In case you were wondering what Hillary Swank has been up to (other than starring on that television show about newspaper in Alaska), here’s your answer! She’s playing an alcoholic in Ordinary Angels, which appears to be another “uplifting, based on a true story” film of 2023. This film is scheduled to be released on October 13th. That’s Friday the 13th, by the way.
Actually, I imagine that this film might do well with an October release date. Consider it to be counter-programming for all the folks who aren’t into horror. Here at TSL, we’ll be in the middle of our annual horrorthon. As the song goes, “if it makes you happy….”
Apparently, A Haunting In Venice is not the only crime-related film that Tina Fey (who one does not usually associate with crime films) has coming out this year. On June 16th, she will be co-starring in Maggie Moore(s), along with Jon Hamm and Nick Mohammed. The film was directed by Hamm’s Mad Men co-star, John Slattery. Here’s the trailer:
Based on a true story, eh? To be honest, the trailer make it look like this film might be trying too hard to be quirky and Coenesque but who knows? Sometimes, a good film gets a bad trailer and, more often, a bad film will get a really good trailer. The cast is certainly talented so we’ll see!
Eric Roberts appears about twenty minutes into 2020’s Free Lunch Express. He plays a man standing in line at a Vermont welfare office. He tells a youngish Bernie Sanders (played, at that point in the movie, by Sam Brittan) that the easiest way to make some extra money is to run for public office because there’s no limit on the amount of money you can raise and you can keep whatever you have left after the campaign. Having been recently kicked out of a commune and having no interest in getting a real job, Sanders is intrigued by the advice and soon embarks on his first political campaign. Roberts only appears in that one scene. It probably took an hour or two of his time to film. Roberts spends the entire scene laughing, supposedly because he’s amused over the idea of making a living as a perennial political candidate.
(For that matter, Eric Roberts is not the only familiar face to pop up in Free Lunch Express. Not surprisingly, Kevin Sorbo shows up. He plays the ghost of George Washington and I’ll admit that I chucked at his Elizabeth Warren joke. Far more surprisingly, Malcolm McDowell shows up as the narrator and epically rolls his eyes at every major moment of Sanders’s life.)
As for the rest of the film, Free Lunch Express is an attempt to do an Adam McKay-style satire about the career of Bernie Sanders. Unfortunately, the problem with trying to make fun of Bernie Sanders is that even Bernie’s most fervent supporters already realize and often acknowledge that he’s a vaguely ludicrous figure. Indeed, the very things that the film pokes fun at — like Bernie’s permanently messy hair, his thick Brooklyn accent, his habit of yelling out his comments while pointing upwards, and his apparently inability to make normal small talk — are the same things that most of his supporters find to be appealing about him. I disagree with Bernie on the majority of the issues and I would probably move to another country if he was ever elected President but, at the same time, I can’t help but kind of like him. One reason why so many people voted for him in 2016 is because he seemed to be authentic in a way that other politicians did not. It’s easy to poke fun at a slick politician but it’s far more difficult to do so at someone who looks like he just got out of bed and who tends to say whatever pops into his mind. It’s far easier to satirize the personality of a Hillary Clinton or a Mitt Romney than it is to satirize a Bernie Sanders.
Free Lunch Express follows Bernie through three stages of his life. As a child, Bernie (played by Jonah Britton) swears a blood oath while standing in front of a poster Joseph Stalin and he declares that he’ll never be bullied again. As a young man, Bernie (Sam Brittan) moves to Vermont and annoys all the other hippies to such an extent that he’s forced to take Eric Roberts’s advice and run for political office. And, as an old and ineffective Senator, Bernie (now played by Charles Hutchins) runs for the presidency and only drops out after Hillary (Cynthia Kania) promises to campaign in Wisconsin and Ohio in the general election. There were a few moments that made me chuckle, like the portrayal of Ben & Jerry as being two hippies who can’t have a conversation without shouting out the name of their latest flavor or Bernie cluelessly traveling to dreary Moscow for the worst honeymoon ever. But, for the most part, the humor falls flat and the jokes are often too repetitive to really be effective. Having a young and nerdy Bernie swear his allegiance to Stalin because he thinks that Stalin, who killed millions of his own citizens, will create a world without bullies is funny. However, having the ghost of Stalin randomly speak to Bernie throughout the years is a joke that grows tiresome and never really pays off. It’s pretty much the same issue that I had with Adam McKay’s Vice. Much as Vice did with Dick Cheney, the film tries so hard to take down Sanders with ridicule that it instead makes him seem almost likable. Indeed, by focusing on the times that Bernie was, in the film’s view, humiliated by Hillary Clinton, the hippies at the commune, and basic economic realities, the film actually portrays Bernie as someone who refuses to surrender his principles, regardless of how often the rest of the world tells him that he’s wrong. The film aims to be Tartuffe and instead turns into Candide.
Finally, on a personal note, I think anyone who ever runs for office should be ridiculed, regardless of what they believe or whether or not they’ve done a good job. It’s a good way to keep them honest and to remind theme that they’re supposed to work for us and not the other way around. If one’s beliefs can’t survive a joke or two, that says far more about the beliefs than it does about the jokes.
Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:
Somehow, I missed this trailer when it dropped last week. Well, no matter! The movie’s not being released until September 15th so I still have time to share the trailer for A Haunting in Venice, the latest Agatha Christie adaptation from Kenneth Branagh! This film finds Poirot retired and living in self-imposed exile in Venice. When he attends a séance, he is dragged back into the world of mystery solving.
The cast of suspects includes: Kyle Allen, Camille Cottin, Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, Jude Hill, Ali Khan, Emma Laird, Kelly Reilly, Riccardo Scamarico, and Michelle Yeoh! Not having read Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, I can’t tell you who the murderer is or even who the victim is. But, personally, I suspect Tina Fey did it.
That right, everyone! We’ve got yet another After movie coming out this year. So far, I think I’ve listed every single After movie on my annual “worst films of the year” list and, judging from this trailer, I have a feeling that it might happen again.
As far as I can tell, Tessa is still angry that Hardin turned their extremely boring relationship into a book. So, Hardin decides to pout, scowl, probably start drinking again, and eventually he continues to stalk her because that’s pretty much what happens in every After film. I really do have to wonder what type of contract was signed by Josephine Langford and Hero Fiennes Tiffin that requires them to spend the rest of their careers playing these extremely shallow and unlikable characters.
(And yet, as shallow and unlikable as Tess and Hardin are, I’ve still watched every film in this stupid franchise. I’m not sure why, to be honest. I think it might have something to do with the terrible fascination that everyone tends to have with natural disasters and grisly car accidents.)
To me, it will never not be funny that Hardin Scott, one of the most pretentious and self-pitying characters ever forced on the reading and viewing public, is apparently now to be portrayed as the literary voice of his generation. I don’t know if it’s sad because it’s so silly or because it’s so plausible.
In the late 1970s, the Rev. Jim Jones was a very powerful man.
The leader of the California-based People’s Temple, Rev. Jones had made a name for himself as a civil right activist. As a minister, he made it a point to reach out to the poor and to communities of color. (It was said, largely by Jones, that he had been forced to leave his home state of Indiana by the Ku Klux Klan.) Local politicians eagerly sought not only Jones’s endorsement but also the donations that he could easily raise from the members of the People’s Temple. Though there were rumors that he was more of a cult leader than a traditional preacher, Jones was appointed chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Everyone from Governor Jerry Brown to San Francisco Mayor George Moscone appeared with Jim Jones at campaign events. Among the national figures who regularly corresponded with Jim Jones were First Lady Rosalyn Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale.
Of course, what actually went on behind the closed doors of the People’s Temple was a bit of secret. Jones was a self-proclaimed communist who claimed to have had visions of an upcoming nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. In his sermons, he often claimed that it would be necessary for both him and the rest of the People’s Temple to eventually leave the United States. Jones spoke of enemies that were trying to destroy him, like the reporters who investigated Jones’s claim of being a faith healer and who followed up on reports that Jones was sexually exploiting both the women and the men who followed him. Jones secretly started to make plans to leave the United States in 1973 but it would be another four years before he and a thousand of his followers arrived in Guyana. The People’s Temple Agricultural Project sat in the jungle, isolated from oversight. It was informally known as Jonestown.
Over the next year, Jonestown did not exactly thrive. Rev. Jones demanded that his people work hard and he also demanded that they spend several hours a day studying socialism and listening to him preach. Jones ran his commune like a dictator, refusing to allow anyone to leave (for their own safety, of course). Anyone who questioned him was accused of being an agent of the CIA. In the U.S, the families of Jonestown’s citizens became concerned and started to petition the government to do something about what was happening in Guyana. A few people who did manage to escape from Jonestown told stories of forced labor, suicide drills, rape, and torture. The People’s Temple claimed that those people were all lying and, because Jones still had his government connections, he was largely left alone.
Finally, in 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan, a Democrat who had a history of opposing the political establishment, flew down to Guyana so that he could see Jonestown for himself and also bring back anyone who wanted to leave. Despite the efforts of Jones to disguise the truth about life in Jonestown, several people did ask to leave the colony with Rep. Ryan. Jones sent his most loyal men to meet and open fire on Rep. Ryan’s entourage at a nearby airstrip. Rep. Ryan and four others were shot and killed, making Ryan the first Congressman to be assassinated since 1868. Nine others, including future Rep. Jackie Speier, were wounded in the attack.
Back at Jonestown, Jim Jones announced that his prophecy was coming true and that the imperialists would soon descend on Jonestown. Though 85 of Jones’s followers managed to escape into the jungle, the other 909 residents of Jonestown subsequently died. Though some showed signs of having been murdered by Jones’s followers, the majority committed suicide by drinking poisoned Flavor-Aid. Jim Jones shot himself in the head.
The world was horrified and the term “drinking the Kool-Aid” entered the discourse. And, of course, many filmmakers were inspired by the horrific events that happened in Jonestown. Ivan Rassimov, for instance, played a Jim Jones-style cult leader in Umberto Lenzi’s Eaten Alive. Meanwhile, Powers Boothe would win an Emmy for playing Jim Jones in a 1980 television miniseries called Guyana Tragedy.
Guyana Tragedy is often described as being the definitive film about Jim Jones. However, a full year before Guyana Tragedy aired, the Mexican director, Rene Cardona Jr., was in theaters with his own version of the Jim Jones story. To anyone who is familiar with Cardona’s style of filmmaking, it’s perhaps not surprising that 1979’s Guyana: Crime of the Century did not win any awards.
Cardona’s film opens with a rather odd title card, explaining that, though the film is based on Jonestown, the names of certain characters “have been changed to protect the innocent.” But if you’re going to start the film by announcing that it’s about the biggest news story of the past year, what’s the point of changing anyone’s name? And for that matter, why is Jim Jones renamed James Johnson and his colony rechristened Johnsontown? Jones was hardly one of the innocents, not to mention that he was dead and in no position to sue when the film came was released. Why is Leo Ryan renamed Lee O’Brien, especially when the film portrays Ryan as being the type of hard-working and honest congressman that anyone would be happy to vote for?
The film opens with Rev. James “Johnson” (played by Stuart Whitman) giving a lengthy sermon about how it’s time for the congregation to move to Guyana, which he describes as being a Socialist paradise. Oddly, in the film, the People’s Temple is portrayed being largely white and upper middle class whereas, in reality, the opposite was true. Indeed, Jones specialized in exploiting communities that were largely marginalized by American society. One reason why Jones’s claim of government persecution was accepted by the members of his church is because the People’s Temple was made up of people who had very legitimate reasons for distrusting the American government.
A few scenes later, Johnson is ruling over “Johnsonville.” Since this is a Cardona film, the viewers are shown several scenes of people being tortured for displeasing Johnson. A child is covered in snakes. Another is shocked with electricity. A teenage boy and girl are forced to kneel naked in front of Johnson as he announce that their punishment for trying to run away is that they will be forced to have sex with someone of Johnson’s choosing. Once the torture and the nudity is out of the way, the film gets around to Congressman O’Brien (Gene Barry) traveling to the Johnsontown. Since the audience already knows what’s going to happen, the film becomes a rather icky game of waiting for O’Brien to announce that he’s ready to go back to the landing strip.
Because the film has been released under several different titles and with several different running times, Guyana: Crime of theCentury has gotten a reputation for being one of those films that was supposedly cut up by the censors. I’ve seen the original, uncut 108-minute version of Guyana and I can tell you that there’s nothing particularly shocking about it. Instead, it’s a painfully slow film that doesn’t really offer much insight into how Jim Jones led over 900 people to their deaths. While Gene Barry make for a convincing congressman, Stuart Whitman gives a stiff performance as the Reverend Johnson. There’s very little of the charisma that one would expect from a successful cult leader. One gets the feeling that Whitman largely made the film for the paycheck.
Of course, Whitman was hardly alone in that regard The film features a host of otherwise respectable actors, including Yvonne DeCarlo, Joseph Cotten, John Ireland, Robert DoQui, and Bradford Dillman. As well, Cardona regular Hugo Stiglitz appears as a photographer. (Stiglitz is perhaps best known for starring in Nightmare Cityand for lending his name to a character in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.) Of the large cast, I appreciated the performances of Cotten and Ireland, who play Johnson’s amoral but well-connected attorneys. (The characters are based on the Temple’s real-life attornes, Charles Garry and Mark Lane. Lane also wrote the first JFK conspiracy book, Rush to Judgment.) I also liked Yvonne DeCarlo’s performance as the most devoted of Johnson’s followers. Even Bradford Dillman’s natural blandness was used to good effect as his character comes to represent the banality of evil when it comes time for him to start administering the Flavor-Aid. But those good performances still can not overcome the film’s slow pace and the fact that the film didn’t bring any new insight to the tragedy.
The film sticks fairly close to what is believed to have actually happened at Jonestown but, in the end, it barely even works as an example of shameless grindhouse filmmaking. It’s not even offensive enough to be enjoyable on a subversive level. Instead, it was just a quick attempt to make some money off of the crime of the century.
Released in 2008, Germany’s The Baader Meinhof Complex begins in 1967. The entire world appears to be in the grip of protest and revolution. The Viet Nam War is raging. Economic inequality is increasing. For neither the first nor the last time, the Middle East is consumed with conflict. All across Europe, young Leftist activists protest against what they consider to be American imperialism.
At a protest in Berlin, the police shoot and kill an unarmed student. Outraged by not only the shooting but also the lack of accountability on the part of the police, journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) announces on television that, even though the Nazis may no longer be in power, Germany is still a fascist state. Her words scandalize many viewers but they inspire two young activists named Andreas Baader (Moritz Bliebtreu) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek). Baader and Ensslin protest by blowing up a department store. Their subsequent arrest and trial makes them celebrities. It also leads to them meeting with Meinhof, who finds herself drawn to the two charismatic radicals. Though convicted, both Baader and Ensslin are released pending an appeal and they soon become the leaders of the Red Army Faction. They amass a following of other young radicals, many of whom are searching for some sort of purpose for their lives. Among those who join them is Meinhof herself, who abandons her safe, middle-class liberalism and instead commits to Baader and Ensslin’s revolution. For every violent act that Baader and Ensslin mastermind, Meinhof writes the press release that justifies it by pointing out the violent acts being carried out by governments acoss the world.
At first, the revolution itself is almost fun. Baader and Ensslin both obviously enjoy their celebrity. When the RAF goes to Jordan to attend a sort of terrorist training camp, they promptly get on their host’s nerves by appearing not to take their training particularly seriously. The heads of the camp want to teach combat skills. Baader just wants to learn how to rob a bank and he and Ensslin take such delight in upsetting the stuffy heads of the camp that it’s hard not to like them. From the start, though, there are hints that the fun isn’t going to last. Baader may be charismatic but he’s also arrogant, temperamental, and lacking in self-awareness. He’s the type of revolutionary who will goad his lawyer into stealing a woman’s bag but who throws a fit when, moments later, someone else steals his car. For all their talk of how they’re willing to do whatever it takes to bring about a revolution, neither Baader nor Ensslin seem to initially understand the true risks of their activities. When a member of their group is killed in a shoot-out with the police, they are stunned and angered, as if it never occurred to them that the police would kill someone who opened fire on them. As the RAF’s action grow more violent and more people are killed as a result, Meinhof struggles to justify the violence. Eventually, not even Baader and Ensslin can control the organization that they’ve created.
It’s a familiar story. What starts off as idealism is eventually consumed by fanaticism and cynicism. The belief that’s one cause is right leaves people on both sides convinced that anything they do to promote that cause is correct. The film presents the violence of the 60s and 70s as being a never-ending cycle, with the violent response of each side merely fueling the anger on the other. At one point, a government official wonders why Baader has such a hold on his followers and the reply is that Baader has become a living myth, an activist celebrity who is idealized by his followers but who, in reality, can be just as arrogant, petty, and egotistical as those that he’s fighting. For many, he and his organization offer an escape from a pointless bourgeois existence but, in the end, he and Ensslin and Meinhof are perhaps the most bourgeois of all.
Aided by a strong cast, director Uli Edel captures the feel of a world that seems like it’s perpetually on the verge of revolution. Though the film is full of scenes of car chases, bombs exploding, and bullets being fired, Edel never allows us to forget the real costs of such actions. The film ends with the suggestion that the cycle of violence and revolution is destined never to end as one act leads to another. As the film reminds us, it’s a story that has played out many times in the past and will continue to play out in the future.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasionally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1988’s Space Mutiny! I picked it so you know it’ll be good.
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Space Mutiny on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! Then, at 10 pm et, switch over to Twitter and Prime, start Hoosiers, and use the #MondayMuggers hashtag! The live tweet community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
The story behind the making of 1971’s The Last Movie is legendary. It’s also a bit of a cautionary tale.
In 1969, Hollywood was stunned by the box office success of an independent, low-budget counter-culture film called Easy Rider. Easy Rider not only made a star out of Jack Nicholson but it was also the film that finally convinced the studios that the way to be relevant was not to continue to crank out big budget musical extravaganzas like Doctor Doolittle and Hello, Dolly! Instead, it was decided that the smart thing to do would be to hire young (or, at the very least, youngish) directors and basically just let them shoot whatever they wanted. The resulting films might not make much sense to the executives but, presumably, the kids would dig them and as long as the kids were paying money to see them, everyone would continue to get rich. Because Dennis Hopper had directed Easy Rider, he suddenly found himself very much in demand as a director.
Of course, almost everyone in Hollywood knew Dennis Hopper. Long before he became an icon of the counter-culture, Dennis Hopper had been a part of the studio system. John Wayne even referred to Hopper as being his “favorite communist.” Everyone knew that Dennis could be a bit arrogant. Everyone knew that Dennis was very much into drugs and that, as a result, he had a reputation for being a bit unstable. Everyone knew that Dennis Hopper deliberately cultivated an image of being a bit of a wild man and a revolutionary artist. But Dennis Hopper had just directed Easy Rider and Universal was willing to give Hopper some money to go down to Peru and direct his follow-up.
The Last Movie was a film that Hopper had been planning on making for a while. The film’s original script told the story of an aging and broken-down stuntman named Kansas who retires to Mexico and searches for a gold mine with a friend of his. Hopper first tried to get the film going in 1965, with Montgomery Clift in the lead role. After Clift died, Hopper tried to interest John Wayne in the starring role but, though Wayne enjoyed having Hopper in his films so that he could threaten to shoot him whenever Abbie Hoffman said something shocking, he had no interest in being directed by him. When Universal finally agreed to put up the money for the film, Hopper offered the lead role to Jack Nicholson. Nicholson turned it down and told Hopper that it was obvious that Dennis wanted to play the role himself. Dennis decided that he agreed with Nicholson and he cast himself as Kansas. Dennis also made the fateful decision to not only change the story’s setting to Peru but to also film on location.
Dennis and a group of friends flew down to Peru, which, at that time, was the cocaine capitol of the world. Drug use was rampant on the set, with Dennis reportedly being one of the main offenders. The cast and crew filmed during the day and partied at night and no one was particularly sure what the film was supposed to be about. Amazingly, Hopper finished filming on schedule and within budget but, much as he did with Easy Rider, he also overfilmed and ended up with 40 hours of footage. Not wanting to be bothered by the studios, Hopper edited the footage in his compound in Taos, New Mexico. Working slowly and continuing to consume a large amount of drugs and alcohol, Hopper still managed to put together a film that had a straightforward storyline. When Hopper showed his initial cut to filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, the director of El Topo accused Hopper of being too conventional in his approach, which led to Hopper chopping up the film and reassembling it. Finally, after spending over a year working with the footage, Hopper turned in his final edit.
Universal had no idea what to make of the film that Hopper delivered to them. Still, they released it with the hope that the same crowd that loved Easy Rider would embrace The Last Movie. While the film did win an award at the Venice Film Festival, critics hated it and, even worse, audiences stayed away. The film’s reception was so overwhelmingly negative that Hopper found himself largely exiled from Hollywood, with only a few directors (like Francis Ford Coppola) willing to take the chance of working with him. It wasn’t until the 80s, when he finally got clean and sober, that Dennis Hopper was able to reestablish himself as a character actor and, ultimately, a beloved cultural institution.
But what about The Last Movie? Was is it really as bad as the critics claimed? Or was it, as some more recent reviewers have suggested, an unacknowledged masterpiece that was ahead of its time? I recently watched The Last Movie to find out for myself.
Despite its reputation, The Last Movie gets off to a pretty strong start. Samuel Fuller (playing himself) is directing a hilariously over-the-top and violent western in the mountains of Peru. Kansas (Dennis Hopper) is working as a stuntman. He’s fallen in love with a local sex worker named Maria (Stella Garcia). Kansas is meant to be an aging Hollywood veteran, someone who has broken a lot of bones and who carries a lot of aches as a result of his line of work. (One can see why Hopper initially imagined an actor like John Wayne in the role.) He knows that this is going to be his last job and, as we see over the first 25 minutes of the film, he feels alienated from the rest of the cast and crew. Admittedly, Hopper does appear to be a bit too young for the role. The ideal Kansas would have been someone like Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, or perhaps Warren Oates. But, still, Hopper does a good job of capturing Kansas’s mixed feelings about the western that’s being filmed around him.
A lot of familiar faces pop up in the film’s fictional western. Dean Stockwell plays an outlaw. Jim Mitchum, Russ Tamblyn and Kris Kristofferson plays his associates. Peter Fonda is the youthful sheriff. Michelle Phillips is the daughter of the town’s banker and apparently, she’s also the girlfriend of one of the outlaws. We watch as the actors pretend to shoot guns and kill each other while the cameras are rolling, just to get up off the ground once “Cut” is yelled. When a local Indian who has been cast as an extra grows upset at the violence, an assistant director explains to him that no one really dies while the cameras are rolling. When shooting wraps, the film company goes home but Kansas stays behind with Maria. One day, the local priest (Tomas Milian) warns Kansas that the local indigenous people have moved into the abandoned film set and are trying to shoot their own movie. Kansas discovers that they have built wooden cameras and wooden boom mics and that their chief is giving orders in the style of Sam Fuller. They’re also firing the guns that the Americans left behind.
The first part of the film works quite well. Hopper’s camera captures the beautiful and isolated Peruvian landscape. The violent western is a pitch perfect and affectionate parody of a generic studio film. Though Hopper is a bit too young for the role, he still does a good job of capturing Kansas’s alienation from his fellow Americans. Even more importantly, the first part of the film seems to have an identifiable theme. The American film crew invaded an isolated part of Peru and changed the culture of the natives without even realizing it. Now, they’ve left but the natives are still dealing with the after effects of the American “invasion.” It’s easy to see, within that part of the story, a critique of both American culture and American foreign policy.
The second part of the film is where things start to fall apart. Kansas meets an old friend named Neville (Don Gordon). Neville has discovered a gold mine in the Peruvian mountains. With Kansas as his partner, he tries to get a businessman named Harry Anderson (Roy Engel) to invest in it. Kansas and Neville try to impress Harry and his wife (Julie Adams, best-known for being stalked by The Creature From The Black Lagoon). Kansas and Neville take the Andersons to a brothel and, in the process, Kansas offends Maria. Kansas then paws Mrs. Anderson’s fur coat and mentions that human beings are covered in hair. For all of their efforts, Harry will not invest, no matter how desperately Neville begs him to reconsider.
The second part of the film drags, with many of the scenes being obviously improvised between Hopper, Gordon, Garcia, Engel, and Adams. Unfortunately, the improved conversations aren’t particularly interesting and they tend to go on forever. Usually a reliable character actor, Don Gordon ferociously chews the scenery as Neville and it doesn’t take long before one grows tired of listening to him yell. (Gordon was far more impressive in Hopper’s Out of the Blue.) With the use of improvisation and overlapping dialogue, the second half of the film tries to feel naturalistic but instead, it’s a migraine-inducing method exercise gone wrong. It’s also during the second part of the film that a “scene missing” title card flashes on the screen, an indication that the discipline that Hopper showed as a director during the beginning of the film is about to be abandoned.
Finally, the third part of the film — well, who knows? The final 25 minutes of the film is collection of random scenes, some of which may be connected and some of which may not. The natives have decided that the only way to properly end their “film” is to kill Kansas. Kansas is shot several times and rides away on his horse. Suddenly, Kansas is back at his home and Maria is taunting him for getting shot. Then, Kansas is riding his horse again. Then suddenly, Dennis Hopper and Tomas Milian are laughing at the camera. A script supervisor tries to get Dennis to look at the shooting schedule while Dennis drinks. This happens:
Milian points out that the blood on Hopper’s shirt is dry. Hopper looks at his shoulder, where Kansas was previously shot, and says that someone needs to add his scar before he can shoot the scene. Ah! So, now we’re acknowledging that it’s all just a movie. Thanks, Dennis! Suddenly, Dennis is Kansas again and he’s collapsing over and over again in the dust. He appears to be dead but no, now he’s Dennis again and he’s standing up and smiling at the camera. And now, he’s singing Hooray for Hollywood. And now, suddenly, Kansas and Neville are talking about The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and then….
Well, let’s just say that it goes on and on before finally ending with a scrawled title card.
It’s a disjointed mess and it’s all the more frustrating because the first 30 minutes of the film is actually pretty good. But then, Dennis apparently remembered that he was supposed to be the voice of the counter-culture and he gave into his most pretentious impulses. Of course, just because a film is a mess, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be entertaining. And again, the first part of the film is entertaining and third part of the film is weird enough that it’ll hold most people’s attention for at least a few minutes. But the middle section of the film is so slow and pointless that it pretty much brings down the entire film.
In the end, what is The Last Movie about? In The American Dreamer(a documentary that was filmed while Hopper was editing The Last Movie in New Mexico), Hopper spends a lot of time talking about revolution and taking over Hollywood but The Last Movie is hardly a revolutionary film. The film is at its most alive when it is focused on the shooting of its fictional western. For all the satirical pokes that The Last Movie takes at the studio system, it’s obvious that Hopper had a lot of affection for Old Hollywood and for directors like Sam Fuller. Kansas may say “Far out,” but he’s hardly a hippie. Even the film’s jumbled finale seems to be saying, “It’s all Hollywood magic!” In the end, the film’s call for a new style of cinema is defeated by its love for the old style of cinema.
Instead, I think The Last Movie works best when viewed as a portrait of paranoia. Hopper himself admitted that he was naturally paranoid and the heavy amount of drugs that he was doing in the 70s didn’t help. One reason why Hopper filmed in Peru and edited in New Mexico was so the studios couldn’t keep track of him and, while directing, he worried about being arrested by the Peruvian secret police. As an actor, Hopper plays Kansas as being someone who views the world with caution and untrusting eyes. He doesn’t trust the other members of the film crew. He loves Maria but he’s still convinced that she’s going to betray him. Even the natives ultimately try to destroy him and the script supervisor tries to get him to stick to the shooting schedule. The film works best as a disjoined portrait of one man’s paranoid and fatalistic world view.
The Last Movie pretty much ended the studio’s attempts to harness the counter-culture by giving money to self-described revolutionaries. The new wave of directors — like Spielberg and Lucas — may have shared Hopper’s then-politics but they weren’t looking to burn down the system. (Hopper himself later became a Republican.) The Last Movie may not have been the literal last movie but it was, for a while at least, the last of its kind.
In 2014, the Atlas Shrugged trilogy came to a close with Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt? As you can probably guess from the title, this is the movie that finally revealed the elusive character of John Galt.
Unfortunately, after all the time spent discussing the character over the past two movies, there’s really no way that the actual John Galt could possibly live up to all the hype. John Galt, the man who stopped the motor of the world and who is the world’s greatest living engineer, turns out to be a sensitive lumberjack type who has founded his own scenic village in Galt’s Gulch. He’s manly and handsome and chivalrous and he’s a bit dull. Kristoffer Polaha, who plays the character, is a perfectly pleasant and likable actor but there’s nothing about his screen presence or his performance that suggests that he’s the man who has figured out how to save civilization from the regulatory state. As a character, Galt works best as a literary creation, someone who the reader can imagine for themselves. When seen on screen, he’s a bit of a letdown.
Taking over the role from Taylor Schilling and Samantha Mathis, Laura Regan plays Dagny Taggart as an overworked businesswoman who really needs a vacation. (Of the three actresses who played the character, only Mathis was credible as the dynamic Dagny of Ayn Rand’s original novel.) Having crashed her plane in the mountains at the end of the second film, Dagny is nursed back to health by John Galt and the inhabitants of Galt’s Gulch. Dagny is shocked to discover that most of her old friends are now living in Galt’s Gulch. As they explain, they’re on strike and they’re no longer going to serve a government that is looking to control and ultimately destroy them. Unfortunately, the film presents Galt’s Gulch as being a bit of a dull place, one that is not even livened up the presence of pirate Ragnar Danneskold (Eric Allan Kramer). It’s the type of place where Dagny can visit the local farmer’s market and recuperate in a taste-fully decorated bed and breakfast, all while falling in love with her hunky host. If the first two Atlas Shrugged films now feel somewhat prophetic, the third one feels like a Libertarian-themed Hallmark movie.
Atlas Shrugged: Part III feels a bit rushed. Apparently, no one from the cast and crew of either the first or the second film returned to work on Atlas Shrugged: Part III and it feels quite a bit different from the previous two films. Whatever one may think of the way the first two films presented the effects of government regulation, they were effective because they specifically showed the consequences. The audience actually saw two trains collide due to incompetent management. The audience saw the government showing up and forcefully taking over Rearden Metal. The third film relies on a narrator, one who tells us what happened instead of letting us see it with our own eyes. We hear about a bridge collapsing but we don’t see it. We hear about union thugs forcefully taking over a factory but we don’t see them. We hear about out-of-control government bureaucrats but, as opposed to the first two films, we don’t really get to spend much time with them and, when we do, they’re far more cartoonish in their villainy than they were in the first two films. John Galt does get to deliver his speech to the world but it’s in a truncated form and the film’s decision to then cut to Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Ron Paul all praising the speech on television not only goes against the film’s depiction of a country where public dissent is suppressed but it also reminds the audience that the film’s outlook has more in common with Fox News than Ayn Rand.
As previously mentioned, the third film has a totally different cast from the first two films. Greg Germann is enjoyably over-the-top as the unhinged James Taggart but, otherwise, the new cast fails to make much of an impression, with some of them only showing up for a few brief seconds before disappearing from the story. Rob Morrow plays Hank Rearden but is only seen for less than a minute. By sidelining one of the book’s most important characters, Atlas Shrugged: Part III also drops the whole storyline about Hank’s affair with Dagny. While I guess that makes it easier for the film to then have Dagny and John Galt hook up, it still feels a bit unfair to the people who actually watched the entire trilogy.
Considering that both Parts I and II have improved with the passage of time, Part III is a rather disappointing ending for the trilogy. Upon watching, John Galt would probably be disappointed but not surprised.
Through the Shattered Lens