In honor of Easter, here’s a boss track from the Patti Smith Group’s 1978 album “Easter.” This is Patti’s cover of the showstopping track from the classic 1967 Peter Watkins-directed rock and roll film “Privilege.”
I realize “Because the Night” is the best-known track and while I like that song, it’s a bit overplayed, especially due to that annoying 10,000 Maniacs cover from the early 1990s (the one with Natalie Merchant over-enunciating every syllable like a high school English teacher after one too many glasses of Chardonnay).
I hope I don’t offend anyone with deep religious beliefs with what I’m about to write. My intent is not to be glib or arch in any way. My point is that sometimes you can find a deeply spiritual message in what may seem like the unlikeliest of sources.
Lars Von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves” is an art-house film from 1996 that garnered some rave reviews and awards that year (including a Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, along with an Oscar nomination for lead actress Emily Watson). However, it’s also a film that polarized many. Like many of Von Trier’s films, “Waves” is a film that people either deeply love and deeply hate. I am firmly in the first category. The description below will contain several spoilers, but there’s no way to discuss why this film is important to me without discussing them…
“Waves” is the tale of a young Scottish woman named Bess (played by Watson) who has some deep psychological issues. She comes from a strict Calvinist religious community that frowns upon her marriage to a Norweigian oil rig worker named Jan (played by Stellan Skarsgard). Jan has to frequently spend time away from Bess because of his job, which causes her great distress. She prays for Jan to be returned home and the next day, Jan becomes paralyzed from an accident on the oil rig. He no longer can walk and can no longer function sexually. Jan urges Bess to seek out other men and tell him about it. Bess refuses because she loves him, but his condition deteriorates and he tells her that if she has sex with other men, his condition will improve. Bess believes these actions are the will of God and starts to do what Jan asks her to, even though she doesn’t want to. Her encounters make her the scorn of the village, but believing she is doing the right thing, continues to do what Jan asks her, leading to the ultimate sacrifice for her husband. A literal miracle then occurs … though, not necessarily the kind that happy endings are made of.
On the surface, “Waves” seems like a depressing, twisted, misogynistic, sexual melodrama with no redeeming value. And … some of that is not entirely inaccurate, especially when “Waves” is seen in conjunction with Von Trier’s other films (“Dancer in the Dark,” “Anti Christ”), which actually make “Waves” look like “Love Actually.”
But there is more to “Waves” than meets the eye, which becomes more apparent once you see the ending. In case you didn’t deduce what the movie is a metaphor for … “Waves” is the story of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for mankind, albeit told in a modern context. Except that the Christ in “Waves” is the human Christ of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” a real person who doesn’t know if he is strong enough to carry out God’s will, but does it anyway. The physical and mental tortures that Bess suffers parallel the crucifixion. One could potentially see “Waves” as a brutal Marquis de Sade-like satire on the story of Christ. However, I see the opposite.
I first watched “Breaking the Waves” on video on a Friday night, when I was very tired and only expected to watch a half hour before going to sleep. I not only raptly watched the entire 2 hour and 36 minute film that night, but was so shaken and moved by what I had seen, I couldn’t sleep for at least two hours after it was over.
There’s a lot of people who positively hate this film and I can understand why. As you can imagine, “Waves” is not a big hit among feminists. But it made me understand the Christ story in a way I never had before. It was also one of Martin Scorsese’s 10 favorite films of the 1990s.
On a side note, the soundtrack (featuring T. Rex, Elton John, Deep Purple, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople, Thin Lizzy, among others) is one of the best rock soundtracks ever assembled for a film.
One of the best (and sadly forgotten) indies from the mid-1990s is George Huang’s dark Hollywood satire “Swimming with Sharks.” “Sharks” is “The Player” filtered through David Mamet and contains one of Kevin Spacey’s finest performances as the Satanic studio executive Buddy Ackerman. The verbal brutality Spacey’s character inflicts on his underling, played by Frank Whaley, is alternately frightening and … darkly funny (if you’re in a particularly sick mood). Attached is the infamous scene where Whaley gives Spacey a packet of Equal instead of Sweet ‘n’ Low. Key dialogue: “You … have … no … brain. No judgement calls are necessary. What you think means nothing. What you feel means (heh-heh) nothing.”
Damn, this live version of “Once in a Lifetime” is so iconic of the first half of the 1980s. This played on MTV and USA’s “Night Flight” relentlessly for a 9-month period between 1984 and 1985. As much as I loved this, I got really, really sick of it at the time. But distance does make the heart grow fonder. And seeing it for the first time in several years makes me appreciate what a great job not only the Talking Heads did here, but what Jonathan Demme did with making the amazing concert film “Stop Making Sense” in 1984. Demme’s had some setbacks since his Oscar win for “The Silence of the Lambs,” but as “Rachel Getting Married” proved, don’t ever count Demme out. The man has made some great, great films.
I remember seeing this at least 4-5 times as a midnight movie at the Naro Theater in Norfolk, Virginia back in the 1980s. The theater was always packed and they always had to stop the movie at least 4-5 times due to multiple people dancing in front of the screen. Yes, there were THAT many people dancing in front of the screen that they literally had to stop the movie until people sat down … multiple times.
One of the best documentaries ever made … hell, one of the best movies I’ve EVER SEEN is the 2007 film “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.” The film chronicles a real-life battle between two men for the world “Donkey Kong” champion. Yes, that’s “Donkey Kong” the video game.
On the surface, the premise may seem silly, weird, geeky, trite, and more than a little precious. But damn, “The King of Kong” is so much deeper than that. I’m not kidding or being facetious when I say that “The King of Kong” is more exciting, suspenseful, and thrilling than almost any big-budget Hollywood blockbuster of the last several years. Much of this looks like a Christopher Guest mockumentary or a Robert Altman-directed eccentricity fest. But it’s totally real. And the fact that it’s a documentary only makes it more riveting. This could potentially be the best Erroll Morris film Erroll Morris never made.
If you’ve never seen this film, it’s a total must-see. I promise you it’s one of the most exhilarating and fun films you’ll ever watch.
“Pecker” is arguably John Waters’ last good film. I hate to say this, because I personally like Waters as a raconteur and essayist. Even for his movies that I didn’t particularly like (“Cecil B. Demented” and “A Dirty Shame”), the audio commentaries on the DVDs are a riot and are worth the price of the DVDs alone.
Having said that, “Pecker” is Waters’ very funny and appealing utopian vision of an unusually cool, but diverse underground … a mix of high-brow and low-brow, blue-collar and hipster, gay and straight, criminal and non-criminal, etc. I’ve never really liked Edward Furlong as an actor, but he’s really great as the title character, an “outsider” artist and photographer who sees beauty and art in (mostly blue collar) things many people dismiss or laugh at “ironically.” His navigation from obscurity to fame to fame on his terms may be unrealistic, but it is inspiring and very sweet.
Despite my sentiments about what a sweet film this is, there is full frontal nudity and a lot of rude jokes / language scattered throughout “Pecker” so if you’re prudish, it’s best to stay away. However, “Pecker” is a very fun movie and it gives one hope that someday, artistic and social barriers can come down and all the cool people can finally come together, hang out, and well, be cool with what each person decides makes them happy.
For better or worse, “Pecker” is the pop cultural artifact that introduced “teabagging” to a wide audience.
In 1986, director John McNaughton was hired by a Chicago-based video company to make a quickie violent exploitation film inspired by the true story of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. McNaughton returned with a violent film all right, only it wasn’t the “fun” Freddy Krueger-style slasher film the producers were expecting. The resulting film, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,” was a true look into the void and an attempt to delve realistically into the mind of a monster, without sensationalism or cheap emotion. It was immediately called one of the most disturbing and upsetting films ever made. The film was eventually released in 1990 unrated (since the ratings board refused to give it an R) and was a success with critics, who lauded the film’s realistic tone and fine acting.
McNaughton’s 1996 film “Normal Life” was an equally audacious attempt to drain the “criminal lovers on the run” genre (popularized by “Bonnie and Clyde”) of its sensationalism and tendency to portray its lead characters as romantic “beautiful losers.” While McNaughton doesn’t seem to hate his lead characters in “Normal Life,” he doesn’t see them as misguided heroes either.
Luke Perry and Ashley Judd give, arguably, their finest performances as a troubled married couple who turn to armed robbery to fund their version of the American Dream. Perry plays the decent, but painfully co-dependent cop with a romantic hero complex named Chris. Judd plays an emotionally disturbed and grossly immature woman named Pam. When Chris sees Pam for the first time in a bar, she has had a fight with her boyfriend and cuts her hand on a broken glass. He brings bandages over and asks her to dance. It goes downhill from there … Eventually, Chris and Pam marry, but Pam’s mental instability and immaturity put them in a deep financial hole. Chris eventually turns to crime to dig their way out and Pam, turned on by Chris’s recent path, eagerly joins in. The result is a coldly brilliant portrayal of two criminals on a downward spiral.
Perry and Judd are two actors I’ve never had much affection for, but their performances in “Normal Life” are mesmerizing. Judd brilliantly plays Pam’s emotional train-wreck of a character all too well. With his droopy mustache and passive nature, Perry positively nails the type of co-dependent person who falls in love with someone like Judd’s character and desperately tries to make the relationship work at any cost, despite the fact that the Judd character continually proves she don’t deserve it.
“Normal Life” was dumped by its distributor Fine Line into home video hell. I didn’t post the trailer, because frankly, it makes the film look like the cheesiest straight-to-video schlock that I’m sure the studio thought they had. But trust me, the film is so much better than that and it deserves to be seen without being prejudiced by the atrocious trailer that I found online. A true gem if there ever was one.
Easily one of the Top 5 best books I’ve read about American film history is Mark Harris’s terrific 2008 tome “Pictures at a Revolution.” “Pictures” focuses on the five films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1967 and through chronicling the genesis, production, and release of these films, Harris makes a strong argument that this was the tipping point between the Hollywood of old and the “new Hollywood” that emerged in the 1970s. If you enjoyed Peter Biskind’s seminal 1970s Hollywood chronicle “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” “Pictures” is a worthy prequel and, arguably, just as complex and readable as Biskind’s famous book.
However, please note that while Harris focuses extensively on the five Best Picture nominees of 1967 (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “Dr. Doolittle,” “The Graduate,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” and “In the Heat of the Night”), this isn’t the limit of the tale that “Pictures” tells. Harris paints vivid portraits of the creative forces behind these films (Mike Nichols, Warren Beatty, Arthur Penn, Stanley Kramer, Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Norman Jewison, Rex Harrison, Faye Dunaway, Francois Trauffaut, Buck Henry, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Anne Bancroft, and Joseph E. Levine among several others) as well as other films from the era that were also making a huge impact (“Jules and Jim,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “Blow Up,” “The Sound of Music,” “My Fair Lady,” “A Patch of Blue” among several others). While “Pictures” may not be as gossipy as Biskind’s classic, it serves as a wonderfully entertaining social history of how 1960s Hollywood reflected (and in many cases, resisted) the cultural changes that swept the nation during that tumultuous decade. If you have any interest at all in film or social/cultural history, Harris’s book is a must-read.
Favorite anecdote: Warren Beatty is showing “Bonnie and Clyde” to Warner Brothers studio head Jack Warner. Warner advised that if he has to get up to go to the bathroom, the picture will not work. Warner excused himself three times to use the restroom. At the end of the screening, Warner advised that the film was terrible because it was “a three-piss picture.” Beatty tried to flatter Warner by saying that “Bonnie and Clyde” was an homage to the gangster movies that made Warner Brothers a huge success in the 1930s. Warner’s reply: “What the f–k’s an ‘homage’?”
Whether you want to admit it or not, there’s a part in all of us that feels a certain pleasure when people who have risen to a higher level of success or notoriety than we have are taken down a peg … or twelve. This feeling is called “schadenfreude” and it’s the basis for for all of those clicks on TMZ.com and PerezHilton.com, all those times you pretend not to scan the headlines of the tabloids when you’re in the checkout line, and all of those times your computer mouse finds itself going to the “Entertainment” and “Celebrity” sections of your favorite news page. I’m not putting this practice down. While it’s a trait not too many people are proud of, it performs a necessary balancing act for our psyches. When you’re working a job you don’t like to pay for things you don’t need, it’s nice to be reminded those people who we think “have it all,” really don’t.
However, despite the rationalizations indicated above, I find it hard to rationalize why I’m addicted to Darwin Porter’s celebrity biographies. Forget TMZ. Forget Albert Goldman. Forget even Kenneth Anger (the author of the original “Hollywood Babylon,” the Magna Carta of Hollywood sleaze). Porter’s celebrity biographies are … hands down … the absolute FILTHIEST, DIRTIEST, and SLEAZIEST celebrity biographies you’ll ever read. I’ve read four of Porter’s bios so far (Steve McQueen, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, and Linda Lovelace) and every time I put one of his books down for sleep, I feel like I need one of those Karen Silkwood showers afterwards. This is because Porter focuses almost exclusively on the sexual lives of his subjects and he goes into extremely explicit detail about the sights, the sounds, and … sometimes … the smells of their sordid private affairs. Yet, while such details may seem titillating, they actually have the opposite effect. By the end, you feel like you’ve been ravaged by the entire series run of E! True Hollywood Stories and then abandoned with no cab fare for your efforts. I realize, of course, these protestations are hollow considering I’ve read four of these damn bios, but like Kyle MacLachlan’s character in “Blue Velvet” keeps going back to see Isabella Rossellini’s troubled character, I keep wandering back to Porter’s books.
Yes, most of Porter’s subjects are dead and therefore, can’t defend themselves. Yes, you’re a complete moron if you believe 100% of what you read in these books. However, there’s also the adage that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” So, if you’re looking for that literary equivalent of hanging out at the bar until closing to find that special someone who will utter the magic words “Why not?”, Porter’s books are the ticket. As long as you have your bulls–t director on high and have the Comet cleanser close by, you’ll do just fine. Of course, you’ll go to hell for merely browsing any of these books. But at least if you’re going to hell for reading a book, Porter makes it worth your while. Most of his tomes are over 400 pages long and all of them are jam-packed with with nothing but the “bad” (or “good,” depending on how evil you are) stuff you’re looking for. And … most of them are available digitally … so you can read these books without rousing too much suspicion. However, please be warned that Porter does love to throw the inappropriate pictures around like many people pass out after-dinner mints. Like a Whitman’s Sampler of sleaze, you never know what picture might pop up when you turn the page, so be careful reading these books on a plane.
Being a cultural phenomenon can be a good thing for the initial success of any film. Some of these iconic films not only maintain their popularity throughout the years, but their status as classics only strengthens. Examples of this phenomenon: “Casablanca,” “The Godfather,” “Star Wars,” and “Pulp Fiction.”
However, some films are so of their time, that they don’t hold up as well and are often dismissed in later years as flukes. “Saturday Night Fever” is probably the best example of a film that was phenomenally successful (with both audiences and critics) during its initial release, but which subsequently became a pop culture joke due to the fading popularity of disco. While the reputation of “Fever” has improved slightly over the years (most noticeably after lead actor John Travolta became hip again from his role in “Pulp Fiction”), most people look at it as a campy reminder of the 1970s at their tackiest. Yes, there are a lot of scenes that seem unintentionally funny these days (Travolta’s character Tony primping in front of the mirror). Yes, those 1970s fashions are painfully ugly. And yes, the film has a wall-to-wall disco soundtrack, so if you despise disco, this film will likely be pure torture to watch. But while I would never call “Fever” a great film, it’s a damn good one.
While most people remember the dancing, the music, and the bad fashions, most people don’t ever talk about how dark “Fever” actually is. “Fever” is an extremely gritty and grim 1970s NYC urban masterpiece that belongs in that celebrated genre of films that also includes “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Warriors,” and “Death Wish.” The language is pretty crude and by today’s standards, very politically incorrect. Many of the male characters in the film are fairly misogynistic. There’s also the extremely dark fact that Tony not only attempts to rape his dance companion at one point, but that he doesn’t stop the gang rape of a young woman who is in love with him when it’s happening in the backseat of the car he’s driving. (He thoughtfully calls her the c-word after it’s over and she’s crying hysterically). I’m not criticizing the film for any of this, by the way. These ugly scenes not only illustrate how complex “Fever” actually is, but that there’s no way the film would ever be released, let alone shot, as scripted if made these days. Nowadays, Tony would have to have a “redemptive arc” of some kind or be punished in some way for what he does or doesn’t do. The ugly scenes in “Fever” are so powerful, it makes me a little pissed that the film isn’t better than it actually is. But what’s there isn’t bad at all. When I watched it again recently, the film that it most reminded me of is Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.”
The scene I’ve included here is not from any of the famed dance sequences, but the scene where Tony and his friends enact revenge on a gang they believe hurt their friend. It’s a pretty well-staged and intense fight scene.
The unsung hero of “Fever” is the screenwriter Norman Wexler. In addition to “Fever,” Wexler was the author of many gritty 1970s films including “Joe” and “Serpico” (both films yielded him Oscar nominations). However, the secret to Wexler’s genius was revealed in Bob Zmuda’s book about Andy Kaufman “Andy Kaufman Revealed!” Before Zmuda became Kaufman’s partner-in-crime, he worked for Wexler as his assistant. However, Zmuda called Wexler “Mr. X” in the book because Wexler was still alive when the book was written… and Zmuda still lived in grave fear of Wexler. (He confirmed “Mr. X” was Wexler long after Wexler passed away). Zmuda’s accounts of “Mr. X” are some of the funniest and most dangerous tales of urban performance art you’ll ever read. “Mr. X” later inspired Kaufman’s brand of confrontational performance art, but compared to “Mr. X,” Kaufman comes off as cuddly as Wayne Brady.
Dave's Strange World 