Tag Archives: Tony Denison

October True Crime: Getting Gotti (dir by Roger Young)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In this 1994 made-in-Canada movie, Anthony Denison plays John Gotti.  We watch as he goes from being a street boss to Paul Castellano to assassinating Castellano so that he can take over the Gambino crime family.  Gotti thinks that he’s the king of New York and he’s convinced that no one will ever bring him down.  U.S. Attorney Diana Giacalone (Lorraine Bracco) is determined to prove him wrong.  She becomes the first of many prosecutors to try to get Gotti and Gotti reacts by having his attorney launch a series of outrageously misogynistic attacks against her.  Gotti doesn’t just want to defeat Diana.  He also wants to humiliate her.  Diane may have the evidence but Gotti’s got the money.  Who will get Gotti?

Now, I guess I could argue here that the horror aspect of this film comes from the crimes that Gotti commits.  And it is true that we see Gotti kill a number of people.  He’s a sadistic killer, the type who will shoot someone twenty more times than he needs to.  As the last of the truly flamboyant gangsters, Gotti would go on to become something of a pop cultural institution.  But one should not overlook the fact that, for all of his charisma and bravado, John Gotti was not a nice guy.  Of course, I should also point out that none of that charisma is really present in Anthony Denison’s performance as Gotti.  As played by Denison, John Gotti — the so-called Teflon Don whose greatest strength was his shamelessness — comes across as being a little boring.

Actually, the scariest thing about this film is Lorraine Bracco’s performance as Diana Giacalone.  Bracco does a lot of yelling as Giacalone.  Sometimes, it’s understandable.  Giacalone is portrayed as being someone who grew up on the same tough streets as Gotti and who resents people like Gotti and the Mafia giving a bad name to Italians in general.  The problem is that Bracco yells her lines even when there’s no reason to be yelling.  At one point, she discovers that someone screwed up her lunch order and she screams about it as if the world is ending.  Visiting her mother (Ellen Burstyn) for the holidays, Giacalone yells at her family.  When the verdict comes in, Giacalone yells some more.  The yelling is pretty much nonstop and, as a result, one starts to feel that the other U.S. attorneys might have a point when they say that Giacalone is a loose cannon.  The film tries to present her as being a strong, no-bullshit woman who is going up against an army of misogynists but there’s more to being strong than just yelling.  It would be such a big deal if the film had given her a personality beyond yelling but it doesn’t.  I blame the script more than I blame Lorraine Bracco, who can be a very good actress when cast in the right role.

Getting Gotti pretty much hits every Mafia cliche.  Whenever anyone drives around the old neighborhood, Italian string music plays.  There’s a moment where Giacalone yells that her goal is to make sure that people understand that the Mafia isn’t “Al Pacino looking soulful” in The Godfather.  I had to wonder if Giacalone had ever actually watched The Godfather.  Seriously, an Italian attacking The Godfather?  Who does she think she is, Joe Columbo?

Gotti remains the Gotti film to watch.

October True Crime: Karla (dir by Joel Bender)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

When it comes to true crime cases, few are as disturbing as the story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.

Paul and Karla were a young, married couple who lived in Ontario.  They were both attractive.  They were both popular.  They were both superficially charming, in the style of someone who you might have taken a class with but the only thing you can really remember about them is their smile.  And they were both killers.  Paul Bernardo, a wannabe rapper who had previously made his money by smuggling cigarettes and who was also a serial rapist, murdered at the least three teenage girls, including Karla’s sister, Tammy.  When Paul was arrested, Karla told prosecutors that she had helped Paul with his murders but only because he threatened and abused her.  Prosecutors, perhaps moved by a picture that Karla’s friend took of her bruised face after one of Paul’s beatings, made a deal with her for her testimony.  In return for testifying against Paul Bernardo, Karla was convicted only of manslaughter and given a 12-year prison sentence.  (She was 23 at the time and would only be 35 when released from prison, assuming that she served the full sentence.)  However, during the trial, video tapes of the murders were uncovered and showed that Karla had been a far more active participant in the murders than she had originally admitted.  That included the murder of her sister, Tammy.

There were calls to rescind Karla’s plea bargain and to try her for murder but since her plea bargain had only required her to provide enough evidence to convict Paul, it was ruled that she had upheld her end of the bargain.  While Paul Bernardo is currently serving his life sentence, Karla Homolka is now free and living somewhere in Canada.

Needless to say, the case drew international attention, both due to the circumstances of Karla’s plea bargain and also to Paul and Karla’s image of being the “Ken and Barbie Of Serial Killers.”  It’s a case that continue to haunt Canada, an example of how the accused was ultimately treated with more respect than the victims.  For her part, Karla continues to claim that it was all Paul and that she was forced into helping.  Paul claims that he and Karla were equal partners and that the actual murders were all committed by Karla.  Personally, I think they’re both lying.

2006’s Karla stars Laura Prepon as Karla Homolka.  The film opens with her already in prison and being interviewed by a psychiatrist (Patrick Bauchau) who has been assigned to determine if there’s a risk of her reoffending.  As Karla tells her story, we see flashbacks of Karla’s life with Paul (Misha Collins).  Prepon and Collins are both chillingly believable as the soulless Paul and Karla.  Laura Prepon plays Karla as being a narcissistic sociopath who is incapable of understand that she’s not the victim in this story.  I imagine that Prepon’s performance probably captures the essence of the real Karla, even if Prepon doesn’t really look like her.

That said, the film itself is largely a surface level exploration of the case.  The film’s script attempts to maintain some ambiguity as to whether or not Karla Homolka was a voluntarily participant in the murders or if she actually was just too scared of Bernardo to stop him.  Prepon plays her as being a sociopath but the script still tries to play both sides of the debate and, as a result, the film falls flat.  The film may be called Karla but it doesn’t really get into her head and, as a result, it has all the depth of an Investigative Discovery special.  In the end, the film feels like it’s trying to exploit the notoriety around a famous case without taking a firm position on the case’s biggest controversy.  When it comes to the crimes of Karla Homolka, that’s not an option.

Love On The Lens: The Amy Fisher Story (dir by Andy Tennant)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Poor Mary Jo Buttafuoco!

As seen in the 1993 made-for-tv movie, The Amy Fisher Story, Mary Jo (Laurie Paton) was just a normal Long Island housewife.  She was married to an auto mechanic named Joey (Anthony John Denison).  She had a family and a nice house and a seemingly perfect life.  But, one day, a teenage girl named Amy Fisher (played by a young Drew Barrymoe) showed up at her front door and claimed that her younger sister was having an affair with Joey.  When Mary Jo accused Amy of lying and then said she was going to call her husband, Amy pulled a gun and shot Mary Jo in the head.  That Mary Jo survived, albeit with partial facial paralysis, was a miracle.

The Amy Fisher Story was the third of the movies to be based on the true story of Amy Fisher and her affair with Joey Buttafuoco.  If Casualties of Love portrayed Amy as being an obsessed stalker who targeted a saintly man and if Amy Fisher: My Story portrayed Amy as a vulnerable teen who was groomed by a sleazy older man, The Amy Fisher Story suggests that perhaps the truth was somewhere in between.  As played by Drew Barrymore, Amy Fisher is immature, unstable, and self-destructive even before she meets Joey Buttafuoco.  As played by Anthony John Denison, Joey is a cocky and arrogant womanizer who grooms a teenage girl and leads her to believe that the only thing keeping them from being truly together is the fact that he has a wife.  (If Casualties portrayed Joey as being a dumb, salt-of-the-Earth type of guy and Amy Fisher: My Story portrayed him as being coldly manipulative and cruel, The Amy Fisher Story portrays him as being a self-centered idiot who did whatever he felt like doing without thinking about any possible consequences.)  Of all the performers who played Amy and Joey, Drew Barrymore and Anthony John Denison are the most convincing.  On the one hand, that lends a credibility to this film’s version of the events that led to the shooting of Mary Jo.  On the other hand, it also means that neither of the main characters is particularly likable.

The film instead tries to make a hero out of a reporter named Amy Pagnozzi (Harley Jane Kozak), who finds herself assigned to follow the Amy Fisher story when she would much rather be reporting on the upcoming presidential election.  Pagnozzi pops up throughout the story, commenting on the media feeding frenzy and generally acting annoyed by the whole thing.  The problem with this approach is that, for all of Pagnozzi’s condemnation of the country’s tabloid mentality, she’s still a part of the monster.  It’s hard to have sympathy for someone complaining about how a story is covered when they’re the one doing the covering.

Interestingly, for a film that condemns that way the story was covered, The Amy Fisher Story is probably the most tabloid-y of the three films.  Every sordid detail — from Amy and Joey’s motel meetings to Amy’s work as an escort to her subsequent dalliance with a gym owner — is provided in artfully filmed detail.  The result is a film that can feel a bit over-the-top but that’s exactly the right approach to take when it comes to a story like this.  When you’re making a movie about a suburban teenage escort who shoots her boyfriend’s wife, there’s really not much need or room for subtlety.  The Amy Fisher Story works because it fully embraces the melodrama and it features a performance from Drew Barrymore that remind us that, back before she became a permanently cheerful talk show host, Drew was a force of pure chaos.

When it comes to the story of the Fishers and the Buttafuocos, this is the film to see.

Film Review: Atlas Shrugged Part Three (dir by J. James Manera)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2014, the Atlas Shrugged trilogy came to a close with Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt?  As you can probably guess from the title, this is the movie that finally revealed the elusive character of John Galt.

Unfortunately, after all the time spent discussing the character over the past two movies, there’s really no way that the actual John Galt could possibly live up to all the hype.  John Galt, the man who stopped the motor of the world and who is the world’s greatest living engineer, turns out to be a sensitive lumberjack type who has founded his own scenic village in Galt’s Gulch.  He’s manly and handsome and chivalrous and he’s a bit dull.  Kristoffer Polaha, who plays the character, is a perfectly pleasant and likable actor but there’s nothing about his screen presence or his performance that suggests that he’s the man who has figured out how to save civilization from the regulatory state.  As a character, Galt works best as a literary creation, someone who the reader can imagine for themselves.  When seen on screen, he’s a bit of a letdown.

Taking over the role from Taylor Schilling and Samantha Mathis, Laura Regan plays Dagny Taggart as an overworked businesswoman who really needs a vacation.  (Of the three actresses who played the character, only Mathis was credible as the dynamic Dagny of Ayn Rand’s original novel.)  Having crashed her plane in the mountains at the end of the second film, Dagny is nursed back to health by John Galt and the inhabitants of Galt’s Gulch.  Dagny is shocked to discover that most of her old friends are now living in Galt’s Gulch.  As they explain, they’re on strike and they’re no longer going to serve a government that is looking to control and ultimately destroy them.  Unfortunately, the film presents Galt’s Gulch as being a bit of a dull place, one that is not even livened up the presence of pirate Ragnar Danneskold (Eric Allan Kramer).  It’s the type of place where Dagny can visit the local farmer’s market and recuperate in a taste-fully decorated bed and breakfast, all while falling in love with her hunky host.  If the first two Atlas Shrugged films now feel somewhat prophetic, the third one feels like a Libertarian-themed Hallmark movie.

Atlas Shrugged: Part III feels a bit rushed.  Apparently, no one from the cast and crew of either the first or the second film returned to work on Atlas Shrugged: Part III and it feels quite a bit different from the previous two films.  Whatever one may think of the way the first two films presented the effects of government regulation, they were effective because they specifically showed the consequences.  The audience actually saw two trains collide due to incompetent management.  The audience saw the government showing up and forcefully taking over Rearden Metal.  The third film relies on a narrator, one who tells us what happened instead of letting us see it with our own eyes.  We hear about a bridge collapsing but we don’t see it.  We hear about union thugs forcefully taking over a factory but we don’t see them.  We hear about out-of-control government bureaucrats but, as opposed to the first two films, we don’t really get to spend much time with them and, when we do, they’re far more cartoonish in their villainy than they were in the first two films.  John Galt does get to deliver his speech to the world but it’s in a truncated form and the film’s decision to then cut to Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Ron Paul all praising the speech on television not only goes against the film’s depiction of a country where public dissent is suppressed but it also reminds the audience that the film’s outlook has more in common with Fox News than Ayn Rand.

As previously mentioned, the third film has a totally different cast from the first two films.  Greg Germann is enjoyably over-the-top as the unhinged James Taggart but, otherwise, the new cast fails to make much of an impression, with some of them only showing up for a few brief seconds before disappearing from the story.  Rob Morrow plays Hank Rearden but is only seen for less than a minute.  By sidelining one of the book’s most important characters, Atlas Shrugged: Part III also drops the whole storyline about Hank’s affair with Dagny.  While I guess that makes it easier for the film to then have Dagny and John Galt hook up, it still feels a bit unfair to the people who actually watched the entire trilogy.

Considering that both Parts I and II have improved with the passage of time, Part III is a rather disappointing ending for the trilogy.  Upon watching, John Galt would probably be disappointed but not surprised.