “tax credit” Canadian movies of the 1970s.  As the Canadian government tried to bring more filmmaking north of the border, generous tax credits were offered, which resulted in a number of movies, such as these, which because of this financial structure didn’t need nearly as much box office success in order to make money.  For any of them that did hit it big, it was just a big bonus on a minimal investment.

Black Christmas is well worth a look for anyone who is interested in the roots of modern horror films.  It’s a good example from the genre, but it’s still solidly OF the genre, so if that doesn’t do it for you, it might be best to stay away.

November 23, 2008:  A Woman Under the Influence

I’ve been working my way through a borrowed John Cassavetes DVD box set for a distressingly long time now, and will probably give up before I get to the end.  There are just so many movies to watch, it makes an intense focus on one director seem too indulgent.  These are good movies, but they require a particular mood.

John Cassavetes was an American actor/director who made his living playing macho men on TV and in big Hollywood productions (The Dirty Dozen), which gave him the flexibility to write and direct his own films with small budgets and a stable of actors he regularly used.  These films cut right to the heart of human nature and human relationships.  I have only seen a handful of them, and while sometimes difficult to watch, they are most definitely rewarding.

A Woman Under the Influence stars Peter Falk (TV’s Columbo, though perhaps better known to the current generation as the visiting grandfather reading aloud in The Princess Bride) and Gena Rowlands (Cassavetes’ wife and frequent muse) as a husband and wife who are coming apart at the seams.  That’s not to say that they are splitting up, but rather that each of them is falling apart individually, and they can’t figure out how to help each other the way they need to be helped.  Falk is a gruff utilities worker who has a macho image to uphold and doesn’t know how to react reasonably when his wife starts to act a bit loopy.  Rowlands is a loving wife and mother who is beginning to act out in strange ways as an uprising against the rigid way in which society expects her to live, a way of life which is enforced by her husband.

Eventually, she is committed to an asylum for a brief period, even though she is arguably the only sane one of the lot, and once she is out, nobody quite knows how to handle her.

Cassavetes’ films tend to have very low production values, with uneven lighting and handheld camera work, but these techniques permit real intimacy with the actors and let them inhabit the characters and the places.  I wasn’t thinking about Columbo (Peter Falk’s iconic TV role) as I watched this.  I was thinking about how a husband and wife can know each other so well but be unable to show each other the tenderness they deserve.  The world sure doesn’t make it easy to live your life the way you want to.

November 22, 2008:  The Godfather: Part II

Ah, where to even begin?  I could probably spend all day writing about the Godfather films, and volumes have already been written.  Doesn’t anyone who actually cares about this story already know everything they want to know, while anyone else really isn’t into it at all?  What would be the purpose of this review?

The Godfather films, from 1972, 1974 and 1990, are perhaps the most critically-lauded film series of all time.  The first two both won Best Picture Oscars, a feat which was unprecedented, is unlikely to ever be repeated, and even more amazingly was well-deserved.  Iconic images and lines and scenes and gestures from the films have become part of a popular culture spanning generations, and the films have great mass appeal, while at the same time being complex and challenging and rewarding to analysts and critics.  Based initially on a best-selling 1969 novel from Mario Puzo, who also worked with director Francis Ford Coppola on adapting the novel for the screen, the later films have fleshed out the original story to mythic proportions.

The core of the story centres around the Corleone Family, and initially the patriarch “Don” Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), a Sicilian who came to America as a child, tried to make an honest living, and realized that the corruption among officialdom made honest living a losing proposition for the ordinary man.  He turned slowly to a life involving crime and corruption, rationalized by the fact that the corruption would exist regardless of what he did and that it and would either work against him or could be made to work for him.  His dream was for his children to be able to grow up as power players in the legitimate business and political world of America, to be the ones wielding the power.  Alas, mafia wars claimed either the bodies or the souls of his adult children as he watched his dream slipping away, ever hoping that the next generation of the family might be the one to really make it in legitimate America.

By the time of the second film, Vito has passed away and the family business is being run by Michael (Al Pacino), the one child out of four who was the family’s greatest prospect for legitimate success.  But Michael has transformed from a fresh-faced young student to a cold and remorseless mafia “businessman”, always claiming to try and make the business legitimate and claiming that his family is the most important thing to him, but struggling against his instinctive sense that anyone who crosses him must be eliminated in order to secure his position.  In this second film, Michael’s ruthlessness cuts a little too close to the family itself, and he watches his world fall apart around him because of what he’s done, even as he wonders what more he could possibly have done to protect it.  Michael understands the paradox facing him, but can’t accept that there’s no solution which fits into the rules by which he lives.  Intercut within the present-day (late1 1950s) story is the tale of young Vito Corleone and the reason for his move to America, and his subsequent rise to power in his New York neighbourhood.  The parallels between Vito (portrayed as a young man by Robert De Niro in an Oscar-winning supporting performance) and Michael, reluctant cornerstones of their families, forced to bear the stresses of protecting a delicate balance at all times without ever showing weakness, are clearly drawn.  This film runs 3 hours and 20 minutes, and every minute of it needs to be there.

My exposure to the Godfather films has gone in waves over the years.  I first saw the original films when I was in high school, followed shortly by the third film which was in theatres around that time.  Those single viewings were hardly enough to come to appreciate the depth of these works.  I revisited them occasionally until the DVDs were released and I immediately bought them, and in the years since I have occasionally gone on Godfather binges, usually watching pieces of the films adding up to complete viewings over the space of days or weeks.  Most recently, I watched The Godfather: Part II in several pieces, jumping around and rewatching scenes, skipping over others but ultimately returning to them, and eventually reaching a point where I could claim that I had watched the whole movie again.  It’s not uncommon for me to watch one of the storylines (present-day or the chronicles of the young Vito) and not the other.  The subtitles available on the DVDs are very useful for catching bits of dialogue and throwaway lines, and keeping track of the multitude of characters who pop in and out of the stories and in several cases appear in all three films.

A simple review of these movies can’t do them justice.  They are essential viewing for any film enthusiast, and there’s far more depth than would be found in just a simple gangster movie, if that’s what might be keeping the reluctant viewer away.  But it’s a serious commitment to the story with three films of around three hours each.  The Godfather: Part III receives mixed reviews and that is a story for another time, but it is a rewarding and consistent continuation of the story for those who are connected to the characters and want to see where they went.

November 21, 2008: Wall Street

Wall Street (1987) is a movie I’ve seen many times over the years, often in pieces, since it’s an example of a movie I can turn on to watch a certain scene, and find myself engrossed until the end.  On this particular occasion I watched the film in several installments over the space of a week.  The noted viewing dates in my reviews always refer to the date on which I finished watching a movie.

I seem to have always had a love-hate relationship with Oliver Stone’s films, as they have been an integral part of the backdrop of my viewing for years.  It was a long time before I came to appreciate Best Picture and Best Director Oscar winner Platoon (1986), though I’ve come around to it in recent years.  I don’t particularly seek out his other Best Director Oscar-winner, Born on the Fourth of July, but it’s worth revisiting once every decade or so.  I saw JFK on a first date, Natural Born Killers was my introduction to my favourite theatre in Toronto, and Wall Street struck a chord with me from the first time I saw it in the theatre way back when it was first released and I knew nothing about what was going on.  However, I find The Doors to be basically unwatchable, Any Given Sunday was a bit too footballish for my tastes despite some promise, and my second viewing of U-Turn several years after its release revealed it to be far more blatantly Stone-indulgent than I had recalled.

This movie centres (or does it?) around Charlie Sheen playing Bud Fox, a young stock broker in the mid-1980s, before the unraveling and the big crash, struggling to break free of the nickel-and-dime clients he’s forced to work with, and wanting to “bag the elephant” – to get on the brokerage team of a seriously rich player in the mergers and acquisitions which were so popular at the time.  Gordon Gekko (an Oscar-winning role for Michael Douglas) is just such an elephant, and Bud’s persistence, passing him through and far beyond a pivotal and morally-questionable turning point, gets him on the team and propels him into the life he’d always imagined for himself.  But greed has a habit of making people take things too far, and it’s even harder when family members are directly affected.  Bud is nominally the lead character in this story, but Gordon Gekko proves to be the core force driving it all, and Bud is starkly painted as not being quite the power player he imagines himself to be.

Oliver Stone’s father was an actual New York Stock Exchange trader on the floor of the exchange, so Stone had been exposed to this environment for many years and this film was something of a tribute to his father, who passed away the year before it was released.

John C. McGinley, perhaps better known to the current generation as one of “the Bobs” in the 1999 film Office Space, is a regular player in Oliver Stone’s films, having portrayed one of the soldiers in Platoon in addition to appearing in later films in much smaller roles.  In Wall Street, he plays a nerdy and enthusiastic co-worker of Bud’s.  I’ve always felt that he was better cast in this role than in Platoon, and I think he adds playful energy to the stockbroker’s office scenes in this film.

The timing of the release of Wall Street was extraordinarily convenient.  The setting of the film is noted as being 1985, two years before the late-1987 release.  This was because of the desire to set it before the insider trading scandals which began to surface in 1985 and 1986.  The release date of the film also fell mere months after the stock market crash of October 1987, perhaps leading to greater interest in the film, since the stock market focus at that point made it timely in a way that would have been impossible to plan.

I really enjoy this film, but it’s not perhaps the most accessible storyline, theme or presentation.  Absent are a lot of Oliver Stone’s stylistic trademarks, which will appeal to some (including me).  An iconic performance from Michael Douglas, and a tight script with lots of high finance and intrigue reveling in the excesses of the 1980s, make this a winner for me.