The Unnominated: Star 80 (dir by Bob Fosse)

Posted on October 27, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences claim that the Oscars honor the best of the year, we all know that there are always worthy films and performances that end up getting overlooked. Sometimes, it’s because the competition too fierce. Sometimes, it’s because the film itself was too controversial. Often, it’s just a case of a film’s quality not being fully recognized until years after its initial released. This series of reviews takes a look at the films and performances that should have been nominated but were,for whatever reason, overlooked. These are the Unnominated.

First released in 1983, Star 80 is an examination of fame, obsession, misogyny, and finally madness. All four of those qualities are exemplified in the character of Paul Snider (Eric Roberts), a man with a charming smile, a ludicrous wardrobe, and the personality of a pimp. When we first see Paul Snider, he’s naked and he’s covered in blood and he’s ranting about how the world is trying to destroy him. Even if he wasn’t holding a rifle, he would be terrifying. Suddenly, we flash back to a few years earlier. Snider is being dangled out a window by two men. Snider pathetically begs to be pulled back into the room. The men laugh at him before pulling him up. Snider, looking fairly ridiculous in a cheap suit that he probably thinks makes him look like a celebrity, fights off tears as he says he deserves to be treated with dignity.

Star 80 is based on a true story. Mariel Hemingway plays Dorothy Stratten, the actress and Playboy playmate who was murdered by Paul Snider. Snider, who often claimed credit for having “made” Dorothy, was married to her at the time, though Dorothy had filed for divorce and was dating director Peter Bogdanovich. Unwilling to let her go and return to being a small-time hustler, Snider shot Dorothy and then himself. Director Bob Fosse, who was best known for directing musicals like Cabaret and All That Jazz, was attracted to the story because he understood that type of world that produces sleazes like Paul Snider. According to Eric Robets, Fosse even said that he probably would have ended up like Paul Snider if not for his talent.

Snider, the film quickly establishes, really doesn’t have any talent beyond the ability to manipulate people who are too naïve to see through his bullshit. Snider wants to be a star. He wants to be rich. He wants people to kiss his ass. When he meets Dorothy, he sees her as his ticket. Dorothy’s mother (a poignant performance from Carroll Baker) sees straight through him from the start. Tragically, Dorothy doesn’t realize the truth abut who he is until they’re already in Hollywood. As Dorothy tries to break away from him, Paul desperately tries to find some sort of success, all the while complaining that the world is conspiring to keep him from being a man.

Eric Roberts dominates the film and it’s one of the scariest performances that I’ve ever seen. Roberts is convincing when he’s ranting and raving against the world that he feels is against him but what’s even more disturbing is that he’s convincing when he’s turning on the charm. Paul Snider may not be smart. Paul Snider may not be talented. But he know how to gaslight. He knows how to destroy someone’s fragile confidence, largely because his own confidence has been shattered so many times that he’s become an expert in exploiting insecurity. Snider is a tacky dresser and nowhere near as smooth as he thinks but, intentionally or not, he uses that to his advantage. He tries so hard to impress that it’s easy to see how someone could feel sorry for him and want to help him. However, because Fosse lets us know from the start what Snider is really going on inside of Sinder’s head, we never make the mistake of trusting him. We know who Paul Snider is because we’ve all known a Paul Snider.

Eric Roberts’s performance is so intense that it’s unfortunate but not surprising that it was overlooked at the 1983 Oscars. He was playing a truly repellent character and he did it so convincingly that I imagine many viewers had a hard time realizing that Eric Roberts was not Paul Snider but was instead an actor playing a terrible character. Some probably said, “Why should we honor such a loathsome character?” and again, the answer is because there are many Paul Sniders out there. Roberts captured much more than just one man’s breakdown. He captured a sickness at the heart of a fame-driven culture.

Of course, Paul Snider was not the only symptom of that sickness to be depicted in Star 80. Every man that Dorothy either uses her in some way or just views her as being a commodity. Hugh Hefner (Cliff Robertson) presents himself as being a fatherly mentor but Robertson plays him as being just as manipulative and ultimately narcissistic as Paul Snider. Director Aram Nicholas (Roger Rees, playing a character based on Peter Bogdanovich) seems to love Dorothy but their relationship still feels out-of-balance. Aram, afterall, is the director while Dorothy is the actress. The private detective (Josh Mosel) that Paul hires to spy on Dorothy seems to have no lingering guilty over the role he played. Even Snider’s roommate (David Clennon) is more interested in talking about his dog and his car then about the murder/suicide of two people with whom he lived.

It’s a dark film and not one to be watched when depressed. At the same time, it’s a portrait of obsessiveness, misogyny, and an overwhelming need to be “someone” that still feels relevant today. Along with Sweet Charity, it was the only Bob Fosse film not to be nominated for Best Picture. (This was back when there were only five best picture nominees. Three of the nominated films — Terms of Endearment, Tender Mercies, and The Right Stuff — hold up well. Two of the nominees — The Dresser and The Big Chill — are a bit more iffy.) Eric Roberts was not nominated for the best performance of his career. Again, it’s a shame but not a surprise. This was a dark and disturbing film, a true Hollywood horror story. One imagines that most members of the Academy wanted to escape it far more than they wanted to honor and be reminded of it.

Previous entries in The Unnominated:

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Film Review: The Mean Season (dir by Phillip Borsos)

Posted on April 24, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

From the very first few scenes of the 1985 film, The Mean Season, one thing is abundantly clear. People are dying in Florida.

In itself, that’s probably not a shock. Death is a part of life, after all. Add to that, the majority of The Mean Season takes place in Miami, the seventh most populous area of the United States. It makes sense that the more people you have living in one area, the more people are also going to end up dead. That’s just the way things work.

Still, Malcolm Anderson is getting tired of all the death. Played by a youngish and sexy Kurt Russell, Malcolm’s a journalist. He covers the crime beat for the Miami Herald. He spends all day reporting on death and violence and he’s finally reached the point where he’s burned out. He and his girlfriend, a teacher named Christine (Mariel Hemingway), are even planning on moving to Colorado. Malcolm says that he could be very happy working at a small town newspaper. His editor (Richard Masur) doesn’t believe him and, quite frankly, neither do we. Malcolm may say that he wants peace and quiet but it’s hard not to feel as if he’s fooling himself.

One day, Malcolm gets a phone call. The voice on the other line (which belongs to character actor Richard Jordan) is deceptively calm. The caller explains that he’s a fan of Malcolm’s work. The caller also claims to be responsible for a series of murders that have recently taken place. At first, Malcolm is skeptical. After all, he gets calls from crazy people all the time. That’s one reason why he wants to leave Miami, after all. But then the caller starts to give Malcolm details about the crimes, details that haven’t been released to general public…

The killings continue and, after every murder, the caller contacts Malcolm. Soon, Malcolm is appearing on the national news, giving carefully calculated interviews about what it’s like to be a celebrity. Malcolm is soon on the front page of all the papers. Malcolm’s happy. His editor is happy. But you know who isn’t happy? The killer. He didn’t go to all the trouble to kill those people just so Malcolm could get famous off of his hard work! Soon, the killer is no longer content to just call Malcolm. Now, he wants to meet face-to-face and maybe even get to know Christine as well…

The Mean Season is one of those movies that starts out well but then falls apart towards the end. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that the killer eventually ends up kidnapping Christine. You probably figured out that was going to happen as soon as I told you that Malcolm had a girlfriend. (It doesn’t help that Christine is such an underwritten character that it feels like the only reason she was put in the film was so she could be used for one gratuitous nude scene and then get kidnapped.) Once the killer kidnaps her, he goes from being a genuinely intriguing menace to just being a typical and overly verbose movie psycho.

That’s a shame because the first half of The Mean Season is really quite good. The film makes excellent use of its locations, capturing the humid atmosphere of Florida in the summer. As the killer, Richard Jordan alternates between being coldly calculating and surprisingly vulnerable without missing a beat. (Interestingly, he appears to be personally hurt when he realizes that Malcolm doesn’t consider him to be a friend.) Not surprisingly, Kurt Russell is likable as the conflicted Malcolm but his best moments are the ones where he suggests that Malcolm has become so addicted to fame that he’s almost hoping that the killer strikes again. As the two homicide detectives who are assigned to keep an eye on Malcolm, both Richard Bradford and Andy Garcia are perfectly cast. A scene where Bradford tries to comfort a child who accidentally gets in the middle of the search for the killer is the best in the film. “We’re just looking for the bad guys,” he tell the traumatized child. It’s small moments like this that elevates The Mean Season above the typical mid-80s serial killer film.

Seen today, The Mean Season — with its emphasis on newspapers — feels like a historical artifact. If the film were made today, Russell would definitely work for either a 24-hour cable news channel or an online news site. It actually would be interesting to see this story updated and retold for the age of clickbait. Somebody needs to get on that and, while they’re at it, come up with the type of ending that an otherwise intriguing story like this deserves.

An Olympic Film Review: Personal Best (dir by Robert Towne)

Posted on February 24, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Like all good people, I am currently obsessed with the Olympics. I was hoping that I would be able to post an Olympic-related film review every day during the games but, unfortunately, regular life got in the way and it didn’t happen. I’ll try to post what I can today and then, for the rest of this upcoming week, I will be concentrating on reviewing films that have been nominated for best picture.

(Interestingly enough, only one Olympic-related film has been nominated for best picture and I reviewed Chariots of Fire years ago.)

The 1982 film Personal Best is a movie that I recorded off of Cinemax last year, specifically so I could review it during the Winter Games. That may have been a mistake on that part because Personal Best doesn’t actually deal with the Winter Games. Though it’s a film about athletes training to compete in the Olympics, they’re all runners, swimmers, and pole vaulters. In short, they’re all hoping to compete at the Summer Games (which, for my money, are nowhere near as much fun as the Winter Games). On top of that, no one in Personal Best actually gets to compete at the Olympics.

Of course, that wasn’t how things were supposed to go originally. While doing research for this review, I discovered that Personal Best had quite a long and somewhat tortured production history. The directorial debut of the famous (and famously slow) screenwriter Robert Towne, Personal Best was originally meant to showcase athletes preparing for the 1980 Summer Olympics. However, shortly after production began in 1980, it was announced that the United States would be boycotting the Olympic Games and the script was hastily changed to reflect that fact. Shortly after the boycott was announced, production was put on hold when the Screen Actors Guild went on strike. In what the New York Times described as being “a ploy to allow the movie to become an independent production and resume shooting during the strike,” Towne filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. The end result of that lawsuit was that David Geffen stepped in and financed the film.

This led to yet another lawsuit, this one filed by Towne against Geffen. Towne claimed that Geffen forced him to sign a “coerced agreement” that not only lost him the rights to a script he had been working on about Tarzan but also left him dead broke. Geffen, in that same New York Times article, is quoted as saying, “Robert Towne took a picture budgeted at $7 million – ‘Personal Best’ – and made it incompetently for $16 million,” and that he agreed to take over financing because, ‘no other studio would pick the film up because Robert Towne had spent $5 million, and there wasn’t a coherent scene in the entire movie.”

I know what you’re saying. “That’s great, Lisa, but what’s the actual film about?”

Personal Best, for the most part, is about bodies in motion. Oh, don’t get me wrong. There’s a plot. Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) is a young runner who hopes to someday compete in the Olympics. She finds herself torn between following the advice of her lover, Torry (Patrice Donnelly) and the advice of her manipulative coach (Scott Glenn) and things get even more complicated when she enters into a heterosexual romance with a swimmer named Denny (Kenny Moore). Both Towne and the film deserve credit for the forthright way that it portrays Chris and Torry’s relationship and also for its unapologetic portrayal of women who are just as competitive and determined to win as men.

But really, the film doesn’t seem to be that concerned with the story that it’s telling. The film itself is far more interested in the images of professional athletes competing and training. This is one of those films that is full of slow-motion scenes of people running down tracks and attempting to jump over hurdles. Most of the cast was made up of actual athletes and Towne’s camera lovingly captures every single ripple of muscle as they move across the screen. Watching the film, it was hard not to be reminded of the way Leni Reifenstahl fetishized athleticism in Olympia. This is a film that loves, celebrates, and comes close to worshiping athletes. That wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that the film lingers for so long on those bodies that it’s hard not to eventually get bored with them. I mean, there’s only so many times you can watch someone jump over a hurdle in slow motion before you don’t care anymore.

And it turns out that, no matter how impressive the athletes may look, you do need to tell a compelling story, especially if, like Personal Best, your film is over two hours long. As written, Chris Cahill is not particularly likable or even that interesting. Her life revolves around competition and she really has no other interests. That may be a realistic portrayal of what it takes to be the best but there’s a reason why most sports biopics are heavily fictionalized. Chris spends a lot of time getting mad and crying and it gets a little bit old after a while. Perhaps it would be different if we believed that Chris actually was one of the best runners in the world but the film never quite convinces us. (It doesn’t help that Mariel Hemingway spends the entire film surrounded by actual track and field athletes. Hemingway does her best with the role but it’s always easy to tell who is actually an athlete and who is just acting.) On the other hand, the coach and Torry are far more interesting characters but both of them keep getting pushed to the side.

Personal Best is a film that will be best appreciated by people who are as obsessed with athletics as the film is.

Shattered Politics #67: The Contender (dir by Rod Lurie)

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Spoilers)

The 2000 political melodrama The Contender is one of the most hypocritical films that I’ve ever seen.

The Contender tells the story of what happens when U.S. Sen. Laine Hanson (played by Joan Allen) is nominated to be vice president by President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges). During Laine’s confirmation hearings, Rep. Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman) dredges up rumors that, at a college frat party, Laine took part in a threesome in exchange for money.

When Runyon asks Laine about the rumors, she replies that she refuses to answer any questions about what she may or may not have done while she was younger. She replies that it is “simply beneath my dignity” and you know what? She’s absolutely right. First off, if someone could be disqualified just because of what they did in college then nobody would eve be eligible to be President. Secondly, and far more importantly, nobody would care about Laine’s sexual history if she was a man.

For over two hours, Laine refuses to answer any questions about the allegations and instead, she turns the tables on her attackers. And while this alone would not have made The Contender a good film (because, after all, The Contender was written and directed by Rod “Straw Dogs” Lurie), it at least would have been a film that I could respect.

But, Rod Lurie being Rod Lurie, he just couldn’t help but fuck it all up.

Towards the end of the film, Laine is attending a White House reception. She and President Evans sit down on the White House lawn and, as the stars shine above them, Evans says, “Just between us, is it true?”

Now, there’s two things that Laine could have said here that would have kept this film from falling apart. Laine could have said, “It’s none of your business.” And that would have been the right thing to say because, quite frankly, it is none of the President’s business. The whole point of the movie has been that it’s not anyone’s business.

Or, if the film actually had any guts, Laine could have said, “Yes, it’s totally true. Like most people, I experimented when I was in college. But that doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not I’m qualified to be your vice president.”

But no. Instead, Laine smiles and says, “Nothing happened. Two guys propositioned me, I said no, and they spread rumors.”

So, basically, the film is saying, “It’s nobody’s business if Laine was sexually active in college but don’t worry, Mr. and Mrs. American Audience, she was a virgin until she turned 30. So, it’s still okay for you to like her…”

And that’s the thing about The Contender. It’s a film that doesn’t have the courage of its own convictions. It’s a film that drags on for over two hours and it expects you to forgive it just because it pretends to have good intentions. As a woman, there’s nothing I hate more than being pandered to and, for all of its attempts to come across as being feminist, The Contender is all about pandering.

What makes The Contender an interesting bad film — as opposed to just your usual bad film — is how even the littlest details feel false. It’s obvious that Lurie knew all of the legal details that go into confirming a Vice President but he didn’t know how to make any of those details dramatically compelling. So, the film becomes a bit of a know-it-all lecture. By the time that Saul Rubinek popped up and said, “Do you know what Nelson Rockefeller said about the vice presidency?,” I found myself snapping back, “No, what did Nelson Rockefeller say about the Vice Presidency? Please tell because ah am so sure that it is just goin’ to be the most fascinatin’ thang that ah will ever hear in mah entire life!”

(The more annoyed I get, the more pronounced my Texas accent.)

There’s a lot of weird little things about The Contender that just don’t work. They may not sound like major problems but when combined together, they start to add up. For instance, there’s a long shot where we see U.S. Rep. Reginald Webster (Christian Slater) and his blonde wife at a White House reception and the shot just lingers on them for no particular reason. Long after you would expect the shot to end, it’s still going. This wouldn’t be an issue if there was some narrative reason for that shot. Instead, it’s just randomly dropped in there.

And then, after Laine is nominated, we see the front page of a newpaper and there, in the middle of the page, is a headshot of Joan Allen. Underneath it, a small headline reads, “It’s Laine!” It just feels so fake. Wouldn’t the nomination of the first female vice present actually rate a bigger headline and a more dynamic picture?

Speaking of fake, towards the end of the film, President Evans picks up a framed magazine cover and stares down at it. The magazine, itself, looks like one of those joke “Man of the Year” pictures that people pose for at a state fair. On the cover is a picture of Last Picture Show era Jeff Bridges. The headline on the magazine reads: “President Jackson Evans. His ideas have changed the world.” Not his actions, mind you. Not his policies. Instead, his ideas have changed the world. But the film shows us no evidence of this and, during Laine’s confirmation hearings, everyone spends the whole time debating the same old shit that they always seem to be debating in Washington.

(Of course, if you’re lucky enough to have a name like Jackson Evans, I guess you might as well become President.)

Of course, when it looks like Laine might not be confirmed, President Evans speaks before Congress. “For the first time, a woman will serve in the executive!” he declares, which seems like a hilariously awkward way to put it. (People in this film don’t talk like human being as much as they talk like characters in some fucked up Washington D.C. fanfic.) He then adds, “There are traitors among us!”

So, I guess the message here is yay for demagogues.

And don’t even get me started on Kathryn Morris, as the cheerful FBI agent who investigates Laine’s past and who, at one point, announces, “Laine is hope!” Would a male FBI agent ever have to deliver a line that stupid?

And also don’t even get me started on the subplot about Gov. Jack Hathaway (William Petersen), who stages an auto accident in an attempt to convince President Evans to nominate him for vice president.

The Contender is not a good film but it could have at least been a respectable film. But then, Rod Lurie had to have President Evans ask whether it was true or not.

Perhaps being a hypocrite was the idea that changed the world.