January 20, 2006 at 2:18 am · Filed under Movies
It’s a ‘57 Plymouth Fury that has a(n evil) mind of its own. Again, I’m the last one to get on the (evil) bus to see this. I am (evil) sorry.
I didn’t find it particularly scary, but I mostly enjoyed it. I did find the language between the teen leads to be rather salty for the mid-1980s. I thought that was more of a ’70s thing, but the trend survived to here, at least. It is interesting to note that the main boys, Keith Gordon and John Stockwell, have had reasonable success as directors in recent years. Stockwell does surf movies like Into the Blue and Blue Crush and Blue Watery Blue Blue. Gordon has gone a bit artsier, including the latest incarnation of The Singing Detective, Waking the Dead, and the terrific Vonnegut adaptation Mother Night. The female lead, Alexandra Paul, went on to become the least-endowed woman on Baywatch.
So, the car is really really mean, and it has the ability to repair itself when it gets wrecked. The pre-digital effects that make this work are pretty cool. Apparently, they used high-power vaccums to implode the cars from the inside, and then they just reversed the footage, so the car appears to heal. The effect is kind of like how a Joan Rivers plastic surgery must be.
The movie starts and ends with George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.” Man I hate that song. I guess it sort of works here.
January 20, 2006 at 1:44 am · Filed under Movies
To celebrate the opening day at the Sundance Film Fest: Another one of those movies that everyone else saw before I did. You can’t really pretend to know anything about late-20th-century film if you haven’t seen this. Okay, up until now, I was pretending. I was a sham. I’m not anymore. Shout it from the rooftops: I know something about late-20th-century film!
So why is SLV (directed by Steven Soderbergh) important? Well, it was the first “independent” film really worthy of the sobriquet that made a big splash outside of the festival circuit, and sort of swooshed Sundance-the-event and Miramax-the-company into prominence on its coattails. Made for about $1 million, it grossed about $25 million at the American box office, where it was seen by everyone who aspired to know anything about late-20th-century film, present company excluded.
I knew the premise: a half-nice, half-creepy guy (James Spader, big surprise) gets off on making videotapes of women talking about their sex lives, and it ruins Andie McDowall’s marriage to Peter Gallagher. Well, Peter Gallagher ruins his own marriage by affairing with Laura San Giacomo, who happens to be Andie’s sister.
It’s a pretty nice little film; lots of intensity from the four actors, without feeling play-y. This is what Closer should have been, was trying to be, and utterly failed at.
I was really fascinated by the success of Spader’s character’s sad-sack approach to intimacy with women, rather than trying to bed them, he just asked them to tell him and his camera their most deeply-held secrets. And they did. I wonder if this would have changed my approach to romance in the ’90s if I had seen this movie way back then. It probably would have, and it’s kind of scary to contemplate.
I have always maintained that Andie MacDowall is a terrible actress who happens to show up in some darn fine movies (c.f., Groundhog Day, Short Cuts, The Player, Four Weddings and a Funeral). She’s actually fairly genuine in this; I would venture to say that the role is close to her own persona, but that’s idle speculation meant to prop up my decades-old supposition. I gotta admit, she’s good here. Of course, on the down side, SLV lead directly to Green Card…
You will note that I have capitalized this film’s title, contradicting the “official” film title. You will need to sue me, mr. soderbergh.
