Category Archives: Film Review

Ghosts of Sundance Past: Last Night At The Alamo (dir by Eagle Pennell)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Sundance Film Festival is currently underway in Utah.  For the next few days, I’ll be taking a look at some of the films that have previously won awards at Sundance.

1983’s Last Night At The Alamo is the epitome of an indie film.  Filmed in black-and-white and populated with performers who possess a raw authenticity, Last Night of the Alamo takes place over the course of one long day and night.

A seedy Houston bar known as The Alamo is set to close down and the regulars come by for their final drinks.  It’s definitely a blue collar bar, a place where the conversations are loud and it seems like there’s always a possibility that a fight could break out at any minute.  Claude (Lou Perryman) shows up after getting kicked out by his wife and spends a good deal of the movie yelling and cursing into a telephone.  Ichabod (Steve Mattila), a young exterminator, spends almost the entire movie arguing with his girlfriend, Mary (Tina-Bess Hubbard).  Steve (J. Michael Hammond) is an adult who still has the personality of a high school bully.  For all the arguing and the taunting and the cursing that one hears over the course of the film, it’s also obvious that the regulars at the Alamo have formed a community of sorts.  No one is surprised when Claude starts yelling into the telephone.  That’s just Claude being Claude and he’s allowed to have his breakdown in peace.  As long as he doesn’t interrupt anyone else’s drinking, he’ll be tolerated.  It’s a very Texas attitude but then again, Last Night At The Alamo is a very Texas film.

It was written by Kim Henkel, who is probably best-known for writing the screenplay for the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  (Henkel also appears in the film.)  Director Eagle Pennell was one of the pioneers of the Texas film scene, making independent films about life in his home state.  (Robert Redford has said that one of the main reasons he started the Sundance Film Festival was because he was impressed with Pennell’s films and wanted to create something that would bring attention to indie filmmakers like Pennell.)  Much like many of the characters in Last Night At The Alamo, Pennell struggled with alcoholism and his promising career fizzled out as a result.  He died at the age of 49.  Legend has it that, shortly before his death, he was seen standing on a Houston streetcorner with a sign asking for either “a rich woman or a warm beer.”  Again, it’s a very Texas story.

The majority of the characters in Last Night At The Alamo look up to the bar’s best-known regular, Cowboy Regan (Sonny Carl Davis).  Cowboy is handsome and friendly, with a quick smile and a confident manner that makes him stand-out amongst the regulars at the Alamo.  He presents himself as being successful and connected and he claims that he has a friend in Austin who is going to save The Alamo from demolition.  Deep down, Cowboy is just as desperate as everyone else at the bar but he does a far better job of hiding it.  The others look up to him not so much because they believe his stories but because they want to believe them.

It’s an almost plotless film but it does a great job of capturing my home state, with its blue collar culture and its frequent embrace of hucksters like Cowboy.  Watching the film, one can see why it’s a favorite of Richard Linklater’s.  It’s a melancholy film in many regards.  Most of the characters don’t have much going for themselves.  But they do have their bar and they have the community that they bult for themselves.  The Alamo may be closing but life will continue just as surely as Ichabod and Mary will start and end every day yelling at each other.

Last Night At The Alamo was a prize winner at the 1984 Sundance Film Festival, winning the Dramatic Jury Prize.  It can be found, in all of its grainy black-and-white glory, on YouTube.

Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Goodfellas (dir by Martin Scorsese)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1990 and continuously acclaimed ever since, Goodfellas did not win the Oscar for Best Picture.

I’m always a bit surprised whenever I remember that.  Goodfellas didn’t win Best Picture?  That just doesn’t seem right.  It’s not the other films nominated that year were bad but Goodfellas was so brilliant that it’s hard to imagine someone actually voting for something else.  Seriously, it’s hard to think of a film that has been more influential than Goodfellas.  Every gangster film with a soundtrack of kitschy tunes from the 6os and 70s owes huge debt to Goodfellas.  Every actor who has ever been cast as a wild and out-of-control psycho gangster owes a debt to Joe Pesci’s performance as Tommy DeVito.  When Ray Liotta passed away two years ago, we all immediately heard him saying, “I always wanted to be a gangster.”  Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway remains the epitome of the ruthless gangster.  For many, Paul Sorvino’s neighborhood godfather redefined what it meant to be a crime boss.  Lorraine Bracco made such an impression as Karen Hill that it somehow seemed appropriate that she was one of the first people cast in The Sopranos, a show that itself would probably have not existed if not for Goodfellas.  Frank Sivero, Samuel L. Jackson, Tobin Bell, Debi Mazer, Vincent Gallo, Ileana Douglas, Frank Vincent, Tony Sirico, Michael Imperioli, Tony Darrow, Mike Starr, Chuck Low, all of them can be seen in Goodfellas.  It’s a film that many still consider to be the best of Martin Scorsese’s legendary career.  Who can forget Robert De Niro smoking that cigarette while Sunshine of Your Love blared on the soundtrack?  Who can forget “Maury’s wigs don’t come off!” or “Rossi, you are nothing but whore!?”  Who can forget the cheery Christmas music playing in the background while De Niro’s Jimmy Conway grows more and more paranoid after pulling off the biggest heist of his career?

Plus, it’s a Christmas movie!

And yet, it did not win Best Picture.

Myself, whenever I’m sitting behind a garbage truck in traffic, I immediately start to hear the piano coda from Layla.  For that matter, whenever I see a helicopter in the sky, I flash back to a coke-addled Henry Hill getting paranoid as he tries to pick up his brother from the hospital.  Whenever I see someone walking across the street in the suburbs, I remember the scene where Henry coolly pistol-whips the country club guy and then tells Karen to hide his gun.  I always remember Karen saying that she knows that many of her best friends would have run off as soon as their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide but “it turned me on.”  It would have turned me on as well.  Henry might be a gangster and his friends might be murderers but he doesn’t make any apologies for who he is, unlike everyone else in the world.

But it did not win Best Picture.

How many people have imitated Joe Pesci saying, “How am I funny?”  How many times did Pesci and Frank Vincent have to listen to people telling them to “go home and get your fucking shinebox?”  A lot of people remember the brutality of the scene where Pesci and De Niro team up to attack Vincent’s crude gangster but I always remember the sound of Donavon’s Atlantis playing on the soundtrack.

And then there’s Catherine Scorsese, showing up as Tommy’s mom and cooking for everyone while Vincent struggles to escape from the trunk of a car.  “He is content to be a jerk,” Tommy says about Henry Hill.  Just a few hours earlier, Tommy was apologizing to Henry for getting blood on his floor.

Goodfellas is a fast-paced look at organized crime, spanning from the 50s to the early 80s.  Ray Liotta plays Henry Hill, who goes from idolizing gangsters to being a gangster to ultimately fearing his associates after he gets busted for dealing drugs.  It’s a dizzying film, full of so many classic scenes and lines that it feels almost pointless to try to list them all here or to pretend like whoever is reading this review doesn’t remember the scene where the camera pans through the club and we meet the members of the crew.  (“And then there was Pete The Killer….”)  Goodfellas is a film that spend two hours showing us how much fun being a gangster can be and then thirty minutes showing us just how bad it can get when you’re high on coke, the police are after you, and you’ve recently learned that your associates are willing to kill even their oldest friends.  No matter how many times I watch Goodfellas, I always get very anxious towards the end of the film.  With the music pounding and the camera spinning, with Henry looking for helicopters, and with all of his plans going wrong over the course of one day, it’s almost a relief when Bo Dietl points that gun at Henry’s head and yells at him, revealing that Henry has been captured by the cops and not the Gambinos.  Karen desperately running through the house, flushing drugs and hiding a gun in her underwear, always leaves me unsettled.  It’s such a nice house but now, everything is crashing down.

There’s a tendency to compare Goodfellas to The Godfather, as their both films that re-imagine American history and culture through the lens of the gangster genre.  I think they’re both great but I also think that they are ultimately two very different films.  If The Godfather is sweeping and operatic, Goodfellas is the film that reminds us that gangsters also live in the suburbs and go to cookouts and that their wives take care of the kids and watch movies while the FBI searches their home.  If The Godfather is about the bosses, Goodfellas is about the blue collar soldiers.  The Godfather represents what we wish the Mafia was like while Goodfellas represents the reality.

Goodfellas is one of the greatest films ever made but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to Dances With Wolves, a film that left audiences feeling good as opposed to anxious.  To be honest, Martin Scorsese losing Best Director to Kevin Costner feels like an even bigger injustice than Goodfellas losing Best Picture.  One can understand the desire to reward Dances With Wolves, a film that attempts to correct a decades worth of negative stereotypes about Native Americans.  But Scorsese’s direction was so brilliant that it’s truly a shame that he didn’t win and that Lorraine Bracco didn’t win Best Supporting Actress.  It’s also a shame that Ray Liotta wasn’t nominated for playing Henry Hill.  At least Joe Pesci won an Oscar for redefining what it meant to be a gangster.

Goodfellas is proof that the best film doesn’t always win at the Oscars.  But it’s also proof that a great film doesn’t need an Oscar to be remembered.

Hot Shots! (1991, directed by Jim Abrahams)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

There are a lot of reasons why it’s hard to take Top Gun seriously but, for me, the biggest problem is that I’ve seen Hot Shots!  Directed by Jim Abrahams, Hot Shots! does for Top Gun what Airplane! did for disaster movies.

Charlie Sheen plays Topper Harley, the hot shot Navy Pilot who is haunted by the death of his father.  (“I’ve even got my father’s eyes,” Topper says before revealing that he carries them around in a cigarette case.)  Topper has left the Navy and is living in a teepee with the Old One.  Command Block (Kevin Dunn) asks Topper to return to the Navy to take part in Operation Sleepy Weasel.  Topper puts on a leather jacket and hops on a motorcycle.  The Old One tells Topper to pick up some batteries for his walkman.

Cary Elwes plays Kent Gregory, who says that Topper is not safe in the air.  Valeria Golino plays Ramada, the psyciatrist who helps Topper deal with his father issues.  Jon Cryer is Washout, who has wall-eyed vision.  Kristy Swanson is Bo, the only female pilot.  William O’Leary is the pilot who has the perfect life and wife but who everyone calls “Dead Meat.”  And finally Lloyd Bridges is Admiral Tug Benson, who has never successfully landed a plane and who has suffered and recovered from almost every war wound imaginable.  Tug is clueless but he loves America and his admiral’s hat.

Hot Shots! is one of the better parody films to come out in the wake of Airplane!  Charlie Sheen’s limitations as a dramatic actor actually made him a good comedic actor and Cary Elwes does a decent Val Kilmer imitation.  Some of the jokes have definitely aged better than others.  In 1991, Valeria Golino singing on a piano automatically brought to mind Michelle Pfieffer in The Fabolous Baker Boys but does anyone remember that film (or that scene) in 2025?  (The 9 1/2 Weeks scene is even more of a distant memory to most but Valeria Golino is so appealing in those scenes that most viewers — well, most male viewers — won’t mind.  In this case, the parody is far more successful than the original.)  Hot Shots! is at its best when imitating Top Gun‘s kinetic, music video-inspired style.  The mix of quick-cut editing and ludicrous dialogue is hard to resist.  After watching Charlie Sheen dance on his motorcycle and Cary Elwes explain what a chafing dish is for, it’s hard to take Top Gun seriously ever again.

The Films of 2024: Woman Of The Hour (dir by Anna Kendrick)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This morning’s Oscar nominations were dominated by Netflix’s Emilia Perez, which picked up a total of 13 nominations.  Though it has yet to win an Oscar for Best Picture, Netflix has definitely picked up its game over the past few years.  Every year, there’s a major contender that’s produced and released by Netflix.  The Irishman, Marriage Story, Power of the Dog, Maestro, they were all films that were heavily pushed by Netflix.  This year, Netflix actually had many potential contenders but, in the end, it put its full weight behind Emilia Perez and it paid off this morning.  Whether it will pay off on Oscar night had yet to be seen.

Unfortunately, that means there a few Netflix films that got pushed to the side.  As many mentioned this morning, Angelina Jolie’s performance in Netflix’s Maria was ignored, despite having been viewed as an Oscar lock just a few months ago.  The Piano Lesson also failed to pick up a nomination for Danielle Deadwyler.  Myself, I wish that Netflix would have just spent a bit more time pushing a film called Woman Of The Hour.

Woman of the Hour is the directorial debut of Anna Kendrick and it’s about as far from the light-hearted world of Pitch Perfect as one can get.  Based on a true story, the 70s-set film features Kendrick as Sheryl Bradshaw, an aspiring actress who goes on The Dating Game and asks questions to three contestants, not knowing that Bachelor #3 is actually a serial killer named Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto).

The film jumps back and forth in time, mixing Sheryl’s appearance on the tacky game show with the horrific crimes of Rodney Alcala.  On the show, Sheryl grows frustrated with the stupid, pre-written questions that she’s been handed and instead, she starts asking her own questions.  The three “bachelors” are taken by surprise but only Alcala is able to keep up with Sheryl.  Separated from Sheryl and just hearing her questions, Alcala manages to sound like an intelligent and interesting human being.  (As with most serial killers, Alcala is a master manipulator and knows what to say to put people at ease.)  It’s only after Sheryl selects him and they have a face-to-face meeting that Sheryl comes to realize that Alcala is not the man he presented himself as being.

The film’s style might seem disjointed to some.  Woman of the Hour is full of flashbacks and flashforwards.  The empty glitz of the Dating Game and Sheryl’s refusal to play dumb for the approval of the show’s producers is contrasted with the brutality of Alcala’s crimes.  It’s a technique that builds a sense of dread and inevitability.  Sheryl may not know who Bachelor #3 is but we do and it’s hard not to worry when it becomes obvious that he’s the bachelor she’s going to pick.  Even more importantly, the film contrasts the show’s casual misogyny with Alcala’s own hatred of women.  Kendrick uses the film to comment on the everyday fears women navigate, from the casual sexism of the show’s producers to the outright danger of a predator like Rodney Alcala.  There’s a poignant scene where Sheryl encounters a casting director’s crass comments about her body, undoubtedly reflecting the real-life experiences Kendrick herself has faced.  (“I’m sure they look fine,” one smarmy producer says after Sheryl explains that she doesn’t do nude scenes.)  This is a thriller but it’s also a critique wrapped in suspense.

Woman of the Hour is a compelling watch, not just for its thrilling narrative but for its heart-wrenching look at the vulnerability of women in a predatory world.  Kendrick proves herself as a director with a voice, one that’s both fresh and deeply personal.   Woman of the Hour is a film worth 94 minutes of your time.

Scenes That I Love: “That’s Bird Seed!” from The Oscar

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Have you ever wondered what it takes to win an Oscar?  The 1966 film, The Oscar, revealed to audiences just how sleazy a world Hollywood can be.  Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd) does everything he can to win an Oscar and he doesn’t care who he hurts!  But fear not — Hollywood may not be perfect but it has no room for someone like Frankie Fane!  At the end of the movie, a man named Frank does win the Oscar but his last name is Sinatra and Frankie Fane is left humiliated.  That’ll teach him to try to pull one over on the Academy!

The Oscar is an incredibly silly film but it’s also a lot of fun.  In this scene that I love, Frankie’s best friend — played by Tony Bennett, in both his first and final film — confronts Frankie about the type of star that he’s become.

“That’s birdseed!”

Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Thin Red Line (dir by Terrence Malick)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Based on a novel by James Jones (and technically, a sequel of sorts to From Here To Eternity), 1998’s The Thin Red Line is one of those Best Picture nominees that people seem to either love or hate.

Those who love it point out that the film is visually stunning and that director Terrence Malick takes a unique approach to portraying both the Battle of Guadalcanal and war in general.  Whereas Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan told a rather traditional story about the tragedy of war (albeit with much more blood than previous World War II films), The Thin Red Line used the war as a way to consider the innocence of nature and the corrupting influence of mankind.  “It’s all about property,” one shell-shocked soldier shouts in the middle of a battle and later, as soldiers die in the tall green grass of the film’s island setting, a baby bird hatches out of an egg.  Malick’s film may have been an adaptation of James Jones’s novel but its concerns were all pure Malick, right down to the philosophical voice-overs that were heard throughout the film.

Those who dislike the film point out that it moves at a very deliberate pace and that we don’t really learn much about the characters that the film follows.  In fact, with everyone wearing helmets and running through the overgrown grass, it’s often difficult to tell who is who.  (One gets the feeling that deliberate on Malick’s point.)  They complain that the story is difficult to follow.  They point out that the parade of star cameos can be distracting.  And they also complain that infantrymen who are constantly having to look out for enemy snipers would not necessarily be having an inner debate about the spirituality of nature.

I will agree that the cameos can be distracting.  John Cusack, for example, pops up out of nowhere, plays a major role for a few minutes, and then vanishes from the film.  The sight of John Travolta playing an admiral is also a bit distracting, if just because Travolta’s mustache makes him look a bit goofy.  George Clooney appears towards the end of the film and delivers a somewhat patronizing lecture to the men under his command.  Though his role was apparently meant to be much larger, Adrien Brody ends up two lines of dialogue and eleven minutes of screentime in the film’s final cut.

That said, The Thin Red Line works for me.  The film is not meant to be a traditional war film and it’s not necessarily meant to be a realistic recreation of the Battle of Guadalcanal.  Instead, it’s a film that plays out like a dream and, when viewed a dream, the philosophical voice overs and the scenes of eerie beauty all make sense.  Like the majority of Malick’s films, The Thin Red Line is ultimately a visual poem.  The plot is far less important than how the film is put together.  It’s a film that immerses you in its world.  Even the seeming randomness of the film’s battles and deaths fits together in a definite patten.  It’s a Malick film.  It’s not for everyone but those who are attuned to Malick’s wavelength will appreciate it even if they don’t understand it.

And while Malick does definitely put an emphasis on the visuals, he still gets some good performances out of his cast.  Nick Nolte is chilling as the frustrated officer who has no hesitation about ordering his men to go on a suicide mission.  Elias Koteas is genuinely moving as the captain whose military career is ultimately sabotaged by his kind nature.  Sean Penn is surprisingly convincing as a cynical sergeant while Jim Caviezel (playing the closest thing the film has to a main character) gets a head start on humanizing messianic characters by playing the most philosophical of the soldiers.  Ben Chaplin spends most of his time worrying about his wife back home and his fantasies give us a glimpse of what’s going on in America while its soldiers fight and die overseas.

The Thin Red Line was the first of Terrence Malick’s films to be nominated for Best Picture and it was one of three World War II films to be nominated that year.  However, it lost to Shakespeare In Love.

Stripes (1981, directed by Ivan Reitman)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Bill Murray and Harold Ramis join the army.

Wait, that can’t be right, can it?  Bill Murray and Harold Ramis were cinematic anarchists.  Early in his career, Bill Murray was the ultimate smart aleck slacker who did not have any respect for authority.  Harold Ramis was hardly a slacker but he came across as someone more likely to be marching on the Pentagon than guarding it.  Stripes is one of the ultimate examples of a comedy where the laughs come from things  that don’t seem to go together suddenly going together.

John Winger (Murray) at least has a reason to join the army.  He has a dead end job.  He has just broken up with his girlfriend.  The country appears to be at peace so why not spend four years in the Army?  It’s harder to understand why John’s friend, Russell (Ramis), also decides to enlist, other than to hang out with John.  Along with Ox (John Candy), Cruiser (John Diehl), Psycho (Conrad Dunn), and Elm0 (Judge Reinhold), they enlist and go through basic training under the watchful eye of Sgt. Hulka (Warren Oates).  John and Russell go from treating everything like a joke to invading East Germany in a tank that’s disguised as an RV.  They also meet the two sexiest and friendliest MPs in the service, Stella (P.J. Soles) and Louise (Sean Young).  Russell goes from being an proto-hippie who teaches ESL to asking John if he thinks he would make a good officer.  John goes from not taking anything seriously to picking up a machine gun and rescuing his fellow soldiers.

It’s a comedy that shouldn’t work but it does.  It’s actually one of my favorite comedies, full of memorable lines (“Lighten up, Frances.”), and stupidly funny situations.  The cast is full of future comedy legends and P.J. Soles shows that she deserved to be a bigger star.  This was early in Bill Murray’s film career and he was still largely getting by on his SNL persona but, in his confrontations with Hulka, Murray got a chance to show that he could handle drama.  With all the comedic talent in the film, it’s Warren Oates who gets the biggest laughs because he largely plays his role straight.  Sgt. Hulka is a drill sergeant who cares about his men and who knows how to inspire and teach  but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about having to deal with a collection of misfits.  (Watch his face when Cruiser says he enlisted so he wouldn’t get drafted.)

The movie does get strange when the action goes from the U.S. to Germany.  What starts out as Animal-House-In-The-Army instead becomes an almost straight action movie and the movie itself sometimes feels like a recruiting video.  Join the Army and maybe you’ll get to steal an RV with PJ Soles.  That would have been enough to get me to enlist back in the day.  But the combination of Murray, Ramis, and Oates makes Stripes a comedy that can be watched over and over again.

The Films of 2025: The Calendar Killer (dir by Adolfo J. Kolmerer)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Germany is living in a state of terror.  A serial killer known as The Calendar Killer has been brutally murdering people across the country.  The killer leaves the date of the murder on the wall, written in his victim’s blood.  His victims are given the choice between killing their husband or being killed themselves.  Hey, Calendar Kill — not everyone’s a murderer, okay!?  Seriously, what a jerk.

(As a sidenote, who knew that Saw was popular enough to inspire a copycat in Germany?  Cinema truly is the international art form.)

A few days ago, Klara (Luise Heyer) woke to a terrifying message on a wall, telling her that either she or husband would die on December 6th.  Now, it’s December 6th and Klara is walking home at night.  She calls a helpline for women who are outside and alone at night.  Jules (Sabin Tambrea) answers.  Even though Jules is soft-spoken and careful to choose his words with sensitivity, Klara is hesitant to tell her about either the Calendar Killer or her husband.  When Jules finally coaxes the details out of her, she reveals that she is married to Martin (Friedrich Mucke).  Martin is an prominent politician but he’s an abusive husband, one who forced Klara to take part in a humiliating orgy that was apparently inspired by watching Eyes Wide Shut one too many times.

(Saw and Eyes Wide Shut, we now know what’s inspiring the Germans.)

Klara is not only fleeing the Calendar Killer but her husband as well.  When she attempts to commit suicide, Jules begs her to live and to keep fighting.  Jules talks about his own tragic past, about how his wife committed suicide and he lost a child in a fire that broke out the same night.  Even though Jules is not supposed to leave his apartment and is having quite a few personal issues of his own, he sets out to find Klara.

The Calendar Killer gets off to a good start but it goes off the rails as it progresses.  There’s a few too many coincidences and the big twist is one that you will see coming from miles away.  The problem with the twist isn’t that it’s predictable as much as it’s one that makes less and less sense the more that you think about it.  It makes you realize just how implausible the whole Calendar Killer thing is.  There are a few genuinely creepy scenes and Luise Heyer is a sympathetic heroine but, in the end, the film is never as thought-provoking or emotionally moving as it presents itself as being.  The film attempts to end on a note of empowerment but it doesn’t quite feel earned.  If the film had fully embraced its grindhouse potential, it would have been an entertaining B-movie with a worthy message.  Instead, it strikes an uneasy balance between being a bloody horror film and being a message film and, as a result, it really doesn’t feel like it truly commits to either.

It’s a shame.  The film definitely had potential but, in the end, it just doesn’t come together.

Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Insider (dir by Michael Mann)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1999 Best Picture Nominee, The Insider, the American media takes a beating.

Al Pacino plays Lowell Bergman.  Bergman is a veteran newsman who, for several years, has been employed as a producer at 60 Minutes.  He is a strong believer in the importance of the free press and he’s proud to be associated with both 60 Minutes and CBS News.  He’s one of the few people who can manage the famously prickly correspondent, Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer).  When we first see Bergman, he and Wallace are in the Middle East and arranging a tense interview with the head of Hezbollah.  It’s easy to see that Bergman is someone who will go anywhere and take any risk to get a story.  It’s also apparent that Bergman thinks that the people that he works with feel the same way.

That all changes when Bergman meets Jeffery Wigand (Russell Crowe), a recently fired tobacco company executive who initially agrees to serve as a consultant for one of Bergman’s story but who leaves Bergman intrigued when he reveals that, due to a strict confidentiality agreement, he’s not allowed to discuss anything about his time as an executive.  As the tobacco companies are currently being sued by ambitious state attorney generals like Mississippi’s Mike Moore (who plays himself in the film), Bergman suspects that Wigand knows something that the companies don’t want revealed.

And, of course, Bergman is right.  Wigand was fired for specifically objecting to his company’s effort to make cigarettes more addictive, something that the tobacco industry had long claimed it wasn’t doing.  Wigand’s pride was hurt when he was fired but he knows that breaking the confidentiality agreement will mean losing his severance package and also possibly losing his marriage to Liane (Diane Venora) as well.  However, Wigand is angered by the heavy-handed techniques that his former employer uses to try to intimidate him.  He suspects that he’s being followed and he can’t even work out his frustrations by hitting a few golf balls without someone watching him.  When Wigand starts to get threats and even receives a bullet in the mail, he decides to both testify in court and give an interview to Wallace and 60 Minutes.

The only problem is that CBS, after being pressured by their lawyers and facing the risk of taking a financial loss in an upcoming sell, decides not to run the interview.  Bergman is outraged and assumes that both Mike Wallace and veteran 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall) will support him.  Instead, both Wallace and Hewitt side with CBS.  Left out in the cold is Jeffrey Wigand, who has sacrificed almost everything and now finds himself being attacked as merely a disgruntled employee.

Directed by Michael Mann and based on a true story, The Insider is what is usually described as being “a movie for adults.”  Instead of dealing with car chases and super villains and huge action set pieces, The Insider is a film about ethics and what happens when a major media outlet like CBS News fails to live up to those ethics.  (No one is surprised when the tobacco company tries to intimidate and silence Wigand but the film makes clear that people — or at least people in the 90s — expected and hoped for more from the American press.)  Wigand puts his trust in Bergman and 60 Minutes largely because he believed Bergman’s promise that he would be allowed to tell his story.  It’s a promise that Bergman made in good faith but, in the end, everyone from the CBS executives to the tobacco companies is more interested in protecting their own financial future than actually telling the truth.  Wigand loses his family and his comfortable lifestyle and Bergman loses his faith in the network of Edward R. Murrow.  It’s not a particularly happy film but it is a well-made and thought-provoking one.

Pacino and Crowe both give excellent performances in the two lead roles.  Pacino, because he spends most of the film outraged, has the flashier role while Crowe plays Wigand as a rather mild-mannered man who suddenly finds himself in the middle of a national news story.  (Crowe’s performance here is one of his best, precisely because it really is the opposite of what most people expect from him.)  Crowe does not play Wigand as being a crusader but instead, as an ordinary guy who at times resents being put in the position of a whistleblower.  (Director Mann does not shy away from showing how Bergman manipulates, the reluctant Wigand into finally testifying, even if Bergman’s motives were ultimately not malicious.)  That said, the strongest performance comes from Christopher Plummer, who at first seems to be playing Mike Wallace as being the epitome of the pompous television newsman but who eventually reveals the truth underneath Wallace’s sometimes fearsome exterior.

The Insider was nominated for Best Picture.  Somehow, it lost to American Beauty.

Down Periscope (1996, directed by David S. Ward)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

After being passed over twice as a result of both a “brushing incident” with a Russian submarine and an embarrassing tattoo, Lt. Commander Thomas Dodge (Kelsey Grammer, playing Dodge as being the laid back opposite of Frasier Crane) has finally been promoted and given his own submarine to command.  The catch is that the submarine is a rusty piece of junk from World War II and he’s been assigned a crew of misfits.  Captain Dodge is to take part in a war game.  Admiral Winslow (Rip Torn) wants Dodge to prove that even an out-of-commission submarine can be dangerous by infiltrating Charleston Harbor undetected and then blowing up a dummy warship in Norfolk Harbor.  If Dodge is successful, he’ll get a nuclear submarine to command.  If he fails, he’ll be assigned of desk job and probably leave the Navy.  While the sympathetic Winslow encourages Dodge to “think like a pirate,” the antagonistic Admiral Graham (Bruce Dern) pulls out all the stops to make sure Dodge fails.

I imagine that Down Periscope was probably pitched as Police Academy In The Navy and it follows the general rules of the Police Academy films, right down to casting Lauren Holly as the one woman on the submarine who has to overcome her own insecurities and prove herself to all the men.  Unfortunately, none of the misfits on the crew are as memorable as the cadets from Police Academy and the movie’s attempts to mix juvenile humor with suspenseful naval action are not at all successful.  Having Rob Schneider go totally over the top as Dodge’s second-in-command while having William H. Macy give a serious performance as the captain assigned to prevent Dodge from reaching the harbor indicates that Down Periscope has a definite identity problem.

Harry Dean Stanton plays Howard, who is the submarine’s chief engineer and who uses whiskey as a fuel to keep the submarine moving.  Toby Huss has a few amusing moments as the electrician who keeps electrocuting himself.  Grammer, Dern, and Macy have more than proven their talents in other projects and Rip Torn will always be remembered for bringing Artie to profane life on The Larry Sanders Show.  Director David Ward also directed Major League and wrote The Sting.  A lot of talent went into making Down Periscope so it’s a shame the film wasn’t more memorable.