Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon) is an idealistic young law school graduate who discovers that having a degree and passing the bar doesn’t automatically make you a success. He gets a job working a bar that just happens to be owned by an ambulance chasing attorney named Bruiser Stone (Mickey Rourke). Bruiser takes Rudy on as an associate and assigns his associate, Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito), to teach Rudy how to find cases. When Bruiser flees the country to escape an FBI investigation, Rudy and Deck start their own law firm. Rudy soon finds himself with the case of his young career, representing a family in a law suit against Great Benefit Insurance. Rudy also falls for Kelly (Claire Danes), a young woman who is being abused by her husband (Andrew Shue).
It can be hard to believe today but, in the 90s, every John Grisham novel was adapted for the screen. Most of the adaptations weren’t very good but audiences ate them up. In many ways, The Rainmaker is the ultimate John Grisham adaptation because it contains every single trope that John Grisham made popular with his legal thrillers. This time, Matt Damon is the charismatic attorney. Roy Scheider is the soulless corporate CEO who needs to be brought down. Jon Voight is the intimidating opposing counsel. Danny DeVito is the eccentric comic relief and Mickey Rourke is the dues ex machina who returns to the movie to give Rudy a piece of information at the exact right moment. The appeal of Grisham is that he made readers (and eventually moviegoers) feel like insiders while presenting them with stories that were essentially very simple good vs evil morality tales. The insurance company is so cartoonishly evil that there’s no doubt Rudy is going to defeat them. There’s also no doubt that Rudy is going to find a better calling than ambulance chasing because the only thing that people hate more than insurance companies is lawyers.
The Rainmaker is never as complex as it pretends to be but it’s an entertaining legal movie. It was also director Francis Ford Coppola’s last big hit. It’s really more of a Grisham film than a Coppola film but Coppola’s influence is still felt in the almost uniformly excellent cast. (Ignore Andrew Shue if you can. Melrose Place was very popular in the 90s.) Damon, Danes, Rourke, Voight, Dean Stockwell, Danny Glover, Teresa Wright, Virginia Madsen, and Mary Kay Place all give memorable performances. Roy Scheider is loathsome as the sweater-wearing CEO. Best of all is Danny DeVito, who gets all of the best lines.
The Rainmaker was the best of the 1990s Grisham adaptations. While it’s not quite a masterpiece, it’s still emotionally very satisfying.
“The sleeper has awakened.” — Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides
David Lynch’s Dune is one of those movies that somehow manages to be both a spectacular failure and a strangely hypnotic piece of cinema at the same time. It feels like a film willed into existence through pure creative tension: on one side, Frank Herbert’s dense, political, and spiritual sci‑fi novel; on the other, David Lynch’s surreal, psychological, dream‑logic sensibility. The result is a singular oddity—visually bold, dramatically uneven, and endlessly fascinating if you’re in the mood for something that feels more like a hallucination than a conventional space opera.
To call the adaptation ambitious is underselling it. After the collapse of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s infamous attempt to adapt Dune, the project eventually landed at Universal with producer Dino De Laurentiis, and Lynch—fresh off The Elephant Man—was brought in to turn Herbert’s galaxy‑spanning book into a two‑hour‑ish feature. On paper, it seems like inspired casting: Lynch had the visual imagination and emotional intensity to do something memorable with the material. But he was never a natural fit for streamlined blockbuster storytelling. His instincts live in mood, subconscious imagery, and uneasy psychological textures rather than clean plot mechanics. You can feel that clash all over the final film, and it’s part of what makes it so weirdly compelling.
Right from the opening, Dune doesn’t hold your hand. Princess Irulan’s floating head lays out a massive info‑dump about spice, the Imperium, and Arrakis that plays like someone reading you the glossary at the back of a sci‑fi novel. It’s dense, awkward, and kind of charming in its sincerity. The movie takes Herbert’s universe extremely seriously—no wink, no irony, no attempt to sand off the stranger edges. The Bene Gesserit, mentats, feudal houses, and prophecies are all presented straight, as if the audience will either keep up or be left behind. There’s something almost punk about that level of commitment.
Kyle MacLachlan, in his debut as Paul Atreides, is perfectly cast for Lynch’s take on the character. He’s got this earnest, slightly naive presence that gradually hardens as the story pushes him toward messiah status. Instead of leaning into a swashbuckling hero archetype, Lynch frames Paul’s evolution as something interior and dreamlike, almost like a spiritual awakening happening inside a hostile universe. Paul’s visions aren’t giant, crystal‑clear CGI prophecy sequences; they’re fragmented, flickering images, whispers, and flashes of desert and blood. You can feel Lynch trying to drag the sci‑fi epic into his own subconscious, even if the narrative doesn’t always keep up.
The supporting cast is packed with strong, sometimes delightfully bizarre performances. Francesca Annis gives Lady Jessica a sensual, haunted calm that fits the Bene Gesserit’s mix of discipline and manipulation. Jurgen Prochnow’s Duke Leto radiates dignified doom; he feels like a man who knows he’s walking into a trap but can’t step off the path. Then you get to the Harkonnens, where Lynch just lets his freak flag fly. Kenneth McMillan’s Baron is a grotesque comic‑book monster, oozing, cackling, floating on anti‑grav tech, and reveling in cruelty. It’s not subtle, but it is unforgettable. And of course Sting as Feyd‑Rautha, stalking around in barely‑there outfits and sneering like a rock star beamed in from another film entirely, just adds to the movie’s fever‑dream energy.
Visually, Dune is a feast and sometimes a bit of a choke. The production design leans into a kind of retro‑futurist baroque: cavernous sets, ornate technology, and spaces that feel less like functional environments and more like places out of a dark fantasy. Lynch and cinematographer Freddie Francis infuse everything with shadow, smoke, and texture, so even the quiet scenes feel heavy and loaded. The sandworms are huge, tactile, and worshipful in scale; the way they burst from the desert feels more like a religious manifestation than a monster attack. Even if you’re lost in the plot, the images stick with you—daggers, stillsuits, weirding whispers, blood on sand.
The sound and music do a ton of work in giving the film its identity. The score, primarily by Toto with contributions from Brian Eno, is this fusion of 80s rock sensibility and orchestral grandeur. It shouldn’t work, but it does; the main theme swells with tragic heroism, while other cues veer into eerie, synthy territory that matches Lynch’s off‑kilter tone. The sound design around the “weirding” abilities, the internal monologues, and the roar of the sandworms all help sell the world even when the script is sprinting past exposition. It’s one of those films where you might not fully grasp every detail, but the combined force of image and sound makes you feel like you’ve visited a real, deeply strange place.
The big structural problem, and the thing that most clearly separates Lynch’s adaptation from Denis Villeneuve’s two‑part version, is time and emphasis. Lynch is trying to cram the entire arc of Dune into a single film, and that means the plotting goes from methodical to breakneck halfway through. The first half lingers on the setup—Caladan, the move to Arrakis, the betrayal—while the second half rockets through Paul’s Fremen transformation, the guerrilla war, the sandworm riding, and the final confrontation. Subplots are hinted at and dropped, character arcs feel truncated, and the voiceover is forever trying to patch gaps the edits created. Themes like ecological transformation, the manipulation behind religious prophecy, and the long‑term horror of Paul’s rise are mostly reduced to gestures.
The best way to see Dune in Lynch’s version is actually through the extended cut, which adds a bit more context to certain scenes and lets the film breathe slightly more than the theatrical release. The theatrical cut is so aggressively compressed that pieces of motivation and setup just vanish, leaving the story feeling even more disjointed. The extended version restores some of the connective tissue—especially around Paul’s early time with the Fremen, the political maneuvering in the lead‑up to the final act, and the way certain characters orient themselves in the larger conflict. It doesn’t magically fix the studio‑driven structure or the inherent weirdness of Lynch’s choices, but it does make the film feel a little more complete, a little closer to the director’s original vision. It’s still messy, but less like a rushed homework assignment and more like a genuinely eccentric, if compromised, longform take on Herbert’s world.
Tonally, Lynch and Villeneuve are almost mirror images. Lynch’s film is cramped, loud in its weirdness, and often grotesque, playing like a baroque horror‑opera about destiny. Villeneuve’s is stately, slow‑burn, and solemn, more interested in the weight of empire, colonialism, and religious manipulation. Even their takes on Paul are distinct. In Lynch’s film, Paul ultimately plays more like a triumphant chosen one; whatever ambiguity is there gets overshadowed by the climactic victory and the literal act of making it rain as a grand, almost celebratory miracle. Villeneuve leans harder into the darker implications: Paul is framed as a potentially dangerous figure whose rise may unleash something terrible, and his two‑part arc emphasizes the holy war and fanaticism coalescing around him instead of treating his ascension as a clean win. Where Lynch’s ending lands somewhere between pulp myth and studio‑mandated uplift, Villeneuve’s execution feels closer to a tragedy about messianic power.
Knowing all that, Lynch’s Dune ends up feeling like a relic from an era when studios occasionally handed gigantic, unwieldy properties to filmmakers with intensely personal styles and just hoped for the best. It doesn’t “work” in a conventional plot sense, and if you’re coming to it after the sleek coherence of Villeneuve’s films, it can feel like a chaotic, cluttered alternate‑universe version of the same story. But that alternate universe has its own power. There’s a raw, handmade intensity to Lynch’s take—a sense that he’s trying to turn Dune into a waking dream about destiny, decay, and the seduction of power, even as the studio scissors are hacking away at his vision.
In the end, David Lynch’s Dune is a beautifully broken thing: a movie that fails as a straightforward adaptation but succeeds as a cinematic experience you can’t quite shake. Villeneuve gives you a clearer, more faithful, and philosophically aligned Dune, the one that explains itself and lets you sit with its implications. Lynch gives you the nightmare version, messy and compromised, but pulsing with strange life. If Villeneuve’s two‑part saga is the definitive modern telling, Lynch’s film—especially the extended cut—remains the haunting alternate path, a vision of Arrakis filtered through a very particular mind, sandblasted, grotesque, and unforgettable.
First released in the groovy and psychedelic year of 1970, The Dunwich Horror stars Sandra Dee as Nancy, an somewhat innocent grad student at Massachusetts’s Miskatonic University. When the mysterious Wilbur Wheatley (Dean Stockwell) comes to the university and asks to take a look at a very rare book called The Necronomicon, Nancy agrees. She does so even though there’s only one edition of The Necronomicon in existence and it’s supposed to be protected at all costs. Maybe it’s Wilbur’s hypnotic eyes that convince Nancy to allow him to see and manhandle the book. Prof. Henry Armitage (Ed Begley) is not happy to see Wilbur reading the book and he warns Nancy that the Wheatleys are no good.
Nancy still agrees to give Wilbur a ride back to his hometown of Dunwich. She finds herself enchanted by the mysterious Wilbur and she’s intrigued as to why so many people in the town seem to hate Wilbur and his father (Sam Jaffe). Soon, she is staying at Wilbur’s mansion and has apparently forgotten about actually returning to Miskatonic. She has fallen under Wilbur’s spell and it soon becomes clear that Wilbur has sinister plans of his own. It’s time to start chanting about the Old Ones and the eldritch powers while naked cultists run along the beach and Nancy writhes on an altar. We are in Lovecraft county!
Actually, it’s tempting to wonder just how exactly H.P. Lovecraft would have felt about this adaptation of his short story. On the one hand, it captures the chilly New England atmosphere of Lovecraft’s work and it features references to such Lovecraft mainstays as Miskatonic University, the Necronomicon, and the Old Ones. As was often the case with Lovecraft’s stories, the main characters are students and academics. At the same time, this is very much a film of the late 60s/early 70s. That means that there are random naked hippies, odd camera angles, and frequent use of the zoom lens. The film makes frequent use of solarization and other psychedelic effects that were all the rage in 1970. Lovecraft may have been an unconventional thinker but I’m still not sure he would have appreciated seeing his fearsome cult transformed into a bunch of body-painting hippies.
Really, the true pleasure of The Dunwich Horror is watching a very earnest Sandra Dee act opposite a very stoned Dean Stockwell. Stockwell was a charter member of the Hollywood counterculture, a friend of Dennis Hopper’s who had gone from being a top Hollywood child actor to playing hippie gurus in numerous AIP films. As for Sandra Dee, one gets the feeling that this film was an attempt to change her square image. When Wilbur tells Nancy that her nightmares sound like they’re sexual in origin and then explores her feelings about sex, Nancy replies, “I like sex,” and it’s obviously meant to be a moment that will make the audience say, “Hey, she’s one of us!” But Sandra Dee delivers the line so hesitantly that it actually has the opposite effect. Stockwell rather smoothely slips into the role of the eccentric Wilbur. Wilbur is meant to be an outsider and one gets the feeling that’s how Stockwell viewed himself in 1970. Sandra Dee, meanwhile, seems to be trying really hard to convince the viewer that she’s not the same actress who played Gidget and starred in A Summer Place, even though she clearly is. It creates an oddly fascinating chemistry between the two of them. Evil Wilbur actually comes across as being more honest than virtuous Nancy.
Executive produced by Roger Corman, The Dunwich Horror is an undeniably campy film but, if you’re a fan of the early 70s grindhouse and drive-in scene, it’s just silly enough to be entertaining. Even when the film itself descends into nonsense, Stockwell’s bizarre charisma keeps things watchable and there are a few memorable supporting performances. (Talia Shire has a small but memorable roll as a nurse.) It’s a film that stays true to the spirit of Lovecraft, despite all of the hippies.
First released in 1986 and still regularly watched and imitated, Blue Velvet is one of the most straight forward films that David Lynch ever made.
For all the talk about it being a strange and surreal vision of small town America, the plot of Blue Velvet is not difficult to follow. After his father has a stroke that leaves him confined to a hospital bed, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home from college. Lumberton appears to be a quiet and friendly little town, with pretty houses and manicured lawns and friendly people. Jeffrey, with his dark jacket and his expression of concern, appears a little out-of-step with the rest of the town. He’s been away, after all. One day, while walking through a field, Jeffrey discovers a rotting, severed ear. Jeffrey picks up the ear and takes it Detective Williams (George Dickerson). Detective Williams, who looks like he could have stepped straight out of an episode of Dragnet, is such a man of the innocent 1950s that his wife is even played by Hope Lange.
“Yes, that’s a human ear, alright,” Williams says, deadpan.
Blue Velvet (1986, dir by David Lynch, DP: Frederick Elmes)
With the help of Detective Williams’s blonde and seemingly innocent daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), Jeffrey launches his own investigation into why the ear was in the field. He discovers that Lumberton has a teeming criminal underworld, one that is full of men who are as savage as the ants that we saw, in close-up, fighting over that ear in the field. Jeffrey discovers that a singer named Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) is being sexually blackmailed by a madman named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). When Dorothy discovers Jeffrey hiding in her closet (where he had been voyeuristically watching her and Frank), it leads to Jeffrey and Dorothy having a sadomasochistic relationship. “Hit me!” Dorothy demands and both the viewer and Jeffrey discover that he’s got his own darkness inside of him. “You’re like me,” Frank hisses at Jeffrey at one point and, if we’re to be honest, it almost feels like too obvious a line for an artist like David Lynch. Lynch once described the film as being “The Hardy Boys in Hell,” and the plot really is as straightforward as one of those teenage mystery books.
That said, Blue Velvet also features some of Lynch’s most memorable visuals, from the brilliant slow motion opening to the moment that the camera itself seems to descend into the ear, forcing us to consider just how fragile the human body actually is. The film goes from showcasing the green lawns and blue skies to Lumberton to tossing Jeffrey into the shadowy world of Dorothy’s apartment building and suddenly, the entire atmosphere changes and the town becomes very threatening. We find ourselves wondering if even Detective Williams can be trusted. That said, my favorite visual in the film is a simple one. Sandy and Jeffrey walk along a suburban street at night and the camera shows us the dark trees that rise above them, contrasting their eerie stillness to Sandy and Jeffrey’s youthful flirtation.
Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet
Dean Stockwell shows up as Ben, an associate of Frank’s who lip-synchs to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams while Frank himself seems to have a fit of some sort beside him. In retrospect, Blue Velvet played a huge role in Dennis Hopper getting stereotyped as an out-of-control villain but that doesn’t make him any less terrifying as Frank Booth. Hopper, recently sober after decades of drug abuse and self-destructive behavior, summoned up his own demons to play Booth and he turns Frank into a true nightmare creature. Isabella Rossellini is heart-breaking as the fragile Dorothy. That said, the heart of the film belongs to Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern and both of them do a wonderful job of suggesting not only the darkness lurking in their characters but also their kindness as well. For all the talk about Lynch as a subversive artist, he was also someone who had a remarkable faith in humanity and that faith is found in both Jeffrey and Sandy. MacLachlan and Dern manage to sell moments that should have been awkward, like Sandy’s monologue about the returning birds or Jeffrey’s emotional lament questioning why people like Frank have to exist. Both Jeffrey and Sandy lose their innocence but not their hope for a better world.
BlueVelvet is a straight-forward mystery and a surreal dream but mostly it’s an ultimately hopeful portrait of humanity. The world is dark and full of secrets, the film says. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a beautiful place.
Blue Velvet (1986, dir by David Lynch, DP: Frederick Elmes)
Some people love money so much that they make their own.
In 1985’s To Live And Die In L.A., Williem DaFoe is magnetically evil as Rick Masters, a genius at counterfeiting who has gotten rich by selling other people fake money. The film features a lengthy sequence showing how Masters makes his money and the viewer really is left feeling as if they’ve just watched an artist at work. Masters has a talent and he’s a professional. He’s good at what he does. Unfortunately, he’s also a sociopath who is willing to kill just about anyone who he comes across. There have been a lot of movies made about sympathetic counterfeiters. They’re often portrayed as being quirky and rather likable individuals. This is not one of those films. DaFoe’s charisma makes it impossible to look away from Rick but he’s still not someone you would ever want to have to deal with for a prolonged period of time. One gets the feeling that Rick eventually kills everyone that he does business with.
Secret Service agents Richard Chance (William Petersen) and John Vukovich (John Pankow) are investigating Masters. They’re a classic crime movie partnership. Vukovich is youngish and, when we first meet him, goes by-the-book. Chance is a veteran member of the Secret Service, an impulsive loose cannon whose last partner was killed by Masters. Chance is now obsessed with taking Masters down and he’s willing to do whatever it takes. If that means threatening his lover and informant, the recently paroled Ruth (Darlanne Fluegel), so be it. If that means defying the lawyers (represented by Dean Stockwell), so be it. If that means committing crimes himself and nearly getting Vukovich killed in the process, so be it. At first, Vukovich is horrified by Chance’s techniques but, as the film progresses, Vukovich comes to embrace Chance’s philosophy of doing whatever it takes.
What sets To Live and Die in L.A. apart from some other films is that, even as it concludes, it leaves us uncertain as to whether or not Chance and Vukovich’s actions were really worth it. This is not a standard cops-vs-robbers film. This is a William Friedkin film and he brings the same moral ambiguity that distinguished The French Connection to this film’s portrait of the Secret Service. (When Chance isn’t chasing after a counterfeiter, he’s foiling an assassination attempt against the president.)
Like The French Connection, To Live and Die In L.A. features an pulse-pounding car chase, one that occurs as Chance and Vukovich make an escape from robbing a man who they believe to be a criminal. (The man turns out to have been an FBI agent.) This chase involves Chance and Vukovich driving the wrong way down a crowded freeway, desperately tying not to crash into any of the cars that are swerving out of the way. It’s such an exciting scene that it’s easy to forget that Chance and Vukovich are actually escaping from committing a crime. In The French Connection, Gene Hackman was chasing the man who tried to assassinate him. In To Love and Die In L.A., Chance is fleeing the consequences of his own actions.
To Live and Die In L.A. holds up well. DaFoe and Petersen both give charismatic performance but, for me, it really is John Pankow who carries the film. Vukovich’s transformation from being a straight-laced member of law enforcement to being a doppelganger of his partner is both exciting and a little disturbing, To Live and Die In L.A. is a crime film that leaves you wondering how far one can go battling the bad guys before becoming one of them.
1992’s The Player tells the story of Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins).
It’s not easy being Griffin Mill. From the outside, of course, it looks like he has the perfect life. He’s a studio executive with a nice house in Hollywood. He’s young. He’s up-and-coming. Some people, especially Griffin, suspect that he’ll be the president of the studio some day. By day, he sits in his office and listens to pitches from respected screenwriters like Buck Henry. (Henry has a great idea for The Graduate II!) During the afternoon, he might attends dailies and watch endless takes of actors like Scott Glenn and Lily Tomlin arguing with each other. Or he might go to lunch and take a minute to say hello to Burt Reynolds. (“Asshole,” Burt says as Griffin walks away.) At night, he might go to a nice party in a big mansion and mingle with actors who are both young and old. He might even run into and share some sharp words with Malcolm McDowell.
But Griffin’s life isn’t as easy as it seems. He’s constantly worried about his position in the studio, knowing that one box office failure could end his career. He fears that a new executive named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) is after his job. Two new screenwriters (Richard E. Grant and Dean Stockwell) keep bugging him to produce their downbeat, no-stars anti-capitol punishment film. His girlfriend (Cynthia Stevenson) wants to make good movies that mean something. Even worse, someone is sending Griffin threatening notes.
It doesn’t take long for Griffin to decide that the notes are coming from a screenwriter named Dave Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio). Griffin’s attempt to arrange a meeting with Dave at a bar so that Griffin can offer him a production deal instead leads to Griffin murdering Dave in a parking lot. While the other writers in Hollywood mourn Dave’s death, Griffin starts a relationship with Dave’s artist girlfriend (Great Scacchi) and tried to hide his guilt from two investigating detectives (Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett). Worst of all, the notes keep coming. The writer, whomever they may be, is now not only threatening Griffin but also seems to know what Griffin did.
After spend more than a decade in the industry wilderness, Robert Altman made a critical and commercial comeback with The Player. It’s a satire of Hollywood but it’s also a celebration of the film industry, featuring 60 celebrities cameoing as themselves. Everyone, it seems, wanted to appear in a movie that portrayed studio execs as being sociopathic and screenwriters as being whiny and kind of annoying. The Player both loves and ridicules Hollywood and the often anonymous men who run the industry. Largely motivated by greed and self-preservation, Griffin may not love movies but he certainly loves controlling what the public sees. In the end, only one character in The Player sticks to her values and her ideals and, by the end of the movie, she’s out of a job. At the same time, Griffin has a social life that those in the audience can’t help but envy. He can’t step out of his office without running into someone famous.
The Player is one Altman’s most entertaining films, with the camera continually tracking from one location to another and giving as a vision of Hollywood that feels very much alive. Tim Robbins gives one of his best performances as Griffin Mill and Altman surrounds him with a great supporting cast. I especially liked Fred Ward as the studio’s head of security. With The Player, Altman mixes melodrama with a sharp and sometimes bizarre comedy, with dialogue so snappy that the film is as much a joy to listen to as to watch. That said, the real attraction of the film is spotting all of the celebrity cameos. (That and cheering when Bruce Willis saves Julia Roberts from certain death.) Altman was a director who often used his films to explore eccentric communities. With The Player, he opened up his own home.
First released in 1988, Tucker: The Man and His Dream is a biopic about Preston Tucker.
Tucker was an engineer in Detroit who went from designing vehicles for the Army during World War II to trying to launch his own car company. His ideas for an automobile don’t sound particularly radical today. He wanted every car to have seat belts. He wanted a windshield that popped out as a safety precaution. He want brake pads and he also wanted a car that looked sleek and aerodynamic, as opposed to the old boxy cars that were being pushed out be Detroit. He wanted a car that got good mileage and he wanted one that could be taken just about anywhere. Unfortunately, Tucker’s dreams were cut short when he was indicted for stock fraud, a prosecution that most people agree was a frame-up on behalf of the Big Three auto makers. Tucker was eventually acquitted but his car company went out of business. Of the 50 cars that Tucker did produce, 48 of them were still on the road and being driven forty years later.
The film stars Jeff Bridges as Preston Tucker, Joan Allen as his wife, Christian Slater and Corin Nemec as two of his sons, Lloyd Bridges as the senator who tried to take Tucker down, Martin Landau as Tucker’s business partner, and Dean Stockwell as Howard Hughes, who shows up for a few minutes to encourage Tucker to follow his dreams regardless of how much the government tries to stop him. One gets the feeling that the film was a personal one for director Francis Ford Coppola, a filmmaker who has pretty much spent his entire career fighting with studios while trying to bring his vision to the screen. Tucker fought for seat belts. Coppola fought for a mix of color and black-and-white in Rumble Fish. Tucker stood up for his business partner. Francis Ford Coppola stood up for Al Pacino when no one else could envision him as Michael Corleone. As is the case with many of Coppola’s films, Tucker: The Man And His Dream is a film that Coppola spent years trying to get made. It was the film that Coppola originally intended to be the follow-up to The Godfather, with Marlon Brando projected for the lead role of Tucker. After watching the Tucker, it’s hard not to feel that it worked out for the best that Coppola was not able to make the film in 1973. It’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Jeff Bridges in the role of Preston Tucker.
“Chase that tiger….chase that tiger….chase that tiger….” It’s a song that Tucker sings constantly throughout the film as the camera spins around him and how you react to Tucker: The Man And His Dream will largely depend on how tolerant you are of Coppola’s stylistic flourishes. Coppola directs the film as a combination of Disney fairy tale and film noir. The opening of the film, with Tucker running around in almost a manic state and excitedly telling everyone about his plans, is presented with vibrant colors and frequent smiles and an almost overwhelming air of cheerful optimism. As the film progresses and Tucker finds himself being targeted by both the government and the other auto companies, the film gets darker and the viewer starts to notice more and more shadows in the background. The moments of humor become less and less and there’s a heart-breaking moment where Martin Landau, in one of his best performances, reveals just how far the government will go to take down Tucker’s company. But, in the end, Tucker refuses to surrender and Jeff Bridges’s charming smile continues to fill the viewer with hope. The film becomes about more than just cars. It’s a film that celebrates all of the innovators who are willing to defy the establishment.
There’s a tendency to dismiss the majority of Coppola’s post-Apocalypse Now films. However, Tucker: The Man And His Dream is a later Coppola film that deserves to be remembered.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!
This week, a man from the past returns to haunt Castillo.
Episode 2.9 “Bushido”
(Dir by Edward James Olmos, originally aired on November 22nd, 1985)
This week’s episode opens with yet another intricately plotted drug bust going awry. This time, a dealer ends up dead, a DEA Agent ends up knocked out and tied up in a bathroom, and $50,000 goes missing. Watching the tapes of the bust, Castillo is shocked to spot a familiar face on the scene. Castillo says that Jack Gretsky (Dean Stockwell) was his partner when he was working for the CIA in Vietnam. Gretsky has long been thought dead but there he is, on tape and ruining Castillo’s bust.
Realizing that Gretsky was sending him a message, Castillo decides to deal with the situation personally. After visiting two CIA agents (Jerry Hardin and Tom Bower) who work out of an adult novelty shop, Castillo tracks Gretsky down to a Buddhist temple. The two of them talk. Gretsky reveals that he’s married to a Russian woman and that he has a son. He asks Castillo to watch over them if anything happens to him. The stoic Castillo agrees and then gives Gretsky a hug. Castillo says that he has to arrest Gretsky. Gretsky says he knows and then pulls a machine gun, forcing Castillo to kill him. The CIA agents are happy to no longer have to deal with Gretsky.
A day later, the coroner’s office calls Vice and says that Gretsky was terminally ill with cancer and probably only had a few days left to live. When Crockett and Tubbs go to tell Castillo, they find his badge and a note sitting in the office. Castillo is fulfilling Gretsky’s final wish and protecting his wife (Natasha Schneider) and his son, Marty (Robin Kaputsin). Castillo sees it as being a part of the samurai code by which he lives his life. Meanwhile, a rogue CIA agent named Surf (David Rasche, giving a wonderfully unhinged performance) is working with the KGB to track down Gretsky’s family.
Directed by Edward James Olmos, Bushido is a wonderfully odd episode. With a combination of skewed camera angles and deliberately eccentric performances from Dean Stockwell and David Rasche, this episode plays out with the relentless intensity of a fever dream. (The opening drug bust even features Zito burying himself in the sand and using a straw to breathe until its time to emerge and knock out one of the bad guys. It’s weird but it’s great.) Olmos contrasts Castillo’s trademark stoicism with the more verbose characters played by Stockwell and Rasche and, as a result, Castillo emerges as an honorable man who hides his emotions because he knows that’s the only way to survive in his world. To fall in love like Jack or to get cocky like Surf can only lead to one’s downfall.
After a few uneven episodes, Bushido is a nice reminder of what Miami Vice was capable of at its best.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1971’s The Failing of Raymond! It can be viewed on YouTube!
Poor Raymond!
Played by a young Dean Stockwell, Raymond is patient at a mental hospital who blames everything that has gone wrong on his life on one failed test. During his senior year of high school, he got a 61 on an English test and, as a result, he not only only failed the class but he also wasn’t allowed to graduate. The test was administered by a substitute teacher named Mary Bloomquist (Jane Wyman), one who did not know that Raymond had a reputation for being a bit eccentric. When Raymond tried to ask her whether or not the final two questions were for extra credit, Mary refused to call on him because she was more preoccupied with her failed affair with another teacher (Dana Andrews). Raymond didn’t answer the final two questions, even though he believed that he had the correct answers. Now, locked away in a hospital, Raymond comes across an article announcing that beloved teacher Mary Bloomquist will soon be retiring and moving to England.
Seeking revenge, Raymond escapes from the hospital. While police Sgt. Manzek (Murray Hamilton) search for Raymond, Raymond returns to his old school. When he finds Mary in her classroom, Mary mistakes Raymond for a mover responding to a classified ad asking for help in getting all of her things packed up. Raymond may be a homicidal but he also craves direction and praise so he helps Mary with her packing. As he packs, Mary talks about her decision to retire and it turns out that she’s not quite the monster that Raymond imagined her to be. Mary is retiring because she feels that she has never made a difference as a teacher.
That said, Raymond is still determined to get his revenge. He wants Mary to give him the test a second time and to give him a passing grade. And if she doesn’t, he’s prepared to kill her. Unfortunately, despite claiming to have spent years studying the material, Raymond still thinks that Robert Browning wrote the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.…
As the old saying goes, you never know how much your actions might effect someone else’s life. Mary is a dedicated and well-meaning teacher who cares about her students but her decision to fail Raymond, made on a day when she was distracted by her own personal problems, is something that Raymond has never forgotten or forgiven. Mary can barely remember it happening but Raymond has based his entire life around that moment and, as the film progresses, it becomes clear that he’s incapable of understanding that the entire world doesn’t revolve around what happened to him during his senior year. On the one hand, Mary definitely should have answered Raymond’s question about whether or not the final two questions were multiple choice. On the other hand, Raymond has clearly been using the incident as an excuse to justify every mistake that he’s made sense. Ironically, Raymond’s quest for revenge gives Mary the chance to finally be the teacher that she truly wants to be.
It’s an intriguing premise. Unfortunately, like so many made-for-TV movies from the early 70s, The Failing of Raymond is occasionally a bit too stagey for its own good. Despite only being 73 minutes long, it never really develops any sort of narrative momentum. That said, Dean Stockwell gives a performance that makes clear why Alfred Hitchcock was planning on casting him as Norman Bates if Anthony Perkins somehow fell through. As played by Stockwell, Raymond is unfailingly polite and so obviously wounded that it’s impossible not to feel sympathy for him, even when he’s threatening to kill his former teacher. Jane Wyman, as well, gives a sympathetic performance as Mary, who, despite that one bad day with Raymond, really is the type of teacher we all wish we could have had.
This film was directed by Boris Sagal, who did several made-for-TV movies and also directed Charlton Heston in The Omega Man. His daughter, Katey Sagal, makes her film debut in a small role as one of Raymond’s fellow patients.
Sometimes, you see a film that is just so weird and incoherent that you can’t help but love it.
Of course, it also helps if the film has a once-in-a-lifetime cast of actors who you would never expect to see acting opposite each other.
For me, that’s certainly the case with 1990’s Backtrack. Directed by Dennis Hopper, Backtrack is a film about an artist (Jodie Foster, channeling Jenny Holzer) who witnesses a mob murder committed by Joe Pesci, Dean Stockwell, Tony Sirico, and John Turturro. An FBI agent played by Fred Ward suggests that the artist should go into the witness protection program but she doesn’t want to give up her life as a New York sophisticate who creates challenging LED displays and who can eat Sno Balls whenever she gets the craving for one. (Yes, this is a plot point.) Turturro and Sirico break into the artist’s apartment and kill her boyfriend, who is played by a wide-eyed Charlie Sheen. The artist puts on a blonde wig and goes on the run, eventually getting a job in advertising.
Realizing that his men can’t get the job done, mob boss Vincent Price decides to hire a legendary hitman played by Dennis Hopper (who also directed this film) to track down the artist. However, the hitman becomes fascinating with the artist’s work, finds pictures of her posing in black lingerie, and immediately falls in love with her. Not only does he wants to save her life but he wants her to wear the same lingerie exclusively for him. (Yes, this is a pretty big plot point.) At first, the artist refuses and views the hitman as being some sort of pathetic perv. But then she discovers that he’s covered her bed with Sno Balls….
Meanwhile, a young Catherine Keener shows up as the girlfriend of a trucker who briefly considers giving the artist a ride to Canada.
And then Bob Dylan shows up, handling a chainsaw.
And there’s Helena Kallianiotes, the outspoken hitch-hiker from Five Easy Pieces, yelling at Joe Pesci!
And there’s Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie co-star, Julie Adams! And there’s Toni Basil! And there’s director Alex Cox!
Dennis Hopper not only starred in Backtrack but he also directed and it’s obvious that he placed a call into just about everyone he knew. In fact, one could argue that the only thing more shocking than Vincent Price showing up as a mob boss is that Peter Fonda, Karen Black, Elliott Gould, Robert Walker Jr., and Kris Kristofferson are nowhere to be found in the film. Hopper’s first cut of Backtrack was reportedly 3 hours long but the studio cut it down to 90 minutes, renamed it Catchfire, and Hopper insisted on being credited as Alan Smithee. Later, Hopper released a two-hour version with the Backtrack title and his directorial credit restored.
Regardless of which version you see, Backtrack is an odd film. It’s hardly the first film to be made about a hit man falling for his target. What distinguishes this film is just how bizarre a performance Dennis Hopper gives in the role of the hitman. It’s as if Hopper gave into every method instinct that he had and the end result was a mix of Blue Velvet‘s Frank Booth and the crazed photojournalist from ApocalypseNow. Jodie Foster’s cool intelligence makes her the ideal choice for a conceptual artist but it also makes it hard to believe that she would fall for a jittery hitman and, in her romantic scenes with Hopper, Foster often seems to be struggling to resist the temptation to roll her eyes. Somehow, their total lack of romantic chemistry becomes rather fascinating to work. They are two talented performers but each appears to be acting in a different movie. What’s interesting is that I think a movie just about Hopper’s spacey hitman would be interesting (and, if you’ve ever seen The American Friend, it’s hard not to feel that such a movie already exists) but I think a movie about just about Foster’s artist and her life in New York would be just as fascinating. Taken as individuals, the artist and the hitman are both compelling characters. Taken as a couple, they don’t belong anywhere near each other.
But let’s be honest. This is a film that most people will watch for the parade of character actors delivering quirky dialogue. Even if one takes Hopper and Foster out of this mix, this is an amazingly talented cast. One need only consider that John Turturro did Do The Right Thing before appearing in this film while Joe Pesci and Tony Sirico did Goodfellas immediately afterwards. This film features a once-in-a-lifetime cast, made up of actors who were apparently told to do whatever they felt like doing. Turturro plays up the comedy. Sirico plays his role with cool menace. Stockwell barely speaks above a whisper. Fred Ward plays the one sane man in a world of lunatics. Vincent Price delivers his line as if he’s appearing in one of Roger Corman’s Poe films and somehow, it makes sense that, in the world of Backfire, an Italian gangster would have a snarky, mid-Atlantic accent.
It’s an odd little film, an example of 80s filmmaking with a 70s sensibility. While it’s not touched with the lunatic genius that distinguished Hopper’s The Last Movie, Backtrack is still something that should be experienced at least once.
Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon) is an idealistic young law school graduate who discovers that having a degree and passing the bar doesn’t automatically make you a success. He gets a job working a bar that just happens to be owned by an ambulance chasing attorney named Bruiser Stone (Mickey Rourke). Bruiser takes Rudy on as an associate and assigns his associate, Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito), to teach Rudy how to find cases. When Bruiser flees the country to escape an FBI investigation, Rudy and Deck start their own law firm. Rudy soon finds himself with the case of his young career, representing a family in a law suit against Great Benefit Insurance. Rudy also falls for Kelly (Claire Danes), a young woman who is being abused by her husband (Andrew Shue).
Through the Shattered Lens 