Embracing the Melodrama Part II #88: Dream Lover (dir by Nicholas Kazan)

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1994 film Dream Lover is almost as strange as Zandalee.

Dream Lover opens with Roy Reardon (James Spader, giving a very James Spaderish performance) in the process of getting divorced. Sitting in court, he announces that he’s fired his attorney and that he’s no longer contesting the divorce. The judge informs him that, if he did contest the divorce, the final judgment would be in his favor. Roy says that doesn’t matter. He doesn’t want to contest the divorce.

In the next scene, Roy’s ex-wife tells him that he’s a great guy and that it’s too bad that they couldn’t make the marriage work. They agree that they were just too different. She apologizes for cheating on him. Roy apologizes for hitting her. They agree that Roy has trust issues.

Over the next few minutes of the film, we follow Roy over the course of his new single life. We discover that Roy is a successful architect who is always attracted to brunette artists with troubled backstories. We also discover that Roy’s best friend is an obnoxious yet strangely likable guy named Norman (Larry Miller, who brings some unexpected depth to an obnoxious character). Norman begs Roy for money. Roy refuses to give it to him. Norman invites Roy to an art gallery and offers to set him up with a woman he knows. Roy agrees. And, seriously, the first 20 minutes of the film are so dominated by Norman that you’re kind of surprised when the film moves on and he’s no longer in every scene.

(But then again, that’s the type of film that Dream Lover is. Characters appear and vanish at random. Plot points are raised and then abandoned.)

Anyway, Roy’s date is disastrous. (“You don’t like me,” the woman says as tears stream down her face.) However, during the date, Roy meets Lena (Madchen Amick). When first they meet, they fight. Then they run into each other again at the grocery store and they hit it off. They go to dinner and, despite having a good time, Lena makes a point of not inviting Roy up to her apartment. The next night, Roy shows up unannounced and Lena does invite him up. At first, she’s cold towards him. Then they’re making love. And then they’re getting married. And then the clowns show up…

Oh yes, there are clowns in this movie. Roy is haunted by visions, where he’s at a carnival and random clowns pop up and say cryptic things to him. “How’s the family?” one asks. Another one continually reminds him that he doesn’t know much about Lena.

Years pass by. Lena and Roy have two children but it continues to nag at Roy that he doesn’t know anything about her. He worries that she’s cheating on him. He fears that the children are not his. Roy’s friends tell him that he’s being paranoid. Roy argues that paranoia is just a heightened form of consciousness.

Roy starts to investigate Lena’s past and here’s where I really laughed out loud. Roy finds out that Lena is from North Texas and goes down to her hometown. As Roy arrives in this tiny country town, the camera reveals a huge mountain in the background. Really, Dream Lover? A mountain in North Texas?

Anyway, for me, this film never really recovered from that mountain but, if you can overlook that geographic mistake, Dream Lover is occasionally enjoyable because it is such a weird film. James Spader is hot, Madchen Amick is beautiful, and the entire film features one of those huge and improbable twists that you simply have to see for yourself.

And you can see it because it’s currently available on Netflix!

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #87: One False Move (dir by Carl Franklin)

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Who doesn’t love Bill Paxton?

Seriously, he’s just one of those actors. He’s appeared in a countless number of films and he’s played a lot of different characters. He was a psycho vampire in Near Dark. He was the underwater explorer who got stuck with all of the worst lines in Titanic. In Frailty, he was a father who was driven to murder by heavenly visions. He was the sleaziest of sleazes in Nightcrawler. And, of course, in Big Love, he was an unrepentant polygamist. In all of these roles, Paxton showed the quirkiness that has made him so beloved to film lovers like me. Much like Kevin Bacon, it doesn’t matter what role Bill Paxton is playing. You’re going to like him and you’re going to be happy to see him onscreen.

And yet, considering just how many popular films that he’s appeared in, it’s interesting to note that Bill Paxton’s best performance can be found in a film about which not many people seem to have heard. That film is the 1992 Southern crime drama, One False Move.

Actually, it does the film a disservice to refer to it as merely being a crime drama. I mean, it is a drama and it even has a properly dark ending to prove that fact. And it is about criminals and police officers. But ultimately, the film’s plot is just a starting point that the film uses to examine issues of culture, race, and guilt. In the end, One False Movie is an unexpectedly poignant and penatrating character study of 5 very different people.

We start out with three criminals. Ray (played by Billy Bob Thornton, who also co-wrote the script) is a career criminal, a white trash redneck who is not particularly smart but who is dangerous because he’s ruthless and he’s willing to whatever he need to do to survive. (If you’ve lived in the country, you will recognize Ray’s type as soon as you see him.) Ray’s girlfriend is Fantasia (Cynda Williams), a beautiful but insecure woman. And finally, there’s Ray’s partner and former cellmate, Pluto (Michael Beach). Of the three of them, Pluto is the most menacing, a knife-wielding sociopath with an IQ of 150. Even though he’s working with Ray and Fantasia, Pluto always makes it clear that he considers himself to be both separate from and better than both of them.

Ray, Pluto, and Fantasia have just brutally murdered 6 people in Los Angeles, all of whom were friends of Fantasia’s. Now, they’re making their way to Houston, planning on selling stolen cocaine. Pursuing them are two LAPD detective, Cole (Jim Metzler) and McFeeley (Earl Billings). When Cole and McFeeley come across evidence that the three criminals might have a connection with the tiny town of Star City, Arkansas, they call up the local sheriff.

And that’s where Bill Paxton shows up.

Paxton plays Sheriff Dale Dixon. Dale’s nickname is Hurricane and it’s soon obvious why. Like a hurricane, Dale never stops moving. He’s a well-meaning but hyperactive good old boy who has a talent for saying exactly the wrong thing. When he first talks to Cole and McFeeley over the phone, he amuses them with his enthusiastic bragging and briefly offends them with his casual racism.

Cole and McFeeley eventually end up taking a trip to Star City, so that they can investigate how the three criminals are connected to this tiny town. When Dixon meets up with them, he asks them if they could help him get a job with the LAPD. The two cops initially humor Dixon and laugh at him behind his back. When Dixon’s wife (a wonderful performance from Natalie Canerday) asks Cole to keep Dixon safe, Cole assures her that Ray, Fantasia, and Pluto are probably not even going to come anywhere near Star City.

However, Dixon soon reveals to the two cops that Fantasia’s name is Lila and that her family lives in Star City. What he doesn’t tell them, however, is that he and Lila have a personal connection of their own…

One False Move is a twisty and intense thriller, one that’s distinguished by strong performances from the entire cast. (Even Metzler and Billings bring unexpected shadings to Cole and McFeeley, who, in any other film, would have been portrayed as being stock characters.) But the film is truly dominated by Bill Paxton. When we first meet Dixon, he seems like a joke. We’re sure that he’ll somehow end up being the film’s hero (because that’s what happens in movies about small town sheriffs being underestimated by big city cops) but what we’re not expecting is that Dale is going to turn out to be such a multi-layered and fascinating character. Just as Dale eventually starts to lower his defenses and reveal who he truly is, Paxton also starts to reign in his initially overwhelming performance and reveals himself to be a subtle and perceptive actor. It’s a great performance that elevates the entire film. Al Pacino won the 1992 Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in Scent of a Woman. That award should have gone to the unnominated Bill Paxton.

It wouldn’t be fair to reveal One False Move‘s secrets. It’s a film that you really should see for yourself.

Neon Dream #11: Kinski – Semaphore

Posted on May 26, 2015 by necromoonyeti

I will never summon ethereal fire spirits to rend my foes, and unless the unknown reaches of physics politely comply with Hollywood, I will never receive a post card from the dark side of the Milky Way. I will also never applaud a director’s effective use of taste and smell, or upload a backup of my memory to external storage in between breakfast and a morning shower, but there is a difference here…

Nearly every cyberpunk story I have encountered begins with an apocalypse shortly after its publication. I guarantee you someone is writing one right now in which, in 2020, either Putin or radical Islamists nuke the shit out of everybody. Now it is 2060, and all of a sudden everyone is rocking cybernetic implants, babies grow in artificial wombs, and Lunar Colony Beta just declared independence. It’s not an absurdity. It’s not as if people just go “it’s the future; of course it will be futuristic!” and ignore the context. The assumption is that a cataclysmic act of destruction will somehow propel technology towards radical progress.

This makes sense, if you think about the forces that drive technology forward. In capitalism, there is always an incentive to stagnate. The longer you can milk a product, pumping out new models with superficial “upgrades”, the less you have to invest into research and development. Especially in oligopolies like America, once you establish a monopoly you can dig in your heels for years, even decades, before competition on other fronts undermines your turf. Technology is also hardballed by the western world’s incoherent, slapped-together code of ethics. Since the 1980s, our society has been pretty thoroughly convinced that free will is an endangered species preservable only in captivity. Half of the potential at our fingertips is illegal to research let alone implement, on the grounds that it somehow violates our sanctity.

The post-apocalyptic setting washes us clean of our old ethics and oligarchs. The society that emerges might be a terrible place to live, but it may well be a technocracy. When capitalism undermined the old aristocracy, revolution created bourgeois democracy. The First World War birthed all sorts of hyper-industrial dictatorships, even at the far fringes of the Industrial Revolution’s sphere. A catastrophic event in the information age should, if the trend holds, generate Google empires. How long can conventionally mechanized warlords withstand against soldiers modified to receive live satellite imagery of their terrain and fully regenerate major wounds in a matter of months? Is 45 years too soon for all this? Mother Russia went from de facto feudalism to Sputnik in fewer. And we have to make some allowances for fiction…

There is nothing fundamental preventing massive progress towards biological enhancement–at least nothing we are commonly aware of. The Cyborg Age won’t emerge in our lifetimes, realistically, but only because of entrenched social, political, and economic conditions. The fictional cataclysm is compelling for a lot of bigger reasons, but plausibility still hangs in the air. Our cozy modern lives won’t take us anywhere, but maybe a little pandemonium will usher in the paradigm shift to a society which praises integration of digital technology into our biological systems.

Kinski are a post-rock band from Seattle that formed in 1998. “Semaphore” appears on their 2003 Sub Pop release, Airs Above Your Station. I am pretty sure that the opening two minutes contains a formula to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, but I am too old to do acid. At any rate, I hear it as some sort of major shift in perspective inaugurating an era of progression.