Tag Archives: Jennifer Rubin

Film Review: The Doors (dir by Oliver Stone)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I like The Doors.

That can be a dangerous thing to admit, about both the band and Oliver Stone’s 1991 film.  Yes, both the band and the film could be a bit pretentious.  They both tended to go on for a bit longer than necessary.  They were both centered around a guy who wrote the type of poetry that I used to love back in my emo days.  It’s all true.

But, with The Doors as a band, I find that I can’t stop listening to them once I start.  Even if I might roll my eyes at some of the lyrics or if I might privately question whether any blues song really needs an organ solo, I can’t help but love the band.  They had a sound that was uniquely their own, a psychedelic carnival that brought to mind images of people dancing joyfully while the world burned around them.  And say what you will about Jim Morrison as a poet or even a thinker, he had a good voice.  He had the perfect voice for The Doors and their rather portentous style.  From the clips that I’ve seen of him performing, Morrison definitely had a stage presence.  Morrison died young.  He was only 27 and, in the popular imagination, he will always look like he’s 27.  Unlike his contemporaries who managed to survive the 60s, Morrison will always eternally be long-haired and full of life.

As for The Doors as a movie, it’s definitely an Oliver Stone film.  It’s big.  It’s colorful.  It’s deliberately messy.  Moments of genuinely clever filmmaking and breath-taking visuals are mixed with scenes that are so heavy-handed that you’ll be inspired to roll your eyes as dramatically as you’ve ever rolled them.  Stone loved the music and that love comes through in every performance scene.  Stone also loves using Native Americans as symbols and that can feel a bit cringey at times.  Why would Jim Morrison, whose was of Scottish and Irish ancestry, even have a Native American spirit guide?  At its best The Doors captures the chaos of a world that it’s the middle of being rebuilt.  The 60s were a turbulent time and The Doors is a turbulent movie.  I’ve read many reviews that criticized The Doors for the scene in which Morrison gets involved in a black magic ceremony with a journalist played by Kathleen Quinlan.  I have no idea whether or not that scene happened in real life but the movie is so full of energy and wild imagery that the scene feels like it belongs, regardless of whether it’s true or not.  Stone turns Jim Morrison into the warrior-artist-priest that Morrison apparently believed himself to be and the fact that the film actually succeeds has far more to do with Oliver Stone’s  enthusiastic, no-holds-barred direction and Val Kilmer’s charismatic lead performance than it does with Jim Morrison himself.

The Doors spent several years in development and there were several actors who, at one time or another, wanted to play Morrison.  Everyone from Tom Cruise to John Travolta to Richard Gere to Bono was considered for the role.  (Bono as Jim Morrison, what fresh Hell would that have been?)  Ultimately, Oliver Stone went with Val Kilmer for the role and Kilmer gives a larger-than-life performance as Morrison, capturing the charisma of a rock star but also the troubled and self-destructive soul of someone convinced that he was destined to die young.  Kilmer has so much charisma that you’re willing to put up with all the talk about opening the doors of perception and achieving a higher consciousness.  Kilmer was also smart enough to find the little moments to let the viewer know that Morrison, for all of his flamboyance, was ultimately a human being.  When Kilmer-as-Morrison winks while singing one particularly portentous lyric, it’s a moment of self-awareness that the film very much needs.

(When the news of Kilmer’s death was announced last night, many people online immediately started talking about Tombstone, Top Gun, and Top Secret.  For his part, Kilmer often said he was proudest of his performance as Jim Morrison.)

In the end, The Doors is less about the reality of the 60s and Jim Morrison and more about the way that we like to imagine the 60s and Jim Morrison as being.  It’s a nonstop carnival, full of familiar faces like Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Madsen, Crispin Glover (as Andy Warhol), Frank Whaley, Kevin Dillon, and a seriously miscast Meg Ryan.  It’s a big and sprawling film, one that is sometimes a bit too big for its own good but which is held together by both Stone’s shameless visuals and Val Kilmer’s charisma.  If you didn’t like the band before you watched this movie, you probably still won’t like them.  But, much like the band itself, The Doors is hard to ignore.

The Crush (1993, directed by Alan Shapiro)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Darien or Adrian?  Adrian or Darien?  Who does Alicia Silverstone play in The Crush?  It depends on which version you saw.

When the movie came out in theaters, she was named Darien because she was based on a real girl named Darien who writer/director Alan Shapiro claimed was obsessed with him.  When the real-life Darien saw the movie and saw that she was portrayed as a psycho stalker, she was understandably pissed off and she sued Shapiro.  As a result, when the film was re-edited for TV and later released on video, Darien suddenly became Adrian.

Whether Silverstone’s playing Adrian or Darien, the movie is still fairly lackluster.  This movie came out when Alicia was still known for playing the lead in several sexually-charged Aerosmith videos and it features her doing the whole Lolita thing, which was very popular in the 90s.  She becomes obsessed with her neighbor, Nick (Cary Elwes).  Nick tries to be nice but when it become obvious that he’s not going to risk going to jail even if the the girl next door does look like Alicia Silverstone, Adrian/Darien starts trying to make his life Hell.  She also tries to kill Nick’s girlfriend with a bunch of bees.  Nick’s girlfriend is played by Jennifer Rubin, who was one of the best of the straight-to-video actresses of the 90s.

(Unlike Alicia’s other pre-Clueless starring turn, The Babysitter, The Crush was not straight-to-video but probably would have been if not for those Aerosmith videos.  The Babysitter is also not very good but it’s an unsung classic when compared to The Crush.)

The Crush is one of those movies that got a huge push when it came out.  MTV was all over it and the commercials were edited to make it look like a steamy thriller starring the girl that every boy had a crush on in 1993.  I can’t remember if the movie got an R-rating or a PG-13 but I do know that my friends and I were bummed out when we were told we weren’t allowed to see it.  Later, we rented it on video and discovered, not for the first time, that we were misled.  The movie itself is really tame and Alicia’s miscast.  She actually seems too level-headed to be the type who would try to kill Jennifer Rubin.  Cary Elwes goes through the whole movie with a pained expression on his face, like he’s wondering how he went from The Princess Bride to this.  Kurtwood Smith plays Alicia’s father and he was always good as a bad parent.  It’s also always good to see Jennifer Rubin, even if her role here doesn’t allow her to show off the wicked playfulness that made her a late night Cinemax favorite.  She definitely should have been a bigger star.

The main lesson to learn from The Crush?  If you are going to portray an acquaintance as a murderous psycho, at least be smart enough to change the name.  It will save you a lot of money and trouble.

Cinemax Friday: Stranger By Night (1994, directed by Gregory Brown a.k.a. Gregory Hippolyte a.k.a. Gregory Dark)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Detective Bobby Corcoran (Steven Bauer!) is a cop with an anger problem.  Whenever he and his parter, Troy Rooney (William Katt!!), catch a criminal, Bobby just loses control.  Since, for some reason, they seem to catch a lot of criminals on rooftops, this often leads to Bobby threatening to throw someone over the edge.  Even when his boss, Detective Larson (Michael Parks!!!) tells Bobby to stop trying to kill all of the suspects, Bobby still struggles to control his rage.  He’s seeing a Dr. Anne Richmond (Jennifer Rubin!!!!), a psychiatrist, about his anger issues but since their sessions usually get interrupted by bouts of soft-core, saxophone-scored sex, it is debatable how much time they actually spend digging into the roots of Bobby’s problems.

Bobby also suffers from frequent blackouts.  While he’s unconscious, he’s haunted by black-and-white memories of his abusive father (J.J. Johnston) beating up his mother.  When he wakes up, he’s often in a different room from where he blacked out.  Anne says that Bobby must be sleep-walking.  Bobby says that he’s not sleep walking because he’s stubborn and doesn’t feel safe letting anyone into his mind.  Lately, whenever Bobby passes out, a prostitute ends up dead.  An unknown killer is stalking them and chopping off their ears.  Bobby, with his anger issues and his dislike of prostitutes, is an obvious suspect.  Is Bobby the killer or is he being framed?

Stranger By Night‘s credited director is Gregory Brown, who is better known as Gregory Dark.  Dark is one of the best-known of the directors who specialized in erotic thrillers in the 90s.  Dark was responsible for some of the classics of the genre but, unfortunately, Stranger By Night is not one of his better efforts.  The action frequently drags and, with the exception of Bobby’s black-and-white flashbacks, Stranger By Night has none of Dark’s usual visual style.  The film looks and feels flat and the plot is never feels as involving as it should.  The discovery of the killer’s identity inspires not shock but an indifferent shrug.

On the positive side, it’s got a cast of skilled genre vets and all of them do what they can to elevate the material.  William Katt is jittery and frequently funny while Jennifer Rubin, who deserved to have a much bigger career, is as sultry as ever.  (Rubin brought both intelligence and sex appeal to almost every role that she played and it made her one of the best genre actresses around.)  Steven Bauer, another actor who probably deserves a bigger career than he’s had, does a good job in the lead role.  Bobby isn’t always a likable character and Bauer doesn’t try to make him one.  On the other hand, it’s frustrating that Michael Parks does not get to do much, other than frown.  There’s nothing more frustrating than watching a film that doesn’t take full advantage of the casting of Michael Parks.

Stranger By Night does seem to have a serious subtext.  It tries to deal seriously with how Bobby’s abusive childhood has scarred him and there’s a lengthy scene where Bobby finally talks to his aged father.  The scene is played straight and it’s not the sort of thing that you’d normally expect to see in a direct-to-video erotic thriller.  (It’s a good example of what set Gregory Dark apart from some of the other directors churning out these type of films in the 90s.)  For the most part, though, Stranger By Night is a forgettable trip to the world of late night Cinemax.

From the Golden Age of Cinemax: Saints and Sinners (1996, directed by Paul Mones)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

From the golden age of late night, straight-to-video Cinemax comes Saints and Sinners!

After spending years away, Pooch (Damian Chapa) has finally returned to the old neighborhood.  As soon as he returns, he partners up with his childhood best friend, Big Boy (Scott Plank).  The violent and erratic Big Boy is a low-level gangster with big plans.  He wants to take over the neighborhood and he’s sure that, working with the level-headed Pooch, he’ll be unstoppable.  Complicating matters is that both Pooch and Big Boy have fallen for the same woman, the mysterious Eva (Jennifer Rubin) and, quicker than you can say Jules and Jim, all three of them are soon sharing a bed.  Complicating matters even further is the fact that Pooch is an undercover cop who has recently been caught up in a corruption sting.  His superiors have given him a choice.  He can either help them take down Big Boy or he can go to jail himself.

Though the plot of Saints and Sinners may seem familiar (think of it as being a low-budget version of the Sean Penn/Gary Oldman gangster flick ,State of Grace), it’s distinguished by gritty locations, energetic direction, and two good performances from Damian Chapa and Scott Plank.  But, to be honest, Jennifer Rubin was the main reason that 14 year-old me used to stay up to watch this movie on Cinemax.  In the role of Eva, she’s sexy, enigmatic, and potentially dangerous.  You’re never sure what her game is and, as a result, the movie is not as predictable as you might expect it to be.  Jennifer Rubin was one of the best of the femme fatales to appear in the straight-to-video neo-noirs of the 1990s and shes’ at her best and most uninhibited here.

Saints and Sinners may not have many saints but it has enough sin that it doesn’t matter.

Jennifer Rubin in Saints and Sinners

A Movie A Day #276: Bad Dreams (1988, directed by Andrew Fleming)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When she was a young girl, Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin) was a member of Unity Fields, a group of hippies led by the insane Franklin Harris (Richard Lynch).  When Harris ordered the cult to join him in a fiery suicide pact, Cynthia was the only one to refuse.  While all of the cult members when up in flames, Cynthia ended up spending 13 years in a coma.  When she wakes up, she has no memory of the incident and finds herself as a patient in a psych ward.  She has a support group to provide therapy.  She has two doctors (Bruce Abbott and Harris Yulin) watching her every move.  And she still has nightmares and visions of the long-dead Harris, appearing around the hospital, sometimes burned and sometimes not.  When the members of her therapy group start to die, Cynthia is convinced that Harris has returned to claim her.

A year before starring in Bad Dreams, Jennifer Rubin made her film debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.  That seems appropriate because Bad Dreams would never have existed if not for A Nightmare on Elm Street.  Franklin Harris is only a few bad jokes and a razor blade glove away from being Freddy Krueger’s older brother.  However, if you can see past the movie’s derivative nature, Bad Dreams is not bad.  Some of the deaths are inventive and Jennifer Rubin shows why she should have become a bigger star than she did.  Though Franklin Harris may have been developed as stand-in for Freddy, Richard Lynch is memorably menacing and makes the role his own.  Bad Dreams may have been a clone of another film but not all clones are bad.

A Movie A Day #73: Bitter Harvest (1993, directed by Duane Clark)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Travis Graham (Stephen Baldwin, before he found God) is a doofus who owns a farm.  His late father sent all of the family’s money to a crooked televangelist but he did leave Travis a valuable coin collection.  But then two blondes enter his life.  Kelly Ann (Jennifer Rubin) is a penniless hitchhiker who needs a place to stay and a bed to sleep in.  Jolene (Patsy Kensit) is a British realtor who says she wants to help Travis sell his farm.  Faster than you can say “I don’t know the exact pronunciation but I believe it’s ménage à trois,” that’s exactly what happens.  Travis can’t believe his luck but it turns out that Kelly Ann and Jolene have plans of their own.  Then, in a strangely unrelated subplot, a banker robber who shot the local sheriff (M. Emmett Walsh) shows up at the farm.  Travis kills the bank robber but then Kelly Ann and Jolene start pressuring him to use the robber’s plan to rob a bank himself.

This is one of the many strange movies from the increasingly strange career of Stephen Baldwin.  Now that he’s best known for evangelizing and appearing in celebrity-themed reality shows (including, most infamously, two seasons of The Celebrity Apprentice), it is easy to forget that Stephen Baldwin was once a good character actor who, with the exception of The Usual Suspects, apparently could not pick a good script if his life depended upon it.  His performance as the socially backward Travis is often strange (at times, he seems to be channeling Lenny from Of Mice and Men) but always interesting.  Fans of 90s neo-noir will also be happy to see Delusion’s Jennifer Rubin, playing yet another mysterious and dangerous temptress.  Unfortunately, Bitter Harvest falls apart because of an implausible script and too many loose ends but, until it does, the sultry combination of Jennifer Rubin and Patsky Kensit keeps things watchable.

One final note: The sheriff’s son is played by Adam Baldwin.  Even though the two are not actually related, everyone in the 90s assumed that they were and this makes Bitter Harvest a double Baldwin film.

A Movie A Day #72: Delusion (1991, directed by Carl Colpaert)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

George O’Brien (Jim Metzler) is a former executive at a San Diego computer company who is driving across Nevada.  He is heading to Reno, where he plans to set up a company with the embezzled millions that he has hidden in his trunk.  When he spots former Vegas showgirl Patti (Jennifer Rubin) standing on the side of the road, he stops to pick her up.  She explains that her car broke down and she needs a lift.  George is happy to give her a ride.  The only problem is that Patti is traveling with her boyfriend, Chevy (Kyle Secor).  At first, Chevy just seems to be a goofy guy who talks too much.  However, Chevy is actually a hitman, traveling to Vegas to kill a gangster (Jerry Orbach).  After the hit, Chevy abandons George in the desert and steals his car.  Determined to get his money, George pursues Chevy and Patty across the desert.

Starting like a caper film and ending like a spaghetti western, Delusion was one of the best (and most overlooked) of the many low-budget neo-noirs that came out during the first half of the 1990s.  While the underrated Metzler and Secor both give good performances, Delusion is stolen by Jennifer Rubin, who is sexy, funny, and unpredictable as Patti.  The scene where she performs These Boots Are For Walking is one of the best of the 90s.  Whatever happened to her?

And why hasn’t this excellent retro thriller been given a proper release on DVD or Blu-ray?  If any movie is deserves to be rediscovered via a special edition, it’s Delusion.