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OT: Curtis Hanson, director of LA Conf. (1997) is dead.

posted 8 years ago by swanstep
17 replies | jump to latest

[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Variety has the story:
http://variety.com/2016/film/news/curtis-hanson-dead-la-confidential-1201866310/

It sounds like he's been unable to work for a while because of various illnesses, but that a heart attack got him at age 71. Too young in 2016. Very sad.

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Yes, modernly, 71 is way too young. Especially in Hollywood. But sometimes the genetics are wrong, etc.

I'm reminded that Clint Eastwood is "directing strong"(Sully) at age 86, but Eastwood is perhaps a genetic miracle in the other direction(though he worked at it; his father died at 64 or so. Mom lived into her 90's however.)

And I"m also reminded that, in 2005 at the Academy Theater in LA, I saw Curtis Hanson interview Clint Eastwood on stage in a "Salute to Don Siegel" that sported several clips of Siegel's Eastwood films(Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz), one from The Killers(with Angie Dickison, also in attendance), and the entire original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"(with Kevin McCarthy in attendance and yelling "They're not coming! They're already here!" to us referencing both Body Snatchers and Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" that summer.) Some other notables showed up just to be there -- Anthony Hopkins(his head was HUGE), and Zooey Deschenal(sigh.)

But Hanson and Eastwood were "the main event," just sitting there talking, director to director, with Hanson's "built-in" critical knowledge and track record(LA Confidential and Wonder Boys at that point, plus all before) making him a very worthy interviewer of Eastwood.

I'm so glad I saw them.

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Hanson is regularly discussed on this board for his work directing LA Confidential, one of the best films of the '90s (film101.com gives the critical consensus as LA Conf is the 4th best film of the '90s behind just Pulp Fiction, Schindler's List, Goodfellas, and Raise the Red Lantern).

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Well, "LAC" is my Number One of the 90's , strongly. Pulp Fiction comes in second(and loses to LAC largely because of the dimwit French girl and her scenes in PF.)

More to the point, I think, for some weird reason, not only is "LAC" near "Psycho" in its immediate impact and lasting grip on me but...it may well be the last film that affected me that way. I haven't really gone as crazy for a movie as LA Confidential in the near 20-years since I saw it(and saw it, and saw it); it is as if every movie year brings me a new favorite that just can't get the same mojo going.

Unlike Psycho, I can't get too "simple and specific" about how LAC works on me. Part of it is the year I saw it and the person I saw it with(and saw it with, and saw it with.) We BOTH went ga-ga for it simultaneously and it became an obsession to study it.

Some clues are this:

Its not a Hitchocckian movie, but it has a Hitchcockian structure. And somebody dies a sudden surprising death in a manner that, to me, mixes the Marion murder and the Arbogast murder in the same murder.

Its an ensemble film, and I've always had a soft spot for those. Three main male characters backed by a female lead and a host of male and female support; all intersecting and colliding and creating different combinations of pair-ups.
Studios generally DON'T approve ensemble films, and had one major star been cast in any of the three male leads, the ensemble would have collapsed.

Its set in "Hollywood Los Angeles" and thus shows the levels there of showbiz: the movies(Golden Era glamour), television(with a Dragnet-like cop show), hooking, porno....and the thing that collects them all together: tabloid media.

It intermixes its multiple levels of showbiz with same-track movements of LA's cultures: European-American, African-American, Mexican-American. The movie was tough enough to see all three races for the good and the bad that can be found within all of them, and it pulled no punches about racial conflict. In 1953. In 1997. In 2016.

A great script in every way. James Ellroy's purple noir prose gets its best showing ("Do you read me?" "In Technicolor" "(He's) on the Night Train to the Big Adios(dead)") Curtis Hanson and the talented Brian Helgeland compressed Ellroy's epic novel into something of tight complexity and added entirely new plot twists and fates for key characters THAT WORKED. And as a director, Hanson directed with a sure touch for interweaving a magnificent team of collaborators(cinematography, score by Jerry Goldsmith, period art direction, editing.)

It was funny. LA Confidential got a ton of good reviews, but only one of its cast was Oscar-nommed(the woman, Kim Basinger, and she won.) The films 10 or so great male leads cancelled each other out, "As Good As It Gets" got the key acting awards and "Titanic" sank everything else.

But a lot of folks still think LAC was the best film of 1997. I know I do. And I feel it in some other specific way. I think it was the exhilaration of the "solidly crafted thriller with profundity and depth" that got me.

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But his early directing work for Corman and esp. his writing of The Silent Partner (1978) marks him as a studious Hitchcockian and Psycho-fan.

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Yep. And The Bedroom Window and Bad Influence channel Rear Window and Strangers on a Train, respectively.

Hanson later made his mark with two thrillers that I found "too suspenseful"(i.e.) no fun: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle(killer nanny from hell) and "The River Wild"(convicts hold Meryl Streep and family hostage on a white river rafting ride.) They were solid, but anguished and, again, no fun. And critics paid them little notice. Indeed, many a critic wrote of LA Confidential: "There's no clue to the greatness of this film in Hanson's earlier work." (But there is, of course. The Silent Partner?)

I would add that Hanson happily participated in many a DVD documentary on Hitchocck, praising Hitchcock, and its pretty clear he learned a lot of Hitchcock's lessons well.

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There are quite a few Hanson films I've yet to see, but I can recommend a character piece he did immediately after LA Conf: Wonder Boys. I didn't appreciate it that that much when it came out in 2000, but it's really grown on me. It kicked off the renaissance of Micahel Douglas's career, it has a career-stabilizing performance for Robert Downey Jr, it was probably what got Tobey Maguire Spider-man, and Katie Holmes in a small role looked all-grown-up and has never been better.

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As I recall, "Wonder Boys" was the follow up to "LAC" and so expectations were high and that major cast could be attracted. It was very good, very polished, an East Coast academic setting to counter LAC's period LA.

As it turned out(and as obits are noting), Curtis Hanson ended up with LA Confidential and...Eminem's "8 Mile" as his two crowning acheivements. That's pretty damn diverse.

And I saw Hanson's intelligent HBO film a few years back, "Too Big To Fail," which used a pretty starry cast to tell the horror story of the 2008 housing and stock market collapse. That film had its own starry ensemble(all the names playing the heads of banks summoned to save us from THEM) and professional polish.

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A Hitchockian, good at casting and evidently good with performances; sounds good doesn't it? Hanson was.

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Well stated. I salute him for all of that, but in the final analysis, he's one of those directors who -- against all odds and outta nowhere -- ended up with one Great Big One against which all of his others pales. That happens too much with directors -- Citizen Kane, The Manchurian Candidate, The Last Picture Show -- but when it does, it is a Hollywood miracle even if they are only known for one film.

For Hitchcock, this almost happened with Psycho...except being Hitchcock, he had about 6 other great ones, too.

For Hanson, its LA Confidential.

[–] swanstep 8 years ago

he's one of those directors who -- against all odds and outta nowhere -- ended up with one Great Big One against which all of his others pales. That happens too much with directors -- Citizen Kane, The Manchurian Candidate, The Last Picture Show -- but when it does, it is a Hollywood miracle even if they are only known for one film.

Interesting category: Directors who have exactly one truly great film. Other possible examples:

Spike Lee, Do The Right Thing
Jonathan Demme, Silence of the Lambs
Paul Brickman, Risky Business
Robert Hamer, Kind Hearts and Coronets
Alexander MacKendrick, Sweet Smell of Success
Michael Cimino, The Deer Hunter
John Badham, Saturday Night Fever
Nicholas Roeg, Don't Look Now
Irving Rapper, Now, Voyager
Jacques Demy, Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Barry Levinson, Diner
John Madden, Shakespeare in Love
Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day
The Wachowskis, The Matrix
Terry Gilliam, Brazil
Dario Argento, Supiria
John McTiernan, Die Hard
James Whale, Frankenstein
Fred Wilcox, Forbidden Planet
George Sluzier, The Vanishing
Jack Clayton, The Innocents
Georges Franju, Eyes Without A Face
John Landis, Animal House
Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters
Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine

And, now I think about it, it's the norm for exceptional TV-shows that take up ten year or more of their makers' lives to be unrepeatable crowning achievements: I'm thinking David Case for The Sopranos and Matt Weiner for Mad Men, Jerry Seinfeld for Seinfeld, etc..

[–] movieghoul 8 years ago

Not sure about Whale, I would argue that Bride of Frankenstein is a better film than the original.

And we'll never know how good Magnificent Ambersons could have been without studio interference.

I'd throw in John Schlesinger for Midnight Cowboy

[–] swanstep 8 years ago

Not sure about Whale, I would argue that Bride of Frankenstein is a better film than the original.

I'm happy to retract Whale from my list: I prefer Frankenstein over Bride but your preference is widely held among critics. Beyond that, Whales's original version of Waterloo Bridge (which he made right before Frank) is fabulous (much better than the 1940s remake with Vivain Leigh, which is itself not bad). And the Old Dark House is pretty good too.

Obviously ecarle's distinction between star directors with a bunch of classics and those with just one + a bunch of lessers gets a little slippery. Welles's lessers are things like Touch of Evil, The Trial, Chaimes at Midnight, and The Ambersons, and Frankenheimer's lessers are things like Seconds, Seven Days in May, and Black Sunday. Most directors would kill to have these lessers on their filmographies. But then are we so sure that George Lucas doesn;t reduce to Star Wars. One wants to say, 'No, there's American Graffiti too'. But is AG really in a different league from Seconds and Touch of Evil? Commercially certainly it was but what about quality?

Or think about Mike Nichols: someone who was a real hardass might say there's The Graduate+ a bunch of lesser works. Now I think that that's actually wrong and that Nichols has Virginia Woolf as his second unimpeachable great. When I think of Nichols then I think I have a grip on what ecarle is after: Woolf and Graduate were world-beaters when they came out and their reputations are as high today as they were then....Carnal Knowledge, Wit, Primary Colors, Working Girl, etc. by way of contrast have their fans certainly but were never universally acclaimed.

[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Obviously ecarle's distinction between star directors with a bunch of classics and those with just one + a bunch of lessers gets a little slippery.

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ecarle, here to say: "Deed it does!"

It possibly ONLY works with Curtis Hanson -- hah -- in that he had other hits(the Eminem film likely did better than LAC) and respected movies(Wonder Boys) and workable thrillers(The Silent Partner and those other ones) but...really only rang the gong with LAC.

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Welles's lessers are things like Touch of Evil, The Trial, Chaimes at Midnight, and The Ambersons,

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All highly regarded but none -- honestly -- at the level of Kane. The closest seems to be the "crippled" Ambersons, and Touch of Evil was a flop on release and not really considered fully "coherent" today.

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and Frankenheimer's lessers are things like Seconds, Seven Days in May, and Black Sunday.

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And let's take John Frankenheimer.

Its The Manchurian Candidate that he's known for , even as Seven Days in May, The Train, Seconds, and the late-breaking Black Sunday all have top reputations as very exciting, very masterly films. And yet: only The Manchurian Candidate of that group really makes the "100 Best" lists. The one I really like of the bunch is Seven Days in May but it hardly has much cinematic flair at all. Its a "talking people political thriller." I like Black Sunday better for the action, but it lacks the star power of Seven Days.

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Most directors would kill to have these lessers on their filmographies. But then are we so sure that George Lucas doesn;t reduce to Star Wars. One wants to say, 'No, there's American Graffiti too'. But is AG really in a different league from Seconds and Touch of Evil? Commercially certainly it was but what about quality?

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Again, ecarle's game starts to fall apart. I think American Graffiti is BETTER than Star Wars and I've written of it as "the movie that changed my life." (Why that is so, I don't think I'll go into here.)

Perhaps most movie directors -- and most movie stars -- really get about five major films in their careers. That number would encompass Welles and Frankenheimer(who also made the flops "The Extraordinary Gentleman," "The Gypsy Moths" and "99 and 3/4 dead" or some such title.)

Giving all these guys five films gives them more latitude -- but truly there is many a filmmaker who only REALLY hit it big once.

[–] swanstep 8 years ago

The Onion's AVClub has a very nice appreciation of *that* murder/death scene in L.A. Confidential here:
http://tinyurl.com/zhrufnp
The treatment would have been improved by comparing the scene with Marion's death in Psycho, and by some discussion of Hanson's nice writing of shocking death in The Silent Partner (1978), but you can't have everything!

[–] ecarle 8 years ago

BIG SPOILERS for LA Confidential:

The treatment would have been improved by comparing the scene with Marion's death in Psycho, and by some discussion of Hanson's nice writing of shocking death in The Silent Partner (1978), but you can't have everything

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Indeed not, and I suppose my application of both Psycho murders to this particular great murder scene in LAC is a rather personal interpretation, natch.

Thank you for finding this article about one of my favorite scenes in movie history. The article covers things that I think are very relevant to the scene; I have a few more.

I'll leap right in with the Psycho comparisons:

The sudden death of Kevin Spacey -- as close as LAC had to a major star in a lead role -- before the film was over had me thinking, in the moments after I saw it and FELT it("Hey, wait...he's...oh no! He's getting killed!") is how, I imagined, it must have felt to 1960 audiences to see Janet Leigh get it in Psycho(those audiences, of course, who had not seen the trailer aobut a shower murder.)

I felt: "OK, I may never have gotten the massive surprise of Janet Leigh's death...but it must have felt like THIS one(Spacey's) does to me.

As for the "Arbogastian" aspects of the Spacey murder, well..he's a detective. But a police detective. And yet -- much like Arbogast -- Spacey's Jack "The Big V" Vincennes makes a number of choices and is subject to a number of ironic-bad- luck coincidences that lead to a murder that need not have happened. Also like Arbogast, Vincennes proves so good at his job he gets killed for it. (Recall the "Arbogast on Film" motto: "An investigation... that can only end in my own death.")

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It took me many re-viewings of LAC in general, and of the murder scene in particular, to catch its narrative perfection, which is led up to and led away from the murder.

Its a series of "if onlys" to match Arbogast's ("If only he hadn't have found the Bates Motel," "If only he hadn't found out Marion stayed there", "If only he had come back with the Sheriff" "If only he hadn't decided to go back to the motel alone.")

For Vincennes: If only he hadn't helped set up a young male actor for a gay assignation that lead to the actor's death; If only he hadn't accepted the invitation of Ed Exley(Guy Pearce) to pair up and investigate the "Nite Owl Massacre" as a team(as penance for the killing of the young actor). If only Ed Exley had not been waylaid by hooker Kim Basinger and had sex with her instead of meeting Vincennes as planned; if only Vincennes(alone) had not found the information in police archives that would solve the Nite Owl Massacre and the conspiracy behind it, once and for all, if only Vincennes hadn't decided to go to Dudley Smith's home alone at midnight with information.

And, indeed, if only, on the night that Vincennes visited Dudley's home at midnight, Dudley's "wife and four fair daughters" had not been at Dudley's beach hours in Santa Barbara.

As the article notes, that Dudley's family are gone SHOULD be a clue that Vincennes is dangerously alone with Dudley...but we don't suspect Dudley of true criminal villainy(that he is cop who cuts corners to fight the mob, we get; that he IS the mob, we don't.)

But I always felt that the "wife and four fair daughters line" when I first heard it, was ironic and revelatory: this tough guy leader of men(Dudley) has only a family of daughters; and he's well off(a second home in plush coastal Santa Barbara?) I made note of these things before Vincennes entered Dudley's kitchen and his final moments.

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What's shocking about the kitchen scene is how we follow it as a dramatic scene so intensely that the killing isn't expected at all. Vincennes reports to Dudley with the real cop's skills he had abandoned and with a "good heart." Dudley warns him, "Don't be trying to do the right thing, Vincennes. You haven't the practice."

Key: Dudley prepares a pot of tea and pours a cup for Vincennes, handing the cup to Vincennes on a delicate saucer. Its gracious, our eyes follow it but here's the thing: Dudley has filled Vincennes' hands so he can't reach his gun!(Which we saw Vincennes do quickly and expertly when he found the murdered gay actor.)

Indeed, it is just on handing Vincennes the tea that Dudley asks the fatal question "What does Ed Exley think of all this," getting the lethal answer "I haven't told him yet" and shooting Vincennes with a sudden mercilessness that shocks the system in all ways. (My date that night clutched her mouth with both hands and gasped, and cried.)

Kevin Spacey won the Oscar(supporting) for The Usual Suspects before LAC, and the Oscar(actor) for American Beauty after LAC ...but I believe his most memorable performance is in LAC. This death scene is key to that -- how he desperately heaves for breath as a heart shot drains the life out of him; how he looks resigned in the knowledge that he is dying; how he summons up the humor (and the crime-solving smarts) to say "Rollo Tomasi" as his benediction; and very famously, how the light just goes out of his eyes and the soul goes after (I think it is a freeze frame at the end of the shot, but your really can't tell.)

But Spacey was good leading up to his death, carefully creating a "cool and hip guy" who is just too appalling in what he does to like...and who slowly finds his conscience and his good cop bona fides. Which, of course, gets him killed.

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Jack Vincennes doesn't die this way in James Ellroy's novel; he is killed in a shootout with convicts escaping a train. And I'm pretty sure the "Rollo Tomasi" gambit isn't in the book.

It is my guess that "Rollo Tomasi" and the sudden-death of Jack Vincennes were likely shaped up for ANOTHER script -- perhaps by Brian Helegland -- and fitted perfectly into this tale. Here is a screen version of a book that literally decides to CHANGE the book...if not for the better, than for the different(in the book, Dudley Smith kills people in the first chapter, at a motel shootout that is moved in the movie to be the film's climax.)

And look how "Rollo Tomasi" works:

Ed Exley tells Vincennes that "Rollo Tomasi" is the fictional name given to the thief who shot and killed Exley's cop father and was never caught. "Rollo Tomasi" is "the man who gets away with it."

And so , when Vicennes utters "Rollo Tomasi" as he dies, he is perhaps just laughing at the joke of it -- but also(says this article) planting a clue should Dudley ever mention that name to Ed Exley.

Which Dudley does in the VERY NEXT SCENE with Ed Exley...which I thought was brilliant. No milking of suspense -- BOOM, Exley freezes at the name(while not overreacting) and Exley knows who killed Jack Vincennes. The published screenplay adds plot description to Exleys reaction:

BEGIN:

Dudley: Exley, are you familiar with someone named Rollo Tomasi?

Exley freezes. Jack Vincennes has named his killer, from the grave!

END

Yes, the Oscar winning script actually says that.

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One critic almost gave the game away at 1997's end by writing "The best scene of 1997 is played by Kevin Spacey and James Cromwell in LA Confidential." That was at the end of the year; I suppose most viewers had seen that scene by then.

If I might add a simile from Hitchcock himself to "Rollo Tomasi" it is this:

Bob Rusk's tiepin in Frenzy.

The tiepin is not in the book from which Frenzy was taken. The item Rusk seeks to pull from Babs' dead grasp in the potato truck was a latchkey. But Hitch had done latchkeys in Dial M. By recreating the item as a tiepin, Hitchcock(and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer) could move the tiepin as motif through the film:

Rusk, "The Necktie Strangler," ceremoniously removes the tiepin from his tie and moves it to his lapel so as to free the tie to strangle Brenda Blaney.

After killing Brenda, Rusk eats her apple...and picks his teeth with the tiepin, plucked from his lapel.

Later, after killing his next victim, Babs, Rusk eats more fruit and moves to pull his tiepin from his lapel and...the tiepin is gone! Thus begins "the potato truck scene."

In the next scene the next day, Rusk discusses Babs' murder with pub owner Felix Forsythe. Their conversation concludes with Rusk picking his teeth with his tiepin.

Rusk's tiepin. Rollo Tomasi. Different in certain ways, but not in this: they are "structural motifs" that move from scene to scene to scene and payoff greatly.

[–] ecarle 8 years ago

In follow up to the posts about the Kevin Spacey murder in LA Confidential:

With BIG SPOILERS FOR:

The Untouchables
Minority Report
The Departed

It will remain one of the great movie-going memories of my life how shocked and surprised I was by the killing of Kevin Spacey in LA Confidential...and how utterly awed I was once I realized -- after frequent re-viewings of the film and the scene -- how it had been set up in narrative and executed as a scene.

I've cited Psycho as a forebear to the sudden surprise of Jack's death in LA Confidential.

But here are a few more, of relevance as we shall see:

The Untouchables(1987): Sean Connery was a bigger star than Kevin Spacey was in 1997 when Connery made The Untouchables in 1987. The films share things: each is a favorite film of the year(1987; 1997) for me; and each is my favorite of the decade in which it appeared(The Eighties; The Nineties.)

Obviously, the films share a lot and there you have it, I guess: ensemble cops-vs-mob stories with a touch of "The Magnificent Seven" to The Untouchables.

I think that LA Confidential is ultimately a film of much greater complexity, nuance and discomfort(about racial issues) than The Untouchables, but the latter film has its own sense of stardom, cinematic flourish, great music...and doom.

For just as Kevin Spacey's killing is the surprise second-act capper that sets up the final act of LAC; the surprise sudden-death killing of Sean Connery is the second act capper that sets up the final act of The Untouchables.

There are differences , though. The mob sends a guy to kill Connery and we are well aware that he is in danger in the long "steadi-cam" stalk of Connery the killer. The surprise comes when Connery is killed by ANOTHER "surprise" killer(Frank Nitti) just after defeating the first.

For me personally, some bad luck: maybe Connery's killing in The Untouchables would have surprised and shocked me just as much as Spacey's in LAC, but unfortunately, when The Untouchables was being filmed in 1986, some gossip columnist put this out:

"Sean Connery was briefly hospitalized after special effects squibs burned him during his death-by-machine gun scene in the new film, The Untouchables."

Thanks. Or , my fault for reading. In any event, when I went to see The Untouchables, I knew Connery's Jim Malone would die -- which, actually, made his Oscar-winning performance(Supporting!) all the more poignant as I watched it.

Minority Report(2000). Steven Spielberg's first collaboration with Tom Cruise starts clever(a crime unit that catches killers BEFORE they can commit their murders), gets very grim(eye removal and child abduction and murder are on the murder) and never really finds a classic feel to it. Its flat and derivative. No more so than when second-billed Colin Farrell(a "new" star of some magnitude at the time), goes to police official Max Von Sydow to report on his investigations...and Von Sydow shoots him through the heart. There were murmurs of "LA Confidential!" in my theater. I'm still not sure if Spielberg was directing an "homage" to Hanson's great scene...or just ripping it off. In any event, not much of a surprise.

The Departed (2006). My favorite OF 2006 and, well, of course: cops versus the mob again, an ensemble again(much starrier than LAC got, courtesy of Scorsese's draw as a director) and a Hitchcock premise by way of Chinese crime films: a young cop(Leo DiCaprio) is undercover with Jack Nicholson's Irish Boston mob. A young crook(Matt Damon) is undercover with Martin Sheen's Irish Boston police(with Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin on the force for added star power.) Which rat will be uncovered first? Its Family Plot meets GoodFellas.

Leo DiCaprio is in great jeopardy throughout the film; if the mob guys find HIM out, death will be cruel and merciless(Matt Damon will simply be arrested by the cops he's ratting.) But, in any event, Leo uncovers Matt, beats him up, saves the day...

...until Leo is shot and killed all of a sudden...by yet ANOTHER mob rat in the police department.

Leo's death is quick and sudden and out of nowhere and I must admit I thought of Psycho("star" dies) and LA Confidential(surprise death) when it happened. But: it happens near the very end of The Departed and feel more like a tragic ending than a big plot twist. Moreover: by the time The Departed came out, we had already had the big surprise within LA Confidential(and the little one within Minority Report) and we just weren't so shocked anymore. Marty and Leo got there late.

IMdb debaters will pit "LA Confidential" against "The Departed" and its a good match-up. I loved them both, but I think, in the end, "The Departed" is more of a multi-star vehicle and less of Deep Think period social epic than LA Confidential which, in not having to serve "major stars" like Leo, Jack, and Matt...can let its story do the talking.

[–] swanstep 8 years ago

Kevin Spacey won the Oscar(supporting) for The Usual Suspects before LAC, and the Oscar(actor) for American Beauty after LAC ...but I believe his most memorable performance is in LAC. This death scene is key to that

Spacey's performance in Se7en is similarly you-never-forget-it memorable, built on a twist for the ages. The difference is that Hanson and Helgeland had to write their twist/Rollo Tomasi revelation whereas the 'John Doe turns himself in (and he's ______!)' scene was in the spec. script and was the reason Fincher wanted to make the movie.

[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Kevin Spacey won the Oscar(supporting) for The Usual Suspects before LAC, and the Oscar(actor) for American Beauty after LAC ...but I believe his most memorable performance is in LAC. This death scene is key to that
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Spacey's performance in Se7en is similarly you-never-forget-it memorable, built on a twist for the ages. The difference is that Hanson and Helgeland had to write their twist/Rollo Tomasi revelation whereas the 'John Doe turns himself in (and he's ______!)' scene was in the spec. script and was the reason Fincher wanted to make the movie.

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Given my penchant for the study of movie star careers, I give you ...Kevin Spacey.

He was "around the edges" in good movies like Glengarry Glen Ross(where Al Pacino reams him royally), and Outbreak(supporting Dustin Hoffman and others and getting a good death-by-virus scene in that one) and that John Grishman courtroom drama "A Time to Kill."

But...suddenly, Spacey had this run of "greats" all in a row(though interspersed with the work above): Se7en, The Usual Suspects, LAC, American Beauty. Two Oscars in there and some of the best scripts ever written(well, I think American Beauty is a bit overrated; starts well, finishes horribly.)

Studios and agents moved quickly to try to promote "Kevin Spacy, movie star," but they didn't really know what to do with him. He wasn't macho action star material; he wasn't really romantic leading man material. He was a good villain(see: Se7en).

A string of bad ones -- and I saw them all -- K-Pax and Pay It Forward and The Shipping News -- shot down the Kevin Spacey career down as quickly as it had started.

Spacey turned to the stage -- including the London stage -- for solace.

And then he found his New Age Saving: Netflix series. As one of the first Oscar stars to take on a lead in a Netflix series, Spacey reportedly makes big bucks for "House of Cards." I've watched it. Spacey is great. The series in beneath him with "insider politics" crashing down into tabloid murder melodrama. But Spacey is fun as the twelve-moves-ahead plotting politician nobody can ever outfox.

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What I have always loved about the psycho killer in Se7en is how -- for once -- a cop tries to talk to him and ask "Hey, what is it like to BE bat(blank) crazy? Do you get up in the morning, and think a moment, and realize: "Hey, I'm nuts!" The cop is played by Brad Pitt in not-terribly-bright bully mode and you can see the trap in trying to get a psycho to admit he's a psycho: Spacey never really answers Pitt's questions, or turns them back on him(much like politicians in debates.) Morgan Freeman's older, wiser cop gets more under the killer's skin -- "If God is ordering you to kill these people to cleanse their sins -- how come you enjoy it? -- and the killer goes silent.

In Hitchcock, NOBODY got to talk to Norman Bates about being a psycho, or Uncle Charlie about being a psycho, or Bob Rusk about being a psycho -- except for Bruno to Guy in "Strangers on a Train": "You're sick, Bruno -- you need help!" Bruno's response is to just ignore the comment. You just can't reason with psychos.

But it was fun watching the cop try to talk to a psycho in Se7en...and then see his brutal taunts rebound back on him when the psycho "got the upper hand."

Or head.

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Oscars aside, I do believe that Jack "the Big V" Vincennes is Kevin Spacey's greatest role to date. He's villainous and then virtuous(well, as virtuous as he can be) and his cool cat cover masks levels of compassion that slowly evolve as the film unfolds to Vincennes' sad fate.

[–] swanstep 8 years ago

But...suddenly, Spacey had this run of "greats" all in a row(though interspersed with the work above): Se7en, The Usual Suspects, LAC, American Beauty. Two Oscars in there and some of the best scripts ever written

Particularly getting Suspects, Se7en, and LAC within just a couple of years must have been pretty amazing for Spacey. 3 scripts of such rare quality that the only question is whether the directors and casts etc. won't screw them up. I'm sure the normal case is for a script to *not* blow you away, rather it just seems 'interesting' and if you like the director already then maybe you'll do it... whereas in these three cases the basic property must have felt so *hot*, like any one of them if done well would be career-making. If all three are done well with you in them then you're an immortal - you're Bogart after Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Big Sleep, Pacino after Godfather, Serpico, Dog Day, Leigh after Touch, Psycho, Manchurian, and so on.

A string of bad ones -- and I saw them all -- K-Pax and Pay It Forward and The Shipping News -- shot down the Kevin Spacey career down as quickly as it had started.

I avoided all of these!

[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Particularly getting Suspects, Se7en, and LAC within just a couple of years must have been pretty amazing for Spacey.

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Truly so. And then American Beauty(the weakest of the bunch) and a Best Actor Oscar. (Should have been for LAC, but hell, Jack Nicholson won that year for a character who has proved timeless indeed in his comic-crazy misogyny and misanthropy. Spacey could not have beaten THAT even if he was nominated for LAC. Which he wasn't. Or for Supporting, either(coulda beat Robin Williams for Good Will Hunting?)

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3 scripts of such rare quality that the only question is whether the directors and casts etc. won't screw them up.

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And the director helped write at least one of them(LAC) to make sure the vision was there from the start.

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I'm sure the normal case is for a script to *not* blow you away, rather it just seems 'interesting' and if you like the director already then maybe you'll do it... whereas in these three cases the basic property must have felt so *hot*, like any one of them if done well would be career-making. If all three are done well with you in them then you're an immortal - you're Bogart after Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Big Sleep, Pacino after Godfather, Serpico, Dog Day, Leigh after Touch, Psycho, Manchurian, and so on.

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I've read of a producer named Don Simpson being handed the script for "The Sting"(before he was THE Don Simpson of Bruckheimer/Simpson) by its owner(Julia Phillips) and saying "This is the best script I've ever read." He KNEW he had something big. And so did Robert Redford. And so did Paul Newman(signing up, really, for a beefed up supporting role.) And so did Jack Nicholson(who got the script before Redford and passed, saying "I should give my energies to a project that needs it.")

And I've read that while he was MAKING Psycho, Tony Perkins told friends that he knew he was in something that was going to be big for him.

So sometimes they seem to know.

Kevin Spacey may have benefitted in that he wasn't THAT big a star when the scripts for Usual Suspects and LAC arrived. The budget wasn't there for big stars.

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A string of bad ones -- and I saw them all -- K-Pax and Pay It Forward and The Shipping News -- shot down the Kevin Spacey career down as quickly as it had started.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I avoided all of these!

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I saw them and it was frankly shocking. K-Pax was minor. But Pay It Forward was just terrible and delivered body blows to three careers at once: Spacey's, recent Oscar winner Helen Hunt, and "Sixth Sense" child star Joel Haley Osment(or whatever he was called.) ALL three of them rather took the hit, together.

More dangerous to Spacey was "The Shipping News," set up by the Weinsteins at Miramax for its big "Oscar push" movie. Hell, Spacey was given the Oscar-bait ladies cast of Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench, and JUlianne Moore in support and...no Oscars. THAT really hurt.

I lose track of how Spacey's career spiraled from there. I recall that in 2006, he finally played Lex Luthor in a Superman movie -- about 8 years after he was supposed to play Luthor in a project that folded(a Tim Burton/Nick Cage version.) 2006 was too late; Spacey's heat had faded; his Lex Luthor seemed rather small and campy.

But he makes $500,000 an episode for House of Cards so all is well. In a different venue.

[–] ecarle 8 years ago

I was thinking of tossing this post onto swanstep's reviews of the 1000 films of Edgar Wright but...that's his baby.

So I came over here to the OT Curtis Hanson thread in the thought that a few "random thoughts" on random movies I've rewatched recently might be worth broadcasting a comment or two about.

Its reached the point where new movies hold so little allure for me except in a few cases(The Nice Guys and The Mag 7 thus far this year), that I've taken to re-watching older ones from my younger years as a means of "feeling the old feelings again." I don't rent them or even pull them from my shelf. I just surf the cable movie channels and pick 'em.

Funny to me: I'm about to talk about several "old movies." But they don't seem that old to me. The Maltese Falcon? THAT's an old movie. The Parallax View. Its from 1974. THAT's not that old, is it. I was around to see it in a theater just a few years ago. Uh, a few decades ago.

The "newest" of the bunch that I watched was "Collateral" -- 2004. It looks like it could have come out last week -- in fact, a lot of it looks just like "John Wick" of two years ago. But man, its been 12 years. That used to be a long time.

Anyway, presented quickly:

Catch-22(1970.) This was Mike Nichols' follow-up to the gigantic hit of "The Graduate," and it has an "all-star cast" of sorts: Alan Arkin(the lead), Jon Voight (fresh from Midnight Cowboy), Anthony Perkins and Martin Balsam(hey!), Orson Welles, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss(real life man and wife though she's Arkin's possible lover in this one); Bob Newhart(just ahead of becoming a big TV star), Art Garfunkel(breaking up with Paul Simon and just about to take a bigger lead in NIchols' "Carnal Knowledge") and so forth and so on. Practically everybody in the movie had been a star(Perkins, Balsam) or was about to become one(Charles Grodin, Martin Sheen).

And its a bust, for the most part. The studied deadpan of The Graduate here congealed into a kind of mannered, overdone smugness. The weirdest sense I got from the movie is that Nichols had imported about every New York actor who made the "Elaine's" snob-restaurant scene in the 70's and plunked them down to play make believe GIs in an epic revue sketch.

There are certain pleasures. Jon Voight's Milo Minderbinder remains a great symbol of happy, uncaring capitalism...putting his fellow GIS at all sort of risk in his continuing quest to make a deal, make a buck(replacing silk parachute contents with his corporate stock-offering papers; allowing the Nazis to bomb his own base, for a buck, creating chocolate candy stuffed with REAL cotton -- to make up for a bad deal and a glut of cotton on his hands.)

There's a great scene where Balsam and Arkin walk along a runway and a REAL plane on fire skids and bounces down the runway and crashes without the two men missing a beat in the conversation.

And yes...Perkins and Balsam together again. 10 years down the road from Psycho, Perkins looked and sounded pretty much the same(he reads one line with his "th-th-th next day!" stammer from Psycho.) The shorter, stockier Balsam, alas , was losing his battle with his waistline, and was directed to play his Col Cathcart in a loud, bombastic way -- no "Arbogast cool" here. Still, great to see and hear them together again. Balsam does one scene sitting on the toilet talking to Perkins -- I've read this was as historic a toilet scene as the shot of the toilet in Psycho. Anthony Perkins. Martin Balsam. Toilets.

"Catch -22" the novel was a weird decade-long bestseller and probably doomed to translate to the big screen. What Nichols gave us was big and star-studded...but just a massive misfire of mannered comedy and allusions to Fellini(with a fair amount of R-rated gore to make the war stuff serious.) Recall: the much smaller, much sexier, much gorier "MASH" beat Catch-22 to the theaters and got all the glory.

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The Parallax View. This came out from Paramount the same summer that Chinatown did; and Warren Beatty was reportedly miffed that Chinatown got more heat and studio support. Well...The Parallax View isn't a very good movie. With one exceptional scene I'll get to in a moment.

Beatty himself looks great in the movie -- gorgeous face(perfect nose), tall, strapping...and a big old puffy mane of Giant Seventies Male Hair that, unfortunately, says "You're So Vain" and can't be taken seriously.

Beatty gets an early and believable fight scene with a country deputy that nicely launches a "conspiracy thriller" that glumly marches along from one obvious point to another. Beatty has figured out that a company recruits antisocial loners to be "fall guy assasins." Everybody else who knows this, or who Beatty tells, dies. It gets rather ridiculous after awhile. The bad guys kill all the good guys with ease. Its like no one can escape, or no one stays on guard.

And director Alan Pakula's tone is so sleepy and dull that the thriller elements don't work at all. An overlong bit about Beatty thwarting a bomb plot on an airplane he has boarded, doesn't make sense (they take payment on the plane for tickets like railway conducters, do.) No suspense at all in a scene that should have been VERY suspenseful. Like "Chinatown," "The Paralax View" is heading for a "you can't win" downer ending, but with none of the punch of the other film.

The exceptional scene: Beatty -- going undercover as a potential assassin -- watches a long "indoctrination film" of abstract imagery designed to take the viewer from "mom, apple pie, and the American flag" to "Hitler, mass murder, sexual depravity and vengeance." WE see this entire film start to finish; no cuts to Beatty watching. It is an experience of great power and darkness.

Too bad it was in such a dull nothing of a movie.

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Collateral: It took me a long time to accept Tom Cruise as the Biggest Movie Star around(short of the Other Tom, Hanks.) I like the snipe at him in Top Gun: "Tom Cruise plays a flyboy. He could play a fly, he could play a boy, but not a flyboy." But over time, Cruise aged a bit, matured in face and voice, and developed himself a persona. And it all comes together in Collateral, where he is given white-silver-gray hair, a white-silver-gray suit and matures into full adulthood to play: a psychopathic hit man who commandeers cabbie Jamie Foxx and his cab for an all night series of murders-for-hire.

This one's almost "too suspenseful" -- Foxx is essentially a hostage whose every attempt to escape meets with failure and sometimes gets innocents killed(and some not-so-innocents; it is satisfying to see Cruise kill some muggers). But Michael Mann give the movie a great look "Smoggy LA at night" and great dialogues between the Psycho and the Good Cabbie.

Tom Cruise is great as a horrific villain here, and I always felt it was because even his "good guy top movie star" persona had something false behind it and something cold up front. Does "Collateral" give us The Real Tom Cruise? It feels like it -- and Cruise would eventually transfer the coldness of his hit man here over to his "good guy" in the Mission:Impossible series.

Good scenes along the way: how Cruise befriends one victim in front of Foxx until it is revealed that Cruise will kill THIS man, too, and Foxx freaks out realizing the "friendliness" was just a ruse; a nightclub shoot 'em up in which Cruise single-mindedly moves towards his victim while killing everyone in his way(the job MUST be completed); and a scene where Foxx must act like he IS Cruise to meet with a Mexican cartel kingpin(Javier Bardem, early on) to explain why the flash drive full of victims names has been lost.

And oh -- a particular main character gets it LA Confidential style, out of nowhere -- and it works again.

As I recall, Collateral was almost my favorite film of 2004 until Sideways ambled in at the end of the year. One of the few times the thriller got beat by the small character study.

As you can see above, of the three films, I didn't really like two of them -- but they were nostalgic nonetheless, Catch-22 for its 1970 all-star cast including some 1960 Hitchcock men; The Parallax View for gorgeous Warren Beatty( a man can admire a man for his sheer "movie star presence") and for being one of the more downbeat thrillers of a downbeat year. In 1974, the good guys almost always lost.

Which reminds me: they don't make too many movies like Chinatown and The Parallax View anymore; happy endings are more the norm. But that doesn't mean that the REAL WORLD is any less corrupt in 2016.

We just don't make movies about that anymore. Much.

[–] swanstep 8 years ago

Recall: the much smaller, much sexier, much gorier "MASH" beat Catch-22 to the theaters and got all the glory.

And Patton and Little Big Man beat it too, right? Even if Catch-22 had been great people might have wanted to give it a pass...

Well...The Parallax View isn't a very good movie. With one exceptional scene...Beatty -- going undercover as a potential assassin -- watches a long "indoctrination film" of abstract imagery

WI agree with you about the general implausibility and messiness of a lot of the thriller side of Parallax View (all the Parallax Corp has to do to stop Fraidy's investigation in its tracks is just stop killing people. Let him say what he wants, he can't prove anything...but if you respond with bombing and killing all over the place then, even though we see 'the good guy fail', eventually you'll be found out. Parallax Corp's strategy makes no sense when you think it through!). But I think there are more good scenes than you allow. Most obviously the climax lasts something like 18 minutes and every shot is a discovery of some kind, just *amazing*. And the Space Needle opening scene is well done. And the two scenes where the Parallax guy comes to Fraidy's apartment seemingly simultaneously to warn him and recruit him are good (in fact all the semi-sinister scenes with that guy are good). And the Paula Prentiss scenes near the beginning of the film are all fine or better.

Everything else though (although you single out the bar brawl for some praise) feels a little underdone to me plot-wise, visuals-wise, and dialogue-wise (certainly compared to the swiss-watch precision of Chinatown or Godfather 2 from the same year!). People who *really* love the film, however, embrace the oddity/cheapness/absurdity of a lot of Parallax's plot filling... i.e., as adding to the overall elusiveness of the film (perhaps a good comparison here is some of the TV-pilot meandering Mulholland Dr does in its first hour). I don't buy it... but ultimately the fact that the film's a bit ragged and doesn't make much sense does mean that it kind of hangs round slightly maddeningly in your consciousness... the way a lot of supposed real-world conspiracies with very limited evidence do.

Tom Cruise is great as a horrific villain here, and I always felt it was because even his "good guy top movie star" persona had something false behind it and something cold up front. Does "Collateral" give us The Real Tom Cruise?

I thought Magnolia had already done that? His pick-up artist seminar/cult guy, Frank Mackey, felt *very* revealing like PTA had stared into Cruise's soul. Cruise probably should have won the Oscar for that... and that he didn't was an early sign that Cruise didn't really 'have it all' in Hollywood, that a lot of his peers regarded him warily (perhaps because of his Scientology).

I need to rewatch Collateral - I though it was pretty good at the time tho' I kinda hated its crumby digital look.

[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Recall: the much smaller, much sexier, much gorier "MASH" beat Catch-22 to the theaters and got all the glory.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And Patton and Little Big Man beat it too, right? Even if Catch-22 had been great people might have wanted to give it a pass...

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Patton and MASH had it on the WWII aspects; Little Big Man on the epic(though hey, Marty Balsam's in that too -- he was in many ways the most prolific actor to come out of Psycho.)

I must also perhaps rescind my "gorier" take on MASH. Catch-22 is pretty gory , too, in two moments: one in which a man is sliced in half by an airplane propeller and a crucial scene in which a living young man's intestines fall out as Arkin moves his body around.

But MASH also had all that operating room gore -- most famously, a shot of blood spurting out of a patient's neck on the operating table with the docs putting their hands on the wound to tamp it down.

And yet...MASH(especially) and Catch-22 were sold as COMEDIES. Well, it was 1970. R ratings. Vietnam. A rougher world view.

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well...The Parallax View isn't a very good movie. With one exceptional scene...Beatty -- going undercover as a potential assassin -- watches a long "indoctrination film" of abstract imagery
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WI agree with you about the general implausibility and messiness of a lot of the thriller side of Parallax View (all the Parallax Corp has to do to stop Fraidy's investigation in its tracks is just stop killing people. Let him say what he wants, he can't prove anything...but if you respond with bombing and killing all over the place then, even though we see 'the good guy fail', eventually you'll be found out. Parallax Corp's strategy makes no sense when you think it through!).

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Yes, true.

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But I think there are more good scenes than you allow. Most obviously the climax lasts something like 18 minutes and every shot is a discovery of some kind, just *amazing*.

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The high shot of the politician getting shot, with his golf cart slowing circling into the empty set "American Flag" tables is pretty good. This sequence in general owes a lot to "The Manchurian Candidate," and, I'm afraid, points up how much better that one was than this one. IMHO.

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And the Space Needle opening scene is well done.

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Yes...quite good. And rather in the "air pocket of silence" tradition of Hitchcock's climax to Saboteur. (This movie got some "North by Northwest" comparisions in 1974, and while they are there, THIS movie is a dull downer versus the exhilarating lark of NXNW.)

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And the two scenes where the Parallax guy comes to Fraidy's apartment seemingly simultaneously to warn him and recruit him are good (in fact all the semi-sinister scenes with that guy are good).

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The actor was very good. Walter McGinn. He'd play a more sympathetic part(and get killed) in 1975's "Three Days of the Condor." Some years after - but not many -- McGinn was killed young in a car crash in real life.

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And the Paula Prentiss scenes near the beginning of the film are all fine or better.

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Shared element between Catch-22 and The Parallax View: Paula Prentiss. Somebody somewhere wrote of her as a "great star that didn't happen." I thought she had it all going: great croaky voice, great personality(a bit offbeat), very, very sexy when she wanted to be (as a stripper in What's New Pussycat.) Howard Hawks cast her well in "Man's Favorite Sport" opposite Rock Hudson, trying to get a Grant/Kate Hepburn thing going. And she was paired romantically with Jim Hutton in so many MGM movies that folks thought she was married. No, she was married to Richard Benjamin. And still is today. They are both alive.

Prentiss was long-haired and sexy in Catch-22, but short-haired and paranoid in The Parallax View. She's got that key role: the first person to come with Beatty saying there is a conspiracy, people have died, her life is in danger. He doesn't believe her. She dies.

But even THERE, I feel that the film is rather "too low key and rote." Its sad how quickly she dies (we lose Prentiss' lifeforce for the movie itself), but it is almost perfunctory. Her body in the morgue with that ice-cold music that flows quietly through the whole film.

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Everything else though (although you single out the bar brawl for some praise)

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I single it out because it surprised me THEN. Warren Beatty had kind of cultivated this "pretty boy" persona and I couldn't believe him doing this mano-y-mano fist fight with a bigger guy. Funny thing: among movie stars, Beatty IS a big one. Tall and strapping, almost a giant when paired with Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar. But Beatty rarely used his physical size for action.

More to the point, that (early) brawl gives The Parallax View the feel of the "Saboteur" type thriller it might have been before it goes all predictable and slow and quiet. ( I also like the setting for the brawl, a distant outback Washington State log cabin bar framed by majestic mountains and grey skies; you can FEEL the outdoors isolation.)
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feels a little underdone to me plot-wise, visuals-wise, and dialogue-wise (certainly compared to the swiss-watch precision of Chinatown or Godfather 2 from the same year!).

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Beatty felt Parallax "didn't get no respect" versus Chinatown and Godfather 2, but honestly, it IS too quiet and underdone(I blame director Pakula and his musical composer) and the plot is way too simple. Here is a perfect example of how critics and the Oscars actually DO differentiate between great films and merely good ones.

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People who *really* love the film, however, embrace the oddity/cheapness/absurdity of a lot of Parallax's plot filling... i.e., as adding to the overall elusiveness of the film (perhaps a good comparison here is some of the TV-pilot meandering Mulholland Dr does in its first hour). I don't buy it... but ultimately the fact that the film's a bit ragged and doesn't make much sense does mean that it kind of hangs round slightly maddeningly in your consciousness... the way a lot of supposed real-world conspiracies with very limited evidence do.

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I guess. I will say this for "The Parallax View." It finds a tone -- "sleepy paranoid" and sustains it all the way to the (quiet) finale.

Side-bar: Hume Cronyn is in it as Beatty's long suffering newspaper editor boss who resists the conspiracy theories, then embraces them, then...well, you can guess.

This was 1974. In 1971, Cronyn wrote a letter to Alfred Hitchcock reprinted in the book on the making of Frenzy. Cronyn's letter is poignant: he hasn't worked in 9 months, he's hoping maybe Hitch has a role he could play in "Frenzy." He knows its set in London, but can do a British character. Hitchcock wrote back promptly "If I had a role that fit you, you'd be at the top of the list, but there's really nothing there."

So I'm glad they hired Hume Cronyn for The Parallax View.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tom Cruise is great as a horrific villain here, and I always felt it was because even his "good guy top movie star" persona had something false behind it and something cold up front. Does "Collateral" give us The Real Tom Cruise?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I thought Magnolia had already done that? His pick-up artist seminar/cult guy, Frank Mackey, felt *very* revealing like PTA had stared into Cruise's soul.

--

Ya got me! I forgot all about that one. I shall henceforth copyright "I was typing too fast(and thinking too little.)

THAT said, at least the guy in Magnolia is "explained"(daddy issues) and finds some redemption at the end. The guy in Collateral kills without mercy and finds no redemption at HIS end.

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Cruise probably should have won the Oscar for that... and that he didn't was an early sign that Cruise didn't really 'have it all' in Hollywood, that a lot of his peers regarded him warily (perhaps because of his Scientology).

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Possibly. I can't remember which roles Cruise WAS nominated for -- Born on the Fourth of July and Rain Man come to mind, and of course, Supporting for Magnolia. (The winner, Michael Caine for something else, told Cruise from the stage, "You wouldn't have wanted to win this, Tom. Its Suppporting...your price would go down.")

Someday perhaps Tom Cruise will have put in the years and will get the role to prove himself. I"m impressed by a few things: after a near career implosion about 11 years ago, he's back commanding top dollar today(even if in lesser films like Jack Reacher), and he DID mature on screen. I really like how he looks, how he sounds, and how he acts today.

But that don't mean he ain't weird. Recall that John Travolta may have lost an Oscar nomination for "Get Shorty" when he gave a Golden Globes speech thanking L. Ron Hubbard.

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I need to rewatch Collateral - I though it was pretty good at the time tho' I kinda hated its crumby digital look.

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I liked some of that look. The director is Michael Mann, and I see it as a stripped down companion piece to Mann's "Heat"(1995) which had Pacino and DeNiro and all-star support in a sprawling Los Angeles epic(sometimes compared to LAC, but its not as good), whereas this one is pretty much a two-man two-hander in a cab around LA.

Its Cruise's villainy that runs the engine. He's a fascinating psychopath, up close and personal and he chills you to the bone, even as he sometimes makes small talk with his hostage (Foxx) that almost makes you think he's human.
And his look is great. Much as gray-haired Cary Grant in a silver suit as Roger Thornhill was iconic in NXNW, here its prematurely gray and very much the same sleek look on Cruise. Mann said he wanted Cruise to "look like a bullet." A silver bullet. And he does.)

There's a scene where Foxx seems to have FINALLY escaped but Cruise surprisingly catches up with him and re-captures Foxx yet again,where I realized: "Man, I really HATE Tom Cruise in this movie." He was that good. At being that bad.

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Its not all thrillers, action, and gore;

I re-watched one this weekend from 1985: "Murphy's Romance." Set in a small Arizona town where everybody gathers for church socials, Bingo nights and square dances, its a palpably sweet valentine to "small town American life" that we could really use in these degraded modern political times. James Garner got his only Oscar nomination for playing, well, The Ultimate James Garner Role as a cantankerous, honorable, Man's Man of a handsome Old Coot who slowly wins the heart of the much younger struggling-single-mother Sally Field. Its sweet as hell. Carole King theme song and score. Martin Ritt directed, and I think he had help from his old "Hombre" writers of 1967!

No blood, no guts. No wait -- Garner walks out of the small town's one-screen movie theater(another American mainstay) during a gory murder scene in "Friday the 13th"(partially shown) saying "I worked one summer in a slaughterhouse. I don't need to pay three dollars to re-live the experience."

Funny: the sweet "Murphy's Romance" was guest hosted by big, semi-ugly Ron Perlman on Turner Classic Movies.

Funny: On SNL the other night, they did a spoof of The Music Man . The announcer says: "You are watching Turner Classic Movies, which means you are an old woman or a young gay man."

Hey!

[–] swanstep 8 years ago

Prentiss was long-haired and sexy in Catch-22, but short-haired and paranoid in The Parallax View. She's got that key role: the first person to come with Beatty saying there is a conspiracy, people have died, her life is in danger. He doesn't believe her. She dies.

But even THERE, I feel that the film is rather "too low key and rote." Its sad how quickly she dies (we lose Prentiss' lifeforce for the movie itself), but it is almost perfunctory. Her body in the morgue with that ice-cold music that flows quietly through the whole film.

Agree that Prentiss dropping out of the movie so early is a bummer. In my perfect world, Pakula starts shooting, realizes what he's got with Prentiss and that he needs to keep her around for another 30 minutes on screen at least so that *we* have that pleasure and that then her character's death will really hurt. Someone like Goldman is brought in do some fast rewriting to make this happen...

I liked some of that look. The director is Michael Mann, and I see it as a stripped down companion piece to Mann's "Heat"(1995) which had Pacino and DeNiro and all-star support in a sprawling Los Angeles epic(sometimes compared to LAC, but its not as good), whereas this one is pretty much a two-man two-hander in a cab around LA.

Chris Nolan hosted a big Heat summit recently. It's split up into a series of vids on youtube staring here:
http://tinyurl.com/gvnss5o
Definitely worth checking out if you haven't already. It made me rewatch the film and appreciate it more than I had.

Its Cruise's villainy that runs the engine. H...And his look is great. Much as gray-haired Cary Grant in a silver suit as Roger Thornhill was iconic in NXNW, here its prematurely gray and very much the same sleek look on Cruise. Mann said he wanted Cruise to "look like a bullet." A silver bullet. And he does.)

Good point. It was an interesting look for sure and I think it'll always get a long look in any Cruise career montages for that reason.

Funny: On SNL the other night, they did a spoof of The Music Man . The announcer says: "You are watching Turner Classic Movies, which means you are an old woman or a young gay man."

This sort of remark/joke is often made... and presumably advertisers could tell you what the kernel of truth is in it. I have an advertising marketing exec brother (the one who knew Kate Beckinsale pre-fame) and he often jokes how, as far as advertisers are concerned, I don't exist (it's the same for jury duty - I look like independent-thinking trouble to lawyers, don't fit a predictable, gameable demographic - and so have always been objected off!).

Back to Curtis Hanson. David Edelstein has a snarky review of Girl on the Train here:
http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/movie-review-the-girl-on-the-train.html
in which he talks about how shapely and thrilling the scenes in even a very minor Hanson film, The Bedroom Window, are compared to GOTT.

[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Agree that Prentiss dropping out of the movie so early is a bummer.

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My memories are clear about "back then." I really liked Paula Prentiss, felt good seeing her in this from the beginning, concerned about her plight..and she's gone, just like that. I was p'oed.

I'm reminded what someone wrote about Psycho: "Its as if Hitchcock sets out to depopulate the interesting characters from the screen"(Marion and Arbogast in the main, but also some of the early supporting players who just "go.")

Indeed, Beatty spends a lot of time in this movie rather "going solo" -- it has the edge of a vanity production to it in scenes like the long, long, LONG scene about the plane bombing threat, where Beatty is the only main player on screen.

Which reminds me: a flaw, to me, about The Parallax View(having just seen it), is that when the guy comes to recruit Beatty as an "antisocial loner" living alone in a squalid apartment...he still looks like WARREN BEATTY. Great hair, great face, great body. Its hard to believe Beatty as a desperate man. That face alone could get him work and ladies.

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In my perfect world, Pakula starts shooting, realizes what he's got with Prentiss and that he needs to keep her around for another 30 minutes on screen at least so that *we* have that pleasure and that then her character's death will really hurt. Someone like Goldman is brought in do some fast rewriting to make this happen...

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That WOULD be a perfect world, and guys like Goldman(and Robert Towne on The Godfather -- the Brando/Pacino scene near the end)...knew how to "punch things up."

Briefly on Alan Pakula: not one of my favorite directors. He has three major titles in the 70s -- Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men(screenplay by Goldman) -- in which I think his lethargic, low-energy approach to what are ostensibly thrillers(but really a character study in Klute, a paranoid fantasy in Parallax, and a political film in Men) took away from them. Klute and President's Men are good, IMHO , in spite of Pakula's presence.

Pakula spent the 60's as a producer in concert with director Robert Mulligan, and together they gave us the great To Kill in Mockingbird and the good Love With a Proper Stranger and Up the Down Staircase. THOSE movies had good musical scores and "warm" stories to tell (even with tragedy within them); when Pakula broke off from Mulligan, he got rather glum.

Tragic end for Alan Pakula. In freeway traffic in his car, he was impaled by a pole that flew out of the truck ahead of him and into his windshield. I think about Pakula (and singer Harry "Cat's in the Cradle" Chapin, who died much the same way), when trucks with poles in the back are in front of me. I drive real carefully.

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I liked some of that look. The director is Michael Mann, and I see it as a stripped down companion piece to Mann's "Heat"(1995) which had Pacino and DeNiro and all-star support in a sprawling Los Angeles epic(sometimes compared to LAC, but its not as good), whereas this one is pretty much a two-man two-hander in a cab around LA.
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Chris Nolan hosted a big Heat summit recently. It's split up into a series of vids on youtube staring here:
http://tinyurl.com/gvnss5o
Definitely worth checking out if you haven't already. It made me rewatch the film and appreciate it more than I had.

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I'll take a look. I was a big "Heat" fan on its 1995 release though I felt it was a bit hokey keeping Pacino and DeNiro apart for most of the movie except for a mid-film "coffee date"(in which cop Pacino says he'll take DeNiro down if he has to and DeNiro says he'll do the same to Pacino) and their final confrontation. Fascinating: how each man was the leader of a team of men (good cops, bad crooks) and how those men all had women...and how not everybody got out alive.

Unlike LA Confidential to come, Heat had less of an intricate story to tell and more "star servicing" to do. Perhaps(again), that's why LAC worked so well. No star had to be serviced. Even the biggest name in the cast -- Kevin Spacey -- didn't seem like a leading man yet. He was a character guy in a movie filled with them. Russell Crowe was the star to come OUT of LAC, but he wasn't one when he went in.

Heat wasn't my favorite movie of 1995, but it came close. Casino was. Casino came out in November, Heat came out in December and between the two I had a good long gulp of crime epics with Mr. DeNiro(not always a favorite) fine in both.

Heat connects to Collateral connects to Thief (Michael Mann's first theatrical, and a favorite of 1981) connects to Red Dragon(the Hannibal Lecter movie nobody saw) in this way: all are very stylized with regard to the color scheme of the movie in question. Blues and greens in Thief; greens and reds in Dragon...steel gray and black in Heat.

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Its Cruise's villainy that runs the engine. H...And his look is great. Much as gray-haired Cary Grant in a silver suit as Roger Thornhill was iconic in NXNW, here its prematurely gray and very much the same sleek look on Cruise. Mann said he wanted Cruise to "look like a bullet." A silver bullet. And he does.)
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Good point. It was an interesting look for sure and I think it'll always get a long look in any Cruise career montages for that reason.

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Yes. Cruise has adopted different looks(long hair in Magnolia, a butch in the first M:I, beards and moustaches when necessary) but his "Collateral" look is the best of the bunch thus far. A "color coordinated man." Cary Grant wasn't entirely gray in NXNW and his silver suit was rather subdued. Cruise in Collateral is more "flamboyant" in the brightness of the gray look. But its a great look for him, and somehow suggests the steely calculation of his killer...either a man aged beyond his years, or a younger man in disguise as an older one.

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Funny: On SNL the other night, they did a spoof of The Music Man . The announcer says: "You are watching Turner Classic Movies, which means you are an old woman or a young gay man."
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This sort of remark/joke is often made... and presumably advertisers could tell you what the kernel of truth is in it.

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I suppose. But its not me. I often gravitate to TCM when the movie in question is from the 60's (Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt) or the 70s(The Parallax View.) I don't quite fit their Bette Davis demographic.

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I have an advertising marketing exec brother (the one who knew Kate Beckinsale pre-fame) and he often jokes how, as far as advertisers are concerned, I don't exist (it's the same for jury duty - I look like independent-thinking trouble to lawyers, don't fit a predictable, gameable demographic - and so have always been objected off!).

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I have recently told of seeing a preview of "Cast Away" in 2000...16 years ago, and only being one year younger than their cut-off point where I wouldn't be admitted. Such youthful folly.

As my recent posts have shown, yes, I am of a certain age, but I'm liking The Magnificent Seven and John Wick and other action pieces and I expect that makes me younger than they think I am!

Also as I've noted before, "out here" I have all manner of teenage/20-something relatives who find my tastes quite..youthful.

Its not a matter of wearing love beads and turtlenecks past their prime...its a matter of staying "young at heart."

And TCM can do that for me.

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Back to Curtis Hanson. David Edelstein has a snarky review of Girl on the Train here:
http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/movie-review-the-girl-on-the-train.html
in which he talks about how shapely and thrilling the scenes in even a very minor Hanson film, The Bedroom Window, are compared to GOTT.

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I'll look at the review. Its probably beneficial to Curtis Hanson, now that we've lost him, that expert critics like Edelstein can take a look at Hanson's early work that was notable in its own way(he was often "well reviewed for a B movie") and helped lead the way to the big break of LAC.

And as you can see, "Girl on the Train" isn't faring too well with most critics. Though I read a good review of it the other day that saluted it for its nuance and cinematic style(Emily Blunt's drunken blackouts were evidently quite the in-the-camera technical achievement.) I didn't think it was that great. I do think that Haley Bennett is beautiful.

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And, er...oh. There's a new "John Wick 2" trailer out. Irresistible. At the very end, it is revealed that Laurence Fishburne is in this one, so we get a "Matrix reunion"(why its like Tony and Marty in Catch 22.)

The "John Wick Chapter 2" poster that goes with it is hilarious, as far as I'm concerned.