It’s been
a full year since the
last time I did a movie column, but I’m trying my best to get off my butt and
post more frequently, so here we go.
As I
mentioned in my Jonathan
Kaplan post, I did a ‘70s movie class over the summer. For many months
before, I pretty much exclusively watched movies from that glorious decade.
After the class ended at the end of July, I decided to turn my focus to the
‘80s and ‘90s. Have I regretted it? Not at all. It’s been fun reconnecting with
the period I spent frequently in video stores, both working in and as a
customer.
But mostly
I tried to get to movies I had not seen before. Another aspect of the class was
rewatching many movies I had seen several or many times before. Bring on the
“new” movies!
Have
You Forgotten: One
movie that I thought I had seen before was Brown’s Requiem
(1998), adapted quite well from James Ellroy’s 1981 book by screenwriter and
first-time director Jason Freeland. Michael Rooker is terrific as Fritz Brown,
an alcoholic former cop who has found a comfortable living repossessing cars
but also runs a half-assed private detective agency. He comes alive at the
bequest of one “Fat Dog” Baker (Will Sasso, who contributes one of many
brilliant performances int the movie) to watch over his sister, Jane (Selma
Blair, who also in 1998 before her Cruel Intentions breakthrough
in 1999 played Girl Mike Hits on #1 in Can’t Hardly Wait). Such a
great cast: Kevin Corrigan, Brion James (who died in 1999), Brad Dourif, Barry
Newman, Christopher Meloni, Harold Gould, Jennifer Coolidge and more.
Brown’s
Requiem came out a
year after L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson’s massively
successful, award-winning, etc., etc. Ellroy adaptation. I’m sure I was
interested, but maybe I had a hard time tracking down Brown’s Requiem back then. It’s currently only
available on a DVD released in 2000. Fortunately, Freeland was able to record a
commentary with Rooker for the DVD. They talk about their disagreement over how
much of Ellroy’s exact wording and dialogue from the book to use. From their
discussion, it’s apparent that the veteran Rooker got his way often. Indeed,
one of the highlights of the movie is Rooker’s voice over, in which he fully
inhabits the losing, boozing, fighting spirit of Fritz Brown.
Interestingly,
Freeland, who won awards for Brown’s Requiem from the Fort Lauderdale
Film Festival and Portugal’s Festróia-Tróia International Film Festival,
apparently identified a little too much with Fritz Brown. In 1999, in an
interview with the Baltimore Sun, when he was in town to show Brown’s
Requiem at the Maryland Film Festival, Freeland said, "I was at this
point where finally I was getting a chance to direct a film, which was what I
wanted to do for so long in my life, since I was 18 years old. I kept holding
that out as what will make me happy. And I started to see that it wasn't the
case. …I wasn't enjoying it,” he said about the editing process. "I really
saw how much I identified with him." He stopped drinking while
finishing Brown's Requiem.
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Freeland
would make only one more movie, 2008’s downbeat Garden Party,
which is somewhat engaging (thanks in part to a confident, sexy performance by
Vinessa Shaw) but comes off kind of like
a CW update of Melrose Place in a sleazy, stoned, flip phone-era (so cheap you could just hand them
out to any homeless wannabe pop stars) LA setting and ends
unsatisfyingly. These days, Freeland, who got his start making informercials
for the Psychic Friends Network (yep, the one with Dionne Warwick), is CEO of California Psychics, a Los Angeles-based organization whose slogan is The Joy of
Certainty.
Let
There be Zane: Another
1998 movie I completely missed was I Woke Up Early the Day I Died.
There seems to be some foreign releases (legitimate?) of the movie on DVD along
with bootleg versions, but I was able to find it in good quality on the
Internet Archive. I had a lot of fun watching the movie, but I think I
appreciate most of all the audacity of making this wordless movie boasting an Ed
Wood script, starring post-Titanic Billy Zane (who also produced and
contributed “music design”) and featuring a range and level of celebrities and
actors not seen since the days of ‘70s disaster movies. I kept waiting for
George Kennedy to show up.
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Granted, in
the ‘90s, Ed was
Everywhere; however, just making this movie a reality seems impressive: a very
optimistic endeavor. Maybe it was just a foolish idea, but while the finished
project failed to connect with audiences and critics at the time, and seems to be utterly and unjustly forgotten,
it has a wild energy and creativity that is undeniable and worth holding on to in
these decidedly dark days.
Zane stars
at The Thief, who escapes from a mental institution dressed as a female nurse
and goes on a stealing, murdering binge before ultimately losing the money and
then desperately trying to regain it. Along the way he meets the likes of Tippi
Hedren, Ron Perlman, Maila Nurmi, John Ritter, Christina Ricci, Bud Cort,
Eartha Kitt, Dana Gould, Tara Reid, Karen Black, and many others. Sandra Bernhard
is fantastic in her role as stripper Sandy Sands. Only about a year out from the
end of USA’s Reel Wild Cinema, she’s a perfect fit for the role and
the movie. After coming off the stage topless, she smokes a joint, gives another
dancer stink eye, and then slaps another dancer’s bare ass. I snickered when I
read J. Hoberman’s Village Voice review of I Woke Up Early when
he describes Bernhard being “allowed to do a striptease.” Hoberman’s review was
at least mildly positive while the New York Times called it “sad and
misguided and boring.”
The
fabulous Ed Wood blog, Dead 2 Rights, dug
up all kinds of interesting information about the movie and interviewed director
Aris Iliopulos in 2014. Adding more context to Bernhard’s part in the movie, Iliopulos
says she insisted on heavy metal music playing while she danced, and filming for
the scene took place in the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.
“It was little bit too much,” he added. Ha! One of my other favorite parts in the
interview is the director’s memories of Karen Black, who he says, for her
closeup in the movie, was remembering a young man she met who was going to Vietnam
and wasn’t likely to come back home alive.
Chicago
native Zane, 32 when the movie came out, was incredibly fun as the demented Thief.
An interview with him in the (Arlington Heights, Ill.) Daily Herald in January 1998 claimed producers of the I Woke Up Early were thinking about shooting the movie in the Chicago area. While
promoting the movie at the Toronto International Film Festival during Christmas
time 1998, Zane got drunk on cheap champagne at a party for the movie and missed
his press conference and interviews the next day. The Toronto Star described it this way: “Great party, terrible movie.”
Also in August, I watched Zane in 1991’s Femme Fatale, which
I described in my notes as “another bad movie that was enjoyable to watch” –
lots of those actually this month (I’m looking at you, Death
Wish 3 [1985], Inferno [aka
Desert Heat,1999], Necromancer [1988],
Prime Target [1991,
more on that] and Blindside [1987]).
Colin Firth stars in the movie, and on the surface seems like an unlikely
choice in a slightly seedy thriller, but he does quite well despite the not always fantastic storyline. Zane
fits into a noir-tinged movie more (see Dead Calm, This
World, Then the Fireworks, etc.) and is cool and humorous often as Elijah. He
goes around shirtless mostly and says things like, “He’s from England, so keep
it down, right.” Meanwhile his real-life sister, Lisa Zane, is the object of mystery
and alleged possessor of multiple personalities in the movie who splits after
marrying Firth.
El Salvador native Andre R. Guttfreund directed Femme
Fatale and was not happy that Republic Pictures released
the movie straight to video as an erotic thriller in the United States (it
played theaters in England). There was nothing erotic about his movie, Guttfreund
said to the Seattle Times in June
1991, “It’s really an old-fashioned romance about unconditional love. It’s
Orpheus in search of Eurydice. Aren’t video renters going to feel ripped off
when they see it?”
More
Kaplan Connections:
After writing about Pamela Ludwig in Over the Edge, I was curious
to see her in something else I had not seen before, and that brought me to Rush
Week (1989). I was a dumbass and bought this movie twice on Blu-ray
after selling the first one on eBay without watching it. Ludwig plays a college
newspaper reporter who starts looking into a series of murders taking place
during, you know, rush week. She’s charming and confident, and she would have
made a great Nancy Drew. Ludwig helps make up for some of the movie’s dumber
aspects, mainly any scenes with the frat boys together. The Dickies perform in
costume for a monster-themed party and that by itself is almost worth buying it
twice.
Truck
Turner himself, Issac
Hayes, sent me in search of more Ike, and somehow I landed on the previously
mentioned Prime Target, my first David Heavener movie, but
certainly it will not be my last – though not any of recent vintage, to clarify
(see below). It all starts with him doing a country rap song in the opening and
then, as cop John Bloodstone, burning a kidnapper to death with a blow torch. I
mean, shit, c’mon, damn. Hayes, unfortunately, has a lame role and is forgettable.
Tony Curtis is hilarious as the gangster Bloodstone is transporting to jail, and
the movie also features Robert Reed, Andrew Robinson, Don Stroud, and Jenilee
Harrison, who also was in Curse III: Blood Sacrifice in 1991,
which I unfortunately also watched in 2025.
In
addition to starring in the movie and singing all the songs, Heavener wrote,
directed, and produced the movie. He’s still active, and in July 2024 in the Greenville
Daily Advocate (Ohio) announced a “red carpet premiere” for something called
The Last Evangelist, which airs on his own David Heavener TV, “End
Times Prophecy Channel of Truth.” The plot is described thusly: “The Last Evangelist
is a crime drama set in the near future where unregistered churches have been ruled illegal. Just like Saul on the road to Damascus, when Agent Rhodes’ spiritual
eyes are opened, he turns against the government system to challenge the Antichrist’s
tactics.” Uh-huh.
At the Movies: A great month in the theaters for
me, led by Weapons (2025), which was excellent and scary and funnier
than I expected. Amy Madigan is magnificently frightening in the movie, and in
fact, I dreamed about her several weeks later in costume, but instead of being
her face, it was my old high school assistant principal’s.
Also
terrific was She Rides Shotgun (2025), which was violent,
realistic, and seemed to capture the ‘20s lawlessness law exactly right. Ana
Sophia Heger is heartbreakingly great from the moment we meet her waiting in a
tree after school for her mom. John Carroll Lynch was awesome in Ballard on
Amazon Prime, one of my favorite shows of the summer, and is a very different,
and very disturbing, kind of cop in She Rides Shotgun.
Ethan
Cohen’ s second collaboration with wife Tricia Cooke, Honey Don’t
(2025), got many negative reviews, but it provided a very satisfying Friday
night at the theater for me. The quirky detective setup is frankly something
for which I’m nearly always in the mood, and Margaret Qualley is a badass in
it. I do agree with the Chicago Tribune, which calls Qualley “kind of a
latter-day lesbian Phillip Marlowe from Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye,”
that the movie could have used more badass: “more vibes and less plot.”
The
Naked Gun
(2025) made me smile and laugh frequently as I watched. I enjoyed it a lot. Loved
Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson together. Watching this and The Last
Showgirl (2024) made me realize I have underestimated Pamela Anderson.
Excellent in both very different roles.
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