X’s cover of the Jerry Lee Lewis classic, recorded for the much underrated 1983 Richard Gere-starring remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s film of the same name. If you’re skeptical, give it a shot. I think you’ll see where Tarantino got a lot of ideas.
My favorite Van Morrison song. I first heard it nearly 30 years ago over the end credits of Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.” Until it appeared on Van’s mega-selling “Best Of” album from 1990, the only place you could find it was “The King of Comedy” soundtrack which went out of print almost as soon as it was released. Since the song was nearly impossible to find and I loved “King,” I would always watch the film through the end credits to listen to it.
One of the funniest and creepiest movies of the last decade is Paul Schrader’s corrosive biopic of the late “Hogan’s Heroes” star Bob Crane. Crane was what we would now describe as a “sex addict,” whose obsession and weird friendship with a man who shared that lifestyle with him (as the film alleges) ultimately killed Crane. What’s interesting about “Auto Focus” is how director Schrader so accurately depicts a man with absolutely zero self-awareness. As Schrader put it in a terrific interview with Uju Asika on Salon.com when the movie was released: “… when I’ve dealt with characters like this before, these existential loners, they tend to be introspective. They don’t get it, but they’re trying to figure out how to get it. The interesting thing to me about Crane was that he was not only clueless, he was clueless about being clueless. And I think his greatest flaw wasn’t sex, it was selfishness. Hence the title. I don’t think he understood or appreciated how his actions affected other people. It was just sort of blithe egoism. So the challenge then was to try to make a film about a superficial character that wasn’t a superficial film.” He also described Crane and his partner-in-crime John Carpenter: “You take these kind of Rat Pack guys who have to trade in their narrow ties for beads and bell bottoms in order to score chicks. But of course they remain the same sexist jerks they always were. It’s a fascinating period in American male sexual identity.” In my opinion, Schrader’s best film as a director, slightly edging out 1978’s “Blue Collar” and 1979’s “Hardcore.”
The emotional highlight from David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece “Mulholland Drive,” this is a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” sung entirely in Spanish by Rebekah Del Rio… and it’s devastating within the context of the film. “Blue Velvet” is my favorite Lynch film, but I have to admit that “Mulholland Drive” may actually be his best, a movie that never ceases to astonish me with its depth and meaning.
This film appears to be based on Carole King’s life … but not exactly. Because writer-director Allison Anders did a very smart thing when she came up with “Grace of My Heart.” Instead of going the straight biopic route … and getting raked over the coals for fudging details of what actually happened to keep the story moving, she fictionalized her account. This way, she could create composites of people, tell a compelling story, and keep people focused on her film. And, instead of trying to buy the rights to all of the great songs from the Brill Building era (which would have been cost-prohibitive), she hired the composers of that period (Burt Bachrach, Gerry Goffin, etc) and teamed them up with Elvis Costello and others to write new songs. This was another incredibly smart move, because not only are the new songs terrific in their own right, but having the old songs would have further distracted audiences from the narrative.
Anders script and directing are terrific. There’s loads of great actors in this film (Eric Stoltz, Matt Dillon, Patsy Kensit, Bridget Fonda, John Turturro), but Illeana Douglas towers above them all in the performance of her career as the lead, Edna Buxton. She should have copped an Oscar nomination for this. Unfortunately, even though Martin Scorsese was Executive Producer, the film was released by Gramercy Pictures (the mini-major created by Universal Pictures and Polygram Films), who botched the release of a lot of terrific films of the period (“Dazed and Confused,” “Mallrats,” “Bound,” “Kalifornia”) that are now considered classics. When they had the occasional hit (“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Fargo”), it seemed purely accidental. But I digress …
This is the musical highlight of the film, in my opinion. “God Give Me Strength” was written by Burt Bachrach and Elvis Costello and is sung by Kristen Vigard (Douglas is lip-syncing).
If you want to hear a great podcast about this film, check out The Projection Booth’s episode on this film. It’s really terrific.
http://projection-booth.blogspot.com/2012/04/episode-60-grace-of-my-heart.html
With the exception of Tom Green’s “Freddy Got Fingered,” this is probably the wildest, weirdest film ever released by 20th Century Fox (or any studio, for that matter). The studio heads at Fox at the time (Richard Zanuck and David Brown) were so desperate to look hip and make money in the late 1960s, they hired sexploitation legend Russ Meyer to direct a pseudo-sequel to their trashy 1967 blockbuster “Valley of the Dolls.” Meyer hired film critic Roger Ebert (yes, THAT Roger Ebert), the only mainstream critic who admitted to appreciating Meyer at the time, to write the screenplay. What resulted was a masterpiece! A twisted, f–ked-up, surreal, insane, X-rated masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless. Along with “Midnight Cowboy,” “A Clockwork Orange,” and “Last Tango in Paris,” “Beyond” was one of the few major studio X-rated films to be a box-office hit (a $50 million box-office hit, when inflation is taken into account).
This is one of those films where it’s hard to say whether it was intentionally campy, whether it was just so terrible that it’s funny, or something on the level of the meta-comedy of an Andy Kaufman or Sacha Baron Cohen. As Ebert himself said about the tone of this film: “Meyer directed his actors with a poker face, solemnly, discussing the motivations behind each scene. Some of the actors asked me whether their dialogue wasn’t supposed to be humorous, but Meyer discussed it so seriously with them that they hesitated to risk offending him by voicing such a suggestion. The result is that ‘BVD’ has a curious tone all of its own. There have been movies in which the actors played straight knowing they were in satires, and movies which were unintentionally funny because they were so bad or camp. But the tone of ‘BVD’ comes from actors directed at right angles to the material. ‘If the actors perform as if they know they have funny lines, it won’t work,’ Meyer said, and he was right.
The attached clip is a pivotal scene, where the sinister Phil Spector-like music impresario named Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell reveals his true nature to gigolo Lance Rock (gotta love those character names). Lance is less than sensitive in his remarks to Z-Man and pays the price. This scene teaches an important lesson: if you’ve been tied up by some maniac wielding a sword, and said maniac decides to disrobe, the smart move is to be complimentary on the maniac’s equipment. To be fair, though, never having been in that position, I’m only guessing as to what the right move would be. Apparently, when Ebert revealed to Meyer during the script stage that he was making Z-Man a woman, Meyer took it in stride, saying “You can never have too many women in a picture.”
Needless to say, due to the graphic violence and simulated nudity (you’ll know what I mean when you see the clip), not safe for work or little ones.
A terrific hard rock song from The Move, circa 1971. Put to great use in the 1997 film “Boogie Nights” during the 1980 New Year’s Eve scene … right before everything goes to hell for the characters.
A rare and beautiful ballad by post-hardcore legends Fugazi. From the soundtrack of Jem Cohen’s Fugazi documentary “Instrument.”
Another sadly neglected/forgotten film from the 1980s, “At Close Range” is based on the true story of the Pennsylvania crime family led by Bruce Johnston, Sr. Christopher Walken is in his scariest role ever as the crime boss Brad Whitewood, Sr., a role turned down by Robert DeNiro because he thought it was “too dark” (which is really saying something). Walken’s character may be one of the most evil I’ve ever seen in a film … a cold and ruthless mammal (I can’t bring myself to call him a man, let alone human) who has absolutely no soul. Sean Penn plays his son Brad Jr., a teenager going nowhere who becomes part of his father’s gang. Penn’s character later finds himself in way too deep and learns way too fast that his father’s “love” is expressed solely for the purpose of disarming someone and keeping them under their control. The acting by all parties (especially Walken, Penn, and Mary Stuart Masterson as Penn’s girlfriend) is outstanding. With the possible exception of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” this is director Foley’s finest film. A great film, but terribly disturbing and sad.
One of my favorite films from the 1980s (and one of the most sadly forgotten/neglected) is John Schlesinger’s nail-biting account of two young American friends during the 1970s (one an idealistic communications worker, the other a drug dealer) who decide to sell information to the KGB. Based on the true story about Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee’s descent into treason, it’s extremely well-acted, well-written, well-directed. This is the kind of film that would have won multiple Oscars during the 1970s, but was dumped into theaters January 1985, the traditional no-man’s land for films studios are looking to give a token release to before writing them off as losses on their annual reports. It’s a real shame, because this deserved much better. Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn are incredible in this film as Boyce and Lee. I wish the quality of this trailer were better, but this is what we have to work with.
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