Above Suspicion (1995, directed by Steven Schachter)

Posted on July 11, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Dempsey Cain (Christopher Reeve) is a former test pilot turned homicide detective who ends up getting shot because of the incompetence of another cop, a patrolman named Nick Cain (Edward Kerr). Nick also happens to be Dempsey’s younger brother. While Dempsey’s in the hospital, Nick has an affair with Dempsey’s wife, Gail (Kim Cattrall). When a now-paralyzed Dempsey returns home, he deals with his depression by drinking and contemplating suicide. He tells Gail and Nick that he no longer wants to live but that his life insurance policy doesn’t cover suicide. He comes up with a plan for his wife and brother to stage a break-in and murder him. Because Gail and Nick are secretly lovers and want Dempsey out of the way, they agree. However, it turns out that Dempsey isn’t as naive as they assumed and he still has a few tricks of his own. It looks like the perfect murder but Detective Alan Reinhardt (Joe Mantegna) is determined to solve the case.

Produced for HBO, Above Suspicion is a clever and twisty film noir that, unfortunately, never escapes the shadow of Reeve’s real-life tragedy. Just a week after the film first aired on HBO, Christopher Reeve was suffered the spinal chord injury that left him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Knowing that Reeve would spend the final nine years of his life paralyzed from the neck down can make it difficult to watch Above Suspicion, which is unfortunate because this film features what might be Reeve’s best performance.

As an actor, Christopher Reeve was always typecast as Superman and he definitely missed out on some roles as a mistake. Above Suspicion makes clever use of Reeve’s good guy image but casting him as someone who everyone thinks is a hero but who actually has a very dark side to his personality. Everyone in the film thinks of Dempsey as being Superman but he instead reveals himself to be Lex Luthor. It was definitely a chance of pace role for Reeve and he really seems to enjoy playing a scheming villain for once. Watching the film today, it is obvious that he had enough talent that, if not for his injury, he probably would have eventually made an Alan Alda-style comeback that would have seen him settling into the role of being a much-in-demand character actor.

Interestingly, the clever script was written by William H. Macy, shortly before he found fame as Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo. The film is a clever homage to films like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Ring Twice and Christopher Reeve and Joe Mantegna are both fun to watch as they play their cat-and-mouse game. Despite the real-life tragedy that it unintentionally invokes, Above Suspicion is a clever and twisty thriller featuring a cast of talented actors at their best.

Film Review: Dispatched (dir by Gary Lee Vincent)

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Dispatched, which is currently on Prime, is a low-budget film about a cop named Carl Thomas (Jeff Moore) who has an anger problem and a bad reputation. Even though he makes a lot of arrests and gets a lot of criminals off the streets, his chief (Dean Cain) keeps having to reprimand him for using excessive force.

Anyway, one night, Carl is convinced to go to a revival meeting with some of his fellow police officers. Carl witnesses a faith healing and, overnight, becomes the world most committed and outspoken Christian. Suddenly, he’s able to give up his anger and now, whenever he arrests anyone, he treats them with compassion. He tells them to follow Christ and get their lives together. He goes down to the jail and he passes out bibles. And….

Well, actually, that’s pretty much the entire film. There’s really not much conflict to be found in Dispatched. Admittedly, Carl’s first wife does divorce him because she can’t handle his sudden zeal for religion but most of that happens off-screen. After the divorce, we don’t hear anything else about his ex-wife or his children from his first marriage. We’re also repeatedly told that Carl was violent before he witnessed that faith healing but again, we don’t seem much evidence of it. We do see Carl overreacting during a traffic stop and he definitely doesn’t come across as being the type of cop that anyone would want to deal with but, at the same time, the film shies away from showing us anything that could make us really dislike Carl. That’s a mistake on the filmmaker’s part. For a film about any type of redemption to work, you have to actually have to see some sort of difference between who the main character was before being redeemed and who the main character is afterwards.

That said, I can’t be too hard on Dispatched because, in the end, it’s a low budget message film. The underlying message itself — that anger can be just as much of an addiction as any drug and that anyone can be redeemed if they’re truly willing to do the work — is not a bad one. However, I think this is the type of movie that will be best appreciated by people who already agree with its religious theme. If you’re like me and you tend to be a bit skeptical, you’ll probably zone out once the faith healing begins. If you’re a believer in revival meetings and faith healings, you might have less of a problem with it all. This is a film that preaches to the choir. I doubt it will win over any nonbelievers but the choir might enjoy it and you know what? There’s nothing wrong that. The choir deserves to be entertained. The real Carl Thomas appears at the end of the film. He comes across as being sincere person, which is always a nice thing.

Anyway, Dispatched really wasn’t for me but I’m not going to criticize it the way I would a studio film with a 200 million dollar budget. It’s a well-intentioned film, one that was made for a very specific audience and while will probably be most appreciated by those who already share its worldview.

Mistrial (1996, directed by Heywood Gould)

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

When a NYPD cop and her partner are murdered, overworked and stressed-out Detective Steve Donohue (Bill Pullman) follows a trail of circumstantial evidence that leads him to the door of the cop’s ex-husband, a community activist named Eddie Rios (Jon Seda). Donohue’s attempt to arrest Rios goes terribly wrong and results in a shootout that leaves Rios’s second wife and bother dead before the handcuffs are eventually slapped on his wrists.

Rios may be the one on trial but Donohue is now the one facing judgment. With protesters lined up outside the courthouse and the city’s mayor (James Rebhorn) more interested in his own reelection than in the pursuit of justice, Donohue knows that the only way he’ll be vindicated is if Eddie Rios is convicted. Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. Rios’s sleazy attorney (played by Josef Sommer) gets most of the evidence tossed out of court on a technicality and it appears that Rios is going to walk free. That’s when Donohue decides to take the court itself hostage, pulls out a gun, and demands that Rios immediately be put on trial for a second time, with the jury hearing all of the evidence that was originally thrown out of court.

Mistrial is an example of the good-cop-pushed-over-the-edge genre. Up until a few years ago, this was a very popular genre. Today, of course, it feels tone deaf and it’s a lot more difficult to sympathize with a cop, even a fictional one, complaining about being restricted by the constitution. The main problem with Mistrial is that it’s established early on that Eddie Ramos is guilty so there’s no real tension as to whether Donohue is doing the right thing by demanding a second trial. If there had been some ambiguity about whether or not Ramos was the murderer that Donohue claims he is, it would have made the film much more interesting and less predictable. The other problem is that Bill Pullman is just too naturally earnest and clean-cut to be convincing as an overworked cop who has been pushed into doing something crazy. Remembering back to the 90s, I think someone like Gary Sinise or William L. Petersen could have pulled off the role but Pullman’s just not right for it.

Robert Loggia has a few good moments as Pullman’s sympathetic captain. This was the 2nd time that Pullman and Loggia co-starred together. The first time was in Independence Day. The 3rd time would be in Lost Highway, a film that’s as different from Mistrial as day is from night.

Film Review: Frances Ferguson (dir by Bob Byington)

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Frances Ferguson takes place in a town in Nebraska. As the film’s narrator (Nick Offerman) explains it, it’s a town where everyone knows everyone else. It’s a town where your mechanic knows your bartender and no one can really keep anything a secret for too long. For instance, it’s the type of town where there’s no way that a substitute teacher in her mid-20s is going to be able to get away with having an affair with a 16 year-old student.

The teacher in question is named Frances Ferguson (Kaley Wheeless). Frances wanders through her days in an apathetic haze. When she steps outside of her house, she sees her useless husband (Keith Poulson) masturbating in the car. When she spends time with her mother (Jennifer Prediger), she is criticized for every little thing. On the rare days when she gets called to teach, the students look down on her and Frances thinks about how little she knows about any of the subjects on which she’s giving instruction. Frances goes through her day holding back her emotions. She only screams on the inside and, when she does, only she and the viewing audience can hear.

Things start to look up when Frances teaches a biology class and notices a handsome but vacuous student named Jake (Jake French). When she finds out that Jake has been given detention, Frances volunteers to supervise him. When Frances flirts with him and the scene cuts way, the narrator asks us, “Was this a crime?”

(Yes, it was.)

Frances and Jake have a short-lived affair, though it doesn’t seem to be particularly passionate. If anything, Jake seems to be even more blase about it than Frances. Wearing her old cheerleader uniform, Frances meets Jake in a laundromat. “I’d never date a cheerleader,” Jake tells her. We, the viewers, notice that there are other people in the laundromat. Does Frances want to get caught?

Get caught, she does. “This is the last time we see Jake,” the narrators tells us as Jake fades away. Frances, meanwhile, sits in court. Her mother comes to the trial and tells her that her clothes make her look fat. Frances is convicted and sent to prison. Her mom brings her a chocolate cupcake for her birthday. Frances announces that she’s allergic to chocolate before taking a big bite and then pretending to die. “Get off that dirty floor!” her mother orders her.

You may getting the impression that Frances Ferguson is a strange film and I supposed it is. It’s a comedy but it’s an extremely deadpan comedy, with most of the humor coming from Frances’s seeming apathy to ever single thing that happens to her. It’s not that Frances doesn’t have feelings or emotions. We hear her inner scream enough times to know that she’s not as apathetic as she seems. It’s just that Frances is so consumed with small town ennui that she realizes it’s pointless to react one way or the other. Life is what it is and it continues regardless of how annoying it may all be. Whether she screams on the inside or on the outside, she’ll still have to wake up every morning in the same situation. One day, Frances Ferguson was a teacher. The next day, she was a prisoner. And the day after that, she was on parole and a minor celebrity. (“You’re that teacher!” is a phrase that she continually hears.) What happens, happens.

Here’s the thing …. though it may not sound like it from my description of the plot, Frances Ferguson is an incredibly funny film. A lot of that is due to Nick Offerman’s performance as the snarky narrator. (The narrator has a tendency to wander off topic.) A lot of that has to do with the performance of Kaley Wheeless, who perfectly communicates Frances’s suppressed irritation. Over the course of the film, Frances has to deal with a lot of people who, if not for her one mistake, she would have otherwise never had to deal with. Some of them get on her nerves and some of them — well, two of them — provide her with some comfort. I loved David Krumholtz’s performance as a beleagured but optimistic group leader. Martin Starr also gets a nice bit at the end, though it would be too much of spoiler to say anything else about his role. I also enjoyed the performances of Jack Marshall and Yoko Lawing, as the two detectives who investigate the charges against Frances and who explain that, because of TV cop shows, they can no longer get away with playing good cop/bad cop.

Frances Ferguson is good film. It’s also a short one, clocking in at just 74 minutes. To be honest, it’s the perfect running time for the story that this film tells. We follow Frances’s story for just as long as we need to. Frances Ferguson is on Prime so check it out.

Film Review: Burning Kentucky (dir by Bethany Brooke Anderson)

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Burning Kentucky, which I just finished watching on Prime, is a film that has its own unique vibe. You’re either going to connect with this frequently surreal film or you’re not. If you do connect with it, you’re going to be aware that, while the film has its narrative flaws, it also has moments of visual brilliance. If you don’t connect with it, you’ll probably dismiss it as just being another pretentious revenge thriller. Burning Kentucky currently has a rating of 4.1 over that imdb, not because it’s a bad film but because it’s just not a film for everyone. It’s not a crowd pleaser but it we’ve learned anything recently it’s that crowds suck.

Burning Kentucky takes place in the hills of Harlan County, Kentucky. We find ourselves observing two families. One family lives in a shack and brews moonshine. They eat whatever animals they catch in the wilderness and about the only thing that’s vaguely modern about them is the camera that their daughter, Aria (played, in her film debut, by Emilie Dhir), carries with her. (And even that camera appears to be from the mid-20th century.) Aria also narrates the film, musing about life and death. In the country, she explains, people understand that death is a part of life. Regardless of any sentimental feelings, everything dies.

The other family is headed by an man named Jaxson (John Pyper-Ferguson). Jaxson is the country sheriff, so he’s a man of some importance. However, it’s also obvious that he’s a man who has long been on a downward spiral. He drinks too much and he spends most of his time cursing God and complaining about the local preacher, Abe (Andy Umberger). Jaxson has two sons. Wyatt (Nick McCallum) appears to be relatively stable. Rule (Nathan Sutton), on the other hand, is a junkie who lives in a shack that he shares with Jolene (Augie Duke). Jolene wants to be a singer. She wants to get off drugs. Rule, on the other hand, appears to be content to just slowly kill himself.

Whenever Wyatt can get away from his drunk father and his wasted brother, he spends his time with Aria. They’ve been in love for several years, ever since the night that Aria discovered Wyatt trapped in one of the traps that her family had set around their land. When we first see Aria and Wyatt together, they talk about how they met on the same night that they each lost their mother.

It takes a while to figure out just what exactly is going on in Burning Kentucky. The deliberately paced first half of the film freely hops from the past to the present and then back again. The camera glides over the misty mountains of Kentucky, stopping to linger on deserted houses and crumbling buildings. Everything seems to be suspended in a state of permanent decay. The wilderness appears to be both beautiful and threatening at the same time and the imagery, when combined with Aria’s narration, is often surreal. The first half of the film plays out as if we’re watching a filmed dream.

Unfortunately, the second half of the film is a bit more conventional. Once we finally discover who everyone is relative to everyone else and after we learn what happened in the past, the film settles down to become a standard revenge thriller, albeit one that’s very much concerned with the concepts of guilt, redemption, and human nature. Still, the Kentucky hills remains atmospheric and dream-like and the well-selected performers — particularly Augie Duke and John Pyper-Ferguson — continue to bring their haunted characters to life.

As I said, this isn’t necessarily a film for everyone. The film’s ending will leave a lot of people feeling perplexed but that’s okay. A story like this doesn’t need a neat ending. In fact, Burning Kentucky is a film that demands to end on a hint of messiness and ambiguity. I liked Burning Kentucky. You might like it too.

Film Review: Emerson Heights (dir by Jennifer Hook)

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Earlier tonight, on Prime, I watched a new film called Emerson Heights. (Well, newish. It came out in January.)

Emerson Heights tells the story of two people.

Cody McClain (played by Austin James, who also wrote the script and produced) is an aspiring actor who has recently moved out to Los Angeles with his mother and his little sister. He’s handsome and he’s charming but he’s also dorky enough that he can’t put together a last minute pool party. He’s only played a few small roles and is perhaps best known for appearing in a series of pretzel commercials. At least he’s not having to work at Starbucks.

Briley (Gatlin Green) is an aspiring singer. She does a killer version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow and she aspires to someday perform on Broadway.

Together …. THEY SOLVE CRIMES!

No, actually, they don’t. Instead, they just meet one day and fall in love. Unfortunately, Cody lives in Los Angeles while Briley lives in New York City but they’re determined to make it work. They promise to write to each other often and, whenever Briley can make it out to California, she and Cody spend every moment together. Briley fears that a long distance relationship won’t be able to survive but Cody promises her that it well.

However, can their relationship survive Cody suddenly becoming famous? When Cody starts getting bigger roles and more fans, it all starts to go to his head. While he’s shooting a spy film and hanging out with his seductive co-star, Haley Ryan (Amanda Grace Benitez), Briley is starring in a Broadway production of The Wizard of Oz and trying to figure out how to hold onto her job despite the fact that she’s just found out that she’s pregnant….

Emerson Heights is a pretty simple film. From the minute that we meet Haley and Cody’s smarmy agent (Matt Singletary), we know that they’re both going to try to lead Cody astray. We know that Cody’s going to struggle with temptation, just as surely as we know that Briley is going to be pressured to terminate her pregnancy. It may occasionally be predictable but predictability is actually a strength when it comes to a film like this. Emerson Heights is an unabashedly sentimental love story, a story about two people who belong together but who have to overcome 90-minutes worth of obstacles to reach each other. When you’re having to deal with news of riots, pandemics, and threats of war on a daily basis, the predictable but likable romance featured in a movie like Emerson Heights is actually rather comforting.

And make no mistake about it, this is a very likable film. Austin James and Gatlin Green are two appealing performers and they have a wonderful chemistry together. (It didn’t surprise me to discover that they’re married in real life.) They make for a sweet couple and they just seem as if they belong together. I also liked the enjoyably snarky performance of Amanda Grace Benitez as Briley’s potential rival for Cody’s affection. As played by Benitez, Haley seems to be having such a ball being bad that it’s fun to watch. If you’re going to be a villain in a film like this, you might as well enjoy yourself!

Anyway, Emerson Heights is on Prime. I enjoyed it.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004, directed by Stephen Hopkins)

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Peter Sellers was a brilliant actor and comedian while also being a childish and selfish human being who, because he was always performing, never really developed a personality of his own.

That’s the argument made by The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which stars Geoffrey Rush as Sellers. The film follows Sellers from his success with The Goon Show to his subsequent collaborations with Stanley Kubrick (Stanley Tucci) and Blake Edwards (John Lithgow). Sellers becomes an international star but remains a deeply unhappy person, cheating on his wives, emotionally abusing his son, and being difficult on set. The film makes the argument that that the only person that Sellers truly loved was his doting mother (played by Miriam Margoyles) and that, having been born into a show business family, performing was the only thing that he was capable of doing. Even the few times when he’s shown to be a decent father, husband, or friend, it’s suggested that he’s just acting the role. Rush plays Sellers as being someone who is incapable of understanding how other people think so, whenever he has to interact with them, he simply imitates what he’s seen others do. Just look at the scene where he attempts to flirt with Sofia Loren by grinning up at her like a character in a romantic comedy.

The problem with a film like this is that, because he’s portrayed as being so selfish and immature, it’s hard to make Peter Sellers into a character that you would want to spend any time with. The narrative goes from one Sellers tantrum to another. Stephen Hopkins livens things up by including fantasy sequences where Sellers is taunted by some of his best-known characters, driving home the point that there wasn’t much to Sellers beyond the characters that he played and reminding us of both Sellers’s talent and Geoffrey Rush’s as well. There are also frequent monologues from Rush, dressed up like the other characters in the movie and discussing their relationship with Peter Sellers. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Rush does a good job playing Stanley Tucci playing Stanly Kubrick but when he’s made up to look like Miriam Margoyles, the conceit gets too ridiculous to work.

The main reason to see the film is for the performances, especially Emily Watson as Sellers’s first wife and Stephen Fry as Sellers’s “spiritual advisor.” Stanley Tucci is an inscrutably brilliant Stanley Kubrick while John Lithgow is a hyperactive and crass Blake Edwards. Finally, Geoffrey Rush is a marvel as Peter Sellers. Rush has a difficult job, making an extremely unlikable character compelling but he succeeds despite not always being helped by the film’s script or direction.

Like the man it portrayed, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is flawed but filled with enough talent to watchable.

An Offer You Can’t Refuse #20: The Untouchables (dir by Brian DePalma)

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Let’s do some good!” Eliot Ness shouts as he and a platoon of Chicago cops raid what they believe is a bootlegger’s warehouse.

That line right there tells you everything that you need to know about the 1987 film, The Untouchables. In real life, Eliot Ness was known to be an honest member of law enforcement (which did make him a bit of a rarity in 1920s Chicago) but he was also considered to be something of a self-promoter, someone who tried to leverage his momentary fame into an unsuccessful political career. In the 50s, after Ness had lost most of his money due to a series of bad investments and his own alcoholism, Ness wrote a book about his efforts to take down Al Capone in Chicago. That book was called The Untouchables and though Ness died of a heart attack shortly before it was published, it still proved popular enough to not only rehabilitate Ness’s heroic image but also to inspire both a television series and the movie that I’m currently reviewing.

None of that is to say that Ness didn’t play a role in Al Capone’s downfall. He did, though it’s since been argued that Ness had little to do with actual tax evasion case that led to Capone going to prison. It’s just that, in real life, Eliot Ness was a complicated human being, one who had his flaws. In The Untouchables, Kevin Costner plays him as a beacon of midwestern integrity, a Gary Cooper-type who has found himself in the very corrupt city of Chicago in the very corrupt decade of the 1920s. The film version of Eliot Ness has no flaws, beyond his naive belief that everyone is as determined to “do some good” as he is.

So, The Untouchables may not be historically accurate but it’s still an entertaining film. It’s less concerned with the reality of Eliot Ness’s life and more about the mythology that has risen up around the roaring 20s. Everything about the film is big and operatic. In the role of Al Capone, Robert De Niro sneers through every scene with the self-satisfaction of a tyrant looking over the kingdom that he’s just conquered. While Costner’s Ness tells everyone to do some good, De Niro’s Capone uses a baseball bat to keep his underlings in line. He goes to the opera and cries until he’s told that one of Ness’s men has been killed. Then a big grin spreads out across his face. It’s not exactly a subtle performance but then again, The Untouchables is not exactly a subtle movie. It’s not designed to be a film that makes you think about whether or not prohibition was a good law. Instead, everything is bigger-than-life. It’s a film that takes place in a dream world that appears to have sprung from mix of old movies and American mythology.

In real life, Ness had ten agents working under him. They were all selected because they were considered to be honest lawmen and they were nicknamed The Untouchables after it was announced to the press that Ness had refused a bribe from one of Capone’s men. In the film, Ness only has three men working underneath him and they’re all recognizable types. Sean Connery won an Oscar for playing Jmmy Malone, the crusty old beat cop who teaches Ness about the Chicago Way. A young and incredibly hot Andy Garcia plays George Stone, the youngest of the Untouchables. Best of all is Charles Martin Smith, cast as Oscar Wallace, a mild-mannered accountant who first suggests that Capone must be cheating on his taxes. There’s a great scene in which the Untouchables intercept a liquor shipment on the Canadian border, all while riding horses. Sitting on the back of his galloping horse and trying not to fall off, both Oscar Wallace and the actor playing him appear to be having the time of their lives. For Oscar (and probably for much of the audience), it’s a fantasy come to life, a chance to “do some good.”

The Untouchables was directed by Brian DePalma and his stylish approach to the material is perfect for the film’s story. DePalma fills the film with references to other movies, some from the gangster genre and some not. (In one of the film’s most famous sequence, DePalma reimagines Battleship Potemkin‘s massacre on The Odessa Steps as a shoot-out between Eliot Ness and Capone’s men.) DePalma’s kinetic style reminds us that The Untouchables is less about history and more about how we imagine history. In reality, Capone was succeeded by Frank Nitti and The Chicago Outfit continued to thrive even in Capone’s absence. In the film, Nitti (played by Billy Drago) brags about killing one of the Untouchables and, as a result, is tossed off the roof of a courthouse by Eliot Ness. It’s not historically accurate but it makes for a crowd-pleasing scene.

Big, operatic, and always entertaining, The Untouchables is an offer that you can’t refuse.

Previous Offers You Can’t (or Can) Refuse:

An Offer You Can’t Refuse #19: Scarface (dir by Brian DePalma)

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Hello to my little friend!”

Hi, little friend….

BOOM!

The 1983 film, Scarface, is a misunderstood film. As we all know, it’s the story of Tony Montana (Al Pacino), who comes to Miami from Cuba along with his friend, Manny (Steven Bauer). In return for murdering a former member of Castro’s government, Tony is given a job working for Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia). When it becomes obvious that Tony is becoming too ambitious and might become a threat to him, Frank attempts to have Tony killed. However, the assassination attempt fails, Tony murders Frank, and then Tony becomes Miami’s richest and most powerful crime lord. Soon, Tony is burying his face in a mountain of cocaine while making deals with a sleazy Bolivian drug lord named Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar). Tony also marries Frank’s mistress, Elvira Hancock (Michelle Pfieffer), though it’s obvious from the start the the only person that Tony truly loves is his sister, Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Anyway, it all eventually leads to a lot of violence and a lot of death. Even F. Murray Abraham ends up getting tossed out of a helicopter, which is unfortunate since his character was a lot of fun.

Scarface is a famous film, largely because of Oliver Stone’s quotable dialogue and the no holds barred direction of Brian DePalma. However, I think that people get so caught up on the fact that this is a classic gangster film that they miss the fact that Scarface is also an extremely dark comedy. It satirizes the excess of the 80s. Once Tony reaches the top of the underworld, he becomes a parody of the nouveau riche. He moves into a gigantic house and proceeds to decorate it in the most tasteless way possible and there’s something oddly charming about this crude, not particularly bright man getting excited over the fact that he can finally afford to buy a tiger. Towards the end of the film, there’s a scene where Tony rants while lounging in an indoor hot tub while Elvira languidly snorts cocaine and complains about the crudeness of his language and, at that moment, Scarface becomes a bit of a domestic comedy. Tony’s reached the top of his profession, just to discover that it takes more than a live-in tiger and a wardrobe of wide lapeled suits to achieve true happiness. So, he ends up sitting glumly in his office with a mountain of cocaine rising up in front of him. “The world is yours” may be Tony’s motto but it turns out that the world is extremely tacky. For all of his attempts to recreate himself as a wealthy and sophisticated man, Tony is still just a barely literate criminal with a nasty scar and a sour disposition. The only thing he’s gotten for all of his ruthless ambition is an order of ennui with a cocaine appetizer.

I’ve always found Brian DePalma to be an uneven director. He has a very distinct style and sometimes that style is perfectly suited to the story that he’s telling (i.e., Carrie) and sometimes, all of that style just seems to get in the way (i.e. The Fury). Scarface, however, is the ideal story for DePalma’s over-the-top aesthetic. DePalma’s style may be excessive but Scarface is a film about excess so it’s a perfect fit. For that matter, you could say the same thing about Oliver Stone’s screenplay. Stone has since stated that he was using almost as much cocaine as Tony Montana while he wrote the script. The end result of the combination of Stone’s script, DePalma’s hyperactive direction, Pacino’s overpowering lead performance, and Giorgio Moroder’s propulsive score is a film that feels as if every minute is fueled by cocaine. It’s not just a film that’s about drugs. It’s also a film that feels like a drug.

Scarface is a big movie. It runs nearly three hours, following Tony from his arrival in the United States to his final moments in his mansion, taking hundreds of bullets while grandly announcing that he’s still standing. (Even after all of the bad things that Tony has done — poor Manny! — it’s impossible not to admire his refusal to go down.) It’s also a difficult movie to review, largely because almost everyone’s seen it and already has an opinion. Personally, I think the film gets off to a strong start. I think the scenes of Tony ruthlessly taking control of Frank’s empire are perfectly handled and I love the scenes where Pacino and Steven Bauer just bounce dialogue off of each other. They’re like a comedy team who commits murder on the side. I also loved the “Take it to the limit” montage, which belongs in the 80s Cinema Hall of Fame. At the same time, I think the final third of the movie drags a bit and that Tony’s sudden crisis of conscience when he sees that a man that he’s supposed to murder has a family feels a bit forced. It also bothers me that Elvira just vanishes from the film. At the very least, the audience deserved more of an explanation as to where she disappeared to.

But no matter! Flaws and all, Scarface is a violent satire that holds up surprisingly well. Al Pacino’s unhinged performance as Tony Montana is rightly considered to be iconic. Pacino’s gives such a powerhouse performance that it’s easy to forget that the rest of the cast is pretty impressive as well. I particularly liked the wonderfully sleazy work of F. Murray Abraham and Paul Shenar. That said, my favorite character in the film remains Elvira, if just because her clothes were to die for and she just seemed so incredibly bored with all of the violent men in her life. She goes from being bored with Frank to being bored with Tony and how can you not admire someone who, even when surrounded by all Scarface’s excess, just refuse to care?

Scarface is an offer that you can’t refuse.

Previous Offers You Can’t (or Can) Refuse:

The TSL’s Grindhouse: The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson (dir by Daniel Farrands)

Posted on July 8, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last year, I was one of the few people willing to defend The Haunting of Sharon Tate, which I felt was an effective film despite its rather icky premise. I thought that the film managed to maintain a compelling atmosphere of dread and I also thought that, though somewhat miscast, Hilary Duff gave a good performance in the lead role. Finally, I felt that, despite the exploitative nature of the film, the film was firmly on the side of Sharon Tate and the other victims of the Manson Family. Though the title may have been offensive, the film itself was better than it had any right to be.

I really can’t say the same for The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, which is from the same production team as The Haunting of Sharon Tate and which imagines the final days in the life of another famous homicide victim. Mena Suvari stars as Nicole Brown Simpson, the ex-wife of football player OJ Simpson (played, in a hyperactive manner, by Gene Freeman). The film follows Nicole as she deals not only with her abusive ex-husband but also with shady friends like Faye Resnick (Taryn Manning) and slightly less-disreputable friends like Kris Jenner (Agnes Bruckner).

In the film, Nicole also has a short-lived affair with a handsome but unstable drifter named Glen Rogers (Nick Stahl). In real life, Glen Rogers is currently incarcerated in Florida, where he awaits execution for a series of murders. Rogers has confessed to killing people all across the country, though there’s some doubt as to whether or not Rogers was being honest when he did so. (Rogers later recanted the confession.) Rogers’s brother has claimed that Glen confessed to murdering Nicole Simpson and Adam Goldman, saying that he was actually hired to do so by OJ Simpson. (Technically, Glen Rogers said that Simpson hired him to steal some jewelry but also gave him permission to kill Nicole if he felt that it was necessary.) The film presents Rogers’s story as being fact, complete with a scene of OJ meeting with Glen shortly before the murders occur.

Other than making the case that Glen Rogers murdered Nicole and Ron, the majority of the film is just Mena Suvari walking around Los Angeles and talking to her friends about how she has a feeling that something terrible is going to happen. Whereas The Haunting of Sharon Tate was willing to challenge the audience’s expectations by, at least briefly, changing history and presenting an alternate version of what could have happened that day in 1969, The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson is pretty much a grim march towards death, with each scene bringing the audience closer and close to the night of the actual murderers. If the film actually presented Nicole as being a fully-realized character as opposed to just a doomed victim, the story’s fatalistic atmosphere would work on an existential level but since the film doesn’t seem to care about who Nicole was before she died, it all just feels very sleazy.

Towards the end of the film, there’s an odd scene where an unseen force suddenly starts to violently throw Nicole across her bedroom, sending her against the walls and, at one point, pinning her to the ceiling. It’s a weird scene because it comes out of nowhere and it’s never explained whether it really happened or if Nicole was imagining being attacked. It doesn’t belong in this film and yet, it’s also the only moment when this film feels in any way unpredictable. Is the film trying to suggest that death, as a paranormal entity, was stalking her even before the night of her murder or was the scene just tossed in to liven up what is otherwise a rather slowly paced movie? Who knows? Again, if the film had really explored the issue of whether or not fate is predetermined and inevitable, it would have made for a far more interesting story than the rush job that this film appears to have been.

Mena Suvari and Nick Stahl are two actors who probably deserve better than this. Stahl is especially effective as the creepy but handsome Glen Rogers. Visually, the film is full of Hollywood glamour and ominous shadows. It’s not a bad-looking film, at all. Technically, The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson is well-made but, at the same time, it’s all just so astoundingly pointless. The memory of Nicole Simpson deserved better.