TV Review: Twin Peaks: The Return Part 10 (dir by David Lynch)

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I’m getting a late start on this recap and I imagine that, by the time I’m finished rewatching the latest episode of Twin Peaks and typing all this up, I’ll probably barely be able to keep my eyes open. Dexedrine is a wonderful and helpful tool but it can only do so much.

(Don’t freak out, I take it for my ADD. It helps me focus. The endless energy is just a nice side benefit.)

So, I better not waste any time! Let’s talk about Part 10 of Twin Peaks!

We open in Twin Peaks, at the trailer park to be exact. Richard Horne (Eamon Farren) pulls up outside the trailer of Miriam (Sarah Jean Long), the poor woman who was unlucky enough to see him running down that little boy a few episodes ago. As this episode will demonstrate, Richard is perhaps the most loathsome character to ever appear in a David Lynch film. Even Blue Velvet‘s Frank Booth never ran down a child while driving around Lumberton.

From inside her trailer, Miriam yells at Richard that not only has she gone to the police but that she also wrote Sheriff Truman a letter, telling him that, if anything happens to her, Richard is the one responsible. Richard responds by rushing into the trailer and beating Miriam to death.

As Richard walks away from the trailer, he calls his Deputy Chad (John Pirruccello) and orders him to intercept the letter and keep Truman from reading it.

Elsewhere in the trailer park. Carl (Harry Dean Stanton) sits in front of the manager’s office, plays his guitar, and sings. The gentleness of Carl’s voice provides a stark contrast to the rest of the episode.

Carl’s song is interrupted by the sound of Steve (Caleb Landry Jones), in another trailer, yelling at Becky (Amanda Seyfried) and throwing stuff out the window. Becky is not only Shelley’s daughter but apparently, she’s found herself married to a modern-day Leo Johnson as well. Just like Leo, Steve is upset because he feels Becky isn’t keeping their home clean enough.

(Whatever happened to Leo? I assume all those tarantulas eventually fell on his face and killed him.)

In Las Vegas, Candie (Amy Shiels) — wearing her iconic pink dress — attempts to kill a fly by hitting it with a remote. Unfortunately, the fly happens to be on the face of Rodney Mitchum (Robert Knepper), which leads to him getting smacked. Bradley (James Belushi) rushes into the room the make sure that Rodney is okay, while Candie screams and sobs. The fly, I believe, escaped unharmed.

Janey-E (Naomi Watts) and Dougie (Kyle MacLachlan) visit with Dr. Ben (John Billingsley). While Dougie continues to stare blankly forward, Janey-E explains that he’s been acting strangely for a few days. Janey-E explains that Dougie has a drinking and gambling problem. Dr. Ben is bemused by Dougie’s weight loss. Janey-E agrees that Dougie has lost a lot of weight … “in a good way.” Dr. Ben announces that Dougie appears to be in perfect health. “Remarkable,” Janey-E says while looking at the shirtless Dougie.

Back the Mitchum place, Candie is still crying while Rodney assures her that he’s fine. On the TV, Bradley and Rodney watch a news story about both Dougie and the arrest of Ike the Spike.

“Brad,” Rodney says, “remind me to call off that hit on Ike.”

“Saved us a wad of dough!” Bradley agrees, “Niiiiiiiice!”

Bradley recognizes Dougie from the news. “That’s our Mr. Jackpots,” Bradley says.

At the Jones house, Janey-E watches Dougie eat cake. She asks if he finds her attractive. Dougie says nothing, entranced by the cake. Janey-E tells him that she finds him attractive. Dougie stares at her blankly. Janey-E takes Dougie upstairs, where she rides him while he lays underneath her in a state of stunned euphoria. (Dougie/Cooper, of course, is experiencing all of this for the first time.) Afterward, she tells Dougie, “I love you.” “Love you,” Dougie blankly repeats.

In Twin Peaks, Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) rants on his podcast about pharmaceutical companies. Nadine (Wendy Robie) listens approvingly. We see that she’s sitting in her own store, Run Silent Run Drapes. Yay! Nadine finally perfected her drape runners!

It’s morning in Vegas. As Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon), fresh from being traumatized by all the noise his parents made while he was trying to get some sleep, waits in the car, Janey-E tells Dougie that she can’t stop thinking about last night. Dougie blankly nods.

In the wilderness outside Twin Peaks, Jerry (David Patrick Kelly) is still lost. “You can’t fool me!” he yells, “I’ve been here before!”

At the Sheriff’s office, Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) wonders why Deputy Chad is hanging out in the lobby. Of course, we know that Chad is waiting for the mail so that he can intercept Miriam’s letter. Chad, however, just says that he’s appreciating the beauty of the day. Chad sees the mailman pulling up so he runs outside to meet him. Lucy is rightly suspicious, especially when Chad rather obviously stuffs Miriam’s letter under his shirt.

This is followed by a scene that literally left me queasy. At the Horne House, a bruised and battered Johnny Horne (Eric Rondell) stares at a creepy toy that has the body of teddy bear and a head of glass. Throughout the entire violent and brutal scene that will follow, the toy continues to ask — in a vaguely British accent — “Hello, Johnny. How are you today?”

Johnny Horne (Richard’s uncle)

Richard bursts into the house and demands that Sylvia (Jan D’Arcy) give him money. When she tells him to ask his grandfather, Richard grabs her by throat. As Richard attacks her (and Farren is absolutely terrifying in this scene), Johnny falls out of the chair and groans on the floor. It gets even worse when Johnny calls Sylvia “grandma.”

Sylvia, Richard’s grandmother

In other words, tonight, my greatest fear was confirmed. Richard is Audrey’s son. And judging from both his sociopathic personality and their shared affinity for leather jackets, it appears that Richard’s father is the Doppelganger. A few episodes ago, Dr. Hayward revealed the, when Cooper last saw Audrey, she was still in a coma.

Richard Horne (son of Audrey and Cooper’s Doppelganger)

Richard gets the money. He also calls his grandmother the C-word and steals her jewelry. “Why do you have to make something so simple so fucking difficult!?” Richard snaps before leaving.

Seriously, this scene — more than anything else that we’ve seen so far in this series — left me truly shaken. The performances of Farren and D’Arcy were so intense that, even though I knew it was coming and what would happen, I still had to take a break after rewatching this scene.

After that disturbing scene, we cut back to Las Vegas. Roger (Joe Adler) tells Duncan Todd (Patrick Fischler) that it’s true that Ike has been captured by the police. After Roger leaves, we see that Anthony Sinclair (Tom Sizemore) is in Duncan’s office. Duncan tells Anthony that he’s to go to the Mitchum Brothers and that he’s to claim that Dougie cheated them out of an insurance claim. Duncan believes that the Mitchums will respond by killing Dougie. If the Mitchums don’t kill Dougie, Anthony will have to do it himself.

In South Dakota, love is in the air. Albert (Miguel Ferrer) is on a date with coroner Constance Talbot (Jane Adams). A bemused Gordon (David Lynch) watches them, with Tammy (Chrysta Bell) at his side. But Gordon — you belong with Shelley!

Back in Vegas, Anthony goes to the casino and is spotted by the Mitchum brothers. They tell Candie — who, like the other ladies in pink, is hanging out in their office — to bring Anthony to see them. “You want me to bring him here?” Candie asks, somewhat vaguely, before heading to the casino floor.

As they watch Candie and Anthony on the surveillance footage, the Mitchum brothers realize that they may have made a mistake sending Candie. Candie and Anthony start to have a long conversation. Bradley is finally forced to tell the pit boss, Warrick (David Dastmalchian) to bring both Candie and Anthony back to the main office.

Before Rodney can complain, Bradley says, “If we fire her, she’s got no place to go.” So, in case you were wondering which brother was the nice brother, apparently it’s Jim Belushi.

Anyway, Candie and Anthony finally arrive at the office. The Mitchums demand to know what Candie and Anthony were talking about. Candie thinks for a minute and then remembers that they were talking about how it was going to be hot and smoggy the next day.

Anthony finally gets his chance to tell the Mitchum brothers that Dougie handled their denied claim and that he has a personal vendetta against them. Anthony is not exactly the best liar and the Mitchums tell Candie to show Anthony out of their office.

“You have an enemy in Douglas Jones!” Anthony shouts.

Later, Bradley and Rodney have a drink in their living room. Despite Anthony not being the most convincing of storytellers, the Mitchum brothers appear to believe him and they both agree that Dougie has to die. Rodney announces, “Now I know how Brando felt.”

(Wally Brando, maybe?)

Back in South Dakota, Gordon sits in his hotel room and draws a picture — one that resembles the cave drawings from the 2nd season of Twin Peaks — on a piece of paper. Someone knocks on his door. When Gordon answers it, he has a vision of Laura crying while hearing Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriksie) calling Laura’s name.

As the vision fades, Gordon sees that Albert is standing out in the hallway. Albert enters the hotel room and reveals that, while they were in the morgue, Diane received a text on her phone: “Around the dinner table, the conversation is lively.” Albert says that he and Tammy tracked the text as coming from Mexico. Diane responded with a heavily encrypted message: “They have Hastings. He’s going to take them to the site.”

“What should we do?” Albert asks.

“Keep her close,” Gordon replies.

Tammy then shows up at the room, revealing that she has new information concerning “the penthouse murders” in New York City. (That would be the murder of poor Sam and Tracy in Part 1.) She shows Gordon a picture of the Doppelganger in the penthouse, standing in front of the glass case.

At the Great Northern, Ben (Richard Beymer) takes a call from his now ex-wife, Sylvia. Sylvia demands that Ben repay her all of the money that Richard stole from her. Ben refuses. Sadly, when Ben asks if Johnny’s okay, Sylvia snaps back, “No concern about me!”

Hanging up on his former wife, a frustrated Ben calls out, “Beverly, do you want to have dinner with me?”

At her lonely house, the Log Lady (Catherine Coulson) calls Hawks (Michael Horse) and tell him that “Electricity is humming. You can hear it in the mountains and rivers…in these days, the glow is dying? What will be in the darkness that remains?”

(This scene is even more poignant when you consider it was probably the final thing that Coulson ever filmed before passing away last year.)

The Log Lady tells Hawk that the Truman brothers are “true men … they are your brothers … watch and lesson to the dream of time and space…Hawk…Laura is the one…”

At the Road House, Rebekah Del Rio performs, providing both this episode and the series as a whole with yet another link to Mulholland Drive. (That’s not as crazy as it sounds. Mulholland Drive was originally envisioned as being a spin-off of Twin Peaks, with Audrey moving to Hollywood.)

What to say about this episode? It was, in many ways, deceptively simple. All of the disparate elements of the show are finally coming together. The appearances by Sizemore, Belushi, and Knepper served to remind us — just as Jennifer Jason Leigh did last week — that Twin Peaks is not just random David Lynch quirkiness. Everything is connected. A story is being told. You just have to have the patience to look for the clues.

And finally, to those reviewers complaining that Twin Peaks: The Return is misogynistic, open your eyes. Yes, many of the characters are misogynists. Not a single one of them is, in anyway, portrayed sympathetically. He may be a surrealist but David Lynch is one of the most humanistic filmmakers of all time. If the world of Twin Peaks is sometimes ugly, so is the world outside your front door.

Twin Peaks on TSL:

Lisa Cleans Out Her DVR: Homer and Eddie (dir by Andrei Konchalovsky)

Posted on June 13, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Lisa is currently in the process of cleaning out her DVR. It’s taking her such a long time that she’s running out of cutesy ways to talk about how long it’s taking. She recorded this 1989 comedy off of Starz on May 10th.)

This is another strange one.

Homer and Eddie opens with Homer (James Belushi) standing on the corner of an isolated stretch of desert road. He is hitchhiking. When a car finally stops to pick him up, Homer is so excited! He gets in the back seat, gives the two men in the front seat a really wide smile, and innocently asks them how they’re doing.

One of the men (played by director John Waters) holds up a gun and demands all of Homer’s money. After Homer hands the money over, he is kicked out of the car. As the car drives away, Homer pulls a few dollars out of his sock and loudly yells that he fooled them and that they didn’t get all of his money.

The car abruptly stops and, going in reverse, pulls back up to Homer. Homer gives up his money and the car speeds off.

In short, Homer probably shouldn’t be hitchhiking on his own. Homer, you see, was hit in the head by a baseball when he was younger. He has the mind and the innocent outlook of a child. He is cheerful, he is religious, and he is totally unprepared to deal with real world.

Fortunately, Homer won’t be alone for too long. Homer comes across an apparently deserted car and, without money or a place to stay, he decides to use the car as shelter. However, it turns out that the car isn’t as abandoned as it looks! No, the car is being used by Eddie (Whoopi Goldberg). Eddie stole the car when she escaped from a mental institution. Why was Eddie in the mental institution? She’s a paranoid schizophrenic and she occasionally kills people. Eddie and Homer are soon taking a very strange road trip, heading up north so that Homer can see his dying father.

It’s a very disjointed film, one that switches tone from scene to scene. The two stars seem to be acting in totally different movies. Belushi gives a very broad performance, one that often crosses the line into pure goofiness. Eddie, meanwhile, is continually and constantly full of rage. You never know when she’s going to snap and kill someone. I spent a good deal of the movie waiting for her to kill Homer. Maybe that was the point but it’s still hard to laugh at scenes of Homer and Eddie waving at a school bus full of cheerleaders when you’re also waiting for Whoopi Goldberg to beat and dismember Jim Belushi.

Homer and Eddie can summed up by one lengthy sequence. Eddie takes Homer to a brothel so that he can lose his virginity. While Homer is dancing around in his underwear, Eddie is at a convenience store, shooting the clerk (played by Pruitt Taylor Vince). The clerk, who was perfectly nice to Eddie before getting shot, looks at his wound and feebly says, “Why did you do that?” before dying.

It’s a weird little movie. Usually, I love weird moves but this one is too much of a mess for even me. As I watched it, I couldn’t help but think of how much more interesting the movie would be if it was the child-like Homer killing people and schizophrenic Eddie trying to keep him calm. On a positive note, this was decades before Whoopi Goldberg gave up her edginess to co-host The View and she gives shockingly good performance. When Eddie loses control, she’s actually frightening. But, unfortunately, the film itself just doesn’t work.

A Movie A Day #80: The Palermo Connection (1990, directed by Francesco Rosi)

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

Carmine Bonavia (James Belushi) is an idealistic New York City councilman who wants to be mayor. Despite an easily understood slogan — “Make A Difference!” — his reform campaign is running behind in the polls. Having nothing to lose, Carmine announces that he supports the legalization of drugs. By taking out the profit motive, the Sicilian Mafia will no longer have any incentive to sell drugs in the inner city. Carmine shoots to top of the polls. Now leading by 11%, Carmine marries his campaign manager (Mimi Rogers) and returns to his ancestral home of Sicily for a combination honeymoon and fact-finding tour. The Mafia, realizing that Carmine is serious about legalizing drugs, conspires to frame him for the murder of a flower boy. If that doesn’t work, they are willing to resort to other, more permanent, methods to prevent Carmine from ever becoming mayor.

The Palermo Connection is an unfairly overlooked film from Francesco Rosi, an Italian director who specialized in political controversy. Though The Palermo Connection was sold as a thriller, Rosi was more interested in showing how organized crime, big business, government corruption, the war on drugs, and the poverty of the inner cities are all intricately connected. When Carmine arrives in Palermo, Rosi contrasts the outer beauty of Sicily with the desperate lives of the junkies living there. The pace may be too slow for action movie fans but Rosi gives the audience much to think about. This is probably the last film you would ever expect to star James Belushi but he gives a strong and committed performance as Carmine.

The Palermo Connection, which was co-written by Gore Vidal, is a good film that predates The Wire in its examination of how greed, drugs, poverty, and racism all come together to victimize the most marginalized members of society.

Shattered Politics #87: The Ghost Writer (dir by Roman Polanski)

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 2010 film The Ghost Writer, Ewan McGregor plays a character known as the Ghost. We never actually learn the name of his character and that’s perhaps appropriate. The Ghost has made his living by being anonymous. He’s a ghost writer. He’s the guy who is hired to help inarticulate and occasionally illiterate celebrities write best-selling biographies.

The Ghost has been given a new assignment. He is to ghost write the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). Despite the fact that Adam is one of the most famous men in the world, the Ghost is not initially enthusiastic about working with him.

First off, there’s the fact that Adam and his wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), are currently hiding out in America because America is one of the few countries that will not extradite him to be prosecuted for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. It seems that Adam (much like Tony Blair) is a controversial figure because of some of the actions he may have authorized as a part of the war on terror. Not only does the Ghost have political objections to working with Adam but he has to leave his London home and go to Massachusetts in order to do so.

Secondly, there’s the fact that, once the Ghost arrives in America, he discovers that — for such a controversial figure — Adam is actually rather boring and seems to have very little knowledge about anything that he did while he was prime minister. Instead, he seems to be more interested in spending time with his mistress (Kim Cattrall, giving the film’s one bad performance). Ruth seems to be the political (and smart) one in the marriage.

And finally, there’s the fact that the Ghost is actually the second writer to have worked with Adam. The previous writer mysteriously drowned. While that death was ruled to be an accident, the Ghost comes to suspect that it was murder and that the motive is hidden in the first writer’s manuscript…

The Ghost Writer is a favorite of mine, a smart and witty political thriller that features great performances from Ewan McGregor, Olivia Williams, and Pierce Brosnan. Brosnan especially seems to be having a lot of fun sending up his dashing, James Bond image. Roman Polanski directs at a fast pace and maintains a perfect atmosphere of growing paranoia throughout the entire film. In the end, The Ghost Writer proudly continues the tradition of such superior paranoia films as The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, and the Parallax View.

Incidentally, I have a theory that Adam Lang was also the unseen Prime Minister who was featured in Into the Loop. Watching The Ghost Writer, it’s hard not to feel that Adam really feel apart without Malcolm around to help him out.

Shattered Politics #57: Canadian Bacon (dir by Michael Moore)

Posted on February 1, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I have mixed feelings about the 1995 films Canadian Bacon.

On the one hand, Canadian Bacon is the only non-documentary to have been directed by Michael Moore. And I’m just going to admit right now that I don’t care much for Michael Moore. I think he’s fake. I think he’s the epitome of the type of limousine liberal who exclusively preaches to the converted and who, when all is said and done, does more harm to his causes than good. Just because he doesn’t shave, dresses like a slob, and apparently has never been to a gym, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s worth $50 million dollars. Just because he may claim to be for the workers, that doesn’t keep him from notoriously overworking and underpaying his own employees. Just because he may make films critical of capitalism, that certainly hasn’t stopped him from investing millions in the very same companies that he claims to oppose. And, quite frankly, it’s hard for me to take seriously a man who rails against income inequality when that man happens to own 9 mansions, none of which are exactly housing the homeless right now.

On the other hand, I love Canada! Canada has produced some of my favorite actors. It’s the country that created Degrassi. It’s the home of Lindsay Dianne and the Becoming A Bolder Being blog! Seriously, how can you not love Canada?

In fact, if a war ever broke out between American and Canada, I’m not sure who I’d support. Then again, hopefully Texas will have seceded from the U.S.A. before that happens. I’m keeping fingers crossed about that. Hopefully, once we have seceded, our first action will be to declare war on Vermont. (Not the rest of America, though. Just Vermont.)

The plot of Canadian Bacon is that the President of the United States (Alan Alda) is suffering from low approval ratings so he decides that America needs to find a new country to be enemies with. Mind you, the President doesn’t necessarily want to go to war. Instead, he just wants to have an enemy that he can always be on the verge of going to war with. After a riot breaks out at a hockey game, the President’s advisors realize that Canada would be the perfect enemy!

(And, while this is played for laughs, there actually is a historical precedent here. The War of 1812 was basically a result of America’s desire to conquer Canada.)

Anyway, American airwaves are soon full of anti-Canada propaganda and, since Michael Moore thinks everyone in America is an idiot except for him, gun-toting rednecks are soon preparing to do whatever it takes to defend America. A patriotic sheriff named Boomer (John Candy) decides to invade Canada on his own. Needless to say, things get even more complicated from there and soon a crazy weapons manufacturer (G.D. Spradlin) is plotting to launch a missile attack on Russia and … oh, who cares?

When Canadian Bacon tries to satirize politics and blind patriotism, it falls flat. Michael Moore has somehow earned a reputation for being a satirist but, if you actually look at his work, it quickly becomes apparent that he really doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. The humor in his documentaries is pretty much based on Moore saying, “Look how stupid everyone is except for me!” Since the people who watch Michael Moore documentaries are usually people who already agree with Michael Moore, they naturally find that to be hilarious because they already think anyone who disagrees with them is a joke. However, that doesn’t mean that Moore himself is a comic genius. He’s just a guy telling a joke to an audience that already knows the punchline.

Canadian Bacon is long on righteous indignation but it’s short on anything that would make you want to spend 90 minutes listening to the same point being made over and over again. Moore did make one good decision, in that he selected Rip Torn to play a crazed general. Rip Torn can deliver militaristic insults with the best of them.

The few times that Canadian Bacon actually works is when it gently (as opposed to indignantly) satirizes Canada’s reputation for being the most polite (and most hockey-obsessed) place on Earth. Dan Aykroyd has a great cameo as a Canadian police officer who pulls over Boomer’s truck and politely reprimands him for not including French translations for all of the anti-Canadian graffiti on the side of the vehicle.

Canadian Bacon could have used more scenes like that.

Love you, Canada!

Film Review: Diary of a Hitman (dir by Roy London)

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I’ve been on a mission to see as many obscure and forgotten films as possible, which is why, last night — via Movieplex OnDemand — I ended up watching a 1991 film called Diary of a Hitman.

In Diary of a Hitman, Forest Whitaker plays Dekker, a professional killer. Despite the film’s title, Dekker does not keep a diary. What he does do is talk. A lot. The film is framed by scenes of him telling his story to somebody on the phone. (I was never quite sure who he was supposed to be talking to.) Over the course of the film, he talks to a psychiatrist. He talks to his agent (Seymour Cassel). He talks to a dominatrix. He talks to a corrupt police officer (James Belushi). He talks to a born-again Christian (Lewis Smith) who hires Dekker to kill his wife and a baby that he may or may not be the father of. Eventually, he ends up talking to Jain (Sherilyn Fenn), the woman that he’s been hired to kill. He even has a very brief conversation with Jain’s sister, Kiki (who is played, in a shrill cameo appearance, by Sharon Stone).

With all of the constant talking, it’s not surprising to discover that Diary of a Hitman was based on a stage play. That’s especially obvious during the film’s second act, which almost entirely takes place inside of Jain’s apartment and basically consists of Fenn and Whitaker delivering dramatic monologues about life and death. Director Roy London was an acting teacher (among his students were Sharon Stone and Sherilyn Fenn) and it’s perhaps not surprising that he never found a way to make such obviously stage-bound material feel cinematic. Instead, London directed the film as if he was filming an acting exercise. Just consider the scene where Kiki drops by the apartment unannounced. While watching this scene, I kept having flashbacks to high school theater. I could literally hear one of my old teachers saying, “Okay, for this scene, your motivation is to get her to leave the apartment and your motivation is to stay in the apartment no matter what. And…go!”

That said, Diary of a Hitman is not a total waste of time. Playing the agoraphobic Jain, Sherilyn Fenn (who can be seen playing a far more villainous character in this year’s Raze) gives a sympathetic performance, even managing to redeem a potentially distasteful scene where she attempts to seduce Decker. (I’ve included that scene at the bottom of the review, mostly because — along with Sharon Stone’s cameo — it’s the only scene from Diary Of A Hitman that’s currently available on YouTube.)

And then there’s Forest Whitaker. It’s hard to say whether Whitaker gives a good performance here or not, largely because the character of Decker makes little sense to begin with and he’s required to have a massive change of heart that seems to come out of nowhere. (Whitaker has made a credible killer in several other films, just not this one.) However, what Whitaker lacks in credibility, he makes up for in eccentricity. In the role of Decker, Forest Whitaker gives one of the oddest performances that I’ve ever seen. Delivering the majority of his dialogue in an occasionally incomprehensible rasp and flashing a wide smile at the most inappropriate of moments, Forest Whitaker is a force of misdirected nature in this film. Again, it’s hard to say whether Whitaker actually gives a good performance here but he does make Diary of a Hitman worth seeing.

Guilty Pleasure No. 9: The Principal (dir by Christopher Cain)

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

A confession:

I have a weakness for films about idealistic educators who try to teach and change lives in the inner city. You know which films I’m talking about. These are the films that always take place in a decaying high school and there’s usually at least one scene where the teacher is warned not to care too much about their hopeless students and then the teacher goes, “Someone has to care!”

Why do these films fascinate me so?

To a large extent, it’s because they take place in a world that is so extremely outside of my high school experience. I was recently doing a search on my school and I came across a video on YouTube that was made by some students from my alma mater:

As I watched this video, I realized that neither the students, the campus, nor the neighborhood had really changed in the 9 years since I graduated.

I also realized that, even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I went to one of the most suburban, white bread high schools in the DFW metroplex. At the time, of course, a lot of my classmates thought they were tough. They would make a big deal about blasting Jay-Z and 50 Cent while they were driving down to Starbucks during lunch. For the most part, though, we put the suburb in suburban.

That, I think, is why I’m fascinated by inner city high school films. It’s even better when those films are totally over-the-top and feature a hero who not only teaches but who kicks some ass as well.

Perhaps that’s why I recently enjoyed watching The Principal.

Originally released way back in 1987, The Principal is one of those films that seems to regularly show up on the lesser known television networks. A few weeks ago, I saw that it was going to be broadcast on Ion Television so I set the DVR to record it and I finally ended up watching it this weekend.

In The Principal, James Belushi plays Rick Lattimore. (You can tell that this movie was released quite some time ago because Belushi has a lot more hair and lot less chins than he does now.) Rick’s a teacher with an anger problem. When he sees his ex-wife out on a date with his divorce lawyer, Rick loses it and physically assaults the lawyer. The next morning, Rick is called into a meeting with the school board. He’s expecting to get fired. Instead, he’s promoted. Rick is now principal of Brandel High.

Brandel High, it turns out, is the most troubled high school ever! Drugs are sold and used openly in the hallways. Few students bother to attend class (but yet they still come to the school). The teachers spend most of their time hiding in either their classroom or the teacher’s lounge. The school’s head of security, Jake (Lou Gossett, Jr.), spends most of his time making sarcastic comments. When Rick pulls up on his motorcycle, the first thing he sees is a fight between rival drug dealers.

Rick responds to all of this by holding a school assembly. As every student at Brandel jeers him, Rick announces that he has only one policy: “NO MORE!” It’s at this point that the school drug lord Victor Duncan (played by Michael Wright) stands up and announces, “You talk too much!”

Things continue to build up from there as Rick divides his time between educating and getting beaten up by resentful students, Jake starts to actually care about his job again, and Victor wanders through the school hallways, dressed like he’s in one of the Underworld films and saying stuff like, “Try to reach me and I’ll just cut off your hand…”

The Principal is such an over-the-top, silly, yet heart-felt film that it’s impossible not to enjoy it in much the same way that you might enjoy eating junk food. As I watched this film, I found myself wondering what had happened to James Belushi in the years since it was originally released because, in The Principal, he’s actually likable. However, the film really belongs to Michael Wright. Seriously, as played by Wright, Victor Duncan is the most evil student in the history of high school cinema. When he tells Rick that he’s willing to cut off his outstretched hand, you believe him.

The Principal is a thoroughly predictable film that promotes a dubious educational policy of zero tolerance. However, it’s also a lot of fun.

In other words, it’s the epitome of a guilty pleasure.