Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

World’s Greatest Dad (2009, directed by Bobcat Goldthwait)

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Lance Clayton (Robin Williams) is an English teacher who has a rotten teenage son named Kyle (Daryl Sabara).  Some teenagers go through a rebellious phase.  Some teenagers are troubled because of how they were raised or a recent trauma.  Some teenagers are misunderstood.  Kyle is just a disrespectful and stupid jerk who seems destined to do nothing his life.  He’s the type of fifteen year-old boy who uses his phone to secretly take upskirt pictures of his Dad’s girlfriend while they’re all out for dinner.

Those upskirt pics prove to be the last thing that Kyle sees as he’s looking at them where he dies in a case of autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong.  Lance impulsively stages Kyle’s death to look like a suicide, both to preserve Kyle’s dignity and his own.  Lance, a frustrated writer, composes a suicide note and signs it with Kyle’s name.  When the note is leaked to the press, Kyle is hailed as a sensitive young man and becomes a hero to the former classmates who used to hate him.  Lance goes on to forge and publish a journal, which he claims was written by Kyle.  Kyle is hailed as a hero and Lance as the “world’s greatest dad.”  Lance enjoys the fame, until he doesn’t.

World’s Greatest Dad is a dark comedy, one that has the courage to often be downright unpleasant in its portrayal of how Kyle’s memory is idealized after his death.  It also features one of Robin Williams’s best performances.  Almost every performance that Williams gave had at least a hint of sadness to it.  In this film, he plays one of his saddest characters, a well-meaning teacher who cannot understand how his son has become such a jerk.  By writing the journal, Williams is not only deceiving the rest of the world but also himself.  He’s recreating Kyle as the son that he wanted as opposed to the one he got.  It’s one of Williams’s most emotionally honest and open performances.

For obviously reasons, it’s not easy to watch Williams playing such a depressed character, especially one who staes a suicide but the film really does show what a great actor Robin Williams could be.  In the end, his talent is what we should remember and celebrate.

 

Monday Night Mayhem (2002, directed by Ernest Dickerson)

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In the late 1960s, television coverage of football is dull and boring.  The games are played during the day and the announcers have no personality.  An executive at ABC named Roone Arledge (John Heard) changes all of that by convincing the NFL to start scheduling games for Monday night.  Arledge launches Monday Night Football, a broadcast that puts the viewers at home in the stadium.  Arledge explains that he wants cameras everywhere.  He wants the sidelines and the stands to be mic’d up.  And he wants announcers who will make the game interesting.  He picks an experienced radio announcer named Keith Jackson (Shuler Hensley), former Dallas quarterback Don Meredith (Brad Beyer), and finally an egocentric, loquacious, and opinionated sports reporter named Howard Cosell (John Turturro).  The straight-laced Jackson only lasts a season and finds himself overshadowed by Meredith’s good ol’ boy charisma and Cosell’s eccentricities.  Arledge brings in Frank Gifford (Kevin Anderson) as a replacement and changes both sports and television forever.  Monday night football becomes huge but so do the egos of the men involved.

Based on a non-fiction book by Bill Carter, Monday Night Mayhem is a look at the early days of Monday Night Football, with most of the attention being given to the mercurial Howard Cosell.  As a work of history, it’s pretty shallow.  There’s a lot of montages set to familiar 70s tunes and there’s plenty of familiar stock footage.  Beyer and Anderson do adequate impersonations of Meredith and Gifford without really digging for much under the surface.  Monday Night Mayhem is dominated by John Turturro’s performance as Howard Cosell.  Turturro doesn’t look like Cosell and he really doesn’t sound that much like Cosell but he does capture the mix of arrogance and bitterness that made Howard Cosell such a memorable and controversial announcer.  In its breezy manner, the film hits all the well-know points of Cosell’s life and career, from defending Mohammad Ali to considering a run for the Senate to trying to reinvent himself as a variety show host to the controversy when he was though to have uttered a racial slur during one of the games.  I wish the film had a bit more depth but John Turturro’s committed but bizarre performance keeps it watchable.

King of New York (1990, directed by Abel Ferrara)

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Drug kingpin Frank White (Christopher Walken) has been released from prison and is again on the streets of New York City.  Frank might say that he’s gone straight but, as soon as he’s free, he’s  partying with his old crew (including Laurene Fishburne, Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito, and others).   While Frank’s agent (Paul Calderon) goes to all of the other city’s gangsters and explains that they can either get out of Frank’s way or die, three detectives (Victor Argo, David Caruso, and Wesley Snipes) make plans to take Frank out by any means necessary.  Meanwhile, Frank is donating money to politicians, building hospitals, and presenting himself as New York’s savior.

King of New York is the epitome of a cult film.  Directed by Abel Ferrara, the dark and violent King of New York was originally dismissed by critics and struggled to find an audience during its initial theatrical run.  (It was lumped in with and overshadowed by other 1990 gangster films like Goodfellas and Godfather Part III.)  But it was later rediscovered on both cable and home video and now it’s rightly considered to be a stone cold crime classic.  Walken gives one of his best performances as Frank White and that’s not a surprise.  The film was clearly made to give Walken a chance to show off what he could do with a lead role and Walken captures Frank’s charisma and humor without forgetting that he’s essentially a sociopath.  Walken gives a performance that feels like James Cagney updated for the end of the 80s.  What’s even more impressive is that all of the supporting characters are just as memorable as Walken’s Frank White.  From Laurence Fishburne’s flamboyant killer to David Caruso’s hotheaded cop to Paul Calderon’s slippery agent to Janet Julian’s morally compromised attorney, everyone gives a strong performance.  (I’m usually not a Caruso fan but he’s legitimately great here.)  They come together to bring the film’s world to life.  Everyone has their own reason for obsessing on Frank White and his return to power.  I’ve always especially appreciated Victor Argo as the weary, veteran detective who finds himself trapped by Caruso and Wesley Snipes’s impulsive plan to take down Frank White.  Frank White and the cops go to war and it’s sometimes hard to know whose side to be on.

Director Abel Ferrara has had a long and storied career, directing films about morally ambiguous people who are often pushed to extremes.  Personally, I think King of New York is his best film, a portrait of not just a criminal but also of a city that combines the best and the worst of human nature.  The action is exciting, the cast is superb, and Frank’s justifications for his behavior sometimes make a surprising amount of sense.  Thought there’s occasionally been speculation that it could happen, there’s never been a sequel to King of New York and it doesn’t need one.  King of New York is a film that tell you all that you need to know about Frank White and the city that he calls home.

 

Basic Instinct (1992, directed by Paul Verhoeven)

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Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) is a San Francisco police detective who, along with his jolly partner Gus (George Dzundza), finds himself investigating the ice pick-stabbing of a rock star.  The main suspect is glamorous writer Catherine Trammel (Sharon Stone), who is obviously guilty but manages to outsmart all of the men investigating her by not wearing panties during her interrogation.  Nick finds himself drawn to Catherine, despite his own relationship with with psychologist Elizabeth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn).  The more Nick digs into Catherine’s past, the more he becomes obsessed with her but also the more he suspects that she may be a serial killer.  This is mostly because Catherine obviously is a serial killer and anyone should have been able to figure that out.  Instead, Nick, an experienced homicide detective, just gets turned on.

It’s strange to remember how seriously people took Basic Instinct when it was released in 1992.  People debated whether it was a throwback to Hitchcock or just a dirty movie.  Feminists debated whether it was empowering or exploitive.  For several years afterwards, every show from The Simpsons to Seinfeld parodied the interrogation scene.  (In Seinfeld’s case, it helped that Wayne Knight appeared in the film as the district attorney who kept shifting in his seat to get a better view.)  Sharon Stone was described as being the new Grace Kelly and, for a period of years, was the subject of fawning profiles in which she was asked about the future of sex in movies.  For a while, she was inescapable.

Sharon Stone, to be fair, did make the role of Catherine her own.  It’s impossible to imagine some of the other actresses considered — Michelle Pfeiffer, Geena Davis, Mariel Hemingway, or Meg Ryan — in the role.  After a decade of not getting anywhere with her film career, Stone was hungry to be a star and was also willing to do things on camera that other name actresses would have refused.  Sharon Stone was not the next Grace Kelly and Catherine Trammel was ultimately more of a sexual fantasy than an actual character but Stone still deserves a lot of credit for her uninhibited performance in the role.  Though Stone later said that she didn’t realize what was actually being filmed during the interrogation scene, it’s her confidence and her unapologetic sensuality that makes the scene compelling.  Her performance has the energy that the sleepwalking Michael Douglas lacks.

Today, Basic Instinct is best-viewed as a satire.  Director Paul Verhoeven sends up both the cop film and the erotic thriller with a movie that turned everything to eleven.  The film’s sensibility is established by the fact that Michael Douglas’s “hero” is nicknamed Shooter because he killed two innocent people while high on cocaine.  The film’s main joke is an obvious one.  Everyone is too busy staring at Sharon Stone to notice that she’s about to stab them in the back with an icepick.  Joe Eszterhas’s script was vulgar to the point of parody and, fortunately, director Paul Verhoeven understood that even more than Eszterhas did.

Basic Instinct has been imitated countless times but it’s never been equaled.  To that, the credit is owed to Sharon Stone and Paul Verhoeven.

 

Sunset (1988, directed by Blake Edwards)

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In 1920s Hollywood, famed comedian Alfie Alperin (Malcolm McDowell) has made the transition from screen stardom to working behind the scenes as a producer and studio head.  With the coming of the talkies and the death of silent cinema, Alfie plans to make his mark with an epic western starring Tom Mix (Bruce Willis) as Wyatt Earp.  The real Wyatt (James Garner) is hired to act as an on-set consultant.  Wyatt’s former girlfriend, Christina (Patricia Hodge), is now married to Alfie.

What Mix and Earp discover is that, despite his beloved public image, Alfie is actually a monster who is involved with organized crime and sex trafficking and who has the police on his payroll.  While searching for Christina’s missing son (Dermot Mulroney), Mix and Earp get caught up in a murder involving Alife’s sister (Jennifer Edwards) and a gangster named Dutch (Joe Dallesandro).  At the first Academy Awards are handed out in Beverly Hills, Tom Mix and Wyatt Earp prepare for the final showdown with their producer.

The idea behind Sunset was promising.  Wyatt Earp, a real cowboy who survived the end of the West, teams up with Tom Mix, a movie cowboy who is trying to survive the end of the silent era.  (Earp and Mix were friend in real life, as well.)  Bruce Willis comes across as being too contemporary in the role of Tom Mix but James Garner plays Wyatt Earp with a weary dignity and Malcolm McDowell does a convincing Charlie Chaplin impersonation.  Unfortunately, Blake Edwards’s direction allows the story to meander and the mystery itself is so full of red herrings that it’s impossible to follow.  Edwards didn’t seem to know if he wanted this movie to be a buddy comedy, an elegiac tribute to the end of the silent era, or a satire of Hollywood.  He tried to include elements of all three but the movie itself just doesn’t come together.  Only Garner and McDowell emerge from the film relatively unscathed.

Fortunately, for Bruce Willis, Die Hard was released just two months after Sunset.

The Couch Trip (1988, directed by Michael Ritchie)

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When renowned radio psychiatrist George Matlin (Charles Grodin) has a nervous breakdown, he takes a trip to Europe with his wife (Mary Gross) to both recover and also work on his marriage.  (Matlin’s breakdown was the result of an extramarital affair.)  Needing someone to host Dr. Matlin’s radio show, his producers call Dr. Lawrence Baird (David Clennon), who oversees a mental facility in Chicago.  They assume that Dr. Baird is just dumb enough that they won’t have to worry about him overshadowing Dr. Matlin while he’s guest-hosting.  However, when they call, Dr. Baird is out of his office and the phone is answered by John Burns (Dan Aykroyd), a con artist who has been pretending to be insane so that he can avoid serving time in prison.  Pretending to be Baird, Burns accepts their offer and then escapes from the asylum and heads to Beverly Hills.  The real Dr. Baird, not knowing about the offer, goes on vacation in Europe.  Though Burns had originally only been planning on doing the radio job long enough to get paid enough money to head to Mexico, he soon becomes a celebrity with his non-nonsense, blunt advice.

There’s a lot of talented people in The Couch Trip, including Walter Matthau as a former priest-turned-kleptomaniac and Aykryod’s wife, Donna Dixon, as Matlin’s colleague and Burns’s eventual love interest.  Director Michael Ritchie was responsible for some of the best films of the 70s and radio psychiatry is certainly a ripe subject for satire.  Why, then does, The Couch Trip fall flat?  Some of it is because the movie never seems to know if it wants to be wacky farce or a dramedy about a criminal who finds a new life helping people.  The other big problem is that the talented Dan Aykroyd is miscast as the type of unapologetic smartass that Bill Murray could play in his sleep.  (In a version where Murray played John Burns, Aykroyd would have been perfect casting as George Matlin.)

Aykroyd was one of the most talented members of the original Not Ready For Prime Time Players.  (His impersonations of Nixon and Jimmy Carter were second-to-none.)  Sadly, Hollywood has never figured out what to do with his off-center talent.  The Couch Trip is a prime example of that.

 

Silicon Towers (1999, directed by Serge Rodnunsky)

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Charlie (Jonathan Quint) gets a promotion to an executive job at Silicon Towers.  After his promotion, he is sent an encrypted email that reveals that the company is manufacturing computer chips that it can use to drain money from the banks and to control the world.  Charlie goes on the run, jumping from roof to roof as he tries to avoid the company’s security team and reveal the truth.  Brian Dennehy plays the evil CEO.  Daniel Baldwin plays another executive.  Brad Dourif plays a paranoid tech expert and steals the movie.  Robert Guillaume is the police detective who is investigating the strange things that are happening around the company.  Be sure to hum the Benson theme song while watching.

There was a lot of movies like Silicon Towers in the late 90s.  The internet was still exotic and people were still convinced that technology was going to destroy us all on Y2K.  Silicon Towers was not the only paranoid tech thriller to come out in 1999 but it might have been the most inept.  Serge Rodnunsky made a lot of movies back in the day and never let a lack of a budget stand in his way but he also never seemed to understand the importance of being able to hear dialogue or smooth editing.  There are some good actors in Silicon Towers.  Good luck understanding what any of them are saying.

This film is mostly memorable for the scenes of Charlie “hacking.” Charlie writes his hacking code in HTML.  That’s  pretty much all you need to know.

Gorky Park (1983, directed by Michael Apted)

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Earlier today, I saw that the writer Martin Cruz Smith has died.  He was 82 years old and was best known for a series of detective novels about Arkady Renko, a Russian police detective.  Starting with 1981’s Gorky Park, Smith’s novels not only dealt with Renko’s adventures but also provided a look at contemporary Russia, as it went from being controlled by the communists to being controlled by Putin.  Renko was a cynical observer whose cases often exposed the corruption of the Russian elite, regardless of who was in charge.

The first of Smith’s Renko novels was turned into a movie in 1983.  Gorky Park stars William Hurt as Renko.  Renko investigates the discovery of three dead bodies at a ice skating rink in Moscow.  One of the victims in an American whose brother (Brian Dennehy) is a tough New York cop who has come to Russia to investigate his disappearance.  Renko’s investigation leads him to an American businessman (Lee Marvin) who is smuggling sables out of Russia and who is also a KGB asset.  Joanna Pacula plays a woman whose hope to escape from Russia leads to her getting caught up in the murders and the subsequent investigation.

Gorky Park‘s mystery is easily solved.  Just by casting Lee Marvin in the role, it is automatically clear who is responsible for the murders and it doesn’t take long for Renko to figure it out either.  Instead, the movie is about how Renko’s investigation exposes the corruption of the Russian state, with the KGB first protecting Lee Marvin’s businessman when he’s considered to be an asset and then expecting Renko to assassinate him once it becomes obvious that his activities are becoming a liability.  The subdued William Hurt and the brash Brian Dennehy make for an compelling investigative team while the underappreciated Joanna Pacula gives an outstanding performance as a woman who is so desperate to escape the oppression of the Soviet Union that she’ll risk everything.  (Even though the murderer is an American businessman, the Soviet Union still banned Gorky Park as both a book and a film.)  Gorky Park’s snowy cinematography and Michael Apted’s measured direction captures the chilly paranoia of Smith’s story and the bleak depiction of a society where national pride mixes with healthy a dose of fear.

Upon release, Gorky Park was a box office disappointment, which meant that there would be no further adventures of William Hurt’s Renko on the big screen.  Martin Cruz Smith continued to write, ultimately publishing ten novels about his unconventional hero.

Presumed Innocent (1990, directed by Alan J. Pakula)

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Harrison Ford stars as Rusty Sabich, a smart and ambitious prosecutor who is accused of murdering his former mistress, Carolyn Polhemus (Greta Scacchi).

A lot of people were taken by surprise when Presumed Innocent first came out in 1990.  After a career of always being the hero and the type of person who took his fate into his own hands, Presumed Innocent featured a passive Harrison Ford whose fate was in the hands of his lawyer, Sandy Stern (Raul Julia) and in the prosecutors who are trying to send him to prison.  For most of the movie, the audience doesn’t know if Rusty is innocent and a lot of what Rusty does makes him seem to be guilty.  Just the fact that Harrison Ford was playing someone who would cheat on his wife (played by Bonnie Bedelia, who everyone had last seen sticking up for Bruce Willis in Die Hard) was considered to be shocking at the time.  It says a lot about Ford’s appeal as an actor that he remains sympathetic even though he’s playing a character who does a lot of bad things.  He remains compelling, even though Rusty is forced to spend a good deal of the movie as a passive spectator.  To anyone who underrates Harrison Ford an actor, this is the film to show them.

Presumed Innocent is a murder mystery but it’s also a sad-eyed look at a corrupt judicial system.  Rusty is accused of murder largely due to the whims of fate.  If Raymond Horgan (Brian Dennehy), Rusty’s former patron, had been reelected as district attorney, Rusty would never have been charged.  When the trial moves to the courtroom, the Judge (Paul Winfield) himself is revealed to have been compromised by his own relationship with Carolyn, something that Sandy is willing to use to the defense’s advantage.  John Spencer plays a detective who is willing to hide evidence to protect Rusty.  Joe Grifasi plays a former detective who is motivated less by the evidence in the case and more by a personal grudge against Rusty.  The idea of getting justice for Carolyn is pushed to the side by everyone’s personal drama.  The ending challenges all of our preconceived notions about Rusty and the meaning of guilt and innocence.

Intelligently directed by Alan J. Pakula and featuring an excellent cast, Presumed Innocent is a top-notch legal thriller and also one of Harrison Ford’s best films.

 

Blue Ridge (2020, directed by Brent Christy)

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Former Green Beret Justin Wise (Johnathon Schaech) is the new sheriff of the small mountain town of Blue Ridge.  Sheriff Wise is so good at his job that he can just step inside of a gas station and figure out that it’s been robbed just by observing that the millennial behind the counter isn’t look at his phone.  The sheriff has a phone-obsessed millennial daughter (Taegen Burns) and a supportive ex-wife (Sarah Lancaster), who works as a waitress.

He also has a big mystery on his hands when the daughter of Cliff McGrath (Graham Greene) is found murdered.  The McGraths thinks that the Wade family is responsible.  The Wades have a long-standing grievance against the McGraths.  Sheriff Wise and Deputies Dobson (Lara Silva) and Thompson (Ben Esler) have to solve the mystery before a full-out war breaks out in town.

I was not surprised to discover that this was a pilot for television series.  The movie has the homey feel of the type of mystery show that your parents or grandparents would watch every Friday night.  Sherriff Wise may not be as old as my parents but he definitely shares their feelings about phones and trying to understand what’s wrong with the kids today.

It’s an old-fashioned movie but it’s mildly diverting and it does hold your attention.   Johnathon Schaech gives a strong performance as the sheriff who can beat up three people at once but who still gets nervous before asking a woman out on a date.  Graham Greene and Tom Proctor both give good performances as the rival family patriarchs and the mystery takes some interesting turns.  Blue Ridge did a good job of brining its small town setting to life.  Blue Ridge is good enough to be a pleasant afternoon diversion.