Bill Paxton would have been 69 years old today. As a lover of both films and eccentric Texans, I still miss Bill Paxton.
Today’s scene that I love comes from Twister and it features Bill Paxton showing off some wonderful chemistry with Helen Hunt. One of the great things about Bill Paxton is that he was equally at home in both big blockbusters like Twister and Titanic and low-budget indies like Near Dark. He was an artist who also happened to be a star.
4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films is just what it says it is, 4 (or more) shots from 4 (or more) of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films lets the visuals do the talking.
88 years ago, Dennis Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas.
It seems rather appropriate that one of America’s greatest cinematic outlaws was born in a town that will be forever associated with the old west. Dennis Hopper was a rebel, back when there were actual consequences for being one. He started out acting in the 50s, appearing in films like Rebel Without A Cause and Giant and developing a reputation for being a disciple of James Dean. He also developed a reputation for eccentricity and for being difficult on set and he probably would have gotten completely kicked out of Hollywood if not for a somewhat improbable friendship with John Wayne. (Wayne thought Hopper was a communist but he liked him anyways. Interestingly enough, Hopper later became a Republican.) Somehow, Hopper managed to survive both a raging drug addiction and an obsession with guns and, after a mid-80s trip to rehab, he eventually became an almost universally beloved and busy character actor.
Hopper, however, always wanted to direct. He made his directorial debut with 1969’s Easy Rider, a film that became a huge success despite being an infamously chaotic shoot. The success of Easy Rider led to the Hollywood studios briefly trying to produce counter-culture films of their own. Hopper was given several million dollars and sent to Peru to make one of them, the somewhat dangerously titled The Last Movie. Unfortunately, The Last Movie, was such a bomb that it not only temporarily derailed Hopper’s career but it also turned Hollywood off of financing counter culture films. Hopper spent a decade in the Hollywood wilderness, giving acclaimed performances in independent films like Tracks and The American Friend, even while continuing to increase his reputation for drug-fueled instability. Hopper would eventually return to directing with his masterpiece, 1980’s Out of the Blue. (Out of the Blue was so controversial that, when it played at Cannes, Canada refused to acknowledge that it was a Canadian production. It played as a film without a country. Out of the Blue, however, is a film that has stood the test of time.) Unfortunately, even after a newly cleaned-up Hopper was re-embraced by the mainstream, his directorial career never really took off. He directed 7 films, of which only Easy Rider and Colors were financially successful. Contemporary critics often didn’t seem to know what to make of Dennis Hopper as a director. In recent years, however, Hopper’s directorial efforts have been reevaluated. Even The Last Movie has won over some new fans.
Today, on his birthday, we honor Dennis Hopper’s directorial career with….
4 Shots From 4 Dennis Hopper Films
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on Twitter and Mastodon. 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 10 pm et, we’ve got 1998’s Run, Lola, Run!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Run, Lola, Run is available on Prime! See you there!
The Painter tells the rather predictable story of Peter.
Orphaned by a terrorist attack when he was a child, Peter (Charlie Webber) was raised by a CIA agent named Byrne (Jon Voight). Realizing that the attack had left Peter with superhearing, Byrne raised Peter to be a CIA assassin. But after a failed mission led to the shooting his pregnant wife, Elena (Rryla McIntosh), an embittered Peter retired from the agency. Now, going by the name of Mark, he paints!
Why do retired CIA agents always end up living in a cabin and obsessively pursuing only one hobby? This feels like the 100th film that I’ve seen about a former assassin living in a cabin. Some retired agents keep bees. Some become bricklayers. Some become painters. Oddly, none of them seem to become both bricklayers and painters.
Anyway, Peter is happy with his isolated life but then, everything is upended when a 17 year-old girl named Sophia (Madison Bailey) follows him to his cabin and claims to be his daughter. She says that Elena has vanished and she needs Peter’s help to find her. Peter insists that his name is Mark until his superhearing picks up the sound of heavily armed men gathering outside of his cabin.
This is another one of those action films where the main character is someone who kills without the slightest hesitation and who has trouble showing his emotions. Naturally, there’s a conspiracy inside the CIA and this leads to several scenes of people saying stuff like, “Copy that.” The only fictional character who ever sounded cool saying, “Copy that,” was Kiefer Sutherland on 24. All the rest of these people are just pretenders.
The Painter is pretty stupid. It won’t take you long to guess who the main villain is going to turn out to be and it also won’t take you long to guess how the final showdown is going to go. The action scenes are so haphazardly edited that it’s difficult to keep track of who is actually fighting who and, even if you did know who was fighting who, you wouldn’t really care because none of these people are particularly compelling.
In general, if your main character is going to be remorseless killer, it’s a good idea to cast a charismatic actor in the lead role. Audiences will forgive a lot as long as their watching someone with a compelling screen presence. Unfortunately, both Charlie Webber and Madison Bailey give rather bland performances and neither Peter nor Sophia are particularly likable characters. In particular, Peter drags one innocent computer store owner into his mess and then doesn’t seem to be particularly upset when the poor guy ends up with a bullet in his brain. It’s one thing to be an assassin. It’s another thing to be a jerk about it.
On the plus side, Jon Voight is enough of an old pro to understand that this is a movie that does not reward subtlety and he gives a performance that is totally over-the-top but which is also more than appropriate for the material with which he’s working. (Voight is still a talented actor and it’s a shame that, due to voting for different candidates than the majority of Hollywood, he’s pretty much going to end his career appearing in movies like this.) As well, Max Montesi gives such a cheerfully bizarre performance as a rival assassin that he actually bring the movie to life whenever he’s on the screen.
Unfortunately, the lunacy of Voight and Montesi is not enough to save The Painter. At one point, someone dismisses Peter’s paintings as being “derivative.” They could have been talking about this film as a whole.
Today, we celebrate the birthday of Henry Fonda!
Fonda was born 119 years ago today and, over the course of his long career, he was often cast in role the epitomized everything great about America. It’s rare to find a Henry Fonda film in which he played an out-and-out villain, though he did just that in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. (Leone, in fact, cast Fonda as the evil Frank because he knew audiences would be shocked to see Fonda coldly gunning down settlers and their families.)
One of Fonda’s finest films was 1943’s The Ox-Bow Incident, in which he played a cowboy who finds himself drafted into joining a posse that ends up hanging three men for the crime of murder and cattle rustling. The members of the posse (including seven of whom voted against hanging the men) later learn that the men were innocent. In today’s scene that I love, Henry Fonda reads aloud the letter that one of the men wrote to his wife shortly before he was hung. This was one of Fonda’s most heartfelt and powerful performances.
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, the Shattered Len wishes a happy 80th birthday to the man and the legend, Danny Trejo! Trejo’s journey from being a gang member to an ex-con to a drug counselor to a pop cultural institution is an inspiring one, all the more so because Danny Trejo is so candid about both his past struggles and his present successes.
It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Danny Trejo Films
Runaway Train (1985, dir by Andrei Konchalovsky, DP: Alan Hume)
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987, dir by J. Lee Thompson, DP: Gideon Porath)
Heat (1995, dir by Michael Mann, DP: Dante Spinotti)
Machete Kills (2013, dir by Robert Rodriguez, DP: Robert Rodriguez)
Johansen (Dolph Lundgren) is a San Diego cop who remains on the force despite the fact that most of his old friends and former partners have retired. When he’s filmed beating up a Mexican man on the highway, he becomes the latest target of the Defund The Police movement. It doesn’t matter that the man was a human trafficker who was driving truck full of kidnapped women. Johansen has become an embarrassment.
Normally, you would think this would lead to Johansen being fired or, at the very least, suspended. Instead, his bosses decide to send him to Mexico to escort two prisoners back to the United States. Rosa (Christina Villa) and Leticia (Daniela Soto-Brenner) are two sex workers who witnessed the murder of a group of DEA agents. Their testimony could be key to identifying the killers. Despite his friend and former partner, Brynner (Kelsey Grammer), telling him that he should just retire rather than allow the police department to continually push him around, Johansen heads down to Mexico.
It turns out that bringing the women back to the United States is not going to be easy. A roadside ambush leaves Leticia dead and Johansen severely wounded. Though Rosa’s initial instinct is to abandon Johansen in the desert, she eventually takes him to the home of her cousin, a police officer named Miguel (Rocko Reyes). As Johansen recovers, he discovers that the people who want Rosa dead are not going to give up and that he cannot trust anyone.
Let’s give some credit where credit is due. Dolph Lundgren knows how to direct an efficient B-movie. He has an adequate visual eye, he makes good use of the arid desert setting, and he gets believable performances out of the majority of his cast. Christina Villa especially does a good job as the tough but ultimately kind-hearted Rosa. The movie has a bit more going on underneath the surface than the typical B-action film. Johansen is forced to reconsider his own prejudices while the film’s villains argue that they were forced into their actions by a society that refuses to take care of those who are expected to risk their lives to protect the status quo. It’s not a dumb movie, though it does feature a lot of characters doing rather dumb things and the big twist demands that the viewer accept one too many coincidences.
Lundgren not only directed but co-wrote the script. Apparently, he first came up with the idea of the film in 2006. Interestingly, it’s obvious that the film went into production when Defund The Police was still a strong and powerful political movement and the film itself ultimately suggests that the police should be, if not defunded, at least massively reformed. Of course, by the time the film was released in January, the Defund movement was considerably less powerful and was being blamed for the sharp increase in crime across the nation. Chants of “Defund the police” have been replaced by cries of “Fund the police, for the love of God!” That’s the danger which trying to make a film with a political subtext in an age with a 24-hour news cycle. What was popular when a film goes into production will often be a spent force by the time the film actually gets released.
As for Wanted Man, it’s an efficient B-movie that gets the job done. If nothing else, the sight of Dolph Lundgren and Kelsey Grammer playing best friends is just weird enough to keep things watchable.
On this date in 1905, the great actor Joseph Cotten was born in Petersburg, Virginia. A longtime friend and collaborator of Orson Welles, Cotten was one of the most dependable leading men of the 40s and 50s, an actor with the charisma of star and the talent of an artist.
Today’s scene that I love comes from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt, and it features Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten. Wright plays Charlie. Cotten plays her beloved uncle, who is also named Charlie and who might very well be a serial killer. In this scene, Uncle Charlie drags his niece to a seedy bar, where he confesses that, as she earlier deduced, he is a suspect in a murder investigation. With a mixture of charm and intimidating, Charlie tries to convince his niece to keep his secret to herself.
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, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to English director and editor, John Glen! It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 John Glen Films
For Your Eyes Only (1981, dir by John Glen, DP: Alan Hume)
Octopussy (1983, dir by John Glen, DP: Alan Hume)
A View To A Kill (1985, dir by John Glen, DP: Alan Hume)
Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992, dir by John Glen, DP: Alec Mills)
Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) is a paramedic in New York City. Haunted by the fact that her mother died while giving birth to her while looking for a special spider in Peru (and I cannot believe that I just wrote that), Cassie struggles with showing her emotions and opening up to people. In fact, her only friend appears to be her fellow paramedic, Ben Parker (Adam Scott). Ben’s sister-in-law is pregnant and Cassie tells him, “You’ll be a great uncle, Ben.”
After a near-death experience, Cassie discovers that she has the ability to see into the future. She also discovers that a strange man named Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) wants to kill three teenage girls, Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), Anya (Isabela Merced), and Julia (Sydney Sweeney). Cassie does what anyone would do. She kidnaps the three girls to keep them safe and then hops on a plane to Peru to find out how Ezekiel is connected to her mother’s death.
Madame Web is the latest entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. Because Sony has the rights to Spider-Man, all of the MCU films featuring Spider-Man have been co-productions with Columbia Pictures and have been distributed by Sony. With Spider-Man emerging as one of the few characters to remain a strong box office draw for Marvel, Columbia has produced a series of Spider-Man-adjacent films that feature characters who have appeared in Spider-Man-related media. While Marvel and Disney have Tom Holland swinging his way through New York, Sony has to settle for Adam Scott and Dakota Johnson in an ambulance.
I always assume that the folks at Marvel and Disney probably groan a little whenever they hear that a new Sony film is coming out. The MCU Spider-Man films have been consistently strong, with all three of them proving popular with both audiences and critics. The Sony Spider-Man films, on the other hand, often seem like throwbacks to the bad old days of the early aughts, when most comic book films were still cheap and kind of embarrassing. Madame Web doesn’t do much to change this perception. In fact, the film is even set in 2003, complete with a Blockbuster Video store prominently featured in one scene, Britney Spears’s Toxic playing in a roadside diner, and a totally random reference to American Idol. (What’s funny is that the jokey reference to American Idol would really only work if the show were no longer on the air but actually, it’s still airing on CBS. No one ever seems to notice anymore but it’s still there. If the movie really had any guts, it would have had Dakota Johnson says that she was going home to watch Paradise Hotel.)
Slow-paced and featuring some of the most awkward line readings this side of a community theater production of Bus Stop, Madame Web is not a particularly engaging film. After a truly abysmal prologue set in Peru, the film spends about half-an-hour giving us a tour of Cassie’s not particularly interesting life as a tough New York paramedic before finally getting started on the main story. And even then, the film leaves the viewer feeling cheated because none of three girls — who we are told are all destined to become super heroes — actually become super powered over the course of the film. The film basically says, “They’re all going to be Spiderwoman …. BUT NOT TODAY!” The problem with that approach is that it’s hard not to feel that the only interesting thing about the three girls is that they’re eventually going to have super powers. Without the powers, they’re just kind of boring. Cassie is the only one who has a super power but being able to see three minutes into the future isn’t that much of a power. Dakota Johnson and the rest of the cast all seem to be bored out of their minds and who can blame them?
The main problem with Madame Web is that it’s just not much fun. The best super hero films are fun to watch. That goes for the Marvel films, the DC films, and even the Sony films. (Admit it, the first Venom was kind of fun.) Even with The Dark Knight films, Christopher Nolan understood that the villains had to be flamboyant to make up for Christian Bale’s rather dour Batman. In this film, we’re never quite sure what Ezekiel wants or even who he is. He’s just a random evil guy and not a particularly memorable one. Madame Web does make some attempts at humor but the sitcom-style jokes are negated by Dakota Johnson’s flat delivery. (Oddly enough, sitcom veteran Adam Scott is stuck playing a serious character.) Overall, there’s an overwhelming blandness to Madame Web. It doesn’t engage,. It doesn’t thrill. It doesn’t make you cheer or even jeer. It’s just kind of there.
The film sets up a sequel but, judging from how the film did at the box office and how not even the film’s cast has pretended to be happy with how the film turned out, I’d expect to see Morbius 2 before another installment of Madame Web.
Through the Shattered Lens 