Its not too late...

To head in the right direction...

Nobody's perfect

In the early to mid-1980s I found myself working in a health club. Basically, I worked behind the front desk, greeted people, signed them up for memberships and handed them locks and towels. Far from glamorous, the job had its perks: my co-workers enjoyed a good party and would throw down at any given moment and, for both sexes, there was the occasional eye-candy to keep things moving.

But this was also a time when journalist Aaron Latham wrote an article in 1983 for Rolling Stone called "Looking for Mr. Goodbody," making the claim that health clubs were fast becoming the "new singles bars."

Subsequently, the article's result was that every flabby testosterone stoked dude on the make came waddling through the doors looking for more sex than sweat - which, of course, wasn't even close to reality. Most of the customers joined the club for one reason - they were fat. The club I worked in wasn't even close to those Bally's Fitness Center commercials that showed health club members as hot and hotter.

Walk into my club and the first thing you saw was me, who - at that time - was gangly with barely an ounce of muscle. I wasn't lean, I was like skeletor. I was the polar opposite of the models you saw in those moodily lit, disco-throbbing TV ads that were based on false promises, including the promise to lose your gut.

By the time 1985 rolled around, the health club hype as singles bar was waning. This falling off pretty much coincided with the release of Perfect, directed by James Bridges (The Paper Chase, Urban Cowboy, Bright Lights, Big City) and based on the Latham story. Perfect starred John Travolta as Adam, a magazine writer investigating the "singles bar" scene of bump and grind health clubs. Adam becomes involved with a fitness instructor named Jessie (played by Jamie Lee Curtis who teaches aerobics with a stripper's flair), who wants nothing to do with writers (too pastey). Naturally, as Adam and Jessie fall in love, he starts to lose his journalistic objective point of view and the story suffers.

The movie is ridiculous and represents excessive Hollywood bloat supported by too much money-to-burn and cocaine-fueled studio meetings. What's amazing is how wrong Perfect got it. It was so far from believable that the movie became a Hollywood laughing stock and, while not totally shredding Travolta's career, it certainly slammed the breaks on it - albeit temporarily.

He came back big in 1989 as an out of shape cab driver in Amy Heckerling's popular Look Who's Talking - a film, while a box office hit, that ultimately didn't do Travolta any real favors. After Look Who's Talking, he was sequestered to a couple talking baby sequels and straight-to-video obscurities.

But, not completely down and not quite washed up, Quentin Tarantino found his man in Travolta, who left an indelible mark with his best role as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction.

Strawberry Letter 23

The use of Strawberry Letter 23 by The Brothers Johnson in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown is great.

But its even greater here.

Fun-Truckin'!

I picked up a job in June of 1977 as a lawn boy at a condominium neighborhood in the far west suburbs of Chicago. I'd roll out of bed around 7:00 a.m. and walk along abandoned railroad tracks - about 2 miles - to work.

I'd get there around 7:45 and my first duty everyday, before hauling out the lawn mower, was to skim the community swimming pool - ridding it of leaves and skittering bugs - as well as check the water's chlorine levels. Then I'd make sure the filter was in working order. All of this took about 20 minutes. After, I'd go into the pool clubhouse and grab a few winks on one of the community couches. If I'd had a few too many beers the night before, those few winks easily slid into hours.

When I'd wake up - hopefully by 10:00 a.m. or so, I'd go outside and make my way to the maintenance garage, fill the mower's tank with gas, drag it out to the driveway and fire it up.

The idea was to mow a half dozen lawns a day starting on Monday so that by the time Friday came, all 30 condo units looked crisp and clean. With the mowing, I had to bag the cut grass and edge along the sidewalks. It was hard physical labor.

I hated every minute of it.

By July 1st of 1977, my career as lawn boy was over. I was fired. But I became a free man in the suburbs where the rest of my summer days were spent languidly driving around, playing pinball, goofing off with a crew of buddies, going to the drive-in and drinking gallons of Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boys.

The drive-in - specifically the Skylark Drive-in Theater in Aurora, IL - was where I began my film education. It was there that we spent weeknights and weekends watching double features like:

• Ruby and The Beast Must Die
• The Car and Two Minute Warning
• Audrey Rose and Carrie
• The Devil Times Five and Alice Sweet Alice
• God Told Me To and Rabid
• Chatterbox and Sex with a Smile
• The Van and The Pom Pom Girls

The highlight of those drive-in goodies was seeing The Van multiple times. It was directed by Sam Grossman, and starred Stuart Goetz (who's currently a music editor in the movie business) and Danny DeVito. Promoted as "Fun-Truckin'!", the movie made a truck load of promises it couldn't keep. But that didn't matter - like the best cinema of 1977, it was beer-friendly.

And, best of all, its soundtrack included songs by Sammy Johns. The two songs featured were "Early Morning Love" and, of course, "Chevy Van."

Fosse

My favorite Bob Fosse film is All That Jazz. Of all the choreographer's directorial efforts, All That Jazz is the one that I go back to the most. In 1979, Fosse's structure was already ushering in a new cinematic vision; a time when non-linear filmmaking wasn't the norm in mainstream movies.

And, on a personal level, at that time, I struggled to figure out why Fosse had chosen Roy Scheider, an actor defined by tough guy New York cop roles, to play the main character, Joe Gideon. Couldn't figure it out until I saw a photo of Fosse...

Subsequently, Scheider was perfect for the role of Gideon (who is Fosse's alter-ego), a womanizing, pill-popping, hyper-macho, choreographer/filmmaker who pretty much uses his position to seduce women. But the film is a confessional, with Gideon professing his sins (and guilt) to an angel (Jessica Lange) while he falters in that netherworld between life and death after experiencing a final (he's had a series of them) heart attack.

Gideon is overworked but driven, designing the choreography for - as well as directing - a new stage musical (that's probably destined for failure but based on innovation) and editing his latest film, which is about a stand-up comedian who's on the verge of total annihilation.

Its a bizarre and musically attuned excursion into a man's driven psyche that is wired to keep pushing beyond the fray. All That Jazz is about a man who loves what he does with an intense yet chaotic passion. Gideon embraces life to its extremes.

Fosse weaves a documentary style into All That Jazz, utilizing interview techniques while delving into a sort of first person expose. Its a style Fosse adopted for Lenny and his last film, Star 80.

Star 80, released in 1983, was about the murder of Dorothy Stratten, a Playboy Playmate who married the wrong guy - a destructive, intensly jealous psychopath named Paul Snider. While Mariel Hemingway captured the soft-spoken, indecisive but driven, Stratten - it was Eric Roberts' portrayal of Snider that makes the film so frightening and compelling.

Star 80 was photographed by Sven Nykvist, the director of photography who was best known for his work with Ingmar Bergman. Nykvist's eye in Star 80 captured the glossy, cocaine-fueled and decadent late 1970s (concluding in 1980), where bright color is eventually overtaken by the blackest shadows.

Sadly, Fosse died in 1987, having never directed another film after Star 80.

They don't do trailers like this anymore...

...And that is putting it lightly. Black Angels was released in 1970 actually subverting the already subversive sub-genre biker flick. The trailer alone is balls to the wall, jaw dropping, not for the weak of heart, misogynist action with an impossible to beat off the cliff voiceover.

This fantastic 2 minute, 12 second thrill ride to hell trailer simply dares you NOT to see this crazy film.

Al Pacino or Al Capone?

While its common knowledge that Brian De Palma's 1983 Scarface was 'influenced' by the 1932 Howard Hawks directed Scarface (which was based on the real Al Capone), I believe Al Pacino's performance in the De Palma film was more akin to Rod Steiger's in Richard Wilson's 1959 Al Capone than to Paul Muni's performance in the Hawks movie.

Steiger chews up the scenery - and his lines - in Al Capone, swaggering, spitting nails, sputtering a Chicago accent that almost verges on Pacino's over-the-top Cuban accent in the 1983 Scarface. Steiger's macho gait is also emulated by Pacino throughout Scarface and you almost find yourself picturing Tony Montana while watching Steiger in Al Capone.

Wilson's Al Capone is loaded with incredible black and white imagery captured by cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who worked on other visually stunning films such as The Killing, True Grit, The Wild Bunch, What's the Matter with Helen?, Mikey and Nicky, among others. Chicagoans will appreciate how Ballard captured the look of the city (and suburban Cicero), in all of its bleak, prohibition-era glory (though its likely Al Capone was shot on a soundstage).

Al Capone has been playing on TCM lately and its worth seeking out. Its violent (though no blood is shed), funny and brutal - despite its do-nothing voiceover (by the great timbre of James Gregory, who plays a Chicago detective obsessed with taking Capone down), and a safe, socially-conscious ending - an ending that states Capone died broken-down of an "incurable disease," that pretty much ate away the gangster's brain.

Even at that point in time when the film was released, everyone knew Capone had suffered from syphilis and ended up dying of cardiac arrest.

40 times seems excessive

I watch Jaws every 4th of July. Its a tradition that probably started back in 1975, the year the film was released (June 20, 1975) and the year I first saw it. Me and two friends waited 3 hours in line to see the Spielberg film. While waiting in the lobby, you could hear screams coming from the theater. I had never experienced that before.

But seeing Jaws once wasn't enough for me. That summer I saw Jaws every weekend until I started school in September - probably 10 times.

Jaws was re-released in May, 1979, and I'm sure I saw it another three or four times during that period. And, shortly after, MCA released Jaws on VHS in 1980. But I probably didn't see it on tape until 1983, as that was the year I purchased my first VCR.

Subsequently, starting in 1986, I started to watch Jaws every summer around the 4th of July. I've never missed a year. So, home viewing alone, I've watched the movie 26 times. And a couple years ago, it was screened at the Hollywood Palms Cinema in Naperville, IL, with Richard Dreyfuss in attendance. Naturally, I was there.

In total, I've probably seen Jaws 40 times. I can repeat lines, name side characters (Ben Gardner...Polly ["Let Polly do the printing!"], Harry ["That's some bad hat, Harry."]), hum all the variations of the John Williams score.

But one line I continued to miss - until recently (like maybe a year or so ago) was the penultimate line of the film, uttered as Sheriff Brody points his rifle at the rampaging Great White:

"SMILE you son of a bitch!"

Is it a Kilgour suit?

North By Northwest is my 4th favorite Alfred Hitchcock film right after (in order): Vertigo, The Birds and Psycho. Why I like the first three more is because no matter how many times I've seen them (dozens each), they manage to surprise me with an image I'd never noticed, a strange edit, a sting of music not previously picked up. North By Northwest, on the other hand, is too predictable and I find Eva Marie Saint to be one of the coldest of Hitchcock's notorious blondes. She's not as indelible as Kim Novak (Vertigo) or as opulent as Tippi Hedren (The Birds); she plays too forced and arctic. 

What I do like about North By Northwest is its eye-popping palette dominated by tones of grey punctuated by endless variations of red (and Eva Marie Saint's black and red dress is jaw dropping). But in the realm of grey, check out how Cary Grant's suit literally emerges from the screen.

Though debatable, some sartorial camps claim the suit was designed by Kilgour, French and Stanbury, despite the fact that Grant typically had his suits tailored by Hawes & Curtis, Norton & Sons, Cordings, among others. This blog, however, states it wasn't a Kilgour suit at all and this forum says that is was built by Quintino, Grant's Beverly Hills tailor. We may never know...

Also endlessly debated is the suit's color, which has been erroneously designated as one-tone grey. More than likely (according to an article by Richard Torregrossa, who also says it was, indeed, a Kilgour), Grant's suit was a two-tone blue with a "charcoal background," which is what gives it such rich life on screen. Ultimately, the suit is of impeccable taste, masterfully constructed and timeless.

What's amazing about the suit is how seemingly indestructable it is. Grant wears it throughout most of the film including during the famous dusty cornfield crop duster scene. Grant stumbles and falls in dry dirt - and the suit is covered in it - but all he merely needs to do is brush himself off and the damn thing still looks great! And yes, there were multiple suits (possibly as many as six) used during the shooting of North By Northwest but the impression left is one of awe.

Montgomery Ward paint supervisor

One of the first - and worst - jobs I had (I was 16 years old) was working in the paint department at Montgomery Ward. It was a horrible job and I lasted one day - a six hour shift. The job required mixing paint in one of those paint shakers.

Easy right? But the few customers I encountered were not only rude, they were cruel. One man spent a couple hours bickering with me about the inaccuracies of the color that I was trying to achieve through painstaking, wildly imprecise blending (I had no real training. My supervisor, probably 17, sat in the breakroom and smoked). The customer became so pissed that his face turned blood-red as he he leaned toward me demanding that a manager do the mix job.

My supervisor - with slicked back black hair, red silk shirt, tight black bell bottoms, Kool dangling from the corner of his mouth - strutted out from the break room, grabbed a can of white and a small can of base, and measured - eye and hand - the exact amount of base color to add to the white and placed the can in the shaker and let 'er rip. He was grinning and proud.

After the shaking was done, my supervisor opened the can, showed the contents to the customer who slapped him on the back and laughed, "Well its about time!"

The customer walked out of the store a happy man. Me, on the other hand? Miserable. The next day I called the store and quit.

A few nights later, mid-December 1977, I was standing in line with a couple friends to see Saturday Night Fever. As the theater was emptying from an early showing of the film, out walked my old Montgomery Ward paint supervisor. He recognized me. He smiled and held out a hand.

"That," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder back toward the theater, "was the greatest movie you'll ever see. I've seen it 10 times."

I settled in one of the theater's fabric seats as the film started.

Tony Manero strutting down a crowded NYC street. Struts to "Stayin' Alive." Paint can in hand. Strut. Hot chick toward him. Paint can. Strut. Silk shirt lay away. Strut. Music. Another hot chick. Strut. Paint can.

The Last 10 Films I Saw

I like Film Comment's column "The Last 10 Films I Saw" because it provides insight into the listmaker's (typically a filmmaker or actor/actress) psyche.

Here are the last 10 films I saw:

War Horse - 2011
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher version) - 2011
The Great Ziegfeld - 1936
Bellflower - 2011
The Outlaw Josey Wales - 1976
The Philadelphia Story - 1940
Oliver! - 1968
Scrooge (aka A Christmas Carol) - 1951
Oliver Twist - 1948
A Fistful of Dollars - 1964

Happy New Year

1972's The Poseidon Adventure has recently started to show up at various New Year's Eve midnight screenings as campy, audience participation snark. And deservedly so - after all, its cinema at its most over-the-top. But I love this movie and would comfortably place it on my favorite 50 films of all time list.

Back in 1998, I reviewed it for my defunct website, Sky-High Picture Show, and, for New Year's Eve kicks, I thought I'd rerun the review as originally written (warts and all) here.

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The Poseidon Adventure is one of those movies that quantifies the term 'epic proportions' and truly put the disaster film on the map back in 1972. Sure there was the 1970s airflight disaster flick Airport but The Poseidon Adventure, which is cut from the same formula, captured the hearts and minds of cinematic adventure freaks everywhere.

Outside the obvious air/sea thing, there is a major difference between Airport and The Poseidon Adventure. Where Airport tried to soap up its backstory with romance (Dean Martin and Jacqueline Bisset's illicit affair), The Poseidon Adventure took on a religious backdrop and attempted to remake the gospel according to St. Matthew into the gospel according to Gene Hackman's radical preacher, Reverend Frank Scott.

So underneath the capsized Poseidon - hell upsidedown - we have an array of characters trapped, not only inside the sinking ship, but by their own personality quirks revolving around false pride, sin, etc. Their dilemma, therefore, is a film long debate on doing the smart, brave thing - i.e. saving their asses from certain death by water. Rising, in fact, from hell to a higher level of existence achieved through tenacity, brevity, and faith. Thus, the film's tagline - "Who will survive-in the greatest escape adventure ever!" - gives the viewer a pretty good idea of the movie's surface meaning.

The only way for the survivors to make it is by following - through physical trial and ethereal faith - the dynamic, cursing Scott who, incidentally, has a bevy of young women at his side during the fateful New Year's Eve party when the ship flips. This, of course, signifies his sexual magnetism and alludes to the possibilities of his giving into the temptations of the flesh - which we never see.

The question, therefore, begs - why would we want to follow this man, a man who must choose who's worthy of following him to a better place, one who conveys an obvious anti-religious attitude via cursing and sex? Scott, though heroic, is probably hiding something under his veil of righteousness through radicalism and an open resistance toward prayer. He may even be a liar and agnostic or, possibly, atheist. Yet, he believes he's the chosen one and because of this self-belief, others tend to follow.

The survivors, who decide to follow Scott, run the spectrum of humanity. There's a rogue cop (Ernest Borgnine) married to an ex-hooker (Stella Stevens), a jewish couple (Jack Albertson and Shelley Winters - who ironically choose to follow a Christ figure), two kids (Eric Shea and Pamela Sue Martin), a fitness wimp (Red Buttons) and a dim singer (Carol Lyndley). All of whom have fallen away from God somehow or are too naive to understand.

James Martin (Buttons), however, is the one who suggests that they climb up to the bottom of the boat and Scott, who's a man of action, agrees immediately. They rely on information divulged by 10 year old Robin Shelby (Shea), who's smarter and more knowledgeable about the mechanics of the ship than anyone else. He informs them that aft, the Poseidon's hull is only one inch thick.

"Do you know how thick one inch of steel is, kid?" asks cop Mike Rogo (Borgnine).

Scott jumps in with, "Its one inch thinner than two inches" as if that provides all the answers - which, of course, it does for it leads to hope that leads to purpose.

Even though Hackman's portrayal of Scott reaches the edge of overacting - it works. There's no doubt that Hackman enjoyed this role and played it with gusto. Never subtle, Reverend Scott looks '70's chic with turtle neck sweater, flared pants and cool mutton chop sideburns - a tragically hip reverend, to be sure. He's passionate, youthful and strong - its not a chore for him to be cool and its no wonder the women on the ship are attracted to him.

Director Ronald Neame didn't take the sexual aspect of Reverend Scott too far although there are allusions. The main attraction toward Scott is via teenager Susan Shelby (Martin) who eyes Scott with an unabated lust. She's also the truest believer in Scott and easily follows him no matter the consequences.

The denoument at the end of the film, the place where faith and action converge, is no subtle feat as steam blocks the escape route of the remaining flock. High up heavenward catwalks, danger and death are inevetible. The only way through is Scott, who is willing to be sacrificed to appease God who has been nothing but a foil for the Reverend.

Jumping to the red wheel that will stop the spewing steam, Scott hangs on, slowly turning the wheel while chastising God and his willingness to kill innocent people.

"What do you want from us?" Scott screams, clinging to the wheel - his cross - turning it hand over bloody hand. "We made it this far with no help from you!"

All of it, of course, is a test for Scott - he drops to the depths knowing his sheep will get through.

The main aspect of The Poseidon Adventure - the one thing that brings it a notch above most other disaster flicks from the early 1970's, is its character subtext and quasi-relegiosity. Plus, all the main special effects (flipping the boat via a 90 foot tidal wave) are shown about a half hour into the film and not saved for an earth shattering finale.

Apocalyptic heartbreak

I went through an apocalyptic break-up when I was in my early 20s. It resulted in a whole range of misguided behaviors based on heartbreak and anger. I spent months looking for ways to get the girl who broke my heart back - in more ways than one. I was not a pleasant person to be around during those times. I listened to pissed-off punk rock, drank oceans of beer and participated in other forms of self-destruction.

What I didn't do was make my own movie based on this devastation or build my own flamethrower or modify muscle cars ready for a Mad Max-like apocalypse. These are the things that Evan Glodell did for the making of his indie film Bellflower. Glodell, who directed the film, also plays Woodrow - a possibly brain-damaged 20-something who doesn't handle it well when his girlfriend Milly breaks things off with him. Woodrow spirals so deeply into mental illness that its difficult to discern reality from fantasy.

Which is a pretty accurate account of what happens during a devastating personal loss - like a breakup in your early 20s.

Neo Maxi Zoom Dweebie

The Breakfast Club represents an amalgam of kids in high school. And, like it or not (doesn't matter what era), you probably were one of those kids in The Breakfast Club.

If you were Andrew Clark, you probably would've dated Claire Standish - at least for the appearance of it. If you were Brian Johnson, you may have wanted Claire from afar but she never would have noticed. Or acknowledged noticing.

What the movie got right (and it wasn't the only thing it got right - this is a dead-on teen flick) was the John Bender/Claire Standish hook-up. John and Claire were perfect foils. John needed her societal standing and Claire needed his wildness. I imagine John actually going to college and doing well, imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit probably much like Claire's father. I imagine Claire's father giving John Bender his first break.

But The Breakfast Club is of the moment - capturing a time when the day was the most important thing in the lives of high school kids. A day where there is very little room for the future.

The Philadelphia Story

The Philadelphia Story (1940) gets better every time I see it.

My latest viewing was focused on Katherine Hepburn's performance, which was sublime and amatory. I've never considered Hepburn an actress who imbued eroticism but, then again, I didn't grow up in the 1930s and 1940s, which is when she was starting to come into her own as a leading performer having starred in more than a dozen films before The Philadelphia Story. And it was only a couple years prior to this film that she stopped the show in the Howard Hawks directed Bringing Up Baby - a movie highly regarded by auteur theorists as well as modern filmmakers when they talk about their favorite and most influential films (Quentin Tarantino, for one, gushes when discussing his love for Hawks movies in general and Bringing Up Baby specifically).

Hepburn's character of Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story is referred to (either verbally or myopically) as a "goddess" by the men who surround her: Cary Grant, James Stewart, and John Howard. But Tracy wants to be seen as more than merely a "goddess."

Yet, while Tracy denounces her "goddess" stature (when she speaks she express a self-aware and shrewd intellect), director George Cukor - with the help of cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg - represents Hepburn in the most goddess-like fashion possible. Her features are shadowy softness - due to Ruttenberg's exemplary lighting - and she's often lit from behind, allowing her statuesque figure to show through diaphanous white clothing, which pops in gorgeous black and white photography. Its not by accident that Hepburn's wardrobe (designed by Adrian) pays homage to the clothing often ascribed to the goddesses of Greek mythology.

I don't believe the film is (or was) a sexist affair and, in 1940, attitudes toward women were different. Instead, I find The Philadelphia Story armed to battle sexism in its own way but from the point of view of its own time. And it is from that perspective - especially viewed through the ironic lens of George Cukor - that the movie succeeds.