Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

For many years, the only thing I knew about Broken Arrow, John Woo’s second Hollywood swing after 1993’s Hard Target, is that it was the only movie about which Roger Ebert convinced Gene Siskel to change his mind. The “thumb twist” occurs on a glorious February 1996 episode of Siskel & Ebert & The Movies, in which Siskel also admits to an envious Ebert that he walked out early on the Chris Farley comedy Black Sheep. Siskel opines first on Broken Arrow, citing high-energy action scenes for his admitted half-hearted endorsement, but Ebert’s rebuttal, outlining his disappointment around story and characters he found to be boring, led Siskel to confess, “it doesn’t work.” While I appreciate that Ebert put together a convincing enough argument to get Siskel to go from “thumbs up” to “thumbs down”, I wish one had convinced the other to join their “thumbs up”. Broken Arrow isn’t Woo’s strongest work but it remains, as Siskel originally observes, “simply a lot of fun.”

The movie stars John Travolta and Christian Slater as rival Air Force pilots Major Vic “Deak” Deakins and Captain Riley Hale, respectively. The pair spar in a boxing ring over intense opening credits, with Deak schooling Hale on all things “rope-a-dope”, before receiving their next top-secret mission. They’re tasked with flying a pair of nuclear weapons through the Utah desert on a stealth bomber to determine if the radiation on-board can be detected by external instruments. As Deak and Hale fly under cover of darkness, we cross-cut to scenes introducing park ranger Terry Carmichael (Samantha Mathis) as she heads home from her shift, and henchmen completing on-ground misdeeds at the command of Members Only jacket-wearing Mr. Pritchett (Bob Gunton). It turns out Deak is working with Pritchett to steal the nukes and threaten the US government with them to secure a huge payday and, naturally, it’s up to Hale and Carmichael to foil the blackmail plot.

The title of Broken Arrow is derived from the flagword for when a nuke goes missing; as a DoD agent, played by Frank Whaley, points out, “I don’t know what’s scarier: losing nuclear weapons or that it happens so often, there’s actually a term for it!” Whaley and Travolta had briefly squared off two years prior in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the iconic indie that served as an adrenaline needle to the heart of Travolta’s stalled career. Tarantino helped Travolta get on John Woo’s radar in more ways than one, as the Hong Kong action aficionado screened a copy of Woo’s The Killer for the Vincent Vega actor. As great as that film is, watching a subtitle-free version while Quentin Tarantino translates the lines from Cantonese to English in real time sounds like a nightmare to me. Nevertheless, Travolta was gung ho for the gun fu gem, declaring “I want to be Chow Yun-Fat!” upon the movie’s conclusion. Get in line, Johnny.

I can’t say I detect much Yun-Fat in what Travolta is serving up as Deak — Hale not referring to him as “Deak The Freak” at any point feels like an oversight — but he’s certainly channeling something. Clearly relishing his first time playing an outright villain, Travolta gets to flick cigarettes and bark through clenched teeth at Bob Gunton, whose Warden in The Shawshank Redemption was an even bigger SOB than Deak. It’s also fitting that he spends a fair amount of screen time rubbing his face and chin, as if to contemplate contingencies in his high-stakes plan. Unarmed nukes travel by air, land and water in Broken Arrow, with the payload traveling via helicopter, Humvee and hydroplane at various points in the story. Deak’s evil scheme accounts for a hilarious amount of wrinkles and obstacles but fortunately, Woo settles on a train as the setting for the majority of the movie’s climax. Even more fortuitously, a character falling far out of the locomotive triggers use of a stock sound nicknamed the “Howie Yell”, a legendary guttural scream superior to the done-to-death Wilhelm Scream.

Sonically, Broken Arrow offers its own legacy, with excerpts of the chest-puffing music score by Hans Zimmer that went on to pop up later in sequels to Scream and Speed. “Deakin’s Theme”, which Zimmer describes as “big man” music, is spearheaded by a vibrato-heavy guitar lead set to the sinister strut of its titular character as he enters a locker room. The Morricone moment brings home the Western influence on Woo’s Utah-set actioner, although the film undoubtedly feels of a piece with the action auteur’s oeuvre. No scene is packed tighter with a panoply of Wooisms than the cockpit duel where Hale and Deak wrestle for control of the B-3 bomber. Between gun tussling, intense eye close-ups and an operatic choral score, the only thing that’s missing is a flock of doves to strike the plane’s windshield and engines.

Fairly or unfairly, Broken Arrow has gotten left in the dust compared to 90s action contemporaries like The Rock, which came out a few months later in the summer of ’96, and Face/Off, Woo’s follow-up that arrived just a year later. It shares a similar plot with the former, involving a decorated military man ransoming the United States with their own covert weaponry, and a star with the latter, as Travolta returns to the baddie territory he established with Deak. Both of those movies also feature Nicolas Cage, who, it needn’t be said, is a much more manically magnetic screen presence than Christian Slater. Then again, neither of those movies feature Slater attempting to whitesplain the Ali-Foreman Rumble In The Jungle match to Delroy Lindo.

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

At this point, it’s cliché to say that actors look “unrecognizable” in certain roles but when Colin Farrell appeared as The Penguin in 2022’s The Batman, it was an apt adjective. Sporting a fat suit, gold tooth and facial prosthetics that took hours to apply, his rendering of a mid-level crime boss with an aggressively recessed hairline was strong enough to warrant a lauded HBO spin-off series in 2024. As memorable a role as it’s been for Farrell, it’s not his first time sporting a combover to play a corrupt narcissist in charge. That honor goes to 2011’s raunchy comedy Horrible Bosses, in which Farrell portrays Bobby Pellit, one of the three head honchos that terrorize a trio of hard-working average Joes. “Playing Pellit was all about channeling my inner douche,” Farrell commented in the film’s production notes, and his work as the unhinged heir to a chemical company is a big part of what makes the crime caper work 15 years on.

The opening of Horrible Bosses introduces us to pals Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), and Dale (Charlie Day), who routinely commiserate with each others’ workplace woes over beers. Nick is under the thumb of David Harken (Kevin Spacey), a sadistic executive at a financial firm who belittles and shows contempt for everyone under him. Conversely, Kurt gets along great with his mentor Jack Pellit (Donald Sutherland) but a fatal heart attack puts his incompetent son Bobby in charge of Pellit Chemicals. Dale gets the least amount of sympathy from his buddies regarding his situation, where he’s sexually harassed on a daily basis by his superior Dr. Julia (Jennifer Aniston) at her dental practice. At the bar one night, the boys take to a cockamamie plan in which they each kill their respective bosses to alleviate the abuse they’re all suffering at the hands of three psychopaths.

If their ruse sounds a bit familiar, it’s a comedic riff on Hitchcock’s classic Strangers On A Train, which is name-dropped explicitly by Kurt and mixed up with Throw Momma From The Train by Dale. They’re aided in their plot by “murder consultant” Dean Jones (Jamie Foxx), who adopts a colorful, tough guy nickname so as to not be lumped in with the 1960s Disney leading man of the same name. Among other actors in Horrible Bosses, Foxx represents the film’s “time at club/impact at club” ratio, wherein performers score lots of laughs with limited screen time. Ioan Gruffudd is a whiz-bang wonder in his cameo, portraying an all-business gentleman whom Dale hires via Craigslist for “wet work” thinking he’s a hitman. Comedy legend Bob Newhart even shows up in the movie’s coda as a seemingly harmless CEO harboring a terrible secret that he asks Nick to overlook with a wink.

Likewise, Farrell is comedically efficient on-screen as Bobby, who is introduced as “Dipshit Cokehead Son” by the movie’s enormous text overlay. We first hear him snorting lines in — and holding up the line to — the company bathroom, from which he storms out and grouses to his dad Jack that he can’t get any privacy. He’s a nuisance that Kurt tolerates in a job he otherwise loves but Jack’s passing automatically puts blowhard Bobby in the big boss’s chair. He rolls it out into the hall to confront Kurt when he’s “three hours late” to work after acting as pallbearer for Jack’s funeral, which Bobby presumably did not attend. The screw-up scion wastes no time taking an axe to his father’s company so he can line his own pockets; “this is just an ATM to me!” he blurts to Kurt in their first pow-wow with Bobby at the helm. It’s made clear that they’re all now residing in the “State Of Bobbyville”, which he revises to “The United States Of Me” soon after.

Being a studio comedy from the 2010s, Horrible Bosses and its director Seth Gordon presumably gave plenty of latitude for the central actors to play around with improv during their takes. But as evidenced by the outtakes over the end credits, it seems Farrell may have taken advantage of the opportunity even more than Aniston or Spacey. The bloopers feature what appears to be a deleted scene involving Bobby’s trip to the pharmacy, wherein he pesters a beleaguered pharmacist with queries like “do you like karaoke?” and “do you have MDMA?” He makes full use of his gross haircut too, heaving his combover as he sneezes into his open hand and shows it to the defeated druggist. Primarily for plot reasons, Bobby’s time in the movie is abbreviated in comparison to Julia and David but as the most crudely exaggerated of the titular heavies, Farrell works hard to sell lines that are designed to horrify.

The actor also contributed ideas toward the conception of Bobby’s garish fashion and ostentatious lifestyle, particularly an affinity for Asian appropriation through nunchuck twirling and Chinese dragon decals. He brags at one point that he’s a green belt and has “Kung Fu Fighting” as his ringtone at a time when people still selected those as extensions of their personality. When our protagonists visit Bobby’s vacant house for recon, they find his man cave packed to the gills with samurai regalia and katanas hung on the wall. They’re possessions of a self-stylized “master of the universe” so obnoxiously self-involved that we can’t really feel too bad about him getting what he deserves. The Julia and David subplots in Horrible Bosses haven’t aged especially well — the former due to its cavalier attitude regarding sexual assault and the latter due to the presence of Kevin Spacey — but Colin Farrell’s performance as the boisterous Bobby makes the horrible hilarious.

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

Released the same day as fellow sci-fi classic Blade Runner on June 25, 1982, The Thing may be the coldest movie to ever hit the summer box office. Not only is it set in Antarctica during the winter but the opening shots after the title card depict parka-clad Norwegians chasing an Alaskan Malamute across snowy vistas. But chillier interactions are taking place inside a US research station, where pilot R.J. MacReady (played by Kurt Russell) dips his hand in a bucket to grab ice for his glass of J&B. He’s about to beat the Chess Wizard computer with a move he’s so sure will ice the game, he even taunts the program, smirking, “Poor baby, you’re startin’ to lose it, aren’t ya?” When it responds with a checkmate move, he wastes no time pouring his chilled scotch over the motherboard and calling the Chess Wizard a “cheating bitch”. Ice cold.

Based on both the novella Who Goes There? and its adapted 1951 film The Thing From Another World, The Thing finds MacReady and his team up against something far scarier than a chess-competing computer. The Norwegian scientists trying to shoot the escaped dog end up crashing their helicopter and as a result, Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) accompanies MacReady to their base to figure out what went wrong. Clark (Richard Masur), the American crew member in charge of their sled dogs, kennels the rogue Malamute and the crew is horrified when they find that the canine-appearing creature is not man’s best friend. An inspection of its flamethrower-charred remains leads biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley) to determine it’s an alien lifeform that can perfectly imitate other organisms. Paranoia grows as the team surmises that the extraterrestrial could have already assimilated into their group undetected.

When the villain of your story is a space monster that can replicate the appearance of any of the men trapped in an isolated outpost, director and horror maestro John Carpenter understands there needs to be one character on whom we can always rely. Kurt Russell wasn’t Carpenter’s first choice for the lead; in fact, several actors, including Nick Nolte and Jeff Bridges, were considered before Carpenter finally settled on Russell the day before filming. The pair had worked together twice before The Thing and Russell turned out to be the perfect choice for R.J. MacReady. A war vet who flew choppers in Vietnam, he becomes the team’s de facto leader who, despite getting upset losing to a computer in the opening, gradually embodies the “cooler heads prevail” ethos. To Russell’s chagrin, Carpenter insisted that MacReady wear a sombrero but it was Russell’s idea for MacReady to sport what’s become a legendary cinematic beard.

Look, there’s just no other way to say this: Kurt Russell’s hair in The Thing is nothing short of miraculous. Does it actually make sense that a helicopter pilot in an arctic research facility would be this well-groomed? No, not really. As someone who can’t grow a beard, am I jealous that Russell can grow one this luminous? Yes, yes I am. According to the DVD commentary track, it took the star almost a year to grow it out along with his slightly longer than usual hair. Whether it’s intentional or not, there are a couple wardrobe decisions (in addition to the aforementioned sombrero) that attempt to make MacReady not look like the coolest guy possible. While incinerating one of the “Thing” clones outside the base, MacReady wears clear lab goggles stretched over a hoodie working mightily to stifle his coiffed mane. But it doesn’t last long, as the frost gradually makes its way to the luscious hair on his face and atop his head.

Besides the impeccable hairstyling, one of the primary joys in watching Russell’s performance in The Thing is watching MacReady ascend from just one of the guys to the man in charge. He makes some risky moves along the way to prove his humanity but after he successfully talks station command Garry (Donald Moffat) and radio operator Windows (Thomas Waites) down from a standoff, MacReady becomes the most reliable of the bunch. Shortly after a speech where he establishes how he means to handle things moving forward, he records a message into a tape machine, in case nobody makes it out alive. “Nobody trusts anybody now,” he concedes, “And we’re all very tired.” In that crucial scene, one of the few where a character is alone with their thoughts, Russell has a resignation in his eyes that makes his heroics in the third act all the more impressive.

In addition to his work on-screen, Russell had a major contribution behind the scenes too, working with to Carpenter shore up an ending they both felt would work best serve the story. When the two reportedly weren’t satisfied with the original conclusion, which definitively proved that MacReady is still human after all, Russell reportedly wrote the last scene that appears in the film. It’s understandable why producers would want a horror movie marked by distrust and insecurity to leave audiences with a measure of relief as opposed to more uncertainty. But at the same time, closing on a conversation that percolates with fear of the unknown is the perfect send-off. Like Blade Runner, which was originally released with a studio-mandated “happy ending” that was omitted from future cuts, The Thing works better with a more ambiguous final note.

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

“We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions.” So begins the metatextual and prescient dramedy The Truman Show, released 2 years before reality shows like Survivor and Big Brother would launch in the US and enrapture the public consciousness. The opening lines are spoken (un-phonily) by Ed Harris, the only performer in the cast to score an Oscar nomination, in addition to behind-the-camera nominees Peter Weir for Best Director and Andrew Niccol for Best Original Screenplay. Harris plays Christof, the “televisionary” director of a groundbreaking reality show that’s been running for 30 years, of which Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is unwittingly the star. “While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself,” Christof continues during the film’s opening. “No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life.”

Though it’s actually located in a massive soundstage in LA, the town in which Truman believes he resides is the idyllic Seahaven, similar to the titular setting from Pleasantville, which was released a few months after The Truman Show in 1998. The most important “characters” in his life are his chipper wife Meryl (Laura Linney) and trusty drinking buddy Marlon (Noah Emmerich), though actors with earpieces in roles big and small populate this tiny town. They all get their marching orders from Christof, who runs the production from the Lunar Room control room with the help of assistants like Simeon (Paul Giamatti) and Chloe (Una Damon). Much like a serial from the 1950s, the sudden presence of a UFO sends Truman on an adventure, though the inciting incident in this case is actually a par can light falling from the sky. The questioning of his reality causes Christof to scramble as he works with his crew to preserve the illusion that has been maintained all of Truman’s life.

In the same way it’s difficult to imagine The Truman Show without Jim Carrey, it’s hard to see anyone else in the role of the prodigious puppet master besides Ed Harris. But when production kicked off, it was Dennis Hopper who filled the role of Christof before leaving just two days into the shoot, due to creative differences with Weir and producer Scott Rudin. Hopper never elaborated on what those “creative differences” were but it’s possible he played Christof as too sinister, given his streak of antagonist roles at that point in his career. If his Christof was more of a Lucifer-type, then the God-like approach that Harris came up with on short notice — he was cast mere days before production would’ve been halted — was just the ticket. It’s clear Christof has a god complex, difficult to combat when you literally cue when the sun rises for the star of your show, but it’s also clear that he truly cares for Truman too.

When asked by an interviewer how Truman has yet to discover his entire existence is an elaborate ruse, Christof cooly responds, “we accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.” But it takes a whole lot of work to keep this “world” going and the first scenes of The Truman Show where we spend significant time with Christof depict him hard at work keeping things running smoothly. At one point, he’s feeding lines to Marlon — more precisely, the actor playing Marlon — as he’s in the middle of an emotional conversation with Truman. “The last thing I would ever do to you…is lie to you,” he recites on the verge of tears as Christof looks on. The irony of the moment could come across as a bit of a laugh line but the way Harris whispers the lines into his headset suggest a mea culpa of sorts, that something in Christof regrets the years of deception visited upon his “creation”.

Moments of vulnerability can be difficult when everyone looks to you for strength and direction. After all, Christof has some 5000 cameras at his disposal and antsy network executives, like one played by the eminent Philip Baker Hall, ready to jump down his throat. In addition to his calm composure, Christof certainly has the wardrobe that communicates a forward-thinking control freak. It was design consultant Wendy Weir, the wife of director Peter Weir, who suggested the character sport a backward beret and round wire-rimmed glasses that just shout “genius”. He’s always dressed in black and, in one scene, he’s even wearing the same kind of dark turtleneck sweater that Steve Jobs made famous earlier in the decade. Harris completes the ensemble with a pensive fist to the chin, suggesting that Christof the only kind of gifted mind who could take on the task of crafting Truman’s surroundings.

It’s hard to discuss Ed Harris’ work in The Truman Show without going over the film’s final scene, so apologies in advance for those who haven’t seen it. After many obstacles, including a literal firewall and a biblically strong storm at sea, Truman valiantly sails to the edge of “Seahaven” and rams his boat into the soundstage’s wall. As he makes his way up cloud-painted stairs to a disguised exit door, Christof speaks to Truman for the first time as his words echo through the gargantuan ecosphere like the voice of God. Face-to-face with his “creator”, Truman asks “was nothing real?” to which Christof asserts “You were real. That’s what made you so good to watch.” Truman is obviously the hero of The Truman Show, which makes Christof the de facto villain, but Harris plays him with such genuine care and concern that he’s hard to hate.

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

In hindsight, Cobweb never stood a chance. Released on July 21, 2023, the same day as a couple other movies called Barbie and Oppenheimer, its box office numbers were so dismal that they weren’t even reported, amid the combined Barbenheimer domestic take of $244 million that opening weekend. Lionsgate likely should’ve known better than to release a movie of any kind amid a cultural phenomenon like Barbenheimer, but they absolutely should’ve known better than to release a horror movie in the middle of summer as opposed to October. Not only is Samuel Bodin’s directorial debut a horror movie set during Halloween but it’s one so steeped in spooky season that the central family literally has a pumpkin patch in their backyard. Even though it got demolished at the box office worse than Tommy Doyle’s pumpkin in Halloween, Cobweb remains creepy crawly fun worth spinning up on streaming.

The film stars C’mon C’mon breakout Woody Norman as Peter, a shy and sensitive third-grader who lives under the overly-vigilant eye of his mom Carol (played by Lizzy Caplan) and dad Mark (played by Antony Starr). His school life suffers due to class bully Brian (Luke Busey) and his home life suffers from the stifling control of his parents. Thankfully, he gets some respite in the form of substitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman), who recognizes his troubled inner life and shows him more attention. One night, Peter begins to hear scratching on the other side of his bedroom walls and, along with it, a voice claiming to belong to a sequestered sister of whom he was never made aware. As more nights pass, their conversations grow more in-depth and the voice pushes Peter to stand up both to his parents and the bully at school.

An early intertitle indicates Cobweb begins one week before Halloween, although there are so many visual clues to this throughout the movie that it may not even be necessary to say. If a moonlit shot of the abundance of pumpkins in Peter’s family’s backyard isn’t enough, a creaking swing in the forefront dancing amid the autumn breeze should help drive things home. There are several jack-o-lantern carvings and costumed kiddos abound, in addition to spooky accoutrements like a ridiculously oversized witch hat that Miss Devine sports in class on day. Italian electronic composer Drum & Lace has fun setting the tone on the sonic side of things, staccato strings and hollow marimbas leaving plenty of space in between the notes for tension to creep in.

The melancholy music also stages Cobweb as less of a conventional frightfest and more of a dark fairytale from the perspective of a troubled child trying to make sense of his world. We spend the majority of the movie inside Peter’s home but the production design intentionally makes the rooms appear larger than they actually would be. Numerous establishing shots give us a sense of the ramshackle house’s size but when we go inside, the interiors are impossibly large compared to what we’ve seen from the outside. The effect created is that we’re seeing these spaces through the eyes of Peter, with wide shots casting gargantuan silhouettes and shadows atop the eldritch wallpaper. When we’re small, the rooms in which we spend the most time feel massive but as we grow up, they get smaller and smaller. The visual personification of this concept lends itself to beautifully haunting set design.

The trio of main actors in Cobweb also do a fantastic job making this off-kilter world make its own kind of sense. Lizzy Caplan may still be better known for her presence in comedies like Mean Girls and The Interview but she’s also honed her creep chops on TV in series like Castle Rock and Fatal Attraction. It’s perfect prep for her role here as an overbearing mother who can just barely pass for normal in public but doesn’t bother to conceal her crazy around Peter and Mark. She stresses all the wrong words in her sentences and her emotional reactions to almost every situation are difficult to predict. Even more disconcerting is Antony Starr, effortlessly channeling the psychopathy of his Homelander character from The Boys to this officious father role. “Not everything’s as sweet as it seems,” he warns Peter as they prep cinnamon-scented rat poison for pest control.

Lest one get the sense that Cobweb is too much of a slow burn, it has more than its fair share of jump scares and nightmare scenes before we get to the satisfyingly gnarly conclusion. Up until that point, only a few swear words keep the movie from a PG-13 rating but Samuel Bodin goes hard in the proverbial red paint when it comes to the gore and lethality on display during the final extended setpiece. It’s a welcome contrast in tone to the more chilling and staid tenor that envelops everything preceding it. In that way, it calls to mind the darkly fantastical work of Guillermo del Toro, specifically Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. Cobweb isn’t quite as strong as either of those chillers but at 88 minutes, it’s easy to get wrapped up in its dark delights as the seasons change.

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

When we lost David Lynch earlier this year, it felt like a flame that would never stop flickering was suddenly snuffed out. Suffering from emphysema, the 78-year-old director’s health reportedly took a turn for the worse when the Sunset Fire’s proximity to his house necessitated that he evacuate. There’s a tragic irony in the fact that some of Lynch’s most evocative images prominently involve immolation, like the shack burning in reverse in Lost Highway and the candle flickering monstrously in Jeffrey’s nightmare in Blue Velvet. There’s that infamous on-set photo of him filming The Straight Story where he’s smoking in front of a house on fire and one of his short films is even titled Fire (Pożar). But of his features, flames can be found most prominently in his twisted romance road movie Wild At Heart, which opens with a title card ablaze and peppers in numerous close-ups of stricken matches and cindering cigarettes.

The film tells the love story of snakeskin jacket-wearing bad boy Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and his vivacious sweetheart Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) as it finds itself through various stages of tumult. The main source of obstruction for the star-crossed lovers is Marietta (Diane Ladd), Lula’s viciously overbearing mother who has never approved of Sailor and even goes far enough to send men after him. After Sailor spends almost 2 years in prison for killing one of the attackers hired by Marietta, the couple decide to hit the road to be free from her controlling menace. Plotting a spontaneous trip from North Carolina out to California, Sailor and Lula have the future in their eyes but Marietta hires seedy detective Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) to track them down and bring Lula back home safely.

This being a David Lynch movie, there are plenty of strange detours, mercurial pitstops and eerie non-sequiturs in the journey that make this anything but a traditional road trip. Its manic-depressive push-pull tone is perhaps best typified by the range in soundtrack choices from speed metal band Powermad and The King himself, Elvis Presley. In a five minute stretch, Lula pounds her feet on a motel bed as we crossfade to her dancing shoes bouncing to heavy guitar chugs but after a scuff-up with an interloper, Sailor belts out “Love Me” in the mosh pit. Another standout on the soundtrack is Chris Isaak’s moody masterpiece “Wicked Game”, whose initial release didn’t garner much attention but shot up to number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 after its inclusion in Wild At Heart.

Of all the wayward and wild weirdos Sailor and Lula meet along the way, the most chillingly memorable is the criminally creepy Bobby Peru, played indelibly by Willem Dafoe. While at a string light party in Big Tuna, Texas, Sailor and Lula cross paths with Bobby as he slithers across the yard behind three topless women hootin’ and hollerin’. He’s dressed in all black with slicked back hair, his mustache as thin as the strings of his bolo tie. But his most defining characteristic are his undersized teeth, which we first get a glimpse of as he bites on a cigarette while cheekily clarifying to Lula and Sailor that his last name is the same as the country. Lynch wrote in the script that Bobby was to have grubby and stubby chompers but Dafoe didn’t expect to have dentures molded and created for the character. Once he had them in, he later explained that they unlocked something primal and lascivious within him and became “the key to the character”.

Lynch lingers on Bobby’s creepy smile the longest after Lula responds that she’s 20 years old; we can see the hostile lust in his eyes, even if poor Sailor can’t. Scored by a slowed-down version of Chris Isaak’s “In The Heat Of The Jungle”, Bobby bitterly recalls his Marine days before vulgarly excusing himself to go to the restroom. If that wasn’t off-putting enough for Lula, he barges into her motel room the next day to finish the job, loudly urinating with the bathroom door open. Things only get uglier from there, as Bobby takes advantage of Sailor’s absence and violently coerces her into asking him for sex. It’s a repulsive act and even though he involves Sailor in different criminal pursuits, Bobby does get what’s coming to him and then some by the end of Wild At Heart.

Across hundreds of wide-ranging film roles, Willem Dafoe has made a permanent mark on film history with his impressively expressive face and turn-on-a-dime theatrics. Lynch utilizes Dafoe’s talents perfectly in this fever dream of a film that is still one of the master filmmaker’s more straightforward accounts. Bobby Peru has echoes of Dennis Hopper’s horrid villain Frank Booth from Blue Velvet but Dafoe gives Peru a sort of twisted sex appeal that makes it all the more horrifying when sexual assault is introduced into the story. It can be hard to watch someone behave so repugnantly in a movie and yet the fact remains that you can’t take your eyes off them. As such, Bobby Peru remains one of Dafoe’s most magnetic performances.

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

By the year 2000, Jerry Bruckheimer Films was in the middle of a hot streak, following the box office successes of both Armageddon and Enemy Of The State two years prior. Teaming back up with Nicolas Cage, the star of their 1997 vehicle Con Air, the production company looked to strike lightning again with the heist remake Gone In 60 Seconds. In addition to Cage, the movie boasted a talented ensemble cast featuring fellow Oscar winners Robert Duvall and Angelina Jolie, the latter of whom received second billing on the project. But even with the components for a hot-rodded blockbuster under the hood, the film was a financial failure for Touchstone Pictures and ultimately written down as a $212 million loss for Disney. Critically, it was even more of a crash-and-burn affair and while it doesn’t exactly hold up 25 years later, it encapsulates the turn-of-the-millennium penchant that studios had to outdo each other in the “edginess” department.

Gone In 60 Seconds opens in the middle of a “boost” under cover of darkness at the hands of car thief Kip Raines (Giovanni Ribisi), who makes a noisy getaway with a Porsche 996. Ever the screw-up, Kip brings heat back to his crew’s warehouse, forcing them to ditch the cadre of confiscated cars they’ve spent weeks acquiring. This puts them way behind for the job they’re completing for ruthless gangster Raymond “The Carpenter” Calitri (Christopher Eccleston), who threatens to kill Kip if he can’t make things right. Doubtful that Kip can finish the job, Calitri’s right-hand man Atley (Will Patton) reaches out to Kip’s older brother Randall “Memphis” Raines (Cage), a notorious carjacker who went straight years ago. Up against a ludicrous 72-hour deadline to steal 50 luxury vehicles, Randall recruits — among many others — his mechanic ex-flame Sway (Jolie) and mute mortician Sphinx (Vinnie Jones) to pull off the high-octane heist.

Though Jolie is riding shotgun on the cast list and appears caddy corner with Cage on the one-sheet, she doesn’t appear in Gone In 60 Seconds as much as one may expect. After Randall surprises her by popping by work unannounced, Sway slides out on her creeper to reveal a suspiciously clean uniform and bleached blonde dreadlocks that kids today would deem “a choice”. Randall follows Sway to her second job bartending, her pouty lips and ice-blue eyes reluctantly refusing his recruitment opportunity but, of course, reconsidering the next day. She interrupts a meeting between Randall and Atley, pulling up on her motorcycle and insisting that she’s only taking the job for Kip. From here on, just about every subsequent line Jolie utters is paired with a raised eyebrow, a salacious smirk or both at the same time.

One would assume Jolie shot a good deal more footage for Gone In 60 Seconds that didn’t make the final cut and there are several plausible reasons her scenes hit the cutting room floor. The most obvious is that she doesn’t have much on-screen chemistry with Cage, despite the movie’s best effort to steam up windows with a stakeout-turned-makeout scene. As Sway shimmies over the gear shifter while Randall seduces her by reciting auto parts, they briefly lock lips before she puts the brakes on and insists they get back to work. Cage’s scenes with Jolie are peppered with the actor’s typical eccentric line reads and she tries to return the volleys but for some reason, their freak frequencies don’t quite line up. It doesn’t speak well of the film that Cage has better chemistry with the Shelby Mustang GT500 nicknamed “Eleanor”, overtly identified as “the one that got away”.

At the same time, it’s a wonder director Dominic Sena is even able to accommodate a potential romantic subplot when he has so many other storylines to address. Delroy Lindo and Timothy Olyphant collectively have more screen time than Jolie as detectives chasing down leads and shaking members of the crew down while trying to put the elusive Randall behind bars for good. Portraying the wise old mentor coming back for one last ride, Robert Duvall is relegated to crossing off the female code names for automobiles in canted-angle close-ups during the film’s climax. Elsewhere, rapper Master P plays Johnny B, a gang leader who pops up guns blazing in several scenes to settle a score with Randall left over from his past life. Michael Peña even turns up in an early film role as a thug appalled by the ease with which one of the crew members digs through dog feces to procure a set of laser-cut car keys.

In Gone In 60 Seconds, the cars should be the props and the actors should be the stars but in actuality, the opposite ends up being the case. Much of the movie’s second half is devoted to flashy montages set to big beat remixes on the soundtrack of vaunted vehicles being broken into and illegally revved up. Car nuts might drool at the sight of some of these exotic beasts in action but those watching, like me, who top out at “sensible sedan” will be bored watching what feels like all 50 of those on the checklist being picked off. When I first watched the movie with my friends, I think I was more in awe of the fact that the PlayStation 2 we used to watch it on could play DVDs; clearly, this was no 20th century video game console. Fittingly, Jolie had more success adapting the PlayStation title Tomb Raider just a year later, catapulting her onto the A-list after Gone In 60 Seconds didn’t quite turn the engine over.

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

The poster reads “There’s more than one way to lose your life to a killer” above a fog-obscured shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, the illuminated suspension cables resembling mournful eyes weeping over the Bay Area. This haunting one-sheet sets the stage perfectly for David Fincher’s quietly devastating Zodiac, a thorough and thoughtful retelling of one of the most infamous unsolved cases in United States history. Having spent his childhood in a small town 20 miles north of San Francisco, Fincher had a personal connection to the material, hearing terrifying stories about the elusive Zodiac Killer at an impressionable age. But the film also follows a theme that can be found in many of the other works throughout his career: monomaniacal focus in one’s professional life at the expense of one’s personal life.

After depicting a brutal 4th Of July shooting at a Vallejo highway lookout point, Zodiac introduces us to the main players involved in trying to track down the titular slayer. The San Francisco Chronicle is one of several news outlets to receive encoded letters from the killer who calls himself “Zodiac”, striking immediate and intense curiosity in the paper’s political cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). The Chronicle’s head crime reporter, Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), is skeptical at first, but when Graysmith makes a correct prediction before the first letter is deciphered, Avery becomes the Bernstein to Graysmith’s Woodward. More killings and more letters follow, causing police inspectors Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) to head up the case but as years go by, promising leads turn to dead ends.

Though it’s a movie about a well-known, real-life serial killer, Zodiac doesn’t follow in the footsteps of other mystery thrillers, where we’re shown evil deeds but can feel better having witnessed them knowing justice is served in the end. Fincher and his screenwriter James Vanderbilt did copious amounts of research investigating the true identity of the Zodiac Killer but they don’t present one theory here as absolute truth. It’s as much of a police procedural and news journalism movie as a thriller, given that the search for the killer is the actual story as opposed to their unveiling. How can we reconcile that the details of unspeakable acts can remain forever unknowable to everyone except those involved? How do we collectively move on from cases that are ultimately deemed unsolvable? Zodiac follows two central characters who believe in their bones that we can’t and we don’t.

On the morning the Chronicle receives the first letter, Avery blithely offers 20 bucks to whoever decodes the killer’s name before heading to the nearby watering hole Morti’s for an early drink. Though he acts indifferent initially, Avery’s intrigued after the letter is deciphered that Graysmith correctly predicted the killer wouldn’t reveal their name. He introduces himself to Graysmith — even though they’d already been working together for 9 months — and asks “how does one do that?” with inquisitive snark when Graysmith works to figure out the “leftover symbols” from the Zodiac’s first note. Thus commences the beginning of an unlikely professional partnership, where earnest curiosity and cynical scrutiny produce a nexus of all-encompassing fixation. Gyllenhaal and Downey Jr. play off each other brilliantly as these opposite personalities collide with one another.

Look no further than the sequence following the Chronicle getting their second Zodiac letter, when Avery invites Graysmith to Morti’s intent on pressing him why he’s been going through his trash but instead getting hung up on his drink order. The bartender slides a distractingly blue cocktail Graysmith’s way and after a minute of labored conversation, Avery quips “alright, this can no longer be ignored: what is that you’re drinking?” Graysmith defends his Aqua Velva and after Avery takes a long sip following a short pause, Fincher smash cuts to Downey Jr. with his head resting on a booth table with six empties in front of his face. With an ace song choice of “Crystal Blue Persuasion” playing in the background, Avery drunkenly asks Graysmith what he wants out of all of this sleuthing, explaining “it’s good business for everyone but you.”

Downey Jr.’s sardonic wit is the highlight of these early interactions — and remains one of his most indispensable assets all these years later — but Avery’s self-destructive streak created a pathway for a more tragic performance. After Avery receives a Halloween card from the Zodiac, ominously portending “you are doomed”, crime reporters begin sporting “I Am Not Paul Avery” pins, cheekily signaling they don’t want to be targeted next. Though Paul himself clips it to his lapel and says of the Killer “he wishes to remain anonymous; I wish to remain infamous”, the stresses of the unwanted attention take their toll. Avery buys a gun, smokes like a chimney and takes enough day trips to Morti’s to put his position at the Chronicle in jeopardy. A third act scene set on Avery’s houseboat hammers home how his involvement in the case led to a heartbreaking downward spiral.

Downey Jr. has made it clear through several interviews that his time shooting Zodiac was not especially pleasant. Fincher is well-known to be an exacting filmmaker, sometimes demanding dozens of takes for even seemingly simple scenes. Needless to say, Downey Jr. didn’t have any room for looser line readings or improvisation and Fincher’s penchant for perfectionism inevitably led to long days of shooting. Downey Jr. found his own way of protest by, according to Fincher, leaving mason jars of urine on-set in lieu of loo breaks. Years later, Downey Jr. would work with Christopher Nolan on — and ultimately win an Oscar for —Oppenheimer and the experience working with another similarly precise director seemed to give him a renewed appreciation for the process. Speaking in 2023 with co-star Mark Ruffalo, Downey Jr. admits “I called Fincher recently because, in retrospect, everything changes. 15 years later, you have such a different perspective on stuff, you know?”

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

If the archetypal Denzel Washington performance can be summarized in a single word, it would be “control”. No matter who he’s playing, we in the audience trust that his character has things under control. Robert Zemeckis knows we expect this, which is why he opens his 2012 character drama Flight with Denzel strutting down a hotel hallway to Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright” after ripping a line of cocaine. In fact, it’s so in line with what we expect from his characters, it could certainly be seen as a cocky needle drop so on-the-nose that it’s meant to play for laughs. But like the plane that Denzel’s pilot character Whip Whitaker flips mid-air later in the first act, Zemeckis inverts Denzel’s cool, calm and collected persona in his story of compromised heroism. Washington has been outstanding in many films but his work in Flight remains my favorite of his still-thriving career.

As Whip Whitaker, Denzel exudes the brand of confidence we expect of our commercial captains and it’s not unearned. After taking off from Orlando, Whitaker ably navigates through a storm during takeoff so perilous that it even rattles his young co-pilot Ken Evans (Brian Geraghty). We learn Whip was likely able to stay so sedate during the emergency because he’s still drunk the night before, a condition he exacerbates by pouring a couple shooters of vodka into an orange juice bottle while addressing the cockpit after the fracas. A sudden mechanical failure leads Evans to cede control of the plane back to Whitaker, who turns an uncontrolled nosedive into a crash landing that spares the lives of almost all aboard. Whip wakes up in the hospital with Charlie Anderson (Bruce Greenwood), a friend of Whip’s since their days together in the Navy, by his bed on behalf of the pilots union.

Now it’s Charlie’s turn to navigate a vessel on the ground even more unstable than the one Whip maneuvered in the sky. Charlie and Whip go back a ways but the former doesn’t seem to realize the extent of the latter’s personal issues until he learns more about the details of the emergency crash-land. Charlie brings in a “co-pilot” in the form of criminal negligence attorney Hugh Lang (Don Cheadle), who calls attention to the toxicology report done in the hospital that indicates Whip’s BAC as .0.24%. Given the scale of the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board is forced to conduct a thorough investigation and though Whitaker’s actions were heroic, his compromised state during the flight means he could be facing serious prison time. While waiting for the NTSB to rule on the cause of the crash, Whip finds comfort in the arms of Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a fellow addict he met while recovering in the hospital.

Wisely, Zemeckis doesn’t allow his film to get mired in the bureaucracy of lawyers prepping for the public hearing the NTSB will hold to pass along their findings about the incident. Flight is focused on Whip, what drives him to drink and why it’s so difficult for him to confront his alcoholism. He sees in Nicole a wounded soul struggling to overcome her demons but doesn’t quite seem to consider how much alike they may be. Like everyone else, she’s in awe of the expertise and instinct that allowed him to save all but 6 of the 102 people onboard that fateful flight. But the stress of the NTSB’s in-depth inquiry leads Whip to hit the bottle even harder than usual, causing Nicole to take the role of caretaker more than girlfriend. She hasn’t known him long but knows he needs help, twisting his arm to attend an AA meeting in which he sullenly sits cross-armed before leaving a few minutes after it begins.

As a Denzel Washington vehicle, what Flight does so brilliantly is make us reconsider the confident characters that the larger-than-life actor has portrayed in the past and wonder how many had the struggles that Whip has here. If the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, he’s been stubbornly standing with his heels together for years. Even though it cost him his marriage and a relationship with his now-teenaged son, his addiction remains the most crucial priority in Whip’s existence. Calling the aftermath of the crash a “come to Jesus moment” lines up nicely with the “Act Of God” designation that can appear on accident reports. When Lang brings up the term while surveying the crash site with Whitaker, Whip solemnly ponders “whose God would do this?” Zemeckis taps on the theme of religion earlier in the movie, by way of a cancer patient character played by James Badge Dale who posits that even if you hate God, you’d be a fool not to believe in one.

Though every actor who appears in Flight, including John Goodman and Melissa Leo, makes the absolute best of the screen time they have, Washington is not only perfect for this role but flawless in his execution. After spending more time with Charlie and Hugh after the accident, he’s all too happy to direct his indignation at the airline for giving him a plane that was doomed to fail but isn’t able to admit that his intoxicated state points to deep moral failing. The scene where he attends the funeral of one of the flight attendants shines a spotlight on the vulnerability that Washington brings to this performance. He spends most of his time up to the NTSB hearing scrambling to cover his six, specifically in trying to convince one of the surviving flight attendants that he was in good shape to fly. His desperation and consternation in this moment flies in the face of the stoic, sun-glassed specialist we see in the opening moments of the movie.

Rewatching Flight after seeing Zemeckis’ disastrous Here in theaters last month, it’s a testament to just how right or wrong the veteran filmmaker can go depending on the story he’s piloting. After the one-two punch of What Lies Beneath and Cast Away — the latter which incidentally hinges on a plane crash — in 2000, he spent the rest of the decade on mo-cap animated ventures that leaned into technical innovation. Though the terrifying aircraft setpiece in Flight utilizes CG effects, they still look convincing and Zemeckis holsters the technical wizardry throughout the remainder of the film. He trusts his actors and knows that the special effect is in watching these performers make magic in their interaction with one another.

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

When it comes to horror, I’d like to think that I’ve seen my fair share of both the bonafide classics and the most chattered-about of recent entries. But there’s a title that I’ve seen name-checked more and more in interviews and reviews over the past several years and that’s Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession. Up until last year, it was a bit difficult to access the film (at least in the US) but the cult film finally arrived on streaming for the first time in 2023, thanks to the horror service Shudder. This past summer, it was also announced that Robert Pattinson and Smile 2 director/writer Parker Finn are in the process of remaking the movie, which should widen the original’s audience even further. So it seemed a fitting time to go back and remedy a horror blindspot whose reputation has improved considerably since its initial release in 1981.

At its most fundamental level, Possession is the story of a struggling marriage devolving past the point of recognition. It begins with Anna (Isabelle Adjani) asking Mark (Sam Neill) for a divorce, a request that he doesn’t take especially well at the outset but at least tries to remain civil about. The pair discuss living arrangements and shared custody for their son Bob (Michael Hogben) but after causing a scene at a restaurant, Mark turns to booze to distract himself from the pain of losing his wife. While picking Bob up for school one day, Mark notices that Anna has seemingly left him by himself for days and things get stranger when Mark meets Bob’s teacher Helen (also played by Adjani) and she looks almost identical to Anna. Suspicious of Anna’s goings-on following their separation, Mark hires a private investigator to see what’s keeping Anna from taking care of their son.

The aspect of Possession that usually comes up first when it’s discussed is the intensity of the performances, particularly the dual role by Isabelle Adjani. A flashback sequence set in a subway station showcases spasmodic acting from Adjani so manic and visceral that it went on to inspire homages from a Massive Attack music video starring Rosamund Pike to a similar one-take scene in The First Omen earlier this year. While this is unquestionably Adjani’s most unhinged sequence in terms of physical performance, there are several other scenes of confrontation with Sam Neill’s character that aren’t far behind in terms of ferocity. An argument earlier in the film leads Anna to slap Mark in retaliation, presumably for the first time in their marriage. When he turns back to face her, the fear in her eyes slowly softens and gives way to a demented smile that she unsuccessfully tries to wipe away.

Sam Neill is still best known for his role as Dr. Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park series but he’s many, many miles away from that paleontologist’s placid personality in Possession. Even in the quieter scenes, Neill has a crazed sort of look in his eyes that never makes us feel certain he won’t lash out in a violent rage at a moment’s notice. As his journey into Anna’s troubled psyche and concerning activities creeps along, there’s little question that Mark is losing his grip on reality and sense of self in the process. Even when he rocks back and forth in a chair we see him sit in during several different points in the movie, his body is so rigid that it doesn’t even register that he’s getting any benefit or comfort from the activity. The makeup used on Adjani and Neill makes them appear as pale as ghosts through most of the movie, making it easier to view their characters as a pair of incensed apparitions haunting each other.

Given the personal nature of the narrative, it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Andrzej Żuławski wrote and directed Possession — which he describes as “essentially a very true-to-life autobiographical story” — on the back of a messy divorce. Not only does this inform the numerous scenes of explosive domestic strife but it also underlines Mark’s paranoia about Anna’s lover Heinrich (played by Heinz Bennent) and why she chooses to be with him. Without giving too much away, the inclusion of a Kafkaesque creation and the evocation of doppelgängers later on in the film point to Mark’s fear of the unknown and neurotic insecurity about his own shortcomings. Even without much context into Żuławski’s personal life, it’s fascinating watching him work out his troubled thoughts through this bizarre and beguiling beast of a film.

There are so many movies about demonic and supernatural possession that horror fans may go into Possession expecting familiar narrative beats of the subgenre but the film certainly doesn’t adhere to any such formula. In fact, the simple title generates several questions about which characters in Żuławski’s story are actually possessed and who or what is possessing them. On first viewing, I can’t say I have concrete answers for those questions and yet still feel that it’s a perfect title to sum up the essence of the picture. The acting, not just from the two leads but from all of the performers, feels like it was the product of humans whose spirits temporarily left their body so they could house otherworldly spirits that move and speak in ways that can’t be easily deciphered. If you want to know what it feels like to be in the grips of madness, spending two hours with Possession may just be the ticket.