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With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for April, 2012

‘Mirage’: smart but unheralded New York thriller at FTC

Monday, April 30, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Peter Stone was a rare writer who was as successful on Broadway as he was in Hollywood.

In 1969, Stone was involved with one of the biggest sleeper hits in the history of Broadway — “1776” — and show folk gave most of the credit for the musical’s success to the book writer who turned American history into gripping theater.

Stone, who died in 2003, had a way of mixing fact and fiction without ever letting the seams show, something he pulled off spectacularly in his finest screenplay — the 1974 adaptation of the John Godey book “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.”

The movie mixed thrills and laughs while telling us a lot about the operation of the New York subway system and city politics during a time of financial crisis — Stone did all of this while never losing sight of the central suspense plot about a subway hijacking.

Stone loved the messiness of New York City and its distinctive cynical humor — he knew both the high and low ends of Manhattan life.

Nine years before he did “Pelham One Two Three,” Stone wrote another Manhattan thriller, “Mirage,” that hasn’t gotten much attention in recent years because it went out of print on VHS a long time ago and then took forever to be issued on DVD.

Tomorrow night at 8, it will be my pleasure to introduce a “Martini & a Movie” screening of the wonderful Peter Stone thriller at the Fairfield Theatre Company.

The movie is a perfect addition to the ongoing FTC season of films about New York City because Stone’s witty, cynical story couldn’t take place anywhere else. “Mirage” is long overdue for a rediscovery.

When I screened the film recently, I loved its distinctive Stone mix of comedy and suspense in a story about a Manhattan business executive (Peck) suffering from amnesia in the aftermath of a strange power failure in his downtown office building.

Perhaps at the insistence of Stone and director Edward Dmytryk, “Mirage” contained more Manhattan location footage than most movies of the period — it was shot in 1965, right before Mayor John Lindsay set up the film office that eased shooting on the streets (“Pelham One Two Three” couldn’t have been made without the film office).

The ease with which Stone juggled suspense, romance (Diane Baker plays a woman of genuine mystery), and comedy is still impressive.

What grounds the whole thing, however, is a cast of characters made up of genuine New York types, including a TV-loving hood played by Broadway veteran Jack Weston and, especially, Walter Matthau as private detective Ted Cassell.

The confused executive has no one to turn to when he staggers into the Columbus Circle office of AAA Detective Agency (called that by Cassell so it would be listed first in the phone book). Cassell has just gone into the private eye business, but he knows how his city works and proves to be invaluable to the executive.

Matthau had been playing small roles in movies for the better part of a decade and at the time of “Mirage” was just about to land the stage role in “The Odd Couple” that would push him into Hollywood stardom in his late 40s (Matthau repeated his 1965 stage role, Oscar Madison, in the equally successful 1968 movie version of the Neil Simon comedy).

The actor got special billing in “Mirage” and earned it with a scene-stealing performance that ends with one of the most unsettling exits since Janet Leigh stepped into that shower in “Psycho.”

“Mirage” weakens slightly at the very end — with a too long expository scene explaining the Peck character’s forgotten life as a scientist — but it clearly paved the way for Peter Stone’s “Pelham One Two Three” triumph.

‘Around the World in 80 Days’: nostalgia isn’t what it used to be

Sunday, April 29, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

From July 8, 2011 – It can be dangerous to tamper with your past by going back to a movie you loved as a child but haven’t seen since.

When I impulsively pulled “Around the World in 80 Days” off a video store shelf last week, I thought I was in for a nostalgic treat.

The 1956 best picture Oscar winner wasn’t the first movie I ever saw, but because it was such a big deal to see it in a first-run engagement the occasion is burned into my memory.

A huge theater in downtown Chicago.

Reserved seats like at a play.

A glossy souvenir program book.

And then, three hours of Jules Verne’s British hero Phileas Fogg racing around the globe in 80 days to win a bet he made at his men’s club in London.

The movie was presented in Todd-AO — a super wide-screen process pioneered by the picture’s producer Michael Todd, who was also involved with the development of another giant screen process, Cinerama, a few years earlier.

The combination of the humongous screen, the travelogue aspect of location filming all over the world and the lush, booming Victor Young score made “80 Days” more an experience than a movie.

Over the years, I had read more than a few articles that suggested the film had not aged well and was now high on many movie buffs’ lists of the least deserving best picture Oscar winners.

But I held on to my fond memories of being overwhelmed by the movie as a child. Imagine my surprise last week when I found the landmark film to be virtually unwatchable.

1950s and ’60s epics all tend to look bloated now, featuring glacial pacing that was designed to show off expensive location work and mammoth sets.

The long static shots were accepted by audiences who were wowed by the gigantic screen and rich stereophonic sound.

To compete against the fairly recent introduction of TV, Hollywood aped stage conventions with reserved seats, overtures and intermissions, and greatly expanded running times. Pictures like “Ben-Hur” and “Exodus” would play exclusive runs in mammoth downtown theaters, with only two shows a day, and because of this limited booking policy, the first run engagements would often extend to a year or more.

“Around the World in 80 Days” helped to establish a format that would continue to work well for another 15 years. The reserved seat idea would start to collapse after a series of late 1960s disasters including “Star!,” “Paint Your Wagon” and “Camelot” and then vanish as Hollywood opted for the much quicker pay-off of the wider release strategies of the 1970s and ’80s.

The leisurely pace of these epics was built into the way they were originally presented. Watching them now at home, however, they simply seem monstrously padded.

“80 Days” starts with a 10 or 15 minute prologue that would be inconceivable now. Newscaster Edward R. Murrow drones on and on about the wonders of modern travel vs. the period of the Verne story.

For no apparent reason, we are shown lengthy excerpts from the Georges Melies silent film, “A Trip to the Moon” and then newsreel footage of a U.S. rocket launch before we get to the story of Phileas Fogg which is told at a snail’s pace. Todd and his director were so fond of the location footage they brought back from around the world that there are several scenes in which the traveller characters played by David Niven, Cantinflas and Shirley MacLaine (as an Indian princess!) simply stare out the windows of trains and boats and we get minute after minute of the local color passing by.

The movie held me as a curio from the distant past — how was I not bored to tears as a five-year-old? — but as the final credits rolled (they last seven minutes!) I was very happy that they don’t make them like this anymore.

‘Islands in the Stream’: capturing a great writer’s work on film

Friday, April 27, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

From Sept. 1, 2011 – It’s an understatement to say that Ernest Hemingway was not well served by Hollywood.

“The Sun Also Rises,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Old Man and the Sea,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and the other adaptations can be pretty neatly divided into two categories — faithful but overblown bores or travesties that gut the original stories.

My favorite Hemingway film is one of the least known, director Franklin Schaffner’s 1977 “Islands in the Stream” starring his “Patton” collaborator George C. Scott. The irony here, of course, is that the posthumously published novel is considered minor Hemingway, but Schaffner and Scott used this story of an isolated, twice-divorced artist to capture the essence of Hemingway as a man and artist.

In the story, Thomas Hudson (Scott) is a world-renowned painter-turned-sculptor who has isolated himself in the Bahamas just as World War II starts.

He’s fathered three sons by two ex-wives and has lived at a distance from all of them until the boys spend a summer at his beachside compound — the oldest, draft-age son is from his first wife and the two younger boys are from Hudson’s second marriage.

Scott resembles the Hemingway of the later years so the fiction of Hudson being a visual artist falls away and we can see the autobiographical nature of a story the writer might not have intended to publish (it appeared nine years after his death in 1961).

“Islands in the Stream” contains many of the adventure story elements of earlier Hemingway tales — Hudson helps Jewish refugees from Europe sneak into Cuba (after U.S. authorities have turned them away) — but it goes deeper into male-female relationships and father-son ties than the other movie adaptations.

Scott carries the film with minimal dialogue, but we see him drop his gruff detachment when he spends a summer with his sons and then realizes after they leave how lonely his life has become.

Claire Bloom turns up for a wonderful sequence in which the first wife visits to share some terrible news with her ex-husband. In the space of just a few minutes, we get a real sense of what brought these two people together and then tore them apart.

In the final moments of the movie, Scott gets an incredible death scene after Hudson is wounded in a run to Cuba. He sees his life flashing before his eyes — which Schaffner does a beautiful job of visualizing — and has enough time to come to terms with who he was.

“Islands in the Stream” opened and closed with barely a ripple in 1977 and has never found the audience it deserves. The film’s obscurity is mystifying. The DVD recently went out of print and I picked it up in a bargain bin a few weeks ago for $5. If you see one in your travels, grab it. I don’t think you’ll be sorry.

‘Lethal’: another masterful Sandra Brown thriller

Thursday, April 26, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

From Oct. 11, 2011 – Unlike some of her bestselling peers who can fall back on continuing characters who have sold well in the past, Sandra Brown starts each of her new thrillers with a blank slate.

We never know where Brown will be taking us, or what might happen to her characters, but fans have learned to trust the writer after more than two dozen stand-alone thrillers.

It would be terribly sexist to say that Brown writes “like a man” but she is able to deliver tough thrillers in which the men are as well drawn as the female characters. If you took Brown’s name and picture off a book like “Play Dirty” — in which an ex-pro football player is the protagonist and sex plays a major role in the plot — a reader might assume the novel was written by a man.

One of the strongest characters in “Lethal” is Diego, a ruthless contract killer who has inexplicably fallen in love with an Mexican girl who was brought into this country under appalling conditions and then forced to work in a massage parlor.

Brown doesn’t try to redeem Diego through his relationship with the girl, but it certainly makes him a much more complex “villain” than the ones we generally meet in thrillers.

“Lethal” (Grand Central Publishing) maintains Brown’s high standards with a narrative that keeps springing surprises on us for almost 500 pages.

The author always writes from a place of believing in the idea that good people can eventually triumph over bad ones, but the journeys she takes us on to get her characters out of terrible jams are among the most harrowing (and genuinely shocking) in popular fiction.

“Lethal” starts simply with the widow of a small town Louisiana cop being taken hostage — along with her young daughter — by a man who has apparently just committed a mass murder at a local trucking company.

Honor Gillette quickly finds herself in a terrible position — she assumes the intruder is a psychopath who will probably kill her and her daughter no matter how cooperative they might be — but the situation changes when the woman learns that her beloved dead husband might be connected to the intruder.

Things change so fast in the story — and so many of our assumptions are proven to be false — that the less you know about “Lethal” when you pick it up the better.

Brown’s distinctive mixture of compassion and ruthlessness make the very fast journey to page 476 both moving and shocking. The writer is famous for her last chapter twists and the one hidden away in “Lethal” is a doozy.

The real mystery here is how a writer can remain so endlessly inventive through so many thrillers for so many years.

Is there sex after death? ‘L.A. Zombie’ says ‘yes’

Wednesday, April 25, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

From Aug. 31, 2011 – With pop culture in the middle of another big zombie revival no one should be too surprised by the crazy Bruce LaBruce picture “L.A. Zombie” (Strand Releasing) — due on DVD next month — which presents “intimate” moments among the undead that are probably beyond the wildest dreams of George Romero and Danny Boyle.

LaBruce is a Canadian independent filmmaker who has been exploring the links between standard narrative filmmaking, horror and porn for many years.

The director has always been heavily influenced by Andy Warhol who went from his rambling improvised “art” films such as “The Chelsea Girls” to more commercial fare that helped open the door to hard core porn in the 1970s — Warhol’s “Flesh” and “Trash” contained nudity and sexual situations that were considered quite shocking in the years just before the hard core “Deep Throat” opened in legitimate movie theaters across the country.

Bored with sex pictures, Warhol turned to horror with a 3D “Frankenstein” that was a considerable hit in 1974 and then a less successful “Dracula” a few years later.

LaBruce has followed a similar trajectory with early improvisatory films about bohemian life in Canada, populated by colorful artist and performer friends of his whose willingness to be uninhibited in front of a camera echoed such Warhol “superstars” as Viva and Holly Woodlawn.

The best of these early films is “Super 8-1/2” (1994) which stars LaBruce (below) as a neurotic, self-obsessed actor who is in and out of mental institutions. LaBruce included explicit sex scenes that were highly unusual for art house fare of that period (this was a decade before “Shortbus” and “The Brown Bunny”).

The filmmaker earned points for not asking his actors to do anything on camera that he wouldn’t do (and that was a lot).

In recent years, LaBruce’s interest in horror and porn has been evident in films like “The Raspberry Reich” and “Otto; or, Up With Dead People.” The performances have suffered in some of these movies because of the director’s switch from lively art-world pals to porn stars (Steven Soderbergh ran into the same problem two years ago when he starred XXX actress Sasha Grey in “The Girlfriend Experience”).

The films are more technically accomplished than the earlier ones but there isn’t as much humor and the performers from the porn world are painfully limited actors. The violence and the sex cancel each other out – the sex scenes are too gruesome for the porn audience and the gore elements are too sexually explicit for most horror film fans.

“L.A. Zombie” is in the same enervated spirit as “Otto.” The picture jumps off from a good joke — a zombie newcomer to the City of Angels fits right into the funky drug and sex underworld. And there could have been more humor to be found in the notion of zombie sex — slow, laborious and with seemingly no pleasure involved — being indistinguishable from the deadening sexual mechanics of modern pornography.

But the repetition of the zombie connections becomes as dull as the “plots” of porn pictures — no doubt, one of LaBruce’s points — so what the viewer is left with is a beautifully shot “art” film with a dead-end narrative structure. The result is a very long 62 minutes.

The daring Marlon Brando performance that few have seen

Tuesday, April 24, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

From Nov. 16, 2011 – Thanks to Netflix, last night I watched the 1967 John Huston film “Reflections in a Golden Eye” for the first time in many years.

An adaptation of the Carson McCullers novella set on an Army base in the South, the movie was largely dismissed at the time of its release as a ludicrous Gothic potboiler that wasted the talent of stars Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando.

Taylor had just won her second Oscar for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” but Brando was coming off a series of critical and financial disasters that left his career in tatters (the double-barrelled “The Godfather”/“Last Tango in Paris” comeback was still five years off).

In fact, Brando only got the role of Taylor’s husband, Major Penderton, because her friend, Montgomery Clift, died before the film went into production (Clift was in such terrible physical shape that Taylor had to provide the financial guarantees that made it possible for the un-insurable actor to be cast in a Hollywood production).

The year before “Reflections in a Golden Eye” came out, critic Pauline Kael wrote a long piece about Brando’s 1960s dilemma and the dismal choices he made in which she concluded: “Perhaps Brando has been driven to this self-parody so soon because of his imaginative strength and because of that magnetism that makes him so compelling an expression of American conflicts. His greatness is in a range that is too disturbing to be encompassed by regular movies.”

The John Huston production certainly didn’t qualify as a “regular movie.” Brando plays a repressed gay man — decades before “Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell.” — who spends the film avoiding sexual contact with his wife (Taylor) and lusting after a handsome young soldier (Robert Forster, in his screen debut) who appears to be teasing the Major by getting naked when the officer is around.

The picture was made a year before the rating system’s establishment of the R made it possible to include lots of nudity, profanity and sexual kinks in films designed for adults.

Huston (and producer Ray Stark) knew that big changes were in the wind and Warner Bros. allowed them to show and suggest so much offbeat sexual behavior that the film turned off Taylor and Brando fans at the time, and still manages to unsettle viewers in 2011.

Brando is extraordinary, delivering an almost completely naked performance (in the emotional sense). The Major’s two big deconstruction scenes in front of mirrors seem to anticipate what Robert De Niro would do so memorably as Travis Bickle in a key “Taxi Driver” moment.

Kael was one of the few critics to appreciate what the star did in the movie: “This is one of Brando’s most daring performances: the fat, ugly Major putting cold cream on his face, or preening at the mirror, or patting his hair nervously when he thinks he has a gentleman caller is so pitiful yet so ghastly that some members of the audience invariably cut themselves off from him by laughter.”

“Reflections in a Golden Eye” is 44 years old now, but remains fresh and exciting. It deserves a spot just under “Bonnie & Clyde” and “The Graduate” on the list of revolutionary 1967 films that would point Hollywood in a new direction for the next decade.

Rent it now: World ends with a bang in ‘Kaboom’

Monday, April 23, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

From Oct. 31, 2011 – The latest Gregg Araki picture, “Kaboom,” opened last winter in only a few theaters in urban areas, to good reviews and strong business, but in most locations it was available strictly for in-home viewing through the cable on demand service Sundance Selects.

This relatively new release pattern is very controversial among those who run art houses in the suburbs and college towns — by the time a movie like “Kaboom” reaches their territories a good chunk of the core audience has already seen it at home.

In recent years, the same release strategy resulted in the great Italian crime drama “Gomorra” not playing as many theatrical dates as it would have 20 or 30 years ago.

Fortunately, “Kaboom” is now available on DVD and well worth a look.

The bottom line is that Araki has delivered a funny, sexy and unsettling movie that taps into the same end of the world zeitgeist that is powering two current arthouse films, “Take Shelter” and “Melancholia.”

Araki loves to mix genres and the new movie is simultaneously a campus coming-of-age story, a raucous sex comedy, and an apocalyptic science-fiction thriller.

“Kaboom” follows the anxious and confused Smith (Thomas Dekker, above) who isn’t sure if he’s straight or gay because he is aroused by both sexes.

Smith is put to the test with his new roommate, a not-very-bright-but-very-attractive surfer named Thor (Chris Zylka, below), who may or may not be coming on to him in a passive, half-stoned manner.

Smith’s best friend Stella (Haley Bennett, who makes the most of the script’s funniest lines) is also ambisexual and we watch her get involved with a very intense female exchange student Lorelei (Roxane Mesquida), who appears to be some sort of witch with supernatural powers.

Araki presents this material in a fast-paced, candy-colored style that makes “Kaboom” look like a standard teen/college comedy but which keeps us guessing about what is going on under the surface.

Smith starts to have visions that indicate that the whole world is about to end, but amusingly they don’t really get in the way of his sex fantasies (and exploits).

The central joke here is that a narcissistic, sex-obsessed college student might actually be right in thinking that he is the center of the universe.

Araki is 51 now, but he is still clued into the twentysomething zeitgeist that he explored in earlier sex comedies like “Nowhere” (1997) and “The Doom Generation” (1995). And, Araki clearly still knows how to get the best out of young actors — tapping into their talent as well as their charisma.

Hello I must be going!

Sunday, April 22, 2012 by:Joe Meyers

Your faithful blogger is taking a few days off for R & R and to recharge my cultural batteries.

I will be running a few vintage posts over the next few days, but will return shortly with reports on the new Broadway musical “Newsies” (above) and lots of other film and reading adventures.

Be well!

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