The Big Bum

 This time around my job was made easier by watching yet another film; “The Beach Bum”, with Matthew McConaughey and many others.  Its resemblance to another film, much older but similar, “The Big Lebowski”, reminded me that I’d never actually reviewed the latter film.

The Big Lebowski (1998).  Jeff Bridges plays Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, a stoner/bowler in L.A. who doesn’t seem to do much more than smoke weed and bowl with his comrades, Walter (John Goodman) and Donnie (Steve Buscemi).  Walter affects to be Jewish – citing all sorts of Orthodox restrictions on his conduct - when it was his ex-wife who was Jewish.  The group competes in bowling with an eccentric Latino, Jesus (John Turturro). 

The Dude is harassed by thugs who mistake him for another Lebowski, a rich man who lives nearby.  When he visits the man’s huge mansion and confronts his namesake about the inequity of the situation, a rug ruined by the thug’s gratuitous urination thereon, for which he demands restitution, he’s initially escorted out – until he’s summoned back later when Rich Lebowski sees fit to use him for his own ends.  And thereupon a series of amusing misadventures ensue – even including the Rich Lebowski’s daughter Maude (Julianne Moore), who tends to cut through most of the confusion of the plot, much to our relief. Although the Dude doesn’t seem to have any source of income or a livelihood, he somehow manages to pay rent and buy weed.  Even so, he still seems to have a sense of ethics and responsibility.  In that regard I much prefer the Dude to the Bum.

The Dude is based on a real, guy, Jeff Dowd, and some of the events in the movie are based on real ones, though I have no clue how much of them are, or which particular ones.  Even so, it’s a memorable and enjoyable film which repays multiple viewings.  Not only that, each of the major actors do a commendable role, and it belongs among Bridges’ more notable works.

Jesus Rolls (2020).  A later spinoff, taking Jesus (John Turturro’s characters) as its basis, adding in Bobby Cannavale and Audrey Tatou – plus some secrets like Christopher Walken, Pete Davidson, and Susan Sarandon – hell, even Jon “Mad Men” Hamm.  Apparently Turturro wanted his own film and the Coen brothers disagreed, so he bought the rights from them and had this done, the plot being a remake of an early 70s French film (“Going Places”, with Gerard Depardieu).  The film basically has Turturro, Cannavale and Tatou “going places” in different stolen cars with a variety of misadventures, none of which are particularly remarkable or memorable.  “The Dude” remarked at how his rug, since spoiled by urine, anchored his apartment, and on a grander scale, Bridges’ character itself anchored that film.  If you suspected that a Jesus film wouldn’t be worth watching more than once, and even then out of mere morbid curiosity, you’d be right.  Maybe a better spinoff would be to show us Donnie IN his element.  Maybe not. 

The Beach Bum (2019).  This film is apparently 100% fiction.  Unlike the “The Big Lebowski”, which takes place in L.A., this film takes place in Miami.  The central character is Moondog (Matthew McConaughey), a stoner poet who doesn’t seem to do much other than smoke weed continuously and quote others’ poetry as his own.  His daughter is getting married, and he almost misses the wedding having sex in a greasy spoon kitchen with a woman he just met.  His own wife, Minnie (Isla Fischer) carries on a thinly veiled affair with “Rie” (short for Lingerie) (Snoop Dogg), Moondog’s source of primo quality weed – including an exclusive plant from Jamaica. 

After the wedding, Moondog and Minnie go off driving, the results of which – since both were highly intoxicated – end them up in the hospital, Minnie dying soon thereafter.  She was apparently super rich, but her will puts Moondog’s half into escrow until he finishes his book of poetry, which he has been erratically contributing to with a typewriter.  In between dopey adventures – including a court-ordered stint in rebab, which he simply leaves with a fellow rehabber, Flicker (Zak Efron) – somehow he manages to finish the book of poetry, submit it for publishing, and satisfy the terms of Minnie’s will.  Martin Lawrence is also in here as Captain Wack, a Vietnam Vet (actually highly implausible given that, these days, Vietnam veterans are in their 70s) who gives dolphin tours on his boat but who can’t seem to tell dolphins from sharks, to his injury.

McConaughey did remark, that when making the film, almost all the “weed” is actually fake, some blend of oregano, etc.  However, in one scene, the weed provided by Snoop was, in fact, the real thing.   

As noted, this story is fiction.  How did Moondog hook up with Minnie in the first place?  It seems he was living in her huge mansion until the will freeze evicted him.  The rest of us don’t have rich spouses subsidizing our cannabis lifestyles.  I didn’t find the Beach Bum, Moondog, to be nearly as sympathetic as The Dude.   For all we know, Moondog is who Wooderson (McConaughey’s first role, in “Dazed and Confused”) eventually becomes.  Sadly, unlike “The Big Lebowski” and “Dazed and Confused”, this film doesn’t give us any memorable catch phrases.  

But hey, that might be just my opinion, man….

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.

TRON

This was a movie released in 1982 by Disney, which we saw in the movie theaters when it came out, on our home leave to the US that summer.  It features, among others, Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan, and Bernard Hughes.  The true star, of course, is the special effects.

Story.  The main character, Flynn (Bridges) starts off the movie as a video arcade operator, squeezed out of ENCOM (hmm, sounds like ENRON) by Dillinger (Warner) who stole his game, “Space Paranoids”, and has basically taken over not only the firm itself, but also its system, with his ominous Master Control Program (MCP), which had started out as a chess program (ZZZ).  Flynn meets up with Alan (Boxleitner) and Lora (Morgan) who still work at ENCOM and find Dillinger’s management practices and policies less than ideal.  They sneak Flynn into ENCOM after hours.

Flynn tries to break into the system, and is digitized into the computer itself.  This is where the fun and magic – and confusion – begin.

In the virtual computer world, the programs are personified into people.  They either submit to the MCP or face off against each other in gladiatorial games, including a light cycle game and another one involving discs thrown around like jai alai (where are Crockett and Tubbs?  With G. Gordon Liddy as Dillinger!).  Flynn and his comrade Tron (the computer version of Alan), meet up with another program, Ram, and escape from the games.  Eventually they team up with Yori (Lora’s virtual counterpart) and set off to bring down Sark (Dillinger’s computer counterpart) and the MCP.

To be honest, I found the subtleties of the plot a bit hard to follow, both as a 13 year old in 1982 and as a 39 year old a few weeks ago watching the film again.  Suffice to say that the following things happen:

1.         Ram is de-rezzed (killed), but not before learning that Flynn is, in fact a user (real person and not just another program). 

2.         Flynn captures a Recognizer (nasty bad guy tank which looks like an unfolded staple flying around with its open end face down) and makes some progress in that.

3.         They steal a Solar Sailor, an incredibly cool ship which sails along a beam over cyber landscapes.

4.         Tron interfaces with an I/O tower with his disc and gets the necessary information from Alan in the real world, on how to defeat the MCP.

5.         Despite being captured, Flynn and Lori manage to escape and assist Tron in defeating first Sark, then the MCP itself, which explodes in spectacular fashion. 

6.         With the MCP destroyed, Flynn is re-digitized back to real life, Dillinger is discredited, and Flynn gets to take control over ENCOM.  And there was much rejoicing…

Special effects.  Even today, they hold up remarkably well.  In fact, the entire environment was unique; I haven’t seen anything like it since.  The clever part about this is that it’s MEANT to be a virtual world, not the real world corrupted and enhanced with special effects.  This is why “Tron” and “The Matrix” worked so well, and why “The Phantom Menace” worked so poorly.

            I’m not one of those people who tries so hard to discredit and slam films with substantial special effects, as if to say “uh, you don’t impress me.”  I try to enjoy them and appreciate their role in the picture.  Unless the plot totally and completely sucks, and the movie makers clearly intended to bootstrap the film relying on the special effects – which seemed to be the case with “The Phantom Menace” and the subsequent Matrix films – I can handle them.  I will agree that in some cases, like the recent “Spiderman” films with Toby Maguire (spectacularly miscast as Peter Parker, in my opinion), the special effects are overwhelming even with a passable plot.   It’s all a matter of balance and execution, but ultimately the appreciation and entertainment element will be subjective.  We all have different tastes.

Video games.  I never liked the standalone arcade version of this game.  The video games we really got into with this were the three Intellivision games, “Tron Deadly Discs”, “Tron Maze-A-Tron”, and “Tron Solar Sailor”, the last being one with the IntelliVoice system. 

            Although well done and impressive, “Solar Sailor” was a bit ambitious, and I don’t recall playing it more than 2-3 times, much less completing the game.  “Maze-A-Tron” was alluring and tempting, but I found the scrolling feature to be annoying as hell, as was the MCP challenge phase.  Even if you defeated the MCP, you still got sent back to the maze phase.  So what was the point?? Remarkably, it was “Deadly Discs”, the crudest and simplest of the three, which I found most playable and enjoyable, and which we played by far the most.  You simply throw the disc at the three opponents, block their special discs, knock the doors open, defeat the Recognizer, and after a million points, avoid the bad guys with their paralysis sticks.  This was a game you could play for awhile without getting bored, and one of the better Intellivision games.

Jeff Bridges.  I’ve already mentioned the 1976 King Kong film.  I have to say I generally like his roles, particularly “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” (w/Clint Eastwood), “The Big Lebowski” (w/John Goodman), and “Tucker”.

David Warner.  Remarkably, this guy is STILL alive and still doing movies, though nothing I’ve seen him in lately.  Like Patrick Stewart, he’s a Shakespearean actor who found himself immersed in science-fiction roles. In addition to this film, his other great bad guy role was as Jack the Ripper in “Time After Time”, the 1979 sci-fi film which featured “your humble narrator” Malcolm McDowell as effete, shy, bookish H.G. Wells instead of the nasty, ultra-violent Alex from “A Clockwork Orange”.

Cindy Morgan.  My brother pointed out that she was also the slut in “Caddyshack”, perhaps not as recognizable here with no golf courses, Chevy Chase, or Bill Murray in the Tron virtual world.

I hear they will be making a sequel to Tron, possibly involving Jeff Bridges.  I’ll certainly watch it.

King Kong (1976 Model Year)

I caught the new Peter Jackson "King Kong" film when it came out in the theaters, then purchased the original 1933 film on DVD a few months ago. And recently I bought the 1976 version on DVD. This one seems to get a bad rap. Here are a few thoughts.

1. World Trade Center. After 9/11, it’s not there anymore. So far as I understand, if they are going to build anything to replace it, it won’t be a twin tower replica (though if it were up to me - !!! – I’d say rebuild them just as they were as a big FUCK YOU to Al Qaeda). So this movie is a good way to see it, albeit at night with a big ape, a beautiful woman, a screaming guy in a beard, the National Guard, and a few Vulcan-equipped attack helicopters. Just the way I remember it.

2. Dinosaurs. Where are the dinosaurs? Just Kong, a big snake, and that’s it. No fake brontosaurus, no fake stegosaurus, no fake T Rexes, no fake pterodactyl. No one gets gruesomely eaten by a monster, just chucked off the log into a ravine – not even any giant spiders. That was kind of a letdown.

3. Jessica Lange vs. Fay Wray vs. Naomi Watts. Fay Wray was extremely average. ZZZZ. Naomi Watts is certainly much prettier, but of the three, Jessica Lange was by far the hottest and most interesting. Her backtalk to Kong was hilarious. Even Kong couldn’t resist playing with her boobs. Her acting and "presence" alone give this movie a big plus vs. both the others, each of whom serve as barely competent "woman" for the role, as if they were temps filling a part-time secretary position. Lange adds something special, beyond simply being pretty and screaming.

4. PETROX!! Charles Grodin’s Fred Wilson character was also a laugh. That may have been his best performance in any movie - especially since he usually plays dull, quiet unassertive nonentities. The stiffs in 1933 were cast to type and incredibly dull. Jack Black was fairly good as Denham in the Peter Jackson remake, and Adrien Brody is spectacularly miscast as a heroic adventurer - of all of these, the overambitious Petrox dude steals the show.

5. Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges). Although he came off as a snotty know-it-all sometimes, I still liked his character. He was certainly more interesting than Bruce Cabot (1933) or Adrien Brody (2005). Coupled with Lange and Grodin, it's as if the absence of dinosaurs was offset by much more livelier and interesting human characters.

6. Another Odo Sighting. Rene Auberjonois, aka "Clayton" on "Benson", Father Mulcahy in the film version of "M*A*S*H", and many other places, was Petrox’s witty geologist. Just who the Federation needed on Deep Space Nine.

7. Media Circus. In each movie, Kong was perfectly quiet and cooperative in his "escape-proof steel cage" until the bastards of the press started causing trouble. If they had left well enough alone there probably wouldn’t have been any unpleasantness later on. Kong could have continued his country-wide tour, earned lots of bananas, and lived happily ever after. Maybe he could have written a book (ghost-written, I imagine). Now we’ll never know. I blame the media.

8. VHS. In 1980 we bought our first VCR. After deciding the "Beta vs. VHS????" question in favor of VHS (didn’t everybody?), we went up to the PX at S.H.A.P.E., Belgium, and bought an RCA VCR, something HUGE – twice the size of a current machine and 50 lb.; we ended up calling it the "Dinosaur" years later. And the first tape we bought: KING KONG (1976). We still have it – both the tape and the VCR. Come visit our museum of obsolete equipment, also featuring an Apple //e (with its massive 128k memory capacity).

9. Dino de Laurentiis. Not only did he produce this version, he also produced "Serpico" (mentioned earlier in my blog) and "Conan the Barbarian" (also mentioned earlier in my blog), as well as "Flash Gordon" (1980), "Dune" (the 1984 version with Kyle McLachlan as Paul Atreides and Sting as Feyd-Rautha), and "Maximum Overdrive" (1986), the Steven King film with an AC/DC soundtrack.

So there’s more than meets the eye even with an otherwise mundane remake.