4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Controversial French director Roger Vadim was born 97 years ago today. It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Roger Vadim Films
And God Created Woman (1956, dir by Roger Vadim, DP: Armand Thirard)
Blood And Roses (1960, dir by Roger Vadim, DP: Claude Renoir)
Spirits of the Dead: Metzengerstein (1968, dir by Roger Vadim, DP: Claude Renoir)
Barbarella (1968, dir by Roger Vadim, DP: Claude Renoir)
The Sundance Film Festival is currently underway in Utah. For the next few days, I’ll be taking a look at some of the films that have previously won awards at Sundance.
1997’s In The Company of Men is a film about two guys playing a series of very viscous jokes.
Howard (Matt Malloy) and Chad (Aaron Eckhart) are two mid-level executives who have been sent to work at a branch office for six weeks. While Chad is talkative and aggressive, Howard is much more meek and often seems to be in awe of the far more confident Chad. What the two men have in common is a lot of resentment and bitterness towards women. Chad suggests that they should both date a woman at the same time and fool her into falling for both of them. Then, they’ll both dump her at the same time. Chad has even picked out a victim, Christine (Stacy Edwards), a deaf and introverted co-worker.
That Chad would come up with such a cruel scheme really isn’t a surprise. From the first minute that we see Chad, we think we can tell what type of person he is. Because this is a movie, we hold on to hope that Chad will somehow reveal that he’s not as bad as he seems but, in the end, the whole point of the film is that Chad is not only as bad as we initially think he is but he’s actually even worse. Howard, on the other hand, comes across like a rather mild-mannered guy, the stereotypical nerdy mid-level manager who no one ever notices. Howard could never come up with a scheme like this on his own but, once Chad suggests it, Howard agrees. Howard is a natural follower. He looks at Chad and he sees who he wants to be. Chad looks at Howard and sees someone who he can easily manipulate.
Chad and Howard set their plan in motion and yes, it is difficult to watch as they both pretend to be falling in love with the sensitive Christine while making cruel fun of her behind her back. Again, we know that at least one of the men is going to have second thoughts and try to back out of the plan. We know this because we’re watching a movie. We spend most of the movie hoping that Chad is going to be the one to find his conscience because Aaron Eckhart is the more charismatic of the two men and Chad is the one with whom Christine seems to be truly falling in love. Instead, it’s Howard who falls in love with Christine while Chad remains as sociopathic as ever. By the end of the film, Chad reveals just how manipulative he truly is and Howard discovers that Christine was not the only victim of Chad’s joke.
In The Company Of Men is not an easy film to watch. The comments that Chad and Howard make are shockingly cruel, though one gets the feeling that they’re probably an accurate reflection of what men like Chad and Howard sound like when they’re in private. Director Neil LaBute doesn’t make any effort to soften or excuse their misogyny. It’s a testament to the talents of Eckhart, Malloy, and Edwards that we stick with the film. In the end, In The Company Of Men is an unsettling portrait of misogyny and toxic masculinity, one that is made all the more disturbing by Aaron Eckhart’s charismatic performance as a truly despicable person. The film uses Eckhart’s middle-American good looks to subversive effect and, even when he’s playing such a hateful character, there’s something undeniably fascinating about him. You watch his performance of Chad and you’re almost desperate to find some sort of good inside of him. It’s not there, though. That’s what is truly frightening about In The Company Of Men.
As the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, In The Company Of Men won the Filmmaker’s Trophy.
In the 1981 film Reds, Warren Beatty plays Jack Reed, the radical journalist who, at the turn of the century, wrote one of the first non-fiction books about Russia’s communist revolution and then went on to work as a propagandist for the communists before becoming disillusioned with the new Russian government and then promptly dying at the age of 32.
Diane Keaton plays Louise Bryant, the feminist writer who became Reed’s lover and eventually his wife. Louise found fame as one of the first female war correspondents but then she also found infamy when she was called before a Congressional committee and accused of being a subversive.
Jack Nicholson plays Eugene O’Neill, the playwright who was a friend of both Reed and Bryant’s and who had a brief affair with Bryant while Reed was off covering labor strikes and the 1916 Democratic Convention.
Lastly, Maureen Stapleton plays Emma Goldman, the anarchist leader who was kicked out of the country after one of her stupid little dumbass followers assassinated President McKinley. (Seriously, don’t get me started on that little jerk Leon Czolgosz.)
Together …. well, I was going to say that they solve crimes but that joke is perhaps a bit too flippant for a review of Reds. Reds is a big serious film about the left-wing activists at the turn of the century, one in which the characters move from one labor riot to another and generally live the life of wealthy bohemians. Reed spends the film promoting communism, just to be terribly disillusioned when the communists actually come to power in Russia. For a history nerd like me, the film is interesting. For those who are not quite as obsessed with history, the film is extremely long and the scenes of Reed and Bryant’s domestic dramas often feel a bit predictable, especially when they’re taking place against such a large international tableaux. At its best, the film is almost a Rorschach test for how the viewer feels about political and labor activists. Do you look at Jack Reed and Louise Bryant and see two inspiring warriors for the cause or do you see two wealthy people playing at being revolutionaries?
Reds was a film that Warren Beatty spent close to 20 years trying to make, despite the fact that the heads of the Hollywood studios all told him that audiences would never show up for an epic film about a bunch of wealthy communists. (The heads of the studio turned out to be correct, as the film was critically acclaimed but hardly a success at the box office.) It was only after the success of the 1978, Beatty-directed best picture nominee Heaven Can Wait that Beatty was finally able to get financing for his dream project. He ended up directing, producing, and writing the film himself and he cast his friend Jack Nicholson as O’Neill and his then-romantic partner Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant. (Gene Hackman, Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde co-star, shows up briefly as one of Reed’s editors.) One left-wing generation’s tribute to an early left-wing generation, Reds is fully a Warren Beatty production and, for his efforts, Beatty was honored with the Oscar for Best Director. That said, the Reds lost the award for Best Picture to another historical epic, Chariots of Fire. Chariots of Fire featured no communists and did quite well at the box office.
The film is good but a bit uneven, especially towards the end when we suddenly get scenes of Louise Bryant trudging through Finland as she attempts to make it to Russia to be reunited with Reed. The film actually works best when it features interviews with people who were actual contemporaries of Reed and Bryant and who share their own memoires of the time. In fact, the interviews work almost too well. The “witnesses,” as the film refers to them, paint such a vivid picture of the Reed, Bryant, and turn of the century America that Beatty’s attempt to cinematically recreate history often can’t compete. One can’t help but feel that Beatty perhaps should have just made a documentary instead of a narrative film.
(Interestingly enough, many of the witnesses were people who were sympathetic to Reed’s politics in at the start of the century but then moved much more to the right as the years passed. Reed’s friend and college roommate, Hamilton Fish, went on to become a prominent Republican congressman and a prominent critics of FDR.)
That said, Jack Nicholson gives a fantastic performance as Eugene O’Neill, adding some much needed cynicism to the film’s portrayal of Reed and Bryant’s idealism. Keaton and Beatty sometime both seem to be struggling to escape their own well-worn personas as Bryant and Reed but Beatty does really sell Reed’s eventually disillusionment with Russia and the scene where he finally tells off his Russian handler made me want to cheer. Fans of great character acting will want to keep an eye out for everyone from Paul Sorvino to William Daniels to Edward Herrmann to M. Emmet Walsh and IanWolfe, all popping up in small roles.
Reds is not a perfect film but, as a lover of history, I enjoyed it.
Well before THE NAKED GUN was triggering Reggie Jackson, director Don Siegel and Charles Bronson were triggering human time bombs in TELEFON (1977). Quentin Tarantino even borrowed from this film when he chose the Robert Frost poem for Stuntman Mike’s (Kurt Russell) lap dance from Arlene (Vanessa Furlito). It’s not as sexy, but it’s still a good time as Bronson tries to prevent World War III. Enjoy!
Released in 1999, The Straight Story is one of the greatest films ever made about America.
Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is an elderly veteran of World War II. He lives in Iowa, a kind but rather taciturn man who doesn’t have time for doctors and would rather live on his own terms. That said, when his daughter (Sissy Spacek) finally does manage to drag Alvin to a doctor, he’s told to stop smoking and to start using a walker to get around. Alvin refuses, though he does start using two canes. Alvin is an old man. He’s lived a long time and, in his opinion, he knows best about what he needs to do.
For instance, when Alvin hears that his long-estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton), has had a stroke, Alvin decides that he need to go Wisconsin to see him. The only problem is that Alvin can barely see and he can’t walk and there’s no way anyone is going to give him a car or even a driver’s license. His solution is to ride a lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin.
It’s based on a true story and if The Straight Story sounds like a film that will make you cry, it is. Richard Farnsworth was terminally ill when he was offered the role of Alvin and he accepted because he admired Alvin’s determination to live life his own way. As portrayed in the film, Alvin is not one to easily betray his emotions. He grew up as a part of that stoic generation. He saw his share of violence and death while he was serving during World War II and one gets the feeling that his attitude has always been that, if he could survive that, he can survive anything. (The closest Alvin gets to becoming openly emotional is when he meets another veteran in a bar and it becomes obvious that the two of them share a bond that, as people who seen and survived war, only they can really understand.) Farnsworth so completely becomes Alvin Straight that it’s easy to forger that he was a veteran actor who had a long career before starring in The Straight Story. Alvin may not show much emotion but Farnsworth communicates so much with just the weariness in his eyes and his slow but determined gait that we feel like we know everything about him.
The film follows Alvin on his way to Wisconsin. Along the way, he meets various people and, for the most part, they’re all good folks. Even the runaway hitchhiker (Anastasia Webb) turns out to be a kind soul. When Alvin momentarily loses control of his lawn mower, a group of stranger run out to help him. They don’t know who he is or why he was riding his lawnmower down the street. All that matter is that, at that moment, he’s a person who needs help. The Straight Story celebrates both the beauty and the people of America. It’s one of the most sincere and life-affirming films ever made, one that contains not a trace of cynicism and which is all the better for it. And while many people might be shocked to discover that this film was directed by David Lynch, the truth of the matter is that a strong love for America and Americana runs through all of Lynch’s films. Lynch was an artist who believed that people could surprise you with their kindness and that’s certainly the case with The Straight Story.
The Straight Story was the only one of David Lynch’s films to receive a G-rating. It was also the only film that Lynch made for Disney. It’s interesting to look at Lynch’s filmography and see this heartfelt and deeply touching film sitting between Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. But The Straight Story really does feature David Lynch at his best. It also reveals him as a filmmaker who could do something unexpected without compromising his signature vision. There’s a lot of beautiful, Lynchian images in The Straight Story. But there’s also a lot of heart.
Since today is Tobe Hooper’s birthday, it seems fitting that today’s scene of the day should come from his best-known film. The opening of 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is genuinely unsettling, from the opening narration to the scene of the body being dug up to the news reports of grave robbery. Even the opening credits feel ominous!
The narration was, of course, provided by a young John Larroquette, who has since said that he was “paid in marijuana” for what would become his first feature film credit.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, on what would have been his 82nd birthday, the Shattered Lens pays tribute to Texas’s own, Tobe Hooper!
The Austin hippie who redefined horror and left thousands of yankees terrified of driving through South Texas, Tobe Hooper often struggled to duplicate both the critical and the box office success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s only been in the years since his death that many critics and viewers have come to truly appreciate his unique and subversive vision.
Down here, in Texas, we always believed in him.
It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Tobe Hooper Films
Eggshells (1969, dir by Tobe Hooper, DP: Tobe Hooper)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, dir by Tobe Hooper, DP: Daniel Pearl)
Salem’s Lot (1978, dir by Tobe Hooper, DP: Jules Bremmer)
Lifeforce (1985, dir by Tobe Hooper, DP: Alan Hume)
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 9 pm et, Tim Buntley will be hosting #ScarySocial! The movie? Diary of the Dead, from George Romero!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
The Sundance Film Festival is currently underway in Utah. For the next few days, I’ll be taking a look at some of the films that have previously won awards at Sundance.
First released in 1990, Longtime Companion was one of the first mainstream feature films to deal with the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
The film follows a group of friends and lovers over the course of ten years. The film opens with a crowded and joyous 4th of July weekend at Fire Island. Willy (Campbell Scott) is a personal trainer who has just started a relationship with an entertainment lawyer who, due to his beard, is nicknamed Fuzzy (Stephen Caffrey). Willy’s best friend is the personable and popular John (Dermot Mulroney). David (Bruce Davison) and Sean (Mark Lamos) are the elder couple of the group. Sean writes for a soap opera and one of Fuzzy’s clients, Howard (Patrick Cassidy), has just landed a role on the show. He’ll be playing a gay character, even though everyone warns him that the role will lead to him getting typecast. The group’s straight friend is Lisa (Mary-Louise Parker), an antique dealer who lives next door to Howard and who is Fuzzy’s sister. The film takes it times showing us the friendships and the relationships between these characters, allowing us to get to know them all as individuals.
Even as the group celebrates the 4th, they are talking about an article in the New York Times about the rise of a “gay cancer.” Some members of the group are concerned but the majority simply shrug it off as another out-there rumor.
The movie moves quickly, from one year to another. John, the youngest of them, is the first member of the group to die, passing away alone in a hospital room while hooked up to a respirator. (The sound of the respirator is one of the most haunting parts of the film.) Sean soon becomes ill and starts to dramatically deteriorate. It falls to David to take care of Sean and to even ghostwrite his scripts for the soap opera. Howard’s acting career is sabotaged by rumors that he has AIDS while Willy and Fuzzy tentatively try to have a relationship at time when they’re not even sure how AIDS is transmitted. At one point, Willy visits a friend in the hospital and then furiously scrubs his skin in case he’s somehow been infected. When one member of the group passes, his lover is referred to as being his “longtime companion” in the obituary. Even while dealing with tragedy and feeling as if they’ve been shunned and abandoned to die by the rest of America, the characters are expected to hide the details of the lives and their grief.
It’s a poignant and low-key film, one that was originally made for PBS but then given a theatrical release after production was complete. Seen today, the film feels like a companion piece to Roger Spottiswoode’s And The Band Played On. If And The Band Played On dealt with the politics around AIDS and the early struggle to get people to even acknowledge that it existed, Longtime Companion is about the human cost of the epidemic. The film is wonderfully acted by the talented cast. Bruce Davison was nominated for an Oscar for his sensitive performance as David. If not for Joe Pesci’s performance in Goodfellas, it’s easy to imagine that Davison would have won. The scene where he encourages the comatose Sean to pass on will make you cry. Interestingly, when David gets sick himself, it happens off-screen as if the filmmakers knew there was no way the audience would have been able to emotionally handle watching David suffer any further.
Longtime Companion played at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Dramatic Audience Award.
One of my favorite scenes from TV’s King of the Hill occurs in an episode in which Hank and Peggy are celebrating their wedding anniversary. They’ve sent Bobby and Luanne away for the weekend. They have the house to themselves but, after their anniversary party, Peggy is feeling depressed. She tells Hank that, for the first time ever, she feels old and she regrets all the dreams that she had that have yet to come true, like inventing and selling her own barbecue sauce.
Trying to cheer her up, Hank says, “C’mon, Peg. We got the house to ourselves for weekend …. and I rented an R-rated movie!”
Peggy looks up, briefly hopeful that Hank did something romantic. “What movie?” she asks.
Hank hesitates, glances down at the floor, and says, “Uhmm …. Platoon.”
It’s funny because it’s true. Just about every man that I know loves Platoon. First released in 1986 and reportedly based on Oliver Stone’s own experiences as an infantryman in Vietnam, Platoon is often cited as being one of the greatest war films ever made. Oddly enough, the film has an anti-war and anti-military message but, in my experience, those who love it talk more about the battle scenes than any message that Stone may have been trying to impart about the futility of war. Pauline Kael once wrote that Oliver Stone had left-wing politics but a right-wing sensibility and I think you can definitely see that in Platoon. Despite all of the characters talking about how pointless the war is and how much they resent being forced to risk their lives for no apparent purpose, the film’s energy comes from the scenes of Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) stalking through the jungle and, towards the end, losing his mind and giving himself completely over to the adrenaline that comes from being trapped in the middle of a battle. Throughout the film, we hear Taylor’s rather pedantic thoughts on the military and his fellow soldiers but it’s hard not to notice that his actions and his dialogue are usually far less eloquent. Taylor may be a rich intellectual (and wow, is Charlie Sheen ever unconvincing when it comes to portraying that part of Taylor’s personality) but when he’s in the jungle, he’s just fighting for survival.
The film’s plot centers around the conflict between two sergeants, the peace-loving Elias (Willem DaFoe) and the war-loving Barnes (Tom Berenger). Taylor has to decide which one of the two to follow. The pot-smoking Elias loves his men and goes out of his way to protect them. The beer-drinking Barnes has a much harsher view of the world but, at the same time, he’s the type of scarred warrior who seems immortal. One gets the feeling that he’ll never be defeated. The rest of the platoon is full of familiar faces, with everyone from John C. McGinley to Francesco Quinn to Tony Todd to Forest Whitaker to Johnny Depp to a baby-faced Kevin Dillon showing up. (Dillon is especially frightening as a psycho who has, for some reason, been nicknamed Bunny.) The majority of the platoon is dead by the end of the film. Even with the leadership of Elias and Barnes, the soldiers are stuck in a winless situation. As Taylor points out, the Americans aren’t just fighting the enemy. They’re also fighting each other.
Platoon is certainly not my favorite of the film nominated in 1986. I would have gone with A Room With A View. (Blue Velvet, which is as influential a film as Platoon, was not even nominated.) That said, I can’t deny the power of Platoon‘s combat scenes. Though Stone’s script is didactic and Taylor’s narration is awkwardly deployed throughout the film, Stone’s direction definitely captures the fear and dread of being in a strange place with no idea of whether or not you’re going to survive. Stone is critical of the military (at one point, an officer calls an air strike on his own men) but seems to love the soldiers, even the ones who have pushed over to the dark side.
Platoon was not the first Best Picture nominee to be made about the Vietnam War. The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, and Apocalypse Now were all released first. But both The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now are surreal epics that seem to take place in a dream world. Coming Home, which has a script that somehow manages to be even more didactic than Platoon‘s, focuses on the war back home. Platoon is far more gritty and personal film. Watching Platoon, you can smell the gunpowder and the napalm and feel the humidity of the jungle. I can understand why it won, even if I prefer to watch Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands fall in love.
Through the Shattered Lens 