Deer and Dogs Delivered

 Three movies starting with “D”:  The Deer Hunter, Dogs of War, and Deliverance.

 The Deer Hunter.  I mentioned Michael Cimino’s epically horrible film “Heaven’s Gate” earlier, but now I’ll review his other masterpiece.  This is three hours long.

 Four guys in Pittsburgh, in an ethnic Russian community.  Stan/Stosh (John “I knew it was you, Frodo!” Cazale) is exempt from military service for some reason;  Steven (John Savage); Nicky (Christopher Walken); and Michael (Robert De Niro).  They celebrate Steve’s wedding to Angela, who is pregnant with another man’s child.  They go deer hunting, and Mike kills an impressive male deer.  They go to Vietnam (minus Stosh), and get captured (together) by the VC/NVA and forced to play Russian Roulette.  Mike figures to play with three bullets, and then uses those three shots to kill the three most attentive NVA, takes their weapons and shoots the rest.  In the process of being picked up along the river after escaping, the three lose track of each other.

Mike goes back immediately with no apparent injuries or PTSD.  He hooks up with Linda (Meryl Streep).  Angela is catatonic, but manages to reveal Steve’s location:  missing his legs, playing bingo at a VA hospital.  He wants to stay there indefinitely, as despite being drab and depressing, he’s not much worse off than anyone else.  The only news about Nicky is that he’s AWOL and has not come back.  Ironically, Mike saw him in Saigon before leaving, but couldn’t chase him down after finding him in a Russian Roulette gambling club.

Mike returns again to Saigon, where it must be April 1975:  all hell is breaking loose and civilians are storming the US Embassy compound to leave the country with the Americans.  After some difficulty, he finally tracks down Nicky through the Frenchman.   Sadly, he doesn’t quite manage to get Nicky back to Pittsburgh.  There’s some residual scenage back in Pittsburgh, with Steve now rejoined the community with Angela, but mostly it’s over.  Three hours with only two truly memorable scenes in the entire movie. 

 Dogs of War.  Lately I’ve been checking out older actors’ earlier roles.  Helen Mirren is a major babe in “Age of Consent” (and showing considerable skin).  Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill) actually had a career before “Married With Children” – he’s a NYPD cop in “Cruising”, Al Pacino’s NY cop movie in which he tracks down a serial killer preying on NYC’s gay community.  And in this movie he’s a mechanic who briefly meets with Shannon (Christopher Walken).  

 Shannon is a covert ops guy from NYC who’s hired to assist with a regime change in fictional Zangaro, a country in west Africa.   First he goes on a reconnaissance mission to scope the place out, is badly mistreated by local authorities, barely managing to survive to return to NYC.   Despite this, or maybe because of this – and a huge paycheck promised – he agrees to assemble a team to return and put in a marginally less crappy dictator in place of the crazy current guy.  Lots of violence and explosions.  Tom Berenger is the only other major actor in this. 

 Deliverance.  Four normal guys – Lewis (Burt Reynolds, sans mustache), Ed (Jon Voigt), Bobby (Ned Beatty), and Drew (Ronny Cox) - go on a canoeing trip in Georgia.  The river in question has some dangerous rapids, but the bigger picture is that they are building a dam in the local area which will eliminate the river and put much of the local area permanently underwater.  Although not a hunting trip, per se, Lewis has (helpfully) brought along a bow & arrow.  After Drew has a brief jam with the local banjo kid, they set off down the river, having paid difficult and hostile locals – all of whom consistently give them the “you’re not from around here” treatment – to drive their station wagon and Harvester Scout down to Aindry, the town at the end of the river where they expect to end up.

            Along the way, Ed and Bobby are captured by local Trump supporters and forced to endure unwanted sexual advances that go well beyond merely sniffing their hair.  They are rescued by Drew and Lewis; the consensus seems to be that the locals intended to murder Ed and Bobby after their involuntary romantic interlude.   Then and there, the four agree on a “story”, an alternative explanation of the events, knowing that honestly relating the facts will simply get them a jury of locals sympathetic to the deceased.  On the way back, Drew drowns and Lewis is badly injured.  The authorities suspect foul play but can’t prosecute anyone as the stories are consistent enough and the evidence is buried.   And there was much rejoicing…

The Room and Heaven's Gate

Earlier I specifically reviewed two movies known to be horrendously bad: “Gigli” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space”.  Now it’s time to revisit another pair, “The Room” and “Heaven’s Gate.”

The Room.  This has become a cult classic because of its perceived poor quality.  Unfortunately, it’s actually not bad enough to be “so bad it’s good”.  It’s really just a dull story.  

            Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) is a long-haired, handsome, well-employed guy in San Francisco (the city gets extensive footage so we’re sure exactly where the film takes place – perhaps to pad the running length as the story doesn’t take that long – although it was actually filmed in L.A.)  A perfect catch, right?  His would-be-mother-in-law certainly thinks so.  But his fiancé, Lisa (Juliette Danielle) doesn’t agree:  Johnny is SO perfect, he’s boring.  So she throws herself at any local available males, and eventually finds one horny enough to accept her advances, who happens to be Johnny’s best friend Mark.  Mind you, she’s no particular beauty or catch herself, not all that pretty or sexy, pretty much just plain average in every way.  Normally a woman like her would count her blessings at catching a guy like Johnny.  Not this one.

Eventually Johnny finds out – of course.  And the results aren’t pretty, though not all that surprising, so there are no real plot twists or “damn, I never saw that coming,” more like “well, that escalated quickly.”  In fact, the finale is really the only excitement in the whole film.   That’s it.  No big name actors in this whole thing.   Moreover, many of scenes make no sense, many plot lines are adopted and quickly abandoned seemingly at random, with no connection to the main plot.  Perhaps it was Wiseau’s attempt at some sort of artistic realism, “truth is stranger than fiction”.  But we expect a movie to make sense, we have enough randomness and senselessness in our real lives.

            So what gives the film its notoriety?  The acting is pretty bad, but no worse than a porn movie or those Emmanuelle films.   The special effects are irrelevant, as it’s a drama/romance.  The sex scenes are as tastefully done as any soap opera, which more than anything else this film resembles.  Probably the worst thing about the film is that it’s just pretty boring.   About how you might describe “Gigli”, though that film at least had an A-list cast.

Heaven’s Gate.  This is the famously financially ruinous western from the early 80s.  Kris Kristofferson plays the main guy, Jim Averill, a lawman in otherwise lawless Johnson County, Wyoming.   My father told me this was “the worst film ever made.”  I should have known Michael Cimino, who did “The Deer Hunter”, was responsible, as both films are very long and boring and both feature Christopher Walken.

            After graduating from Harvard in 1870 with John Hurt, Averill finds himself in Wyoming.  The local cattle ranchers, “The Association”, led by Canton (Sam Waterston, in the only unsympathetic role I’ve ever seen him do) draw up a hit list of locals they want arrested and killed.  The targets are recent immigrants from Europe, many Jews, many Germans, etc. the “you’re not from around here” crowd.   They’re just missing Andrea Martin’s clueless Eastern European woman from SCTV, or the entire population of “Fiddler on the Roof’s” fictional Russian village of Anatevka.  

Champion (Walken) starts out as a hitman for the Association but soon switches sides when he realizes its targets are innocents – including his own would-be lover, the local madam Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert).  Nominally Averill’s babe, she shows some serious skin, including full frontal nudity.   That and the visual scenery of big sky Wyoming (actually filmed in Montana – close enough) are among the modest redeeming values of this film.   Jeff Bridges is in here as the local roller rink proprietor, John Bridges (unknown if there any relation).  Minor roles by Geoffrey Lewis, Mickey Rourke, Richard Masur, and Brad Dourif (hard to recognize in a beard).  Not only a decent cast, but the acting is fairly decent as well.  Moreover, it does have a discernable plot, though the plot takes forever to work itself through.

            Of course, the hitmen and the immigrants finally bump ugly in a big climactic battle, which itself takes about 30 minutes – and even that isn’t the end of the film.   Cue Randall in “Star Wars vs. LOTR” bitching about the excessive length.  Remarkably, the 3.5 hour length was itself cut down from the 5 hours Cimino originally wanted.  I had to watch it in three installments: the first 30 minutes, the next 90 minutes, and the final 90 minutes.  Too bad the remaining 90 minutes of cut material wasn’t included as deleted scenes.  

To make matters even more confusing, as originally distributed to theaters in April 1981, the film was cut down to 149 minutes, though the 149 minute “cut” was never released in that format on VHS, laserdisc or DVD. Mind you, 149 minutes is still two and half hours.  All home versions are essentially the one I saw, the 219 minute version, so as of 2014 there is no way – and has been no way – to see the movie as originally theatrically released in 1981. 

Moreover, the story also takes considerable liberties with the historical facts: Watson wasn’t a prostitute, and she and Averill were killed two years before the events in question, among many other significant discrepancies.   Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, eh?  But the #1 issue is simply the excessive length and glacial pace of the film.