4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we pay tribute to the year 1982 with….
4 Shots From 4 1982 Films
Fitzcarraldo (1982, dir by Werner Herzog, DP: Thomas Mauch)
Poltergeist (1982, dir by Tobe Hooper, DP: Matthew Leonetti)
Cat People (1982, dir by Paul Schrader, DP: John Bailey)
King of Comedy (1982, dir by Martin Scorsese, DP: Fred Schuler)
Seeing as how I raved about this film and James Caan’s performance earlier this week, it only seems appropriate that today’s scene that I love should come from 1981’s Thief. Here is the famous diner scene, featuring Caan and Tuesday Weld. Caan later said that he considered this to be the best acting he had ever done.
Since Iron Man first hit theaters in the summer of 2008, especially with the post-credits scene of Nick Fury asking Tony Stark if he knew anything about the Avengers Initiative, comic book fans have always been hoping that all the Marvel Comics properties would soon interact with each other. X-Men and Fantastic Four characters were controlled by 20th Century Fox.
This began to change in 2011 with the massive hack of Sony servers which gave the public behind-the-scenes info on Sony execs worried about the Spider-Man film franchise and how it was lagging behind Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe under the control of uber-producer Kevin Feige. In just a few years after this hack rumors of Spider-Man being loaned out to become part of the MCU became fact.
The next major shift in fans wanting all of Marvel properties becoming part of the MCU was Disney’s purchase and merger with 20th Century Fox in 2017 and completed in 2019. With just a few small restrictions here and there (Universal still hold the rights to the Incredible Hulk character but allowed Disney to the character), the MCU was now pretty much complete.
The first thing fans wanted was a new take on Marvel Comics’ first family: The Fantastic Four.
There’s been several attempts to put the Fantastic Four on the big-screen. From the 1994 unreleased Roger Corman low-budget film to the three films when 20th Century Fox was still a separate studio, fans never really bought into those iterations. But now that the first family was back under Marvel Studios control, especially with Kevin Feige as producer, fans were once again hopeful.
The first official trailer is now out and it looks like it will lean heavily on the Fantastic Four’s 1960’s origins right down to the retro-futuristic design and theme. How the film will explain where the team has been during the MCU timeline will be a narrative that a team of screenwriters and director Matt Shankman will have to navigate.
Fantastic Four: First Steps arrives in theaters on July 25, 2025.
I’m passionate about movies, but my day job consists of providing high quality tax planning and preparation services for a wide variety of clients in the Central Arkansas area. After a couple of months of 70-90 hour work weeks, April 16th is the day that I can begin to focus a little less on work and a little more on the things I truly love. I can’t wait to continue to share my passion for movies, music, Charles Bronson, Chow Yun-Fat, and so many other things with all of you. I need a few days to get some rest and get my mind straight, but I’ll soon be back to sharing my opinions and my life! Thanks to all of you who read my work! ❤️
After stagecoach rodeo racer John Bishop is framed for causing a competitor to have an accident, he’s hauled off to jail. Fortunately, Bishop’s boss, Bob Leadly (Henry B. Walthall), comes through for Bishop and helps him escape from the jail. To thank Bob, Bishop heads down to Mexico to search for Bob’s son, Bart (Paul Fix). The last that Bob heard, Bart was running with an outlaw gang called “The Brotherhood of Death.” The only way get out of the Brotherhood of Death is to die.
By an amazing coincidence both Bart and Bishop’s girlfriend, Mary (Shirley Palmer), are in the Mexican town of Sonora. To try to get Bart to return home, Bishop goes undercover and infiltrates the gang. Once inside, Bishop discovers that gang leader Monte Black (J.P. McGowan) is planning on robbing the silver mine that belongs to Mary’s father.
This is a John Wayne B-western, typical of the poverty row productions that he was making before John Ford cast him as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach and made him into a star. This one features the usual horse chases and bar fights and John Wayne gives a solid-enough performance in the lead role. The most interesting thing about it is that, even though it’s a western, it’s set in modern times. I guess frontier days lasted longer in some parts of the county than in others.
John Wayne’s horse, Duke, appears in this picture and shows again that he was the most talented of all the horse actors in the 30s. He earned his co-starring credit.
“I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”
My latest “Scenes I Love” Monologue Edition comes courtesy of the great Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz from Francis For Coppola’s magnus opus, Apocalypse Now.
The scene is the Kurtz monologue describing the horror he has seen and how it has shaped his thought process and concept on how to fight the enemies he has been tasked to fight and also condemned for the methods he has used to achieve results.
Shot and framed with Brando’s face half in shadows as he describes how the horrors he has seen and committed is just a reflection of the war they’re fighting and how emotions and judgment from those who have not experience and committed such horrors is the path to defeat.
Brando’s time in front of the camera is not very much in the whole runtime of the film, but from beginning to end his shadowy presence looms over everyone and this 5-minute monologue becomes the exclamation mark that succinctly explains the entire theme of the film: “In an insane world, the mad men are the ones who are sane”.
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
136 years ago today, film and comedy pioneer Charlie Chaplin was born. It’s time for….
Opening with a swarm of helicopters spaying for medflies and ending with an earthquake, 1993’s Short Cuts is a film about life in Los Angeles.
An ensemble piece, it follows several different characters as they go through their own personal dramas. Some of them are married and some of them are destined to be forever single but they’re all living in varying states of desperation. Occasionally, the actions of one character will effect the actions of another character in a different story but, for the most part, Short Cuts is a portrait of people who are connected only by the fact that they all live in the same city. There are 22 principal characters in Short Cuts and each one thinks that they are the star of the story.
Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) cleans the pools of rich people while, at home, his wife, Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh), takes care of their baby and works as a phone sex operator. Jerry’s best friend is a makeup artist named Bill (Robert Downey, Jr.) who enjoys making his wife, Honey (Lili Taylor), looks like a corpse so that he can take her picture. One of her photographs is seen by a fisherman (Buck Henry) who has already discovered one actual corpse that weekend. He and his buddies, Vern (Huey Lewis) and Stuart (Fred Ward), discovered a dead girl floating in a river and didn’t report it until after they were finished fishing. (The sight of Vern unknowingly pissing on the dead body is one of the strongest in director Robert Altman’s filmography.)
Stuart’s wife, Claire (Anne Archer), is haunted by Stuart’s delay in reporting the dead body. A chance meeting Dr. Ralph Wyman (Matthew Modine) and his wife, artist Marian (Julianne Moore), leads to an awkward dinner between the two couples. Claire works as a professional clown and Ralph ends up wearing her clown makeup while his marriage falls apart.
Earlier, Claire was stopped and hit on by a smarmy policeman named Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins), who just happens to be married to Marian’s sister, Sherri (Madeleine Stowe). Gene is already having an affair with Betty Weathers (Frances McDormand), the wife of a helicopter pilot named Stormy (Peter Gallagher). When Stormy discovers that Betty has been cheating, he takes a creative revenge on her house.
Doreen Pigott (Lily Tomlin) lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic husband, Earl (Tom Waits). Driving home from her waitressing job, Doreen hits a young boy. The boy says he’s okay but when he gets home, he passes out. His parents, news anchorman Howard Finnegan (Bruce Davison) and his wife, Anne (Andie MacDowell), rush him to the hospital, where his doctor is Ralph Wyman. As Howard waits for his son to wake up, he has a revealing conversation with his long-estranged father (Jack Lemmon, showing up for one scene and delivering an amazing monologue). Meanwhile, a baker named Andy (Lyle Lovett) repeatedly calls the Finnegan household, wanting to know when they’re going to pick up their son’s birthday cake.
Based on the short stories of Raymond Carver and directed by Robert Altman, Short Cuts can sometimes feel like a spiritual descendent of Altman’s Nashville. The difference between this film and Nashville is that Short Cuts doesn’t have the previous film’s satiric bite. As good as Nashville is, it’s a film that can be rather snarky towards it character and the town in which it is set. Nashville is used as a metaphor for America coming apart at the seams. Short Cuts, on the other hand, is a far more humanistic film, featuring characters who are flawed but, with a few very notable exceptions, well-intentioned. If Nashville seem to be a portrait of a society on the verge of collapse, Short Cuts is a film about how that society ended up surviving.
It’s not a perfect film. There’s an entire storyline featuring Annie Ross and Lori Singer that I didn’t talk about because I just found it to be annoying to waste much time with. (The Ross/Singer storyline was the only one not to be based on a Carver short story.) The conclusion of Chris Penn’s storyline wasn’t quite as shocking as it was obviously meant to be. But, flaws and all, Altman and Carver’s portrait of humanity does hold our attention and it leaves us thinking about connections made and sometimes lost. Seen today, Short Cuts is a portrait of life before social media and iPhones and before humanity started living online. It’s a time capsule of a world that once was.
1986’s Nomads opens with anthropologist Jean-Charles Pommier being rushed into an emergency room, badly beaten and struggling for his life. Despite the best efforts of Dr. Eileen Flax (Lesley-Anne Down), Pommier dies in the ER. Flax is shocked by Pommier’s death and, naturally, she’s upset that she couldn’t save him. But, at the same time, people die in hospitals. It happens to the best of doctors.
Except soon, Flax is seeing flashes of the events that led to Pommier’s death. Pommier has somehow entered her mind and soon, she’s reliving his investigation into the origins of a group of destructive, urban nomads that Pommier witnessed causing havoc throughout Los Angeles. Pommier often felt like he was the only person who was capable of seeing the nomads and he grew to be tortured by his fear that they were specifically stalking him. We soon learn that there was reason for that….
Now, based on his name, you’re probably assuming that Pommier is meant to be French. And he is! He’s from France, though he considers himself to be a citizen of the world. He’s traveled everywhere, taking pictures of different cultural rituals across the globe. However, in Nomads, the very French Jean-Charles Pommier is played by Pierce Brosnan. Pierce Brosnan is, needless to say, not French. He’s Irish, even though a lot of people seem to be shocked when they first learn that. Brosnan normally speaks with an accent that could best be described as a mix of posh London and mid-Atlantic American. Everything about him screams the UK. In short, Pierce Brosnan is one of the least convincing French people ever seen on film and he delivers his lines in an accent that sounds like every accent other than the French accent. Watching this film, I found myself thinking about the Monty Python skit where Terry Jones and Carol Cleveland starred in a French movie. (“I see you have a cabbage.” “Oui.”) Brosnan is not a bad actor and it’s entertaining to watch him overact in Nomads. But there’s nothing French about him and every time that someone referred to him as being French, it totally took me out of the movie.
Which is a shame because Nomads may be narratively incoherent but it’s got some memorably surreal visuals and it does a good job of generating a properly ominous atmosphere. Director John McTiernan (who later went on to do Predator, Die Hard, and The Hunt For Red October) makes smart use of slow motion and a handheld camera to keep the audience off-balance. At its best, Nomads achieves a dream-like intensity that makes up for the fact that the story doesn’t make the least bit of sense. The nomads themselves are a memorable and creepy. While Adam Ant plays their leader (and the scene where he smiles as Brosnan attempts to throw him off a building is truly disturbing), the most frightening of the nomads is Mary Woronov as Dancing Mary. Seriously, after I watched this film, I checked all the locks in the house. No urban nomads were going to interrupt me in my sleep!
My suggestion to everyone is to do a Nomads/Nomadlanddouble feature. You’ll never get in another van.
That’s not actually the tag line that was used to advertise 2007’s Into The Wild but perhaps it should have been. Based on the true story of Chris McCandless, a college graduate who gave away all of his money and then roamed the country for two years before starving to death in an abandoned bus in Alaska, Into The Wild seems to be Sean Penn’s attempt to make a modern-day Easy Rider. Just as Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda crossed the country and met several different people over the course of that seminal road film, Into The Wild follows Emile Hirsch’s Chris McCandless as he takes on the identity of Alexander Supertramp and hikes across the continent. Along the way, he meets and befriends hippies (Catherine Keener and Brian H. Dierker), blue collar workers (Vince Vaughn), wayward teenagers (Kristen Stewart), and, most poignantly, a retired man (Hal Holbrook) who sincerely tries to help Chris make peace with his wanderlust.
You would think that this would be the type of film that would bring out Sean Penn’s worst directorial instincts but Penn actually directs with a very real sensitivity and a willingness to see the good in just about everyone that Chris meets. It is true that, especially at the start of the film, Chris can sometimes be a bit difficult to take. He’s so self-righteous and sure of himself. He mistakes his college diploma for being a badge of experience and occasionally, he can come across as being incredibly condescending. But, as the film progresses, Chris starts to realize that he doesn’t know everything and that he can’t do everything by himself. Sometimes, he does need help, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. The film’s most moving moments feature Chris and Hal Holbrook’s Ron Franz. Ron has the years of experience that Chris lacks and Ron also becomes one of the few people to whom Chris is willing to truly listen. And yet, when Ron offers to adopt Chris and give him a permanent home, Chris’s response is to promise to talk to him about it when Chris returns from Alaska. As Chris leaves, it’s obvious that Ron knows that he’s never going to see Chris again. Dying in Alaska, Chris finally makes some sort of inner peace with the parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) and the sister (Jena Malone) that he earlier abandoned. It’s an amazingly touching scene. Penn, whose other directorial efforts have been a bit didactic, seems to be willing to grant a certain grace to everyone in the film, even those whose politics or cultural attitudes he might not necessarily share. Penn not only captures the visual beauty of the America wilderness but also the beauty of the people, a beauty that too many other directors chose to downplay.
It’s a strong film and certainly the best of Penn’s directorial efforts. Emile Hirsch is not always likable as Chris but, then again, the heart of the film is found in the people that Hirsch meets and Penn gets excellent performances from his entire supporting cast. Hal Holbrook received a much deserved Oscar nomination. I also liked Vince Vaughn’s performance as guy who teaches Chris about hard work before getting arrested for stealing cable and also Jena Malone as Chris’s sister, the one person who understands him, even if she’s not invited to travel with him.
Into The Wild is a poignant portrayal of both wanderlust and the often-neglected corners of America. Did Chris find a little of something that he was looking for before he died in that bus? One can only hope.
Through the Shattered Lens