Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

A Movie A Day #87: Free Grass (1969, directed by Bill Brame)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

As everyone surely knows, before they appeared as Dr. Lawrence Jacoby and Benjamin Horne on Twin Peaks, Russ Tamblyn and Richard Beymer co-starred in West Side Story.  Tamblyn played Riff, the leader of the Jets.  Beymer played his best friend, Tony, who fell in love with Natalie Wood.  West Side Story is a classic that won several Oscars.  What is not as well known is that, in between West Side Story and Twin Peaks, Beymer and Tamblyn co-starred in one other movie, a hunk of psychedelic cheese called Free Grass.

By the late 60s, both Beymer and Tamblyn had tired of their clean-cut images and, like their characters in Free Grass, had become card-carrying members of the Hollywood counter-culture.  Beymer plays Dean, a motorcycle-riding drop-out from conventional society.  Dean meets and falls in love with buxom, mini-skirted Karen (played by Lana Wood, younger sister of Natalie).  When a riot breaks out on the sunset strip, Dean punches a cop.  With the Man now looking for him, Dean needs some quick cash so that he and Karen can escape to Dayton, Ohio.

(Dayton, Ohio?)

That’s where Russ Tamblyn comes in.  Tamblyn plays Dean’s friend, Link.  Link works for a drug kingpin named Phil (played not very convincingly by Casey Kasem, of all people).  Phil is willing to pay Dean $10,000 if he smuggles several pounds worth of grass across the Mexican border.  Dean agrees but soon finds himself being pursued by two narcotics agents, played by Jody McCrea and Lindsay Crosby (sons of Joel McCrea and Bing Crosby, respectively).  Because Dean is not willing to commit murder, Link plots to kill him.  But first, Link doses Dean with LSD, which leads to the de rigueur psychedelic 60s light show.

Slow-moving and ineptly directed, Free Grass is for fans of the 1960s counterculture only.  Russ Tamblyn provides the movie with what little energy it has but Richard Beymer apppears to be just as uncomfortable here as he was in West Side Story and Casey Kasem shows why he was better known as a DJ than an actor.  Lana Wood does look good in a miniskirt, though.  Otherwise, Free Grass shows why both Tamblyn and Beymer grew so frustrated with Hollywood that they were both in semi-retirement when David Lynch revitalized their careers by casting them on Twin Peaks.

A Movie A Day #86: Don’t Tell Her It’s Me (1990, directed by Malcolm Mowbray)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This month, since the site is currently reviewing each episode of Twin Peaks, every entry in Move A Day is going to have a Twin Peaks connection.  I am going to start things with Don’t Tell Her It’s Me, a movie that I normally would never think of as having anything to do with Twin Peaks or anything else that David Lynch has ever been associated with.

In this very minor romantic comedy, Gus (Steven Guttenberg) is a cartoonist who has just recently beaten cancer.  The treatment has left him bald, overweight, and lonely.  His sister, a popular romance novelist named Lizzie (Shelley Long), sets hm up with her friend, a journalist named Emily (Jami Gertz).  When Emily does not return Gus’s affection, Lizzie decides to transform Gus into every woman’s dream, which in this movie is a rebel named Lobo who comes from New Zealand and rides a motorcycle.  Gus spends a month working out, growing his hair long, and learning how to speak with a New Zealand accent.  Emily falls in love with Lobo, never realizing that he is actually Gus but what will happen when Gus has to finally tell her the truth?  Despite good performances (especially from Shelley Long), Don’t Tell Her It’s Me it too formulaic and predictable to be memorable.  Even if he does have a mullet and is speaking with a different accent, Steve Guttenberg is always going to be Steve Guttenberg and it’s hard to believe that Emily would not be able to see through his act.

Don’t Tell Her It’s Me actually has two Twin Peaks connections.  Kyle MacLachlan, the one and only Dale Cooper himself, plays Trout, who is both Emily’s editor and her cad of a boyfriend.  It’s a nothing role but fans of Twin Peaks will be interested to know that, when Trout is inevitably revealed to be cheating on Emily, the woman that he’s cheating with is played by MacLachlan’s Twin Peaks co-star, Madchen Amick.

If only the Log Lady had been around, Don’t Tell Her It’s Me could have been a much different picture.

TV Review: Twin Peaks 1.2 “Traces to Nowhere” (directed by Duwayne Dunham)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Traces to Nowhere is an episode defined by two accidents.

The first is Pete Martell serving Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and Sheriff Truman (Michael Ontkean) fish-tainted coffee while Cooper and Truman are asking Josie (Joan Chen) about Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) tutoring her in English.  Pete runs into the room, saying, “Fellas, don’t drink that coffee!  A fish fell into the percolator!”  Hours later, sitting at the Double R Diner, Cooper says that he still has “the taste of that fish-flavored coffee in my mouth.”

The other accident was Killer Bob, who makes his first appearance when Mrs. Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) has a vision of him in the corner of a room.  Bob and his sudden appearances would become one of the best known things about Twin Peaks but, ironically, he wasn’t even a part of the show’s original conception.  Bob was played by Frank Silva, a prop master and set decorator who was working on the pilot episode of Twin Peaks when David Lynch accidentally caught his reflection on camera.  Lynch was so taken by the accidental image that he created the role of Killer Bob specifically for Silva.  Silva made a strong and undeniable impression as the growling Bob but, unfortunately, it would be his only role as an actor.  Silva died of AIDS in 1996, four years after appearing in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

Frank Silva as Killer Bob

Traces to Nowhere was the first regular episode of the series, following the pilot.  Probably in order to reassure nervous television executive and viewers who were on the fence about whether or not Twin Peaks was for them, this episode is more quirky than actively strange.  A lot of time is devoted to the show’s more soapy plot threads, like the affairs between Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) and Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie) and Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and James Hurley (James Marshall) and the abusive marriage of Leo (Eric Da Re) and Shelley (Madchen Amick).

There are a lot of first in Traces to Nowhere.  This is the episode where Audrey first talks to Cooper, Cooper first says that the Great Northern serves a “damn fine cup of coffee,” where Cooper first has a slice of cheery pie, and where Cooper first talks about Albert Rosenfield.  This episodes also features the first mention of the Bookhouse Boys and, most importantly for fans of the series, the first appearance of Catherine Coulson as everyone’s favorite Log Lady.  When the Log Lady first shows up and tells Cooper to ask her log who killed Laura Palmer, the character seems like just a throw away joke.  But fans of the show know how important the Log Lady will become.

Catherine Coulson, was passed away in 2015, was the ex-wife of Jack Nance, who played Pete Martell.  Coulson and Nance both worked with David Lynch on his first film, Eraserhead.  It is said that during the shooting of Eraserhead, Lynch looked over at Coulson and said that he had just suddenly had a vision of her holding a log.  (Nance and Coulson were not the only Eraserhead alumni to later appear on Twin Peaks.  Charlotte Stewart, who played the weak mother of Bobby Briggs on Twin Peaks, earlier played Mary X, Nance’s strange girlfriend in Erasherhead.)

Up next: Zen, or the Skill To Catch a Killer!

Previous Entries in The TSL’s Look At Twin Peaks:

  1. Twin Peaks: In the Beginning by Jedadiah Leland
  2. TV Review: Twin Peaks 1.1 — The Pilot (dir by David Lynch) by Lisa Marie Bowman

A Movie A Day #85: Blue Skies Again (1983, directed by Richard Michaels)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

As Lisa said in her review of Night Game, Erin asked for baseball reviews today and there is no way you can turn down Erin.  So, I watched Blue Skies Again on YouTube.

The Denver Devils is a minor league baseball team that is coming off of its worst season ever.  The new owner (Harry Hamlin) is only concerned with making money and does not know anything about baseball.  The veteran coach (Kenneth McMillan) does not have the respect of his players.  Teammates like Ken (Andy Garcia), Calvin (Joseph Gian), and Wall Street (Cylk Cozart) are worried that they could lose their place on the team at any moment.  The only good news is that two sports agents (Mimi Rogers and Dana Elcar) have found the perfect prospect for the Devils.  This player can play second base.  This player can catch a grounder and turn it into a double play.  This player can hit the ball out of the park.  The only problem?  The player’s name is Paula (Robyn Barto) and she’s a girl!

Robyn Barto was asked to audition after a casting director saw her playing softball for her community college.  Blue Skies Again was her first film role.  In the role of a professional baseball player, Barto was a very convincing softball player.  But Barto was likable and had an engaging screen presence so it’s too bad that this movie was not only her first but also her last.  In the publicity leading up to the release of Blue Skies Again, Barto got to throw out the opening pitch at a Dodger game but that was it for her time in the spotlight.  According to one article that I found that was written ten years after the release of Blue Skies Again, Barto never regretted not having a film career and ended up coaching the softball team at her old high school.

Blue Skies Again was not only the debut of Robyn Barto but also the first feature film for both Mimi Rogers and Andy Garcia.  Garcia does not get to do much but Mimi Rogers shows off the sexy and fun screen presence that always makes me wonder why she never really became a big star.

Blue Skies Again is an okay movie but it does not add up to much.  No one wants to play with a girl but then she gets a hit so everyone changes their mind.  It’s the type of movie that, today, would be made for Hallmark or the Family Channel.  It’s a nice baseball movie but it can’t compare to the real thing.

 

 

A Movie A Day #84: Made In U.S.A. (1987, directed by Ken Friedman)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Dar (Adrian Pasdar) and Tuck (Chris Penn) are two losers.  Dar is angry.  Tuck is a moron.  They live in a dying Pennsylvania industrial town, where they have no future.  Dar is worried that the air has been poisoned by the nearby coal mine.  He and Tuck decide to go to California so that they can look for a woman whose picture they’ve seen in a magazine.  Since Dar and Tucker have no money and no one is willing to pick up two hitchhikers who look like they are on sabbatical from the Manson Family, they end up having to steal cars and hold up convenience stores.  They also pick up a mentally unstable woman named Annie (Lori Singer).  Annie may be dying because of all the pollution in the world.  Dar and Tuck take the time to transport a Native American runaway back to her reservation, where they both get scalped.  Mostly, Dar and Tuck just drive through some of the ugliest parts of America and talk about how, because of pollution, everything is all messed up.

In the 1990s, Made In U.S.A. used to show up frequently on HBO.  It’s a lousy movie, featuring one of the worst performances of Chris Penn’s career.  (Adrian Pasdar is also pretty bad but more is expected from Chris Penn than from Adrian Pasdar.)  Made in U.S.A. does provide a contrast to the relentlessly pro-American films that dominated the box office in the 1980s but it’s really only noteworthy for the soundtrack, which features songs by Sonic Youth and Timbuk3.

Whatever you do, do not mistake this Made In U.S.A. for Jean-Luc Godard’s.

Twin Peaks: In The Beginning

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Twin Peaks started with Marilyn Monroe.  It sounds like a bad April Fools joke but it’s true.

In 1986, after the success of Blue Velvet, David Lynch was hired to direct a biopic of Marilyn Monroe.  Lynch would later say that the Monroe film never happened because, while he liked the idea of doing a story about “a woman in trouble,” he was not comfortable with telling a true story.  Even though the film was never made, it did lead to David Lynch meeting and befriending a screenwriter named Mark Frost.  Frost, who had written for ground-breaking TV shows like Hill Street Blues, was one of the many screenwriter who would take a stab at the screenplay for the Monroe project.

Even after it became obvious that the Monroe biopic was never going to be produced, Lynch and Frost continued to look for projects that they could work on together.  After several film proposals that failed to generate much interest, they followed the advice of Lynch’s agent and worked on a project that, like Blue Velvet, would look at the underbelly of life in small town America.

Lynch and Frost started with an image, a body washed up on the shores of the lake.  The body was Laura Palmer who, like Marilyn Monroe, was a woman in trouble.  Originally called North Dakota (because that was where it was originally meant to take place), this is the project that eventually became Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks premiered on ABC on April 9th, 1990 and, for its first season, it was a phenomena.  Though critics were often baffled, audiences were intrigued by the combination of Lynch’s surrealistic vision and Frost’s serialized storytelling.  Twin Peaks was nominated for 14 Emmys at the end of its first season.  The second season, however, saw rating sharply decline as audiences, critics, and executives all decided that the show was just too strange.  After just 30 episodes, Twin Peaks was canceled.

Even after it ended, Twin Peaks lived on.  There was a feature film.  There were frequent reruns on stations like Bravo.  Twin Peaks‘s quirky style changed the face of television.  Shows like Picket Fences and Northern Exposure were basically Twin Peaks-lite, quirky without ever being truly surreal.

Despite the unceremoniously way that it ended, Twin Peaks never went away and new audiences discover it every day.  In May, 26 years after it went off the air for the first time, Twin Peaks will be returning. with new episodes, to Showtime.  Before it starts again, we are going to take a look back at the original Twin Peaks on this site.  Look for Lisa’s review of the pilot tomorrow.

To quote Dale Cooper, “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”

A Movie A Day #83: Shattered: If Your Kid’s On Drugs (1986, directed by Burr Smidt)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Shattered: If Your Kid’s On Drugs is a typical anti-drug video from the 1980s.  The story is familiar after school special material.  Kim (Megan Follows) and Rick (Rick Segall) are upper middle class kids who live in the suburbs.  Rick is a track star.  Kim is at the top of her class.  That all changes when they start hanging out with the local drug dealer (Dermot Mulroney), who gets Rick hooked on marijuana and Kim hooked on cocaine.  Kim gets an F on her report card.  Rick can no longer jump the hurdles.  Eventually, their parents stop drinking and taking valium long enough to force them into rehab.  The message is that tough love is the only solution.

The only thing that makes Shattered: If Your Kid’s On Drugs noteworthy is the strange and unexpected presence of Burt Reynolds and Judd Nelson, playing themselves and commenting on the action.  The first scene in the video is Burt and Judd driving their pickup truck through the suburbs, talking about how nice it is.  “Lot of nice restaurants,” Burt says.  “Are you going to buy me lunch?” Judd asks.  “Lot of nice restaurants,” Burt replies.  “This town is the American Dream,” Judd says.  “Or the American nightmare,” Burt adds.  When Kim and Rick are getting high in Dermot Mulroney’s chartreuse microbus, Burt and Judd sit on a picket fence and shoot the crap.  Burt can’t understand why teens would use drugs and Judd reminds him that it has been a while since he was a teenager. Rumor has it that both Burt and Judd appeared in this video to fulfill court-ordered community service.

Everything works out in the end.  If you have any doubt, just look at Burt giving us a thumbs up before the final credits roll.

A Movie A Day #82: Sweetgrass (2009, directed by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor)

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101 minutes of sheep and mountains.

That’s the best description that I can give of Sweetgrass.  Sweetgrass is a documentary about shepherds in Montana who take a herd of sheep across the Beartooth Mountains.  There is no real plot.  The shepherds are not interviewed and very little is revealed about who they are.  They are men of few words so mostly the only sound heard is the constant baas of the sheep.  One of the shepherds does yell at the sheep, usually to curse at them for wandering off.  It is only at the end of the documentary that it is revealed that this was the last time that the shepherds herded their sheep and that their ranch, after 104 years of operation, closed the following year.

The scenery is often amazing and the documentary works as a record of and a tribute to a dying way of life.  Sweetgrass does not attempt to explain why these men do the work that they do or why the ranch is finally having to close.  It is a pure documentary, with no outside commentary, making it both enlightening and frustrating.  How much you enjoy Sweetgrass will depend on how much patience you have for baaing sheep.

A Movie A Day #81: The Great White Hype (1996, directed by Reginald Hudlin)

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The Rev. Fred Sultan (Samuel L. Jackson) has a problem.  He is the richest and the best known fight promoter in America but the current (and undefeated) heavyweight champion is just too good.  No one is paying to watch James “The Grim Reaper” Roper (Damon Wayans) fight because Roper always wins.  Sultan has a plan, though.  Before Roper turned professional, he lost a fight to Terry Conklin (Peter Berg).  Conklin has long since retired from boxing and is now a heavy metal, progressive musician.  Sultan convinces Conklin to come out of retirement and face Roper in a rematch.  Since Conklin is white and Roper is black, Sultan stands to make a killing as white boxing fans get swept up in all the hype about Conklin being the latest “great white hope.”

In the days leading up to the fight, crusading journalist Mitchell Kane (Jeff Goldblum) attempts to expose the crooked Sultan before getting seduced into his inner circle.  Meanwhile, boxer Marvin Shabazz (Michael Jace) and his manager, Hassan El Rukk’n (Jamie Foxx), unsuccessfully pursue a match with Roper.  Conklin gets back into shape while Roper eats ice cream and watches Dolemite.

In its attempt to satirize boxing, The Great White Hype runs into a huge problem.  The fight game is already so shady that it is beyond satire.  This was especially true in the 90s, when the The Great White Hype was first released.  (Even more than the famous Larry Holmes/Gerry Cooney title fight, The Great White Hype’s obvious inspiration was the heavily promoted, two-minute fight between Mike Tyson and Peter McNeeley.)  The Great White Hype is a very busy film but nothing in it can match Oliver McCall’s mental breakdown in the middle of his fight with Lennox Lewis, Andrew Golota twice fighting Riddick Bowe and twice getting disqualified for low blows, or Mike Tyson biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear.

The Great White Hype has an only in the 90s supporting cast, featuring everyone from Jon Lovitz to Cheech Marin to, for some reason, Corbin Bernsen.  Damon Wayans is the least convincing heavyweight champion since Tommy Morrison essentially played himself in Rocky V.  The Rev. Sultan was meant to be a take on Don King and Samuel L. Jackson was a good pick for the role but the real Don King is so openly corrupt and flamboyant that he’s almost immune to parody.

When it comes to trying to take down Don King, I think Duke puts it best.

A Movie A Day #80: The Palermo Connection (1990, directed by Francesco Rosi)

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Carmine Bonavia (James Belushi) is an idealistic New York City councilman who wants to be mayor.  Despite an easily understood slogan — “Make A Difference!” — his reform campaign is running behind in the polls.  Having nothing to lose, Carmine announces that he supports the legalization of drugs.  By taking out the profit motive, the Sicilian Mafia will no longer have any incentive to sell drugs in the inner city.  Carmine shoots to top of the polls.  Now leading by 11%, Carmine marries his campaign manager (Mimi Rogers) and returns to his ancestral home of Sicily for a combination honeymoon and fact-finding tour.  The Mafia, realizing that Carmine is serious about legalizing drugs, conspires to frame him for the murder of a flower boy.  If that doesn’t work, they are willing to resort to other, more permanent, methods to prevent Carmine from ever becoming mayor.

The Palermo Connection is an unfairly overlooked film from Francesco Rosi, an Italian director who specialized in political controversy.  Though The Palermo Connection was sold as a thriller, Rosi was more interested in showing how organized crime, big business, government corruption, the war on drugs, and the poverty of the inner cities are all intricately connected.  When Carmine arrives in Palermo, Rosi contrasts the outer beauty of Sicily with the desperate lives of the junkies living there.  The pace may be too slow for action movie fans but Rosi gives the audience much to think about.  This is probably the last film you would ever expect to star James Belushi but he gives a strong and committed performance as Carmine.

The Palermo Connection, which was co-written by Gore Vidal, is a good film that predates The Wire in its examination of how greed, drugs, poverty, and racism all come together to victimize the most marginalized members of society.