This is a continuation of my new regular Pylon series, All or Nothing..., in which I try to tackle the remaining films in a particular filmmaker's oeuvre that I have yet to see. I am kicking off the series with a multi-part cleanup of the filmography of the recently departed Jonathan Demme, one of the most important directors in my lifetime. In Part 1, I tackled his 1974 women in prison flick, Caged Heat. This time, since his 1976 Peter Fonda flick Fighting Mad is apparently nowhere to be found, I recently watched and am now reviewing Demme's final two films of the 1970s, one of which turns out to come mighty close to being one of his masterpieces...
Citizens Band [aka Handle with Care] (1977) Dir.: Jonathan Demme – If you have just happened to catch the late actor Charles Napier in scores and scores of movie and television roles over the past few decades, and you were wondering what his defining role is, look no further. I didn’t know it before I got around to finally watching Demme’s 1977 C.B. radio ensemble piece, Citizens Band, a couple of weeks ago, and saw how excellent Napier was in his role as the philandering truck-driving husband of two different women (who uses a third woman, and a truck-stop hooker at that, as a go-between). Before this, I would have given the award to either his high profile role as the lead singer of the Good Ole Boys, the band that the Blues Brothers trick out of playing at the Country Bunker (“You’re gonna look pretty funny tryin’ to eat corn on the cob with no fuckin’ teeth!”) or his role as the sadistic and impotence-twisted cop Harry Sledge in Russ Meyer’s Supervixens. (Seriously, Harry Sledge is an all-time fantastic villain. You just have to finally sit down to watch a Meyer picture seriously to believe this.) I would have been happy with these assumptions for the rest of eternity.
And then I watched Citizens Band…
To be fair, I thought for many years that I had already seen Citizens Band (also released as Handle with Care). The date of the film’s release (1977) played a part in establishing this belief, as the mid-to-late ‘70s were chockfull of films, music, and TV glorifying the CB radio craze and lifestyle. Of course, everyone thinks about the Smokey and the Bandit movies, C.W. McCall's song Convoy (which was turned into a movie by Sam Peckinpah in 1978), a zillion other songs (some fun but mostly stupid), and TV shows like BJ and the Bear and Movin’ On. The Dukes of Hazzard, too, came mostly out of this craze, kind of a combination of the CB radio, stunt car, and hillbilly genres that some would argue represents the ne plus ultra of ‘70s/’80s trash culture. Being a teenager at the time most of this occurred, I was not discerning one bit, and loved it all as much as anything else I watched, read, heard or collected.
Somewhere in this span, I watched a film called Breaker! Breaker!, which turned out to be the first Chuck Norris film that I remembered. (I also saw his square-off against Bruce Lee in Return of the Dragon around the same time, but I didn't really know who Norris was until Sneak Previews whipped me into a frenzy to see Good Guys Wear Black in the summer of 1978.) What I did not remember was the title, and thought for a good while that Citizens Band was the real name of the Norris movie. When I found out about Demme’s Citizens Band years later, it got me to wondering if maybe I had seen both films. After all, I had taken in so much CB radio nonsense in those formative years of my youth; perhaps I had seen both and mashed the two together in the same way that I could have in my Caged Heat discussion in Part 1?
Not to be. Dialing up Citizens Band on Amazon recently, I was rewarded from the start with a simply stunning, opening title sequence designed by artist Pablo Ferro (more on him in a future Demme post), which immediately set the film apart from all of the low-budget fare Demme had done previously for Roger Corman. What that title sequence spoke to me was that Citizens Band was going to be a different breed of cat than I had been anticipating. Since I have not seen Fighting Mad, it is hard for me to find that line where the formative Demme stops and the fully developed director begins. If Citizens Band is not that film, then at the least, it certainly marks his finest work of the decade.
Citizens Band is an ensemble work detailing the lives of a great many characters built around the day-to-day lifestyle of those who cannot get by without using a CB radio at the center of their stories. It is easy to believe that perhaps Demme was influenced by Robert Altman in maintaining the balance between the characters that fill this movie; I have yet to find anything that states this, but the time was right for this to be so. Any director worth his salt in the mid-'70s couldn’t help but be influenced by Altman in some way, even if it was negatively. What is missing in Demme’s narrative here and elsewhere (until we get to Philadelphia and then his remake of The Manchurian Candidate) is the political drive behind Altman’s work (simply name-checking neo-Nazis as despicable douche-nozzles is not enough), though Demme would more than commit himself deeply to numerous social causes in his frequent documentaries about Haiti's struggle against a dictatorship, AIDs patients, human rights abuses, and other issues.
Most of the characters in the film are known only by their trucker/CB codenames. Paul Le Mat’s character, Spider, is a repairer of CB radios, but who also spends his time monitoring the airwaves as a volunteer for REACT (Radio Emergency Associated Communication Teams). His late night hours have him listening to truckers engage in their unique, stylized patter over their CBs, and he occasionally jumps in with a warning to one CBer about misusing the channel or the dangers of blocking emergency calls. Even the characters that you don't expect to be aficionados of the CB craze will surprise you with their connection to it. Until three months before the start of the film, Spider used to be engaged to Pam (delightfully played by the mostly always adorable Candy Clark), whom is now not just having an affair with Spider’s brother, Dean (a pre-Animal House Bruce McGill), but also likes to tease teenage boys, under the name Electra, with graphic discussions laced with erotic details over the CB radio.
Before we get to that love triangle, we get to the most complicated one in the film. We meet Chrome Angel, played by the more-than-square-jawed Charles Napier, a trucker who not only has two wives in different towns (who have the code names Portland Angel and Dallas Angel) that don’t know about each other at all, but is not shy about seeking out a third sexual partner, a down on her luck hooker in her late ‘30s who is nicknamed Hot Coffee. Chrome Angel opens the film ending up in a nearly fatal trucking accident, but instead only ends up severely injuring his forearm after Spider hears his calls and comes to the rescue. As Hot Coffee takes the lead in nursing Chrome Angel back to health, his two wives arrive in town. On the way there, they happened to meet up on the same transportation, and through a gradual revealing of details, come to the realization that they are married to the same man. Meanwhile, Spider takes up the fight against illegal CB operations, and ends up facing off against a white supremacist group of Neo-Nazis, and any number of other douchebags. All paths lead back to various characters in the film, much confusion will reign, and lives and loves will be altered forever, sometimes won, sometimes lost.
The best films are the ones that truly feel lived in, the ones where you can seriously believe that the roles are filled by real people with real lives, and not just mere actors on a soundstage. Citizens Band is one such film, where it almost feels like the cameras are just intruding in on the daily activities of the citizens of a small town area and seeing how everything is working out for them. I suppose this would be appropriate to the intent of the citizens band radio movement in the first place. A film about a product meant for use by the people really should be about the people who do use that product, and we, the people watching that film, should be given an opportunity to at least understand the people who do find themselves completely captured in that product. In looking back at a film from a full 40 years ago, I can’t help but think what a similar film about the internet would be like today. The racists, the pornographers, the people self-possessed enough they need to expand their egos over the airwaves by either trolling other users or taking over the technology for long chunks of time to where they need to be reminded to allow others the same chance, the people eager to clean up the airwaves for responsible usage… the basic building blocks of our situation today are there in this film, albeit using an entirely different and more basic technology. Then as now, there is nothing in this world that mankind can’t screw up in royal fashion; likewise, there is no problem we cannot surmount if only we apply the proper focus and energy to it and work together for compromise.
One thing that mankind did not screw up was this film, and the main man in charge, Mr. Demme, betrays a steady, measured sensibility that shows his growth and maturity since Caged Heat, his feature debut. Demme is aided immeasurably by the cinematography of Jordan Cronenweth, who filmed Citizens Band back-to-back with his work in Peter Hyams’ Rolling Thunder, long known as Quentin Tarantino’s favorite film. The camera work here is subtly showy and breathtaking at times, especially in the film’s quieter, more intimate moments.
There is a scene between Spider and the lost love of his life, Pam, inside the wood-lined walls of the local school’s gymnasium equipment room. As each one holds the handle on a pommel-horse and lean against it, they mildly argue but mainly spend the time staring into each other’s eyes, trying to see who will make the first move as it is clear they still have feelings for one another. The staring will turn into quick kisses, and eventually a much longer kiss with repercussions, but before that we are given the framing of the two with the camera starting out at waist high as it moves into the scene, and then effortlessly glides up to shoulder height. As Spider makes his case, the camera continues to angle ever so slightly upward and back so that we catch a ray of light pouring down behind them from a bright light perched above off the wall. The light looks very much like that which might stream down through the steeple window of a church at midday. With the tops of their heads tilted towards the light as they continue to argue, the light slowly and slightly obscures the features of their faces, as Spider finishes a line with a kiss, which Pam returns after saying another line. It’s a lovely moment, but it is worth noting that when the scene cuts back to them after establishing that Spider’s older brother (who has been seeing Pam) is about to enter the room, the almost wedding-like sense of the previous shot has turned to raw emotion as he enters the gymnastics room to find the two of them in a deep embrace as they passionately kiss.
Spider remains committed in winning back Pam, and she struggles mightily between fighting her own remaining feelings for him. She is also nervous about destroying him utterly with the knowledge of the affair with his brother. The complications between Napier and his two wives and prostitute pal might seem unwieldy in other hands, but come off as surprisingly tender and sensible here, if not totally believable in today’s world. (They were the Swingin’ ‘70s, after all.) Napier, despite his character’s philandering, portrays a mostly honest man who just couldn’t turn down sharing his love with multiple women that all trigger romance in his soul. His character’s sincerity, as well as that of his lovers, who find a common bond between them, is deeply felt, and I myself are quite sincere in saying this really is Napier’s finest hour. Showy, violent character bits in bigger budget films may be how he is mostly remembered, but this is the film that proves he was perhaps misused as an actor for the most part by Hollywood. (Demme gave Napier parts in film after film over a couple of decades, as he did for other regulars.) Citizens Band gives us a chance to see Napier with different eyes than before.
Most of all, there is that cast. Top-billed Paul Le Mat may have had a bigger showcase in 1980 in Demme’s sublime Melvin and Howard, but I think he is just as fine here in the part of Spider. It is an equally rich role, but this is a slightly younger Le Mat and a little more energetic. It is great fun at first watching him run in circles trying to establish any sort of closeness with his father, Papa Thermodyne (a terrific Roberts Blossom, whom I got the chance to meet briefly before his death), reestablish his relationship with Pam, find peace with his brother, rescue people in trouble on the highways, and thwart those Neo-Nazis who are supposedly out to get him. As the pair of surprised wives, Ann Wedgeworth and Marcia Rodd both do a fine job, but I have to give the edge to Wedgeworth, because it was the one of the first times that I really appreciated her as an actress. (Growing up and seeing her appear all over television, she quite often annoyed me; I think that I am now old enough to give her a shake on occasion.) Alix Elias, unknown to me going in but recognizable, is a lot of fun in the hooker role, with her squeaky voice and Gracie Allen phrasing. (Apparently, she is unknown to a lot of people; she apparently doesn't even rate her own Wikipedia page, even though she has been acting since 1964 and continues to this day.) I adore Candy Clark as Pam, of course, and McGill turns in a sold, more dramatic turn as the brother.
But the film is best when it is just swinging with its freewheeling, playful concept, and the characters swing (sometimes literally) along with it. Jokes that fly just under the radar so that the laughs don’t come off cheap is also a benefit. When Chrome Angel tells Hot Coffee that the way to save her failing prostitution career is to “go mobile,” he convinces her to go shopping for a motorhome to accommodate her johns. Because Hot Coffee looks like nothing more than a dowdy, middle-aged housewife, the unassuming salesman gives his spiel: “Now, this model sleeps three standard, with a five to seven option.” When she chuckles and cheerfully replies, “Golly, that’s plenty. I never even done three,” the joke whizzes right by him, but not the viewer. She builds up enough reserve to ask, while giggling and snorting, if they have the capability to add a bidet to the bathroom, yet again, he thinks nothing of it because she just seems like a cute lady who wants something special for her new home. Despite this interlude, the film is most decidedly not a sex comedy, just a mostly gentle film with a mild bit of ribaldry and outrageousness to keep things interesting and modern.
The abuse that Spider endures from the white supremacist set is also intermittently shocking and meant to throw the viewer off balance, but as to the reasons why I will leave to your own viewing of the film. Mostly, the film walks the line between comedy and drama, mixes in some romance, and even becomes a thriller for a short while deep in the second half. The finale is over the top ridiculous, but still pretty much in line with something the characters involved would probably end up doing. Strangers to Demme may be frustrated by the abrupt tonal shifts in his storytelling, but it is nothing new to his acolytes. (I remember how frustrated some reviewers were, and still are, with the swerving tone of Something Wild in 1986, but it was exactly that style which drove me to a near frenzy over that film.) To me, his movies, however artificial some of the settings may seem, move and shift like life. Or life as I see it, where nothing is ever secure, not love, not happiness, but also not even tragedy. Life just keeps rolling. And it doesn't care about genre.
I can tell you this. I will not shy away from getting the chance to rewatch Citizens Band ever again. It is unfathomable to me now that I put if off for so long. This film played even better with me in this morning's revisit (my third watch, the second being yesterday), and it is a film whose appeal to me is bound to grow over the remaining years I have left. – TC4P Rating: 7/9, but it may go higher with time.
Last Embrace (1979) Dir.: Jonathan Demme – If I had actually seen Citizens Band back in 1977 when it was released, I think that I would have likely expected Demme's next film to follow fairly closely in its footsteps stylistically. Were I to then apply foresight, and I knew that three years down the road lie his Oscar-winning Melvin and Howard (which does have much in common with the first film), it would lend support to my belief that the film bridging the two would not fall too far from the quirky character study tree.
So how surprising was Last Embrace to me when I watched it not long after my first viewing of Citizens Band? Certainly once I saw that the star of the film was Roy Scheider, I did not expect the usual Demme film. Scheider had been known far more for his roles in action/adventure (Jaws, Sorcerer, Jaws 2, Blue Thunder), police shoot 'em ups (The French Connection, The Seven Ups), and conspiracy thrillers (Marathon Man). His Oscar-nominated role in All That Jazz (which came out a few months after Last Embrace) was the anomaly in his career, what with all that singing and dancing going on in it, but like most of his roles, it centered hard on the dramatics. A whole lot of drama in Scheider's filmography, and very little comedy. Still, Scheider could be a really charming guy onscreen, and it's not like he wasn't adept at delivering a funny line or three when he needed; there would still be some gravitas to it, but he could certainly stretch anytime that he needed.
Even more of the surprise could have eroded easily had I spent any amount of time with the film's poster before I watched it. As it is, I am only now truly looking it over, and it really tells the tale. Scheider is seen holding an actress by the hand (presumably co-star Janet Margolin) as she hangs dangerously over the roiling waters of a massive waterfall (and one does not need to presume that the location is Niagara Falls, because the poster tells us so.) The text on the top of the poster reads: "It begins with an ancient warning. It ends at the edge of Niagara Falls. In between there are 5 murders. Solve the mystery. Or die trying." You remember movie posters that said more than just three or four words about the plot of a film. Yeah, they really did used to exist. In the case of Last Embrace, it seems fairly clear to me that the studio didn't really know how to promote this movie, and so they built the poster up into the most proto-Hitchcock sell that they could, emphasizing a novel location for a dangerous stunt within the film that centers on the possible death of a lead figure or figures, pump the fact that there are murders and a mystery within the film, and also point to the possible doomed romance between the characters through the title and image.
And the studio doesn't lie in this case. All of that stuff is in the film in some form. Whether the viewer believes it works or not is up to you. For me, it does not. The poster is a true giveaway: the film is an over-the-top tribute/pastiche of Hitchcockian motifs. While as a Hitchcock fan, it might be expected that I would fall for it instantly, I have grown rather tired of director after director needing to prove that they too can hamhandedly mangle a suspense scenario that Hitchcock could pull off in his sleep (and probably backwards and on heels too), all under the guise of "homage" or "tribute". They are fun once in a while, but I would rather the director come up with an original tangent on an old idea rather than try to slavishly remount a scene from Vertigo or North by Northwest just because everybody has a social memory sense of Hitchcock's greatest hits. In the case of Last Embrace, which is apparently absolutely meant by Demme to be one of those tributes to the Master, we do get some interesting new angles added to the mix, and the set pieces relating directly to more famous scenes are well handled by the director, but the final product overall is just missing the soul that one normally attributes to Demme's best work.
Another slight demerit, which would have played bigger had I seen it upon its release, is that Last Embrace came sandwiched in between Mel Brooks' much loonier (and surprisingly thorough) satire of the same material, High Anxiety, the year before, and Brian De Palma's reshaping of Psycho (along with nods to various other Hitch films), Dressed to Kill, the year after in 1980. I, like many De Palma devotees, love that film for reasons beyond logic can explain; so what if even Hitchcock himself thought it was ridiculous. Still, how many Hitch tributes can you take in such a short amount of time? Why not just tell people to go watch an original Hitchcock film and do your own thing?
Scheider, as "Harry," is seen at the beginning of Last Embrace frequenting a restaurant with his wife in a rather romantic, idealized setting, atmospherically lit with the sound of violin music in the air. Suddenly, there is an intrusion by several gangster-looking types, including character actor Joe Spinell, strange looks pass between Harry and one of the men, and bullets are fired in great quantity across the room. At the end, Harry's wife lies dying. Time passes and we see Harry being discharged from a mental hospital, over the grief and loneliness he felt over his wife's assassination. His doctor, with whom he seems quite familiar about many aspects of his life including his job, tells him to ease back into his former life.
At a crowded platform, with a train hurtling down the line in their direction, Harry stands waiting with many other men. As the train passes the platform, we see Harry lurch forward as it pushed, but he is swung back around onto the platform. (The "Whoa!" noise he emits while spinning about confused me at first, because it made me believe the film was going for broad comedy at that point, and then I realized my laughing was unintentional.) Harry harshly grabs the throat of one of the men behind him on the platform (a very pre-fame Mandy Patinkin), throws him against the wall, and from the look in Harry's eyes matched with his determined grimace, not to mention his kung fu chop-ready hand pointed at Patinkin's neck, we know Harry is a very dangerous and paranoid man, even possibly a killer in the form of an assassin or secret agent. ALF's dad, Max Wright, talks him out of further violence, convincing Harry with "Nobody pushed you, buddy! You stumbled!"
After he makes a stop at a department store to try and get a message (in a lipstick tube) from a salesclerk who seems familiar to him, we realize that Harry is indeed an assassin/agent, or at least he believes that he is, and that he is desperately trying to make connections back to his handlers. But it seems they are intent on remaining hands-off with ol' Harry. One old friend is sympathetic even if she snubs him both before and after this exchange: "Harry, Harry... how are you?" His reply is a sardonic, "I don't know. How is Harry, Harry supposed to be?" He tells her that the hands-off approach and the attack at the train station make him feel like he "is being told a bunch of bad jokes and I don't get the punchlines." Harry goes back to his New York City apartment for the first time since the hospital and finds a strange young woman, Ellie (Janet Margolin) subletting the place. She has even brought in her cat (to which he is allergic) and has no idea that he is the same person she has been told owns the place. There is also the matter of a strange note that has been slipped under the door. Ellie tells him the writing is Hebrew or Aramaic, so he believes she must have left it if she can read it. She says she only knows what the writing looks like when she sees it, and can make out one letter, Gimel, because it appears on dreidels. (I believe that argument.) He storms out to his agency, where his handler (Christopher Walken, just after his Oscar win for The Deer Hunter) both keeps him at arms' length but tries to reassure Harry that he will be called in when he is needed.
Harry consults with a rabbi and finds out the note partially refers to an ancient Jewish "avenger of blood" named Goel. He continues to grow more paranoid as he walks around the city and slowly but reluctantly enlists the further aid of his new roommate Ellie, and their friendship slowly blossoms. Further information from Ellie's professor at Princeton inform him that there have been a series of savage murders across the city, all of them attributable to the same "avenger of blood". The professor tells Harry of other notes that have been found at the crime scenes, and that Harry's note is peculiar because he is the only target that has been left alive. Everything rolls onward from there, from the revelation of exactly why Harry is being targeted (it's actually one of the more stunning parts of the film and something that came out of left field for me, though it is not unbelievable), to the identity of the killer, to that perilous clinging to life at Niagara Falls.
The film is Hitchcock reference-heavy but Demme-light; even if Last Embrace is meant by Demme to honor Hitch, it fails in feeling like a Demme film at all. Last Embrace is Demme in full-on thriller mode, and while it acquits itself admirably in continuing to advance the story while hitting the proper suspenseful beats, the film rather drags at many opportunities. There is little in the way of humor except of the most circumstantial kind. It is undoubtedly Demme's darkest film until The Silence of the Lambs came along in 1991, but his sense of high, fun style and deeply felt humanity that made his films so terrific during his highly successful run through the '80s is fairly absent here. Even Lambs had Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling as an identifying marker of true humanity to keep us centered and hopeful, our light in the darkness as we sought out justice along with her. (If the Lambs film had never been filmed by Demme, and thus Foster would have never played Clarice, it is likely that Lambs author Thomas Harris might really have gotten away with his perverse ending to the third Lecter novel, Hannibal, where he has Lecter turn Starling into a brain-eating love doll of his own design. As it was, I and many readers and reviewers found this ending completely out of character for Starling and the most monumental leap of faith in a series which relied on huge leaps of faith. On a personal level, I wrote Harris off at that point, though it is interesting to muse on a point that the third Lecter book may never have happened if Lambs hadn't been made and turned into such a massive hit.)
Scheider brings highly nervous energy and his usual intensity to nearly every scene but a few with Janet Margolin, and while some of their exchanges border on cute, the budding romance with Margolin in the film doesn't ever really take off for me. Margolin herself is fine, I guess, here; I have just never really gotten her as an actress. The best I can say is that I like her in some scenes but she comes off as amateurish in others. I would like to mention her best moments in the film, but that would give away too much. Let's just say they are two thirds of the way through the film, and she is wearing a lot of lipstick. Most of the other actors are all in far too limited roles to really have made any impact on me, except for John Glover as Ellie's professor friend. His performance, with his character shaking with eager excitement in getting to share his knowledge with Harry, is the best in the film). As Demme often does, the director manages to work in some of his usual suspects here: Spinell, Charles Napier (a much lower key role than I would have guessed, given the circumstances), and Gary Goetzman; apart from Glover (who appears briefly in Melvin and Howard), Marcia Rodd is the other actor who had done only one other film with Demme (she was one of Napier's two wives in Citizens Band). Three other actors in this film also appeared with Scheider in All That Jazz the same year.
The opening of the film features a title sequence that is the complete opposite of the brilliant opening to Citizens Band. Consisting of a simple red type on a black background, it was astounding to read that the sequence is the work of Pablo Ferro, who not only also did Citizens Band, but many of Demme's titles throughout the years. (Most influential of all, he provided his archetypal hand-drawn lettering in the credits for Stop Making Sense, which also make their way into the promotional posters and soundtracks accompanying that concert film.) I am certain the spare introduction is meant to once again evoke memories of the Master's films, but I just find it rather dull. This may just be in comparison to what I am used to seeing spring forth for Ferro's imagination in title sequences over many decades, but I can't help but feel it.
Behind the camera once more is his most frequent cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, and I would guess that if there is one person in a Hitchcock tribute who gets to have the most fun (though possibly the heaviest lifting of all), it would be him. His work here is stellar throughout, though I only got to see a copy on the MGM-HD channel, and the print seemed rather faded (even with the HD appellation on the station ID). Perhaps in the future i will get the chance to collect the blu-ray version to give the film a fairer shake. But in terms of composition and in nailing the details in regards to bringing solid memories of Hitchcock sequences past, Fujimoto is spot on throughout. Demme brings in a ringer for the musical score, hiring frequent Hitch collaborator Miklós Rózsa to add his lush orchestrations to the film. He also used regular Coppola editor Barry Malkin to cut the film together.
Like any Demme film, there seems to have been talent to spare both in front of and behind the camera in Last Embrace. All of the elements are there, and it is perhaps just my own wishing that Demme had made this more fully his kind of film than simply his thesis about Hitchcock techniques that leaves me disappointed by the end. I kind of tailed off in my attention for the last 15 minutes both times that I watched the film, and it is not from my lack of trying to keep focused on the finale. That is a mark to a me that a film stopped having anything to say to me after a certain spot in the proceedings.
That said, there is enjoyment to be in this film, the subject matter of the "avenger of blood" is certainly something I had not really encountered before in a major motion picture, and the details leading to that avenger's crusade is a queasy one that also struck me at least to have been rather unique to the time period. Finally, Last Embrace is a most interesting film to any film buff, especially to the Demme and/or Hitchcock completist. I have had my say on the film, but as always, I leave future viewings to tell me whether I had it right all along or really needed to see the film fresh again. I am intrigued by what I may have to add if I watch this again in, say, six months time. OK, it's a date. – TC4P Rating: 6/9.
Secret in Their Eyes (2015) Dir.: Billy Ray – I filed this one in my entirely too massive folder titled Completely Unnecessary Remakes, the contents of which billow out of the confines of my head's filing cabinet like a mushroom cloud looming above a South Pacific atoll. I am sure it must have seemed like a can't lose proposition to do an American remake of the 2009 Argentinian thriller, El secreto de sus ojos, which took the Best Foreign Film Oscar at the 2010 ceremony. They lined up Chiwetel Ejiofor, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Alfred Molina, Dean Norris and Michael Kelly to beef up their cast dramatically, and then took a rather complicated, non-linear story structure spanning a quarter of a century and, surprisingly, only made it slightly less confusing by dropping the element of a novel within the film telling part of the story and cutting down the story gap to just a mere 13 years. But even with that cast and that nod towards not dumbing something down for an American audience, they still gave us no real, compelling reason to make us want to watch the new version over the original, itself only six years old at the time of this film's release and completely available on the DVD and cable markets. And the performances and direction are just fine in the American version, but only hardcore subtitle haters would prefer this over the first one. The original has an extra layer of depth to it with the element of one of the characters using a novel to tell the story, and the Argentine locations add even more mystery to the proceedings. Here, the American version is just another serial killer story that takes place in Los Angeles and New York, and then they had to somehow tie it to 9/11 as well. I'm over it. I want to watch the original again. – TC4P Rating: 5/9
Deepwater Horizon (2016) Dir.: Peter Berg – I really did not want to see this film when I saw the trailer the first forty dozen times in theatres and on TV. The overly cute scenes between Mark Wahlberg and his family just kind of set off my "too saccharine" alarms, but there was something else bothering me. I knew Peter Berg was directing, and while I still like him just fine from his acting days (the highly underrated Late for Dinner, a film that I outright LOVE) and for directing at least four films that I really enjoyed (Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights, and Hancock), I had a sense that there might be the slight possibility that he would go easy on the oil companies involved in this issue. He is fairly outspoken on a variety of topics, and though he is known to lean left politically, many of his films tend to be quite patriotic, which has also gotten him a conservative fanbase. And he also takes some odd stances on things on social media that garner some controversy, so I thought the chance was there I might not enjoy the tone of this picture. And with the star being Mark Wahlberg, the man who disdains political talk from celebrities but has walked right into playing golf with Donald Trump in years past, I thought the potential that they might wander smack into a scenario that goes too light on BP and Transocean might be valid.
Bang Bang Baby (2014) Dir.: Jeffrey St. Jules – Sometimes nothing is more painful than watching someone try to intentionally create a cult classic. And if you are going to take a shot at using the most obvious gimmick to shortcut your project to this status – making your sci-fi/monster film a musical – then there really needs to be something special at the core of your story. Director Jeffrey St. Jules has a great assist in the lead role from actress Jane Levy, who really does have an Emma Stone thing going at times, though not all the time. (In some shots, she really reminds me of classic noir actress Jane Greer.) As a skirt-wearing auto mechanic living in an idealized late '50s/early '60s setting who is only able to escape her humdrum small town existence via her dreams to became a singing star, Levy is quite engaging and deftly juggles both the more comedic and dramatic moments in the script equally well. As the father who consistently gets in her way, all-star character actor Peter Stormare is perhaps miscast but I think that he brings his usual pro reliability to his role, and even gets his own country-flavored song, which surprised the hell out of me. (I didn't say it was any good, but the scene is funny.) 
American Anarchist (2016) Dir.: Charlie Siskel – I remember reading portions of The Anarchist Cookbook back in the '80s and getting a good laugh from it. We carried the books at the chain of bookstores in Alaska for whom I worked for two decades, and they were mostly kept under the front counter to keep them out of the hands of juvenile delinquents. We knew the Cookbook had bits about making homemade explosives in it, but really, I remember placing it in my mind alongside the Foxfire series and the Carlos Castaneda books and other alternative/hippie/folk culture stuff we carried in those days. (All of that stuff sold like crazy too...) I remember thinking back then that The Anarchist Cookbook was just a funny book that talked about smoking banana peels to get a minor high and other goofy junk like that. I remember reading the section with home bomb-making and thinking “Who would really take the time to do this?” It just seemed too complicated and, frankly, dangerous. Believing it would be used by homegrown terrorists to do harm against the general populace was unthinkable to me at the time, even though I had friends who delighted in using small explosives to blow up toilets at school. 
