Bill Paxton would have been 69 years old today. As a lover of both films and eccentric Texans, I still miss Bill Paxton.
Today’s scene that I love comes from Twister and it features Bill Paxton showing off some wonderful chemistry with Helen Hunt. One of the great things about Bill Paxton is that he was equally at home in both big blockbusters like Twister and Titanic and low-budget indies like Near Dark. He was an artist who also happened to be a star.
4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films is just what it says it is, 4 (or more) shots from 4 (or more) of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films lets the visuals do the talking.
88 years ago, Dennis Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas.
It seems rather appropriate that one of America’s greatest cinematic outlaws was born in a town that will be forever associated with the old west. Dennis Hopper was a rebel, back when there were actual consequences for being one. He started out acting in the 50s, appearing in films like Rebel Without A Cause and Giant and developing a reputation for being a disciple of James Dean. He also developed a reputation for eccentricity and for being difficult on set and he probably would have gotten completely kicked out of Hollywood if not for a somewhat improbable friendship with John Wayne. (Wayne thought Hopper was a communist but he liked him anyways. Interestingly enough, Hopper later became a Republican.) Somehow, Hopper managed to survive both a raging drug addiction and an obsession with guns and, after a mid-80s trip to rehab, he eventually became an almost universally beloved and busy character actor.
Hopper, however, always wanted to direct. He made his directorial debut with 1969’s Easy Rider, a film that became a huge success despite being an infamously chaotic shoot. The success of Easy Rider led to the Hollywood studios briefly trying to produce counter-culture films of their own. Hopper was given several million dollars and sent to Peru to make one of them, the somewhat dangerously titled The Last Movie. Unfortunately, The Last Movie, was such a bomb that it not only temporarily derailed Hopper’s career but it also turned Hollywood off of financing counter culture films. Hopper spent a decade in the Hollywood wilderness, giving acclaimed performances in independent films like Tracks and The American Friend, even while continuing to increase his reputation for drug-fueled instability. Hopper would eventually return to directing with his masterpiece, 1980’s Out of the Blue. (Out of the Blue was so controversial that, when it played at Cannes, Canada refused to acknowledge that it was a Canadian production. It played as a film without a country. Out of the Blue, however, is a film that has stood the test of time.) Unfortunately, even after a newly cleaned-up Hopper was re-embraced by the mainstream, his directorial career never really took off. He directed 7 films, of which only Easy Rider and Colors were financially successful. Contemporary critics often didn’t seem to know what to make of Dennis Hopper as a director. In recent years, however, Hopper’s directorial efforts have been reevaluated. Even The Last Movie has won over some new fans.
Today, on his birthday, we honor Dennis Hopper’s directorial career with….
4 Shots From 4 Dennis Hopper Films
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on Twitter and Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, we’ve got 1998’s Run, Lola, Run!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Run, Lola, Run is available on Prime! See you there!
The Painter tells the rather predictable story of Peter.
Orphaned by a terrorist attack when he was a child, Peter (Charlie Webber) was raised by a CIA agent named Byrne (Jon Voight). Realizing that the attack had left Peter with superhearing, Byrne raised Peter to be a CIA assassin. But after a failed mission led to the shooting his pregnant wife, Elena (Rryla McIntosh), an embittered Peter retired from the agency. Now, going by the name of Mark, he paints!
Why do retired CIA agents always end up living in a cabin and obsessively pursuing only one hobby? This feels like the 100th film that I’ve seen about a former assassin living in a cabin. Some retired agents keep bees. Some become bricklayers. Some become painters. Oddly, none of them seem to become both bricklayers and painters.
Anyway, Peter is happy with his isolated life but then, everything is upended when a 17 year-old girl named Sophia (Madison Bailey) follows him to his cabin and claims to be his daughter. She says that Elena has vanished and she needs Peter’s help to find her. Peter insists that his name is Mark until his superhearing picks up the sound of heavily armed men gathering outside of his cabin.
This is another one of those action films where the main character is someone who kills without the slightest hesitation and who has trouble showing his emotions. Naturally, there’s a conspiracy inside the CIA and this leads to several scenes of people saying stuff like, “Copy that.” The only fictional character who ever sounded cool saying, “Copy that,” was Kiefer Sutherland on 24. All the rest of these people are just pretenders.
The Painter is pretty stupid. It won’t take you long to guess who the main villain is going to turn out to be and it also won’t take you long to guess how the final showdown is going to go. The action scenes are so haphazardly edited that it’s difficult to keep track of who is actually fighting who and, even if you did know who was fighting who, you wouldn’t really care because none of these people are particularly compelling.
In general, if your main character is going to be remorseless killer, it’s a good idea to cast a charismatic actor in the lead role. Audiences will forgive a lot as long as their watching someone with a compelling screen presence. Unfortunately, both Charlie Webber and Madison Bailey give rather bland performances and neither Peter nor Sophia are particularly likable characters. In particular, Peter drags one innocent computer store owner into his mess and then doesn’t seem to be particularly upset when the poor guy ends up with a bullet in his brain. It’s one thing to be an assassin. It’s another thing to be a jerk about it.
On the plus side, Jon Voight is enough of an old pro to understand that this is a movie that does not reward subtlety and he gives a performance that is totally over-the-top but which is also more than appropriate for the material with which he’s working. (Voight is still a talented actor and it’s a shame that, due to voting for different candidates than the majority of Hollywood, he’s pretty much going to end his career appearing in movies like this.) As well, Max Montesi gives such a cheerfully bizarre performance as a rival assassin that he actually bring the movie to life whenever he’s on the screen.
Unfortunately, the lunacy of Voight and Montesi is not enough to save The Painter. At one point, someone dismisses Peter’s paintings as being “derivative.” They could have been talking about this film as a whole.
Steve Landry (Charles Starrett) rides into another town and is once again named the new sheriff. Luckily, Steve’s old friend Smiley Burnette is working as the town’s blacksmith. Steve makes Smiley his deputy and then sets about trying to break up a gang of cattle rustlers. When Steve learns that his jurisdiction does not extend beyond the city limits, he dons the disguise of his alter ego, The Durango Kid, to go after the outlaws.
Has Steve met his match in Belle (Phyllis Adair), the saloon owner who is the secret leader of the outlaws? She notices that The Durango Kid’s boot tracks are the same as Steve’s boot tracks. I’m surprised that no one has ever noticed that before. Steve went through a lot of trouble to disguise himself as Durango but he never bothered to change his boots.
This entry in the Durango Kid series features a lot of Smiley Burnette so your enjoyment on the film will depend on how much tolerance you have for Smiley’s songs and his style of humor. Each film featured Smiley being followed around by a different group of musicians. In this one, Smiley is accompanied by The Trailsman. When Smiley accidentally locks himself in a jail cell, the Trailsman stand on the other side of the bars and sing a song about how Smiley can’t get out of the cell. Smiley does eventually get out but, later on, he’s knocked out cold during an attempted jail break. Smiley’s not much of a help in this one.
This has all of the typical Durango Kid elements, including the stock footage of the stampeding cattle that appeared in nearly all of his films. There’s another saloon fight and a gunfight towards the end. Durango rides out of town alone, leaving Smiley behind, but we know they’ll soon be reunited in another adventure.
Today, we celebrate the birthday of Henry Fonda!
Fonda was born 119 years ago today and, over the course of his long career, he was often cast in role the epitomized everything great about America. It’s rare to find a Henry Fonda film in which he played an out-and-out villain, though he did just that in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. (Leone, in fact, cast Fonda as the evil Frank because he knew audiences would be shocked to see Fonda coldly gunning down settlers and their families.)
One of Fonda’s finest films was 1943’s The Ox-Bow Incident, in which he played a cowboy who finds himself drafted into joining a posse that ends up hanging three men for the crime of murder and cattle rustling. The members of the posse (including seven of whom voted against hanging the men) later learn that the men were innocent. In today’s scene that I love, Henry Fonda reads aloud the letter that one of the men wrote to his wife shortly before he was hung. This was one of Fonda’s most heartfelt and powerful performances.
4 Shots From 4 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, the Shattered Len wishes a happy 80th birthday to the man and the legend, Danny Trejo! Trejo’s journey from being a gang member to an ex-con to a drug counselor to a pop cultural institution is an inspiring one, all the more so because Danny Trejo is so candid about both his past struggles and his present successes.
It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Danny Trejo Films
Runaway Train (1985, dir by Andrei Konchalovsky, DP: Alan Hume)
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987, dir by J. Lee Thompson, DP: Gideon Porath)
Heat (1995, dir by Michael Mann, DP: Dante Spinotti)
Machete Kills (2013, dir by Robert Rodriguez, DP: Robert Rodriguez)
Johansen (Dolph Lundgren) is a San Diego cop who remains on the force despite the fact that most of his old friends and former partners have retired. When he’s filmed beating up a Mexican man on the highway, he becomes the latest target of the Defund The Police movement. It doesn’t matter that the man was a human trafficker who was driving truck full of kidnapped women. Johansen has become an embarrassment.
Normally, you would think this would lead to Johansen being fired or, at the very least, suspended. Instead, his bosses decide to send him to Mexico to escort two prisoners back to the United States. Rosa (Christina Villa) and Leticia (Daniela Soto-Brenner) are two sex workers who witnessed the murder of a group of DEA agents. Their testimony could be key to identifying the killers. Despite his friend and former partner, Brynner (Kelsey Grammer), telling him that he should just retire rather than allow the police department to continually push him around, Johansen heads down to Mexico.
It turns out that bringing the women back to the United States is not going to be easy. A roadside ambush leaves Leticia dead and Johansen severely wounded. Though Rosa’s initial instinct is to abandon Johansen in the desert, she eventually takes him to the home of her cousin, a police officer named Miguel (Rocko Reyes). As Johansen recovers, he discovers that the people who want Rosa dead are not going to give up and that he cannot trust anyone.
Let’s give some credit where credit is due. Dolph Lundgren knows how to direct an efficient B-movie. He has an adequate visual eye, he makes good use of the arid desert setting, and he gets believable performances out of the majority of his cast. Christina Villa especially does a good job as the tough but ultimately kind-hearted Rosa. The movie has a bit more going on underneath the surface than the typical B-action film. Johansen is forced to reconsider his own prejudices while the film’s villains argue that they were forced into their actions by a society that refuses to take care of those who are expected to risk their lives to protect the status quo. It’s not a dumb movie, though it does feature a lot of characters doing rather dumb things and the big twist demands that the viewer accept one too many coincidences.
Lundgren not only directed but co-wrote the script. Apparently, he first came up with the idea of the film in 2006. Interestingly, it’s obvious that the film went into production when Defund The Police was still a strong and powerful political movement and the film itself ultimately suggests that the police should be, if not defunded, at least massively reformed. Of course, by the time the film was released in January, the Defund movement was considerably less powerful and was being blamed for the sharp increase in crime across the nation. Chants of “Defund the police” have been replaced by cries of “Fund the police, for the love of God!” That’s the danger which trying to make a film with a political subtext in an age with a 24-hour news cycle. What was popular when a film goes into production will often be a spent force by the time the film actually gets released.
As for Wanted Man, it’s an efficient B-movie that gets the job done. If nothing else, the sight of Dolph Lundgren and Kelsey Grammer playing best friends is just weird enough to keep things watchable.
Steve Godfrey (Charles Starrett) is in trouble again. He has been accused of stealing another payroll and the only man who can clear his name has just been murdered. Steve thinks that he is being set up by outlaws who want to take control of the dead man’s ranch, which is now owned by Mary Ann Jarvis (Adele Roberts).
Luckily, Steve’s old friend, Smiley Burnette, is working as a cook at the Jarvis Ranch. When Smiley isn’t singing songs with the Colorado Hillbillies, he tries to help Steve clear his name. He explains that Mary Ann Jarvis won’t listen to Steve but maybe she’ll listen to Steve’s alter ego, The Durango Kid!
Durango rides again in this movie, though, the majority of the hour runtime is made up of Smiley Burnette singing songs and making jokes. Smiley Burnette is not for everyone. I enjoy the broad humor he brought to these films but I can understand why others might not. Whenever Smiley sings a song, it does bring the action to a halt but that’s true of every Durango Kid film. If you’re a fan of the series, you either like Smiley or you can at least tolerate him. Smiley does do more than just sing in this movie. He also throws black pepper in the eyes of one of the bad guys.
Even with all of the attention paid to Smiley, The Desert Horseman delivers all of the expected horse chases and gunfights. The story is a little more interesting than usual. Steve has been framed for not one but two crimes that he didn’t commit and that adds some urgency to the proceedings. Charles Starrett, as always, is a believable western hero and he takes the role seriously.
On this date in 1905, the great actor Joseph Cotten was born in Petersburg, Virginia. A longtime friend and collaborator of Orson Welles, Cotten was one of the most dependable leading men of the 40s and 50s, an actor with the charisma of star and the talent of an artist.
Today’s scene that I love comes from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt, and it features Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten. Wright plays Charlie. Cotten plays her beloved uncle, who is also named Charlie and who might very well be a serial killer. In this scene, Uncle Charlie drags his niece to a seedy bar, where he confesses that, as she earlier deduced, he is a suspect in a murder investigation. With a mixture of charm and intimidating, Charlie tries to convince his niece to keep his secret to herself.
Through the Shattered Lens