Tag Archives: Willem Dafoe

April Noir: To Live And Die In L.A. (dir by William Friedkin)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Some people love money so much that they make their own.

In 1985’s To Live And Die In L.A., Williem DaFoe is magnetically evil as Rick Masters, a genius at counterfeiting who has gotten rich by selling other people fake money.  The film features a lengthy sequence showing how Masters makes his money and the viewer really is left feeling as if they’ve just watched an artist at work.  Masters has a talent and he’s a professional.  He’s good at what he does.  Unfortunately, he’s also a sociopath who is willing to kill just about anyone who he comes across.  There have been a lot of movies made about sympathetic counterfeiters.  They’re often portrayed as being quirky and rather likable individuals.  This is not one of those films.  DaFoe’s charisma makes it impossible to look away from Rick but he’s still not someone you would ever want to have to deal with for a prolonged period of time.  One gets the feeling that Rick eventually kills everyone that he does business with.

Secret Service agents Richard Chance (William Petersen) and John Vukovich (John Pankow) are investigating Masters.  They’re a classic crime movie partnership.  Vukovich is youngish and, when we first meet him, goes by-the-book.  Chance is a veteran member of the Secret Service, an impulsive loose cannon whose last partner was killed by Masters.  Chance is now obsessed with taking Masters down and he’s willing to do whatever it takes.  If that means threatening his lover and informant, the recently paroled Ruth (Darlanne Fluegel), so be it.  If that means defying the lawyers (represented by Dean Stockwell), so be it.  If that means committing crimes himself and nearly getting Vukovich killed in the process, so be it.  At first, Vukovich is horrified by Chance’s techniques but, as the film progresses, Vukovich comes to embrace Chance’s philosophy of doing whatever it takes.

What sets To Live and Die in L.A. apart from some other films is that, even as it concludes, it leaves us uncertain as to whether or not Chance and Vukovich’s actions were really worth it.  This is not a standard cops-vs-robbers film.  This is a William Friedkin film and he brings the same moral ambiguity that distinguished The French Connection to this film’s portrait of the Secret Service.  (When Chance isn’t chasing after a counterfeiter, he’s foiling an assassination attempt against the president.)

Like The French Connection, To Live and Die In L.A. features an pulse-pounding car chase, one that occurs as Chance and Vukovich make an escape from robbing a man who they believe to be a criminal.  (The man turns out to have been an FBI agent.)  This chase involves Chance and Vukovich driving the wrong way down a crowded freeway, desperately tying not to crash into any of the cars that are swerving out of the way.  It’s such an exciting scene that it’s easy to forget that Chance and Vukovich are actually escaping from committing a crime.  In The French Connection, Gene Hackman was chasing the man who tried to assassinate him.  In To Love and Die In L.A., Chance is fleeing the consequences of his own actions.

To Live and Die In L.A. holds up well.  DaFoe and Petersen both give charismatic performance but, for me, it really is John Pankow who carries the film.  Vukovich’s transformation from being a straight-laced member of law enforcement to being a doppelganger of his partner is both exciting and a little disturbing,  To Live and Die In L.A. is a crime film that leaves you wondering how far one can go battling the bad guys before becoming one of them.

Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Born On The Fourth of July (dir by Oliver Stone)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1989, having already won an Oscar for recreating his Vietnam experiences in Platoon, director Oliver Stone returned to the war with Born On The Fourth Of July.

Based on the memoir of anti-war activist Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July stars Tom Cruise as Kovic.  When we first meet Kovic, he’s growing up on Long Island in the 50s and 60s.  He’s a clean-cut kid from a nice family.  He’s on the school wrestling team and he’s got a lot of friends.  When he was just 15, he heard John F. Kennedy telling people to ask what they can do for their country and he was inspired.  He decided he wanted to join the Marines, despite the fact that his father (Raymond J. Barry) was still haunted by the combat that he saw in World War II.  (In one of the film’s better scenes, a young Kovic notices that the elderly veterans marching in the Independence Day parade still flinch whenever they hear a firecracker.)  He enlists in the Marines after listening to a patriotic speech from a recruiter (played by Tom Berenger).  Ron runs through the rain to attend his prom and has one dance with Donna (Kyra Sedgwick), on whom he’s always had a crush.  There’s nothing subtle about the way that Stone portrays Kovic’s childhood.  In fact, one might argue that it’s a bit too idealized.  But Stone knows what he’s doing.  The wholesomenss of Kovic’s childhood leaves neither him nor the viewer prepared for what’s going to happen in Vietnam.

Vietnam turns out not to be the grand and patriotic adventure that Kovic thought it would be.  After Sgt. Kovic accidentally shoots one of his own men in a firefight, he is ordered to keep quiet about the incident.  After he is wounded and paralyzed in another firefight, Kovic ends up in a Hellish VA hospital, surrounded by men who will never fully recover from their mental and physical wounds.  Kovic is eventually returns home in wheelchair.  The film then follows Kovic as he goes from defending the war in Vietnam to eventually turning against both the war and the government.  At one point, he ends up with a group of disabled vets in Mexico and there’s a memorable scene where he and another paraplegic (Willem Dafoe) attempt to fight despite having fallen out of their chairs.  Eventually, Kovic returns to America and turns his anger into activism.

There’s nothing subtle about Born On The Fourth Of July.  It’s a loud and angry film and Oliver Stone directs with a heavy-hand.  Like a lot of Stone’s films, it overwhelms the viewer on a first viewing and it’s only during subsequent viewings that one becomes aware of just how manipulative the film is.  Tom Cruise gives a good performance as Ron Kovic but his transformation into a long-haired, profane drunk still feels as if it happens a bit too abruptly.  A good deal of the film centers on Kovic’s guilt about accidentally killing one of his men but the scene where he goes to the soldier’s family and asks them for forgiveness didn’t quite work for me.  If anything, Kovic came across as being rather self-centered as he robs the man’s mother and father of the belief that their son had at least died heroically in combat as opposed to having been shot by his own sergeant.  Did Kovic’s need to absolve himself really give him the right to cause this family more pain?  Born on the Fourth Of July is an effective work of agitprop.  On the first viewing, you’ll want to join Kovic in denouncing the military and demanding peace.  On the second viewing, you’ll still sympathize with Kovic while also realizing that he really owes both his mother and father an apology for taking out his anger on them.  By the third viewing, you’ll be kind of like, “Wow, I feel bad for this guy but he’s still kind of a jerk.”  That said, when it comes to making an effective political film, Adam McKay could definitely take some lessons from Oliver Stone.  Born On The Fourth of July is at its best when it simply captures the feeling of living in turmoil and discovering that the world is not as simple a place as you once believed.  As idealized as the film’s presentation of Kovic’s childhood may be, anyone who has ever felt nostalgia for an earlier and simpler world will be able to relate.

Oliver Stone won his second Best Director Oscar for Born On The Fourth Of July.  The film itself lost Best Picture to far more genteel version of the past, Driving Miss Daisy.

 

 

 

Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Winner: Platoon (dir by Oliver Stone)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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.

RIP David Lynch (1946-2025) 🙏 – A personal reflection…

Posted on by Bradley Crain

It was around 1986 or 1987, and I was around 13 years old. I had never heard of David Lynch, but I was at this video store at the Park Plaza mall in Little Rock when I came across a VHS tape of BLUE VELVET on sale for $1.99. The description looked very interesting, and it had Dennis Hopper in it. I recognized Hopper because he was in one of my favorite movies at the time, HOOSIERS. My dad was a high school basketball coach, so basketball was my life up until I graduated high school. Somehow, I was able to talk my mom into buying it for me. BLUE VELVET was probably the strangest film I had seen up to that point in my life, and there was no doubt that I didn’t understand what was going on in some parts of the film, but I was still mesmerized by it. I became an immediate fan of Lynch.

For the next decade or so, I was on the lookout for anything new from David Lynch, whether it be the TWIN PEAKS T.V. series, or even more importantly to me, WILD AT HEART, with Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe. I’d watch the man’s work all by myself in my home in Toad Suck, Arkansas. It felt like I was in a gang of 1, as I’m not sure there was another person in my community who had any clue who David Lynch was, or who appreciated his work. But that was okay. I enjoyed his films and that’s all that matters.

I haven’t kept up with David Lynch that much over the last few years, but I’ve always recognized what a unique talent he was. Rest in peace, sir, and congratulations on a life well lived!

Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Mississippi Burning (dir by Alan Parker)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1988’s Mississippi Burning opens on a lonely Mississippi backroad in 1964.  A car is pulled over by the police.  Inside the car are three young men, one black and two white.  Judging from their nervous expressions and the sound of the people who stopped them and the fact that they’re in Mississippi during the 60s, we can guess what is about to happen to the people in the car.

With the three men, who were civil rights activists who were involved in voter registration efforts, officially considered to be missing, the FBI sends down two agents to find out what happened.  The two agents are Alan Ward (Willem DaFoe) and Rupert Anderson (Gene Hackman).  Ward is a Northerner who does things by the book and who resents having to deal with lax Southern law enforcement.  He is serious-minded and, just in case we need a reminder of how serious he is, he wears bar-rimmed glasses that make him look like the world’s most fearsome IRS agent.  Anderson is from Mississippi.  He’s a talkative good ol’ boy who was a sheriff before he joined the FBI.  “You know what has four eyes but can’t see?” Anderson asks, “Mississippi.”  It’s a tense partnership, as Ward sometimes disapproves of Anderson’s methods and Anderson thinks that Ward doesn’t understand how things work in Mississippi.

From the first minute we meet local law enforcement, we know that they’re the killers.  Just the fact that one of them are played by Brad Dourif is evidence enough.  However, no one in town is willing to say a word against the police or their cronies.  The white citizens are either too intimidated or they agree with what happened to the three civil rights workers.  (The three men are often referred to as being “outside agitators.”)  The black townspeople live in fear of the Klan and have no reason to trust the word of white FBI agents like Ward and Anderson.

Ward and Anderson investigate the case, hoping that they can find some bit of evidence that will prove the guilt of Sheriff Stuckey (Gailard Sartain), Deputy Pell (Brad Dourif), KKK leader Clayton Townley (Stephen Tobolowsky), and maybe even the town’s mayor (R. Lee Ermey).  One advantage that the FBI has is that the murderers are incredibly stupid.  Another is that Deputy Pell’s abused wife (Frances McDormand, giving the film’s best performance) might be persuaded to testify against her husband.

Mississippi Burning is an example of both powerful filmmaking and problematic history.  Like Ridley Scott, director Alan Parker got his start making commercials and he brought the same sensibility to his movies.  He knew what audiences wanted to see and he made sure to give it to them.  Mississippi Burning looks fantastic and is full of memorable performances.  (Both McDormand and Hackman received Oscar nominations).  The action moves quickly and the villains are so hateful that watching them end up getting humiliated really does bring about a sort of emotional release.

At the same time, this is a film about the Civil Rights era that presents the FBI as being the heroes.  And while it’s true that the FBI did investigate the real-life murders that inspired this film, Mississippi Burning leaves out the fact that the FBI was just a rigorous in harassing and wire tapping Martin Luther King as they were in keeping an eye on the leaders of the Klan.  It’s a film about racism in which the heroes are as white as the villains.  Gene Hackman gives a good performance as Rupert Anderson but the film never really delves all that deeply into Anderson’s feelings about racism in the South.  We’re told that he was a sheriff in Mississippi but we never learn much about what type of sheriff Anderson was.  He’s opposed to the Klan but, historically, the same can be said of many segregationists in the 60s, many of whom felt the Klan’s activities brought unwanted federal attention to what was happening in their home states.  By not delving into Anderson’s own history as a member of Mississippi law enforcement or the FBI’s own more problematic history when it comes to the civil rights movement, the film provides viewers with the escape of viewing the bad guys as being aberrations as opposed to being the norm in 1964.  In the end, Mississippi Burning is an effective thriller with strong heroes and hateful villains.  Just don’t watch it for historical accuracy.

Mississippi Burning was nominated for Best Picture but it lost to Rain Man.

Dead For A Dollar (2022, directed by Walter Hill)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In 1897, bounty hunter Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz) is hired by wealthy Martin Kidd (Hamish Linklater) to track down Elijah Jones (Brandon Scott), the man who Martin says has kidnapped his wife.  Accompanying Max is Alonzo Poe (Warren Burke), who served with Elijah in the Army.

From the start, Max suspects that Martin is not being completely forthright about the kidnapping and it does turn out that Rachel Kidd (Rachel Brosnahan) voluntarily left with Elijah and is planning on traveling to Cuba with him.  Martin has hired crime baron Tiberio Vargas (Benjamin Bratt) to have Rachel raped and murdered because Martin thinks that the tragedy will help him launch his political career.  Because Martin suspects that Max might not be trustworthy, he has hired Max’s rival, Joe Cribbens (Willem DaFoe), to track down Rachel as well.

This film has a cast that is full of talented people and it’s a western directed by someone who has proven himself to be one of the masters of genre, Walter Hill.  I wanted to like Dead For A Dollar but the movie just didn’t work.  Waltz and DaFoe are great actors but they just seem to be going through the motions and Rachel Bsonahan is miscast.  Benjamin Bratt and Hamish Linklater are forgettable villains.  Even worse, Dead For A Dollar has a washed-out visual style that you would never expect from a director like Walter Hill.

Rewatch The Long Riders instead.

Catching Up With The Films of 2024: Saturday Night (dir by Jason Reitman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Saturday Night, which presents what I assume to be a highly fictionalized account of the 90 minutes before the 1975 premiere of Saturday Night Live, did the impossible.  It made me feel sorry for Chevy Chase.

Don’t get me wrong.  As played by Cory Michael Smith, Chevy Chase is not presented as being a sympathetic character in Saturday Night.  The film acknowledges his talent as a comedian and that he was the first star to come out of Saturday Night Live.  But he’s still presented as being arrogant, self-centered, rude, and often deliberately self-destructive.  The film portrays Chevy Chase in much the same way that most people describe him in real life.  Chevy Chase has apparently always been a difficult person to work with and, I suppose to his credit, it doesn’t appear that Chevy himself has ever claimed anything different.  But Saturday Night so piles on Chevy that even I felt it went a bit overboard.  It’s one thing to present Chevy as being the arrogant jerk that he’s admitted to being.  It’s another thing to fill the movie with moments in which people stop what they’re doing to tell Chevy that his career is going to start strong and then fade due to his bad behavior.  At one point, the NBC executive played by Willem DaFoe comments that Chevy could host his own late night talk show.  We’re all meant to laugh because eventually, Chevy Chase did host a late night talk show and it was such a disaster that it’s still, decades after its cancellation, held up as a prime example of a bad career move.  But, in the context of the film, it feels a bit like overkill.  It’s one thing to be honest about someone being a pain in the ass.  It’s another thing to repeatedly kick someone while they’re down.  Chevy, much like the NBC censor who is chanted down in the film’s cringiest moment, simply feels like too easy of a target.

Of course, Saturday Night is full of moments that are meant to comment more on the future than on whatever was going on in 1975.  The whole point of the film is that Saturday Night Live, a show that the network has little faith in and which is being produced by a hyperactive visionary (Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels) who seems to be making it up as he goes along, is eventually going to become a cultural phenomenon.  Every time someone tries to convince Lorne Michaels to cancel the premiere or to miss with the format, we’re meant to think to ourselves, “Little do they know that this show is going to be huge for several decades before eventually just becoming another predictable part of the media landscape.” The scenes of Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) wandering around the set and asking, “What is my purpose?  Why am I here?” may not feel like something that would have happened in 1975 but they’re there because it’s something that people were asking about in 2024.  Watching the film, it helps if you know something about the history of Saturday Night Live.  It helps to know that Dan Aykryod (Dylan O’Brien), John Belushi (Matt Wood), and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) are going to carry the show after Chevy Chase leaves.  It helps to know that Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) is going to become a Hollywood mainstay even after he gets dumped from the premiere for refusing to cut any material out of his act.  It helps to know that the mellow, pot-smoking band leader is actually Paul Shaffer (Paul Rust).  It helps to know that Lorne Michael and Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, giving one of the best performances in the film) are going to become powerful names in American television.  The film may be set in 1975 but it’s actually about all the years to come.

It’s still an entertaining and well-made film, one that I enjoyed watching.  Saturday Night manages to create the illusion of playing out in real time and director Jason Reitman captures the excitement of being backstage before opening night.  It’s an excitement that everyone can relate to, whether their opening night was on television, Broadway, or just a community theater in their small college town.  The backstage chaos of Saturday Night is wonderfully choreographed and, most importantly, it captures the feeling of being young, idealistic, and convinced that you can change the world.  Reitman also gets good performances from his cast, with Cooper Hoffman, Dylan O’Brien, and Rachel Sennott (playing writer Rosie Shuster) as stand-outs.  That said, the film is pretty much stolen by J.K. Simmons, who has a memorably lecherous cameo as Milton Berle and who provides Chevy Chase with a look at what waits for him in the future.  If the film is never quite as poignant as it wants to be, that’s because Saturday Night Live is no longer the cultural powerhouse that it once was.  If Saturday Night had been released just 18 years ago, before SNL became best-known as the place where Alec Baldwin hides out from bad publicity, it would probably be an Oscar front runner right now.  Released today, it’s just makes one feel a little bit sad.  The show that was built on never selling out eventually sold out.

Film Review: Heaven’s Gate (dir by Michael Cimino)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1981 and then re-released in several different versions since then, Heaven’s Gate begins at Harvard University.

The year is 1870 and the graduates of Harvard have got their entire future ahead of them.  At the graduation ceremony, Joseph Cotten gives a speech about how, as men of cultivation, they have an obligation to help the uncultivated.  Student orator Billy Irvine (John Hurt) then gives a speech  in which he jokingly says the exact opposite.  Amongst the graduates, Billy’s friend, Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson), laughs at Billy’s speech.  It’s a bit of a strange scene, if just because all of the graduates appear to be teenagers except for Hurt and Kristofferson, who are both clearly in their 30s.  The graduates of Harvard sing to their girlfriends and dance under a tree and, for a fleeting moment, all seems to be right with the world.

Twenty years later, all seems to be wrong with the world.  Averill is now the rugged and world-weary marshal of Johnson Country, Wyoming.  Cattle barons are trying to force immigrant settlers to give up their land.  Gunmen, like Nate Champion (Christopher Walken) and Nick Ray (Mickey Rourke), are accepting contracts to execute immigrants who are suspected of stealing cattle.  When Averill stands up for the people of Johnson Country, the head of the Wyoming Stock Grower Association, Frank Canton (Sam Waterston), hires a group of mercenaries to ride into Johnson County and execute 125 settlers.  Billy Irvine, who now is dissolute alcoholic who works with Canton, warns his old friend Averill.  Averill, who has fallen in love with Ella (Isabelle Huppert), the local madam, announces that he will defend the immigrants.  Nate, who is also in love with Ella, considers changing sides.

Heaven’s Gate is loosely based on an actual event.  I actually have three distant ancestors who traveled to Wyoming to take part in the Johnson County War.  All three of them survived, though one of them was shot and killed in an unrelated manner shortly after returning to Ft. Smith, Arkansas.  That said, director Michael Cimino is clearly not that interested in the historical reality of the Johnson County War or the issues that it raised.  Just as he did with Vietnam in The Deer Hunter, Cimino uses the Johnson County War as a way to signify a loss of national innocence.  Averill and Irvine start the film as hopeful “young” men with the future ahead of them.  By the end of the film, one is dead and the other is living on a yacht and dealing with what appears to be crippling ennui.

Heaven’s Gate is a bit of an infamous film.  Though the film was pretty much a standard western, Cimino still went far over-budget and turned in a first cut that was over six hours long.  A four hour version was briefly released in 1980 but withdrawn after a week, due to terrible reviews and audience indifference.  A studio-edited version that ran for two hours and 35 minutes got the widest release in 1981.  Since then, there have been several other versions released.  Cimino’s director’s cut, which was released as a part of the Criterion Collection in 2012, runs for 212-minutes and is considered to now be the “official” version of Heaven’s Gate.

For years, Heaven’s Gate had a terrible reputation.  It’s failure at the box office was blamed for bankrupting United Artists.  After the excesses of the Heaven’s Gate production, studios were far more reluctant to just give a director a bunch of money and let him run off to make his movie.  (They should have learned their lesson with Dennis Hopper and The Last Movie.)  Described by studio execs as being self-indulgent and even mentally unstable, Michael Cimino’s career never recovered and the director of The Deer Hunter went from being an Oscar-winner to being an industry pariah.  (Some who disliked The Deer Hunter’s perceived jingoistic subtext claimed that Heaven’s Gate proved The Deer Hunter was just an overrated fluke.)  However, the reputation of Heaven’s Gate has improved, especially with the release of Cimino’s director’s cut.  Many critics have praised Heaven’s Gate for its epic portrayal of the west and, ironically given the controversy over The Deer Hunter, its political subtext.  It’s anti-immigrant villains made the film popular amongst the Resistance-leaning film historians during the first Trump term.

So, is Heaven’s Gate a masterpiece or a disaster?  To be honest, it’s somewhere in between.  Whereas it was once over-criticized, it’s now over-praised.  Visually, it’s a beautiful film but those who complained that the film was too slow had a point.  As with The Deer Hunter, Cimino takes the time to introduce us to and immerse us in a tight-knit immigrant community.  Personally, I like the much-criticized scenes of the fiddler on skates and Averill and Ella dancing in the roller rink.  Overall though, as opposed to The Deer Hunter, the members of the film’s victimized community still feel less like individual characters and more like symbols.  As for the political subtext, I think that any subtext of that sort is accidental.  (I feel the same way about The Deer Hunter, which I like quite a bit more than Heaven’s Gate.)  Cimino is more interested in the loss of innocence than whether or not the Johnson County War can be fit into some sort of nonsense Marxist framework.

The main problem with the film is that there is no center to keep everything grounded.  Kris Kristofferson had a definite screen presence but, as an actor who was incapable of showing a great deal of emotion, he lacks the gravitas necessary to keep from being swallowed up by Cimino’s epic pretensions.  Isabelle Huppert, an otherwise great actress, also feels lost in the role of Ella and Sam Waterston is not necessarily the most-intimidating villain to ever show up in a western.  Christopher Walken, as the enigmatic and intriguing Nate Champion, gives the best performance in the film but his character still feels largely wasted.

There are some brilliant visual moments to be found in Heaven’s Gate.  I even like the Harvard prologue and the ending on the boat, both of which are not technically necessary to the narrative but still add an extra-dimension to both Averill and Irvine.  But, in the end, Heaven’s Gate is big when it should have been small and epic when its should have been intimate.  It’s a misfire but not a disaster.  Even great directors occasionally have a film that just doesn’t work.  Speilberg had his 1941.  Scorsese has had a handful.  Coppola’s career has been a mess but no one can take his successes away from him.  Michael Cimino, who passed away in 2016, deserved another chance.

Film Review: Nosferatu (dir. by Robert Eggers)

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

I stepped out of the doors of the Regal Times Square yesterday, feeling giddy as a schoolkid. In my hands were a custom popcorn bucket and an Orlock Funko-Pop. I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Eggers Nosferatu and Christmas Morning was a delight. It was Film Euphoria. It was as if Halloween had one last gift to give, one final end of film zinger, and give it did.

At my early morning showing for Robert Eggers Nosferatu, we had at least one fellow who fell asleep and snored through the bulk of the film. Not loud enough to be disruptive, but it almost mimicked the strange purring sounds of the film’s antagonist. Granted, I understand. My showing was around 10a.m. on Christmas Morning and perhaps they partied hard the night before. Anything’s possible. Still, part of me likes to think that a person walking into a Robert Eggers film may have some expectations. With only three films under his belt – The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, regular audiences know that he has a taste for the macabre (perhaps even the unhinged), usually employs a slow burn when it comes to pacing and works with a great deal of light and shadow. If either of his previous films worked for you, Nosferatu‘s a near perfect fit for his style. If you’re not a fan of Eggers work, nor a fan of the previous renditions of Nosferatu, there’s little here that will make you change your mind (save for just a little more gore, perhaps). It’s a little hard to spoil a story that’s more than a century old, but Eggers makes enough changes to keep the film from being the exact note for note story as before. Is it scary? Yes. Is there blood? Sure, but none of it is in the ‘jumpscare every other second’ variety. If that’s what you’re looking or hoping for, none of the Nosferatu’s (including this one) will deliver that and you will be quite disappointed. This is a prime cut of wagyu beef, not your everyday sirloin.

As most know, Nosferatu was essentially stolen from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The original – Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was a silent film released back in 1922 by F. W. Murnau. Although the story was written and changed to fit German audiences, elements were still very close to Stoker’s and the Stoker Family tried to get rid of it. Copies were burned, but like that Jumanji box, it managed to slither through the years, gaining popularity to the point of Canonization. If Film History is your thing, I highly recommend watching the 1922 film, if you haven’t already. It amazes me how most of what they did was accomplished (my favorite scene being Orlok prepping his coffins for his trip). At the time of this writing, the movie is currently available on Amazon Prime. For me, I love the 1979 update by Werner Herzog, Nosferatu The Vampyre. There are a few minor changes in the plot, but it’s just as powerful.

Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, Mad Max: Fury Road) is married to his lovely wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, The King) in the town of Wisborg. Ellen suffers from fits of melancholia, which cause her to either spurt morbid tales or put her in convulsive fits. He’s looking for a way to improve his financial station with his bride while keeping her problems hushed, and has found a great opportunity from his boss, Herr Knock (Simon Burney, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation). It appears a wealthy old man wishes to move to Wisborg and purchase an estate there. The only stipulation is that he is infirm and cannot make the journey. Thomas is charged with traveling to the Carpathian mountains, where he is to visit Count Orlock at his home with the deeds and contracts. During his trip, Thomas is warned of the dangers ahead, but proceeds full on, meeting the Count and his strange ways. Upon learning of Ellen and her beauty, the Count sets off a chain of events that will put all of Wisborg at risk. Can the Count be stopped in time?

There’s so much love in this production, it seems. It certainly has the atmosphere down. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who worked on all of Eggers previous films, weaves some magic with light that in some scenes rival Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others. Lanterns and candles are blinding, while at the same time, you might find yourself squinting to see the figure in the shadows. I had a few “look around the screen” moments while watching it. There’s absolutely nothing to complain about from a visual standpoint, it’s just beautiful. It’s also quite dark in nature. We’re dealing with vampires, possession and the occult, which Eggers takes in a few extremes (particularly through Skarsgard, Depp and Burney). Ancient tomes? Check. Romani banishing the darkness with Garlic? Check. Consecrating the soil? Done. The sound design in the film is nice, particularly with the breathing and talking for Orlok, which felt like it travelled through the audience. Blood squelches, screams are crisp. There’s little more I can say there, really. I was entertained and transported.

The cast is wonderful. The only thing I’ve ever watched Lily-Rose Deep do was Yoga Hosers, and she’s come a long way from that. Ellen is a tortured character, and Deep rides this through – fits, convulsions and all – to a point where you may wonder if she was really okay on set. We follow Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas as he moves from quiet reservation to curious disbelief and then ultimately, just full on terrified. Even the smaller roles work. Simon Burney’s character becomes repulsive. Emma Corrin, who had a fun turn earlier this year in Deadpool & Wolverine has good moments, along with Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kraven the Hunter). Then there’s Dafoe. It never hurts to have Willem Dafoe in your lineup. This is his third film with Eggers and he’s come something of a lucky charm as Prof. Ebenhart von Franz. As the Van Helsing of the story, Dafoe is a treat to watch on screen, especially when paired with Ralph Ineson from The Witch. I could watch the two of them as detectives solving Gothic/Victorian X-Files in their own series or movies.

As Orlock, Bill Skarsgard (John Wick 4) really melts into the role, giving the character a low near constant purr and a voice that enunciates every word. Perhaps it was just me, but I did have a bit of a problem figuring out what Orlock was saying at some points. It improved as the story went on, though. Orlock’s look does veer from the traditional, through. That’s a jolt in itself. While he looks more like the Draugr in Skyrim or in Eggers own The Northman, I found myself thinking of “Taserface” in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. If you can get past that feeling, it still works. It’s a creepy character and Skarsgard does it justice, I felt.

Clocking in at about 2 hours and 12 minutes, it’s considered the longest Nosferatu film. I found this odd because were a number of sequences the original and remake had that Eggers missed (like the loading of the coffins). The film is cut pretty well, for what it’s worth, though I’m not sure what they could have removed to trim scenes down.

If the film has any faults, any problems, there was one. The one weird misstep in all of this is a sex scene that seemed just a little out of place. I understand why it happened, and how it was supposed to fuel the story, but it comes on so fast and fierce that I sat there in the audience whispering…”Wait…what’s happening…Whoa…now? Here? Why?” Mind you, this is coming from someone who watched Shame more than once when it was first released. That, if anything, might freak a few people out if they’re not ready for it. Either that, or I’m becoming prudish in my old age.

Overall, I loved Nosferatu. If it weren’t so expensive to get out to a theatre, I’d make another run at it. As a remake, it easily stands toe to toe with John Carpenter’s The Thing and Chuck Russell’s The Blob as one you can sit on the shelf next to those who came before it. It’s a worthy adaptation, with moments of sheer dread and some that may push a boundary or two.

The Florida Film Critics Circle Honors The Beast

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

On the 20th, the Florida Film Critics Circle announced its picks for the best of 2024!

Best Film
Anora
The Beast
The Brutalist
Conclave
Hundreds of Beavers

Best Actress
Carol Kane (Between the Temples)
Léa Seydoux (The Beast)
Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hard Truths)
Mikey Madison (Anora)
Nicole Kidman (Babygirl)

Best Actor
Adrien Brody (The Brutalist)
Daniel Craig (Queer)
Josh O’Connor (Challengers)
Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain)
Ralph Fiennes (Conclave)

Best Supporting Actress
Anna Baryshnikov (Love Lies Bleeding)
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (Nickel Boys)
Isabella Rosellini (Conclave)
Margaret Qualley (The Substance)
Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez)

Best Supporting Actor
Yura Borisov (Anora)
Willem Dafoe (Kinds of Kindness)
Adam Pearson (A Different Man)
Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice)
Denzel Washington (Gladiator II)

Best Cast
All We Imagine As Light
Anora
Conclave
Challengers
Saturday Night

Best Director
Sean Baker (Anora)
Bertrand Bonello (The Beast)
Luca Guadagnino (Challengers)
Payal Kapadia (All We Imagine As Light)
RaMell Ross (Nickel Boys)

Best Original Script
Anora (Sean Baker)
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
Challengers (Justin Kuritzkes)
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
I Saw The TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)

Best Adapted Script
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, Benjamin Charbit & Guillaume Bréaud)
Conclave (Peter Straughan)
Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve & Jon Spaihts)
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross & Joslyn Barnes)
Queer (Justin Kuritzkes)

Best Cinematography
The Brutalist (Lol Crawley)
Challengers (Sayombhu Mukdeeprom)
Conclave (Stéphane Fontaine)
Dune: Part Two (Greig Fraser)
Nickel Boys (Jomo Fray)

Best Visual Effects
Dune: Part Two
Hundreds of Beavers
Tuesday
The Substance
Wicked

Best Artistic Direction/Production Design
The Beast
The Brutalist
Conclave
Dune: Part Two
Maria

Best Score/Soundtrack
The Brutalist (Daniel Blumberg)
Challengers (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross)
Conclave (Volker Bertelmann)
Dune: Part Two (Hans Zimmer)
Flow (Gints Zilbalodis & Rihards Zalupe)

Best International Film
All We Imagine As Light
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World
Emilia Pérez
I’m Still Here
The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Best Animated Film
The Colors Within
Flow
Inside Out 2
Memoir of a Snail
The Wild Robot

Best Documentary
Daughters
No Other Land
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
Will and Harper

Best First Movie
Hundreds of Beavers
Janet Planet
The People’s Joker
Stress Positions
Tuesday

Breakthrough Performance
Brigette Lundy-Paine (I Saw The TV Glow)
Katy M. O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding)
Mikey Madison (Anora)
Ryland Brickson Cole Tews (Hundreds of Beavers)
Zoe Zigler (Janet Planet)

Golden Orange Award for a remarkable contribution to Cinema:
Mountains by Monica Sorelle – A film shot in Miami that paints a loving and critical portrait of what it is like to live there.