Things around Spud Central are starting to pick up steam and it’s
not even Labour
Day. So here we are on Tuesday night just trying to get a jump
on the old Chronicles.
In point of fact, I’m thinking very seriously of going bi-weekly.
So if you get this on
the weekend of Sept 6 instead of August 30, well you’ll
know that’s what I’ve done.
I
was talking to Van Fleet the other day. He wants me to come out
to the place where
he works (Muscletech) and give his creative department a two hour
lecture on how
advertising strategy and creative relate. I’m very flattered
that he believes I know
enough about this subject to yammer on for two whole hours to
a bunch of kids who
all have their own ideas about how things work. But there you
go. My only saving
grace in this situation is that if there’s one thing I can
do well, it’s pontificate.
DRUG WARS (TWO SPUDS)
Michael Mann, who produced this TV miniseries which was later
adapted to a film,
is one of this Spud’s all time favourite film makers. Mann,
who started as a writer
writing things like Police Story and Starsky & Hutch way back
in the day, has always
flitted between TV and theatrical features. If you watch this
film, you’ll see a lot of
the stylistic elements of Steven Soderberg’s Traffic, only
this was a made for TV mini
series. Mann is only credited as producer on this film, but his
signature is all over
this. Any student of Michael Mann will recognize this instantly.
Drug
Wars is about the early days of the war on drugs and the United
States’ attempt
to interfere with the Mexican drug trade, which, at the time was
actually being run at
the highest level out of a federal government ministry. Talk about
your corruption.
There’s a terrific cast including Craig T. Nelson, Treat
Williams and a very young
Benicio del Toro, as the young Drug Lord, Caro Quintaro, who kidnapped
and
murdered a DEA agent, which, in turn sparked a whole lot of nastiness
between the
DEA and the powers that be in Old Mexico. Obviously there’s
a little licence taken
with the truth here and there, but basically this story is all
based pretty much on
facts gathered by journalist Elaine Shannon in her book, Desperados.
This
film has a real high-end veneer to it, because of the powerful
story it’s telling
and all the high powered Hollyweird actors who are telling it.
I found this stuff all
fascinating, but all the time my thoughts kept drifting back to
the simple fact that,
all this murder and mayhem and politics and bullshit is happening
just so some
dweeb from the underbelly of upper Scarberia can have a joint
to smoke while he’s
watching Wheel of Fortune. It just blows my mind, man.
But
I digress. This film was made in 1990 so it’s not going
to be in too many smaller
video stores. I got mine at Rogers. If you can find it, it’s
really worth a boo.
THE WEIGHT OF WATER (NO SPUD 4U)
This is one of those movies that zips back and forth between sometime
in the mid-
1870s and the present. In the present, a poet (Sean Penn) and
his Wife (Catherine
McCormack), Sean’s brother (Josh Lucas) and his babe de
jour (Liz Hurley) sail off to
an island where a grizzly murder took place back in the other
time frame. Sean’s
Wife is a photojournalist who is doing a story on the murders
and trying to figure out
whodunnit some hundred and thirty years after the fact.
Anyway,
this movie kind of sucks for a number of reasons. First and foremost
we’re
asked by the director (Kathryn Bigelow), to believe that the mystery
actually does
get solved, because the crazy wife (Sarah Polley) of the fisherman
who lived on the
island, confessed to the crime on the same day that some other
poor schlub was
hanged for it. This evidently comes as some big revelation that
nobody’s put
together in lo these many years, even thought every detail was
in the public record.
I’m afraid I was still occupied in suspending my disbelief
for a couple of other movies
I haven’t even bothered to review and just didn’t
have any left for this one. Now I
might have nodded off and missed something, but the Wife, who
was also mystified
by all this claptrap, swears she stayed awake.
Then
in act three, there’s this big storm and Elizabeth Hurley
jumps into the ocean
for no apparent reason and drowns. Sean Penn just lights another
cigarette and
pours a another glass of wine, and even though he is supposed
to be a Pulitzer Prize
winning poet, the only poetry he recites is other people’s.
The
Weight Of Water is heavy stuff indeed. It’s a completely
dysfunctional movie
about completely dysfunctional people from the present day and
from way back in
the day too. I have no idea what the point of it was, except maybe
to hasten Sean
Penn’s eventual demise from either lung cancer or liver
disease. I really wish Sean
would get back to doing what he’s good at. The dude has
not made a decent movie
since Dead Man Walking in 1995. What a sad waste of talent.
LOST IN LAMANCHA (TWO SPUDS)
This documentary, made in 2000 is, sadly, all there is to really
show for director
Terry Gilliam’s attempt to make a big budget feature film
entitled The Man Who
Killed Don Quixote. It’s a fascinating look at the big time
film business and the
logistical weirdness that has to be dealt with here is enough
to put even the
toughest Hollyweird Big Time Wannabe right off his lunch.
Terry
Gilliam is the American member of Monty Python’s Flying
Circus, a show and a
troupe, which this Spud used to idolize back in the seventies
when they were in their
heyday. Since the demise of Python, Gilliam went one to make several
amazing
feature films. And from about 1990, he had tried to get a production
of The Man Who
Killed Don Quixote off the ground. When he finally did, he found
that there was
something akin to a curse on this project. Because literally everything
that could go
wrong went wrong. Everything. From not being able to get the principal
actors under
one roof to rehearse, to torrential rains, to a lying Spanish
government to production
snafus to the weirdly coincidental illness of star Jean Rochefort,
which made it
impossible for him to ride a horse, which is a real bitch, since
much of the movie
requires that Don Quixote and his pal Sancho Panza, spend an enormous
amount of
time in the old saddle.
In
addition to being a tragedy for everybody involved, especially
Gilliam, this is also
very sad for movie goers. Because Terry Gilliam is a genius level
director whose films
like Brazil, 12 Monkeys, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The
Fisher King, Time Bandits and several Python features, put him
about half a rung down the ladder from people like Stanley Kubrick
and Orson Welles.
As
a documentary, this film captures the high levels of tension that
exist on a film set
when things start to go wrong and the director’s role changes
from supreme honcho
to left-for-dead carcass in a desert with vultures circling overhead.
The irony was
that nobody directly involved with the project could be blamed.
It seemed like
everything that screwed up was an “Act Of God” of
one kind or another. Somewhere
in this middle of all this, it was revealed that Orson Welles
had tried for 20 years to
get his vision of the Don Quixote legend onto the screen and was
never able to pull it
off, for many of the same reasons that were being revealed as
I watched this film. All
this leads me to believe that there’s either some kind of
curse on this project or
those damn Martians were picking on poor Terry Gilliam, ‘cause
they just don’t have
anything better to do.
Gilliam
and his crew did manage to shoot about 3 or 4 days worth of film
and the
stuff they shot was simply amazing to look at. This guy can put
it on film in spades.
Lost In La Mancha is a fascinating peek at a king-size tragedy.
I kind of felt like a
voyeur watching it. But it does leave you with a really strong
impression of just how
much high octane energy, talent, patience, perseverance and sheer
balls to the wall
guts it takes to make a king size movie. It’s pretty damn
scary on that level.
THE MAN FROM ELYSIAN FIELDS (TWO SPUDS)
There are people out there who are consciously trying and succeeding,
thank God, at
making intelligent dramatic films. In this case it’s the
team of former documentary
filmmaker, George Hickenlooper and former TV writer , Michael
Lasker who have
teamed up to make this tiny little masterpiece. This film stars
Andy Garcia, as a low
rent Hollywood novelist, and Mick Jagger as the escort service
company owner who
gives him a job to help him make ends meet. His first client is
the beautiful young
wife (Olivia Williams) of a dying big time novelist (James Coburn),
who ends up
befriending poor Andy and getting him to help complete his last
novel.
Like
any good film that has to do with literature and male prostitution,
there are a
number of very powerful themes that are being pursued here. The
idea that a man is
capable of almost anything when it comes to taking care of his
family. The idea that
writing doesn’t necessarily get easier with age and experience.
The concept that rich
people will always treat people who are not rich like slaves and
even though they
might have sex with them, they will never really care about them
to any significant
extent.
Everybody
in this movie is very good, including Mick Jagger who plays his
character,
essentially a high class pimp, with a quiet elegance that got
me thinking he might
have some sort of future in the movies. But this film really belongs
to Michael Lasker
for the pure power that he possesses as a writer and Andy Garcia,
whose
performance managed to maintain his character’s dignity
in spite of the fact that a
great deal of nasty stuff was happening to him from the first
scene to the last in this
film. Andy Garcia is the poster boy for the Cuban American culture
and always seems
to pick roles that will stretch him in one way or another as an
actor, so you can’t go
wrong, acting wise at least, with any Andy Garcia movie.
The
Man From Elysian Fields is a very intelligent examination of the
kind of
predicament that even the most intelligent of us can sometimes
find ourselves in.
I’ve been a writer most all of my life. I have no idea what
I would do, if that facility
was taken away from me, or I couldn’t make a living doing
it. I imagine, I would find
something, but the chances of it being something I would love
as much as writing
are extremely remote indeed. So I was able to strongly identify
with Andy’s
character. This is a very quiet, slow paced movie that’s
powered by intelligence and
storytelling. These days that’s a rare combo. Check this
out for sure.
A WALK ON THE MOON (TWO SPUDS)
Walk On The Moon is one of those quintessential American coming
of age dramas. It
takes place at a Jewish cottage resort a couple hours north of
The Big Apple in 1969,
the summer of Woodstock and The Moon Landing, (hence the title).
Diane Lane who
is one of the best looking babes around, plays a Jewish housewife
who is married to
Liev Schreiber, who only comes up on weekends. For a lot of reasons
which make up
the texture of this movie, Diane has an affair with Viggo Mortenson
(Just before he
trundled off to New Zealand to become Lord Aragorn in the Lord
of The Rings trilogy,
and way too high priced for a relatively small movie like this.),
who sells blouses out
of a big bus that visits the resort a couple times a week. Diane,
who got knocked up
when she was 17, had never really been with anybody else other
than Leiv and she
embarks on the affair more out of curiousity and boredom than
anything else.
Walk
On The Moon is a very Jewish movie, about hard working Jewish
people at a
Jewish resort in the summer of one of the weirdest years on record.
It’s very well put
together, intelligently written and filled with some of the best
music any of us have
ever heard. Everything about it rings kind of true and is a pretty
impressive
directorial debut for actor Tony Goldwyn (gee, do you think his
family might have
been in the movie business?)
Well
that’s it for this week or fortnight as the Brits say. I’m
starting to study the TV
Guide, hoping to sniff out the hot new shows. See you in a bit.
COPYRIGHT 2003 - COUCH POTATO CHRONICLES
