Category Archives: Cinema

Classic movie watch — The Big Heat (1953)

If you’re looking for the precursor to Dirty Harry and a thousand other righteous vigilante cops in the cinema look no further than Fritz Lang‘s 1953 film noir masterpiece, The Big Heat. Starring the underrated Glenn Ford as crusading homicide detective Dave Bannion, The Big Heat unspools like an Eisenhower-era nightmare, peeling away the veneer of wholesomeness from a mid-sized metropolis to reveal the festering corruption beneath. With bracingly modern use of brutal violence, Heat is one of Lang’s top crime masterpieces in a career filled with them, and the film still retains its power to shock and disturb today. Like so much of the Austrian genius’ output, which includes genre-defining classics like Metropolis, M, Fury and Scarlet Street, the phrase “ahead of its time” sticks to the The Big Heat. No matter how many times you’ve viewed it, you’ll come away astonished at the remarkable moral distance the film has traveled from start to finish.

While investigating a colleague’s alleged suicide and after talking to the seemingly bereaved widow, Ford’s Detective Bannion is contacted by the dead man’s mistress who reveals that not only was he keeping her on the side but that he was living far beyond the means of a policeman’s salary. After returning to push for answers from the now chilly dead cop’s wife, Bannion is then told to back off by his lieutenant. But when the mistress is found murdered, her body covered with cigarette burns, and O’Bannion begins receiving threatening calls at his home, he goes to the house of the local organized crime figure and Mr. Big, Mike Laguna (played by legendary voice actor Alexander Scourby), to confront him. Laguna offers to buy Bannion off but the straight arrow cop will have none of it. Seeing that Bannion cannot be deterred by the usual methods, the mob plans to murder Bannion by rigging his car to blow up. But when his wife ends up turning the ignition instead and his department continues to stonewall him, Bannion resigns from the force to begin a one-man crusade against Laguna and his fellow “thieves”.

Chief among those accomplices is Laguna’s enforcer, Vince Stone. Played to vicious perfection by the great Lee Marvin, at the peak of his early career powers when he was one of the most badass “heavies” in the movies, Marvin’s Stone is a pure psychopath capable of truly terrifying acts of sudden violence, especially against women. Continue reading →

Documentary view — The Wrecking Crew (2008)

Chronicling the greatest group of musicians you never heard of, 2008’s The Wrecking Crew is a an affectionate, in-depth portrait of the crack session musicians behind some of the biggest hits in Rock ‘n Roll history. This elite group of LA sidemen was anonymous to the general public but omnipresent during the 1960s and 70s on smash hits by Phil Spector, The Beach Boys, Herb Alpert, Sonny & Cher, The Byrds, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, the Mamas and the Poppas, The Righteous Brothers and Elvis Presley, to name just a few of the most prominent stars they recorded with. The Wrecking Crew also served as the real band behind ersatz music industry creations such as The Monkees and The Association, where the members did not actually play their own instruments on the records. Even on the first Byrds album, a real rock band that featured standout musicians like David Crosby and Gene Clark, it’s pretty much just Roger McGuinn and the Crew because producer Terry Melcher didn’t trust the others to play the session at first. As McGuinn slyly comments in the film, both “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” became Number 1 hits. But with just him and the Wrecking Crew, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and its B-side took about 3 hours. When all the Byrds got their chance to play on “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, that took about 77 takes.

If you’re at all interested in Rock folklore or have affection for the big pop hits of that ultra-well produced era, you’ve really got to check out this documentary. Directed by Danny Tedesco, the son of arguably the greatest and most versatile session guitarist of all time, the late Tommy Tedesco, and featuring interviews with the other greats of that exclusive club, The Wrecking Crew serves as a vital oral history of a pivotal era in American popular music. It also sheds an edifying light on a time where a handful of on call musicians worked 15-hour days and criss-crossed Los Angeles from studio to studio working one high powered session after another. Among the standouts profiled are the great electric bassist, Carol Kaye, who was groundbreaking not only because she was a woman but also because she was good enough to play an estimated 10,000 recording sessions in her career, contributing the bass hooks to pop culture artifacts like “The Beat Goes On”, “Windy” and the theme from “Mission: Impossible”. There’s a nice focus on the strong personalities of the impeccable drummers Hal Blaine and Earl Palmer, both Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Famers who helped form the thunderous backbeat of Spector’s immortal Wall of Sound and did less bombastic work on about a million other records. And then there are the Wrecking Crew alumni who graduated to front of the stage stardom, like Glenn Campbell, Leon Russel and Mack Rebennack aka Dr. John.

Ultimately a touching tribute and heartfelt salute to a fun-loving dad and his wonderfully individualistic collective of colleagues, Danny Tedesco’s affably personal piece highlights the very funny Tommy Tedesco’s wry humor and guitar genius but never at the expense of his equally talented and interesting peers. It also makes ample use of fantastic period footage and interviews with big time stars like Cher and Brian Wilson who the Wrecking Crew’s superlative talents helped make so successful. What comes across when those those big names reflect on that time is their heartfelt respect and appreciation for the invaluable musicianship and craft of the men and women who worked their sessions, made their hit records and more often than not didn’t even get an album credit. A must for the casual fan or hardcore Rock fanatic, The Wrecking Crew is both a delightful piece of nostalgia forever preserved in cinematic form and an important record of a vital but hidden behind-the-scenes part of the music industry that most of us never really knew existed. I can’t recommend it highly enough. And the best part is that it’s currently a free rental on Netflix so there’s no reason not to check it out. Chances are you’ll be blown away by the incredible number of Rock classics these session aces played on. I sure was.

Earworm of the day/A little Wednesday comedy

Ever since I flew back from vacation a few weeks ago and killed some time with the obligatory viewing of The Big Lebowski, this song has been rattling around my brain. You know the one — the psychedelic side of Kenny “The Gambler” Rogers? Who knew, right? Works on a few levels — period pop, ironic delight, its permalink with a cult classic movie. And, oh that Coen Brothers “video”!

Are you ready for the sequel?

What We’re Watching – Billabong’s “Pump!”

Even though summer still beats down on us, a surf movie may seem an odd choice for a serious film recommendation, but that’s how I’m offering it to you. Aside from Bruce Brown’s “Endless Summer” and perhaps one or two other exceptions, most surf movies can not fairly be called movies at all. They are more accurately known as “videos” – a collection of impressive surfing snippets set to some popular music of the day, without much in the way of structure, designed more to trigger memories of one’s own surf sessions or inspire one to new heights, all while steadfastly promoting a brand by unapologetically hyping the surfers who are sponsored by that brand. If you’re a surfer, they’re really fun to watch but never go beyond the fun one can find these days by watching a succession of surfing clips on Youtube. They don’t transcend themselves. They’re not movies. The one exception to this rule however, is Billabong’s Pump!.

Pump!, produced by surf clothing company Billabong and directed by famed surf movie director Jack McCoy, was released in 1990. On its surface, Pump! essentially sticks to the same model as other surf flicks of the 80’s, with college/alternative rock playing over the surf clips and not much else of anything to drive the film form start to finish. What elevates Pump! to feature movie level however, is the subtext within these otherwise ordinary choices.

First you have the surfers themselves. The film features many members of the Billabong team circa 1990, but two emerge quickly and wordlessly as the films protagonists- Mark Occhilupo and Richie Collins. In 1990, Mark Occhilupo (known more commonly as Occy) was a bit of a mess. Just 5 years earlier he’d been one of the top ranked pro surfers on the planet, but in 1988 he gave in fully to the pressures of super-stardom and fell into a cycle of drug abuse and depression. Up until the late 90’s (when he staged a legendary comeback and finally became the world champion) his life was marked by excesses of all kinds, manifesting publicly in cycles of huge weight gains and losses, along with attempted comebacks and glimmers of glory followed quickly by his immediate disappearance again. Pump! catches him in his periods of top form during this time. While he may appear a bit off his top form physically in one or two scenes, his surfing is incredible. The only dialogue we hear in the entire movie is a voice-over leading into one segment where Occy, in his thick Aussie twang, briefly describes his loss of appetite for competition and newfound focus on free (non-competitive) surfing. Pump! catches Occy in limbo in more ways than one, and what may have been thought of (at least by Billabong) as a chance to present their fading star as still being the invincible hero of recent memory, was instead presented by McCoy as a man with incredible gifts who is in a game of chicken with fate. While his skill seems as untouchable as ever, his future does not.

Continue reading →

Gorgeous Lady of the Week — Gretchen Mol

It’s not easy having a great second act as an actress in Hollywood, where 20-somethings rule and if you don’t break through by the time you’re 30 there are a dozen other fine young things ready to shove you out of the way. Which is not to say that the remarkable Gretchen Mol did not make an impact at a young age. In fact, no less than the cover of Vanity Fair asked if she was the “Next It Girl” in 1998 when she was just 26. But through no fault of her own, that seemingly instant fame led to blowback and heightened expectations that never seemed to be fulfilled. Until now.

The 42-year-old blonde beauty was born in Connecticut and studied acting at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy and the prestigious William Esper Studio, both in New York City. After work in the traditional training ground of New England summer stock, Mol was spotted by a talent agent and also photographer Davis Powell, which led to a cover on W magazine and a short-lived modeling career, as well as big buzz about her future.

But her publicity always seemed to outstrip her achievements as an actress. Despite solid work in small budget Abel Ferrara films, some nice roles for Woody Allen and good part in the Matt Damon-Ed Norton card sharp caper Rounders (1998), Gretchen never found the broad popular success to break into the upper echelon of A-list actresses. Her lack of career momentum even led to The New York Times coining the term “Vanity Fair Cover Curse”. But she had a good small-scale success in both the stage and film versions of Neil Labute’s The Shape of Things, which seemed to give her renewed confidence.

Finally being taken seriously as an actress and not just another pretty face, she delivered a breakout performance in 2005’s highly-regarded Indie smash, The Notorious Bettie Page. Her complex, finely nuanced conception brought the infamous 1950s S&M pinup girl to life as something more than a half-remembered curiosity. With her fresh-faced sex appeal and sly humor and dressed in magnificent period lingerie and Bettie’s trademark dark bangs, Ms. Mol’s doppelgänger performance turned on a whole new generation to Page’s quirky erotic oeuvre, as well as the complex relationship between exploitation and empowerment.

While contributing more quality work alongside Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in the throwback Western remake 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and on TV as the female lead in the American version of Life on Mars (2008-9), Gretchen still found time to start a family with husband Kip Williams. This also led to her turning down work that strayed too far afield from her New York home. Despite this proscription, she landed her best and perhaps most important role in HBO’s groundbreaking gangster epic, Boardwalk Empire. Her seemingly sweet but incredibly twisted Gillian Darmody, a sort of Prohibition-era Medea, is a jaw droopingly complex character pulled off with consummate skill and chilling depth. Quite simply, Gillian Darmody is one of the great female anti-heroines in cinema/TV history, a scheming, deceptive monster of the first degree, and Gretchen plays her magnificently. With her work in Bettie Page and Boardwalk Empire, Gretchen served notice that she’s an actress who can hold her own with anyone on the A-list. As she enters her mid-40s as a fully mature artist we could well be looking at one of the great second acts by any American actress. She’s well on her way and my money’s on Mol to pull it off.

Classic Movie Watch — The Naked Spur (1953)

The third Western in a sequence of five innovative collaborations between director Anthony Mann and Hollywood legend James Stewart, 1953s The Naked Spur is arguably the leanest of them all if not quite the meanest (that honor goes to the slightly later and still shocking The Man From Laramie). With an excellent supporting cast of only four other players, Spur’s taught plot unwinds in the period directly after the Civil War and finds former Union soldier and rancher-turned-bounty hunter Howard Kemp (Stewart) looking to capture fugitive murderer Ben Vandergroat (a constantly laughing and manipulative Robert Ryan, one of the screen’s great neurotic villains) in order to claim the reward on his head and then buy back his lost ranch. Kemp is helped in his tawdry task first by no-luck prospector Jesse Tate (the always excellent character actor Millard Mitchell) and then a dishonorably discharged soldier-adventurer Roy Anderson (the underrated and wonderfully cynical Ralph Meeker), whose morals are definitely flexible. When the hastily assembled trio corner and capture Vandergroat, they discover he is traveling with the young daughter of one his slain gang, Lina Patch (a very lovely and pixieish Janet Leigh). Tate and Anderson also find out, courtesy of the always-plotting Vandergroat, that Kemp is no lawman and also that the reward on him is a staggering $5000. Confronted with this uncomfortable fact, Kemp reluctantly agrees to deal his other two “partners” in for equal shares of the reward. But shortly after the group heads out for Abilene to turn Vandergroat in, Kemp is shot in a needless confrontation with Blackfoot Indians pursuing the unreliable Anderson, leaving him wounded and ever more at the mercy of his dubious companions and the ever-scheming Vandergroat. With the reward payable dead or alive, and Vandergroat set to hang for his murder, the tension ratchets up as the three “good guys” debate whether they should even bother to keep the fugitive alive, Kemp and Lina begin to fall in love and Vandergroat shrewdly tries to manipulate the others so they will turn on each other and he can make his escape.

The seminal films with Stewart marked a turning point in Mann’s career, his middle period really, as he graduated from very good black & white crime thrillers on tight RKO budgets to expansive location Westerns eventually shot in Technicolor. In his last period, Mann would move on to massive widescreen historical epics such as the remarkable El Cid and the sweeping The Fall of the Roman Empire. But Mann first brought his hard boiled noir sensibilities to the Western and as a result his heroes are much more flawed than John Ford’s prairie Galahads and Howard Hawks’ tough talkers with hearts of gold. Continue reading →

Gorgeous Lady of the Week — Alexandra Daddario

To make the obvious point, Alexandra Daddario has looks and a body that can stop traffic. But she also has the acting chops that make her more than just another pretty face. The 29-year-old native New Yorker began as a teen actress in soaps but she quickly graduated to feature work with a starring role in the Chris Columbus-directed big budget fantasy series, Percy Jackson & the Olympians. She played the hero’s love interest, an earthbound demi-goddess, which is some pretty good casting — with her huge blue eyes, dark brown hair and curves galore, Alexandra is definitely blessed with other worldly beauty.

But Alexandra really broke through with her brave and sexy work on the first season of HBO’s mega-dark miniseries, True Detective, scorching the screen in her love scenes with Woody Harrelson. Fearless, strong, yet also vulnerable, her nuanced performance as Lisa Tragnetti, a young woman in love with an older married cop, put her solidly on Holywood’s A-list.

So it was no surprise to see Ms. Daddario cast as Dwayne Johnson’s daughter in this year’s big budget 3D disaster epic, San Andreas. And you can look for her career to continue to ascend with leads in the upcoming William H. Macy-helmed comedy, The Layover, alongside the equally statuesque Kate Upton; and the latest Nicolas “The Notebook” Sparks’ film adaptation, The Choice, slated for 2016 release.

Alexandra Daddario in Cosmopolitan, 2014

Alexandra Daddario gracing the pages of Cosmopolitan in 2013

Talented, beautiful and self-possessed, it will be interesting to see whether she can succeed in comedy. But Alexandra is surely a natural for a classic Hollywood romance. After all, when she shoots those baby blues your way what choice do you really have?

Classic Movie Watch — The Seven-Ups (1973)

If there is a Big 3 of classic car chase movies, it would have to be Bullitt, The French Connection and The Seven-Ups. In 1968, Bullitt ignited the car chase craze that would come to dominate 1970s cop movies and especially TV series. In 1971, The French Connection turned it into art with its ur-cinematic thrill ride beneath and between the elevated trains of New York City. And the vastly underrated The Seven-Ups, made in 1973, essentially elevated the car chase to the level of deus ex machina perfection. One could argue that from that point onwards that pinnacle has been repeatedly attempted but only succeeded in becoming ever more over the top, digitally enhanced and clichéd (although the fantastic against-traffic-in-the-Paris-tunnels sequence in John Frankenheimer’s Ronin does come pretty close to that level of old-fashioned awesome again).

The connection between these three all-time crime classics is their producer, Philip D’Antoni, the somewhat unknown force behind what came to be an action movie staple. For The Seven-Ups D’Antoni also took the director’s helm for the first time and used what he learned on his previous two smash hits to engineer the biggest, baddest car chase of them all. Check it out and see if you don’t agree.

But The Seven-Ups is more than that white-knuckler through Manhattan and across the Hudson to Jersey (and also, if you’re watching closely and out of continuity, up the Taconic into Westchester). It’s also a gritty police procedural with an outstanding cast led by the late, great Roy Scheider as lead cop Buddy Manucci, working again for D’Antoni after his excellent turn as Popeye Doyle’s partner in Connection. As time goes by, one sees how fantastic an actor Scheider was: funny, wry, intense, the bantamweight champion of no nonsense naturalistic tough guy performances. Is it any wonder that he’s in so many key 1970s films? While the fellow cops on his special semi-autonomous squad, tasked to pursue felony crimes with sentences of seven years and up, are not quite as memorable, they form a decent ensemble. In the end, it’s really the shadier characters who counterbalance Scheider’s intense, driven cop.

Tony Lo Bianco also returns to the D’Antoni fold from his breakout performance in French Connection, this time playing Buddy’s boyhood friend Vito Lucia, a funeral home director who provides Manucci with inside dope on the mob. Continue reading →

Documentary view — Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007

Everybody has a favorite James Bond movie and a favorite actor who played the legendary British secret agent. But today relatively few have ever read Ian Fleming’s original books. Fewer still know the story of the men behind the myth and their herculean efforts to get Bond to the screen and keep him on top throughout the decades. 2013’s superlative documentary Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007 brilliantly fills in the blank spaces and inside history for both the casual 007 enthusiast and the hardcore fanatic.

With unprecedented and officially sanctioned access to the key players in Bond’s creation and remarkably enduring success as a cinematic staple for generations, Everything or Nothing delves into Fleming’s biography to show how his conception of James Bond was forged by his work as an intelligence officer for the British Navy during WWII. A cunning planner of sabotage operations, Fleming was nonetheless primarily a desk man who had to live the action vicariously through the exploits of the men “playing Red Indians”, his colorful term for Special Forces commandos operating behind enemy lines. After the war and with a new Soviet enemy to face, Fleming kicked around a bit before finally finding his calling with the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1953. Wonderfully informed with details from his wartime espionage experience if somewhat crudely written in a potboiler style, Casino Royale struck a cord and was an immediate success. This enabled Fleming to devote his energies to writing new adventures for his super spy to please an enthusiastic public if not always the hot-and-cold critics. Between 1952 and his death in 1964, Fleming cranked out twelve full-length Bond novels and two collections of 007 short stories.

James Bond’s exploits were inherently cinematic and almost immediately various film and television producers approached Fleming with ideas for adaptations, with very mixed results initially. Continue reading →

RIP Leonard Nimoy, 1931 — 2015

Leonard Nimoy, an actor who became a worldwide cultural icon with his multifaceted portrayal of Mr. Spock in the groundbreaking 1960s sci-fi series Star Trek, died this past Friday at the age of 83. Nimoy’s characterization of the starship Enterprise’s First Officer functioned as the calm, intellectual super ego influence on Captain Kirk in diametric opposition to the id persona of the hyper-emotional Dr. “Bones” McCoy. The only alien crewmember in the original series, Nimoy gave creative life to the Vulcan philosophy of anti-emotionalism, logic and intellectual rigor and portrayed the consummate outsider bemusedly observing the confusing passions and paradoxes of the human species. In the series, the Vulcan race had long ago determined to exercise rigid control of their emotions in order to put an end the destructive internecine conflicts of their race. But as a mixed race man whose mother was from Earth, Nimoy also gave subtle expression to the human impulses beneath the surface of Spock’s greenish, pointy-eared exterior, which he sometimes struggled to control.

With its futuristic vision of the USS Enterprise as a powerful but peaceful galactic explorer, representative of a vast United Federation of Planets including an Earth that had survived near-apocalyptic conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries, Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic creation was not an overnight sensation. Slowly but inexorably it gained in popularity, growing from a cult following during its short 3-year 1966-69 run on NBC into a global phenomenon, the relentless result of non-stop syndication, animated spin-offs, novelizations and popular paraphernalia & technical literature. By the time Star Trek was reborn cinematically a decade later in the aftermath of the mega-success of Star Wars, an entirely new audience was ready to receive its tales of multi-ethnic, multi-cultural space adventure, which Roddenberry sometimes slyly referred to as simply a “Western in space.” As the myriad sequels, prequels and entirely new associated TV series proved, Star Trek may have started out as geek culture but there was a hunger across a large segment of the world for this intelligently thought out future of our civilization and its flawed but noble heroes and charismatic super villains. And as geek became chic and the brainy outsider became the unlikely hero of a new industrial revolution in the Computer and Internet Age, it’s no great stretch to believe that it was Nimoy’s characterization of Spock, cerebral and outwardly implacable with hidden reserves of humanity, that helped inspire future computer titans like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in their youth. Building upon The Space Race mania of the 60s, Star Trek helped make science and technology as cool and appealing as the astronauts did — just ask all those fans who wound up working at NASA and in other engineering and technological fields. And, as not only the Enterprise’s First Officer but also its Chief Science Officer, no one was cooler than Mr. Spock.

The cast of the original Star Trek series and creator Gene Roddenberry meet the Space Shuttle Enterprise

Leonard Nimoy was also the cast member who had been with the franchise the longest, predating William Shatner’s Kirk and DeForest Kelley’s McCoy. Continue reading →

Man's Fine Life

The Return of the Well-Rounded Gentleman