THE FIRST MODERN TV SHOW: WISEGUY

“Damn, TV has changed.” --Eddie Murphy, 48 Hrs.

One's own personal neuroses should, for their lone redeeming quality, entertain oneself, otherwise what the fuck good are they? Among mine—which are legion—the one that amusexasperates me the most is my inability to follow more than one TV show at any given point in my life. I get overloaded trying to follow more than one of these massive serial narratives at once; I guess this is half my own glitchy intellect and half every fucking show nowadays is this massive epic. Right now I'm giving Game of Thrones a longer chance than I thought I would a couple weeks ago. The first episode—with the major exception of that rape scene that apparently wasn't a rape scene in the book—I liked. The second and most of the third I spent wondering who the fuck all these people were and whether the blonde chick with the eyebrows was going to have to have a sex scene shoehorned into every episode (I mean, come on, she's attractive, and looks great with her clothes off, but every time she shtups Conan the Barbarian I'm like, “oy, I guess rape trauma is a 24 hour bug in Westeros . . .”). The fourth and fifth eps won me back a bit, enough so that I think I'll make it to the end of the season. The scene where Cersei and Robert took time out from their zillions of nefarious schemes to have a husband-and-wife glass of wine is what did it: it was such a well-written and acted scene that even though the goddamn story of this show is still a brain-buster, I feel like I owe it my full attention. It has its problems, but it also has people cutting each other up with swords and Peter Dinklage fucking owning everything in sight. Especially since the supernarrative is starting to cohere, I'll give it another month and a half.

As much as it make me sound like a cementhead old person saying this, I kind of miss the days when TV shows were like, if you missed one episode because you were out having sex and another one because you were winning at poker you could tune in on the odd slow Monday night and the show would still make sense. And yes, I know everybody except me has DVR, rendering this largely moot. But I still think some TV writers—and you best believe I'm tsk-tsking at those Game of Thrones dudes—get too comfortable with the whole “people are gonna be watching this over and over on DVR anyway” thing and end up jerking off to themselves for being clever and oblique and stuff. I do long for the halcyon days when it was not thus. But I also have to admit I'm a fan of the very first show to start this trend. And I'm not talkin about The Sopranos. Or even OZ. Or even you wiseasses in the back row who said Twin Peaks. I've got plenty of love for all three of those (well, the first two and a half seasons of The Sopranos, anyway), but I'm talkin about a show that predates 'em all: Wiseguy.

Wiseguy was the brainchild of prolific TV writer-producer Stephen J. Cannell, who created and presided over a staggering array of popular television shows in the 70s and 80s, most notably The Rockford Files, The A-Team, and 21 Jump Street. Wiseguy is his most ambitious show, eschewing the autonomous episode format in favor of multi-episode “arcs,” which is basically what all television dramas are today. Other shows might have tried this before, but none on the scale Wiseguy did.

The show's protagonist was Vinnie Terranova, a deep-cover agent of a fictional FBI organized crime unit. As played by Ken Wahl, Vinnie was a deeply compelling protagonist, managing to have enormous internal conflicts without ever becoming too emo (well, at least until the end of the fourth season, but that might have just been because Ken Wahl wanted to go do movies), plausible as both tough and smart. Vinny Terranova's a mensch. A stand-up guy. This is what leads to his massive internal conflict, as his job requires him to be the very antithesis, underlining how much easier it is for actors and undercover cops to do their jobs if they're total sociopaths. But hey, if it was easy, there'd be no story. Look at Limitless.

Vinnie is in the extremely difficult position of not being able to tell his friends and loved ones that he's not a gangster. He's able to tell his brother the priest, Father Pete (Gerald Anthony), but only in confession, and it's a long, agonizing time before he's able to tell his motormouth mother (Elsa Raven). Father Pete and Mama Terranova are series mainstays, though they each got enmeshed in fucktarded subplots as the series went on; Father Pete gets killed, which is dumb, and especially sucks because he's one of the only four priests in the universe who never fucked a kid, and Mama Terranova goes from sanctimonious gangster-hater so stressed out that her Vincenzo became a gangster that she has a heart attack to marrying an elderly Mob patriarch in one of the later, stupider seasons.

As for his professional life, Vinnie has two constant colleagues there as well. His bureau handler Frank McPike (Jonathan Banks) is dour, vindictive, and not above being massively immature when he's pissed off, but Frank is a good egg when you get right down to it and due to the nature of his character gets to have all kinds of good wisecracks, the general tenor of which are summarized hilariously by a tightass superior the first season as “dry . . . biscuit . . . humor” (it makes less sense the more you analyze it, so just take it at face value as fucking funny).



The other is the Lifeguard (Jim Byrnes), with whom Vinnie checks in via payphone (ah, the 80s) to convey and receive information. Their relationship evolves rather quickly from business into a deeply personal, almost familial bond; Vinnie is initially given the code phrase “Uncle Mike” to use when in trouble, but The Lifeguard quickly becomes an uncle to Vinnie, and the two become quite good friends despite almost never meeting face-to-face (this was rarer before the Internet). The Lifeguard helps Vinnie deal with the isolation inherent to the job, and the Lifeguard is himself quite lonely. He's missing both legs, as is the actor who plays him. Jim Byrnes lost both legs in an auto accident when he was quite young; if the role wasn't written for him, it certainly could have been (in a happy epilogue, Jim Byrnes has gone onto quite a successful career as a voiceover actor, so he can make that paper without having to do all that stupid walking shit or play a dude in a 'chair every time he wants to work).

The pilot begins with Vinnie getting out of prison, where he's been establishing his cover as a gangster badass. He proceeds to infiltrate the organization of Atlantic City mobster Sonny Steelgrave (Ray Sharkey, who chews scenery like a Great White) and make the acquaintance of the high-level East Coast underworld. The way the show is written, directed, and acted is very much 80s TV drama—this is to say, a bit more stylized and presentational than the cinema verité camerawork and self-aware snarky dialogue one sees on so many modern shows. By the standards of its time, Wiseguy was an ambitious, terrifically executed show. It suffers slightly in comparison to similarly-themed TV shows produced since, but those shows had far superior resources and didn't have to euphemize for the censors.

This is a particular handicap for a gangster show, because gangsters fucking curse. Wiseguy features a number of unfortunate turns of phrase mandated by the fact that the show was on network TV, but this is just about the only aspect in which the show's world fails to compel completely (well, the first season, at least). Vinnie develops a deep, incredibly complicated relationship with Sonny, and when events inexorably lead to Sonny's arrest, Vinnie legitimately feels as though he's betrayed Sonny. This kind of moral ambiguity, let us not forget, did not fucking happen on TV in 1987. The last episode, concluding with Vinnie and Sonny beating the shit out of each other after Vinnie reveals his FBI status, then slumping to the ground and staring at each other while “Nights in White Satin” plays on the soundtrack, is as powerful a piece of filmmaking as anyone achieved in the 80s. Sonny eventually electrocutes himself rather than be taken alive by the police, achieving a kind of mythic outlaw stature.

Wiseguy's first ten episodes, constituting the Steelgrave Arc, hold up against just about anything put on television in 80s. It feels like both more and fewer than ten episodes, due to the incredibly strong character relationships, and the economy of the writing leading to every episode feeling full and substantial, yet zooming forward. The supporting cast is excellent, featuring a young Annette Bening as another undercover agent Vinnie encounters, and the immortal Joe Dallesandro as the smooth New York Don Paul Patrice, known as “Pat the Cat” due to reasons related in a vivid, disturbing anecdote by Sonny. The Steelgrave saga almost feels too good; how the fuck are they going to get the audience involved in a story about Vinnie bringing down another gangster?

The answer is simple: up the stakes. After one intermediary episode about Vinnie trying to come to grips with the guilt he feels about bringing down Sonny Steelgrave, Frank McPike comes to him with a new assignment: get next to an independent operator named Roger Lococco (William Russ), about whom things don't seem to add up. Vinnie accepts the assignment reluctantly, and liaises with a wisecracking, stereotype-busting Japanese-American agent named Kenny (Clyde Kusatsu, who's fucking awesome). They stage a scene for the purposes of getting Lococco's attention, poolside at a hotel in Stockton, CA at 9am, where both Roger Lococco and Vinnie order Bloody Marys and Vinnie pretends to be buying a gun from Kenny.

This is both fucking ridiculous and kind of awesome, as it posits a world where dudes are so badass that they need to be buying guns at 9 o'clock in the morning over Bloody Marys. Even more ridiculous (and awesome) is that Vinnie's charade works: after Kenny splits, Roger offers an opinion about his favored armament and he and Vinnie proceed to nerd out about guns and do one seriously funny alpha-tough-guy testosterone verbal pas de deux. They hang out a bit; Roger and Vinnie party with some European blondes who're flown in on a private jet by someone named Sue. Vinnie starts getting the sense that there's more than meets the eye, though McPike's superior at the FBI is going to pull the plug. Then Vinnie makes a joke about Nazis (based on nothing more than the blondes speaking German, and the mechanic who installs machine guns in a hunk of shit unmarked cop car-looking car for Roger—the demonstration of which is great fun, by the way—having a thick accent), and even though Vinnie's clearly kidding, suddenly the FBI's throwing massive resources at the thing and the CIA gets involved.

Before Vinnie or McPike can get the idea that a mountain is being made out of a molehill, Roger whisks Vinnie off to a party on a yacht where there're all kinds of massively rich people and coke all over the place and girls with big tits running around in bikinis. Oft spoken of but not yet glimpsed are a shadowy pair—to whom everyone at the party, no matter how rich, looks up—named Mel and Susan Profitt. And, lo and behold, it turns out these two basically control organized crime on planet Earth.

Holy shit, what a pair. Susan, whom we meet first, is played by Joan Severance, at the time about 30 and simply reified sex (albeit in a very 80s, big hair sort of way, but still, gotdamn). She projects both cool competence and irresistible seduction. Mel we meet at the top of episode 2. And he, ladies and gentlemen, is played by Kevin fucking Spacey.

That's right, Wiseguy gave us Kevin Spacey, and without Kevin Spacey, are the 90s really even the 90s? Glengarry Glen Ross, The Usual Suspects, Se7en (if that's still a spoiler and you're pissed, whoops), L.A. Confidential, American Beauty . . . and it all began back in 1988 when he looked kind of like Bill Hicks' over-caffeinated brother. He hams it up so much as Mel Profitt the show needs a “Parental Advisory: the following show contains treyf” warning. He chews so much scenery he was still picking it out of his teeth ten years later. But, make no mistake, he fucking rawks as Mel Profitt.

Mel Profitt is just barely in control of himself, though he controls crime worldwide. He and Susan only function together, and she only seems sane because he's so epically nucking futs. There isn't incestous subtext, it's text. Susan shoots up Mel with mysterious drugs, he operates on a blend of whim, nut-flexing, and garbled Malthusian theory (though I gotta say, a villain ranting about Thomas Malthus on network television warms the heart), and they basically scare the shit out of everyone, up to and including their sergeant-at-arms/favored hitman Roger Lococco.

Vinnie quickly gains Mel's favor, largely because Vinnie has the balls to stand up to him. Susan is also taken with Vinnie, which Mel tries to be okay with except his jealousy ends up getting the better of him, especially after Vinnie trips on his dick and “accidentally” fucks her. Mel resultantly ends up spiraling, which leads to Susan having to kill him with a hotshot. After this, Susan herself goes hopelessly, irrevocably batshit without her other half to ground her. She tells Vinnie that she's pregnant, and that it's his, which freaks Vinnie out—evidently he was hitting it raw—but even freakier is the fact that the pregnancy is hysterical. Eventually, Vinnie has to have Susan committed and thrown in the bughouse, since she isn't competent to stand trial.

As if all that shit wasn't enough . . . it turns out Roger Lococco is a Fed too. He's with the CIA, under even deeper cover than Vinnie. Vinnie and Roger develop a deep bond, with much of the moral ambiguity that characterized his relationship with Sonny, only with the added wrinkle of Roger being a “good” guy in spite of all the people he kills. In a way, Roger is the anchor of the Profitt Arc, a fascinating antihero who does unspeakable things and yet maintains a code of ethics.

Certainly, without an anchor, the Profitt arc would spiral off into the ether. The plot is feverish horseshit, the stakes so melodramatically grand that without a really firm tether it'd float away. But the conviction of the writing, the terrific performances (Wahl, Banks, and Byrnes are still excellent, and grow even further into their roles as the series goes along, and nearly all the baddies and “baddies” are great), and the novelty of the show's form sustain it throughout the first season, making it one of the finest debut seasons in the history of TV.

Subsequent seasons failed to ever reach those heights, but a below-average season from a great show is still better than the best season of a shitty show. In seasons 2 and 3, the arcs got shorter and the targets more esoteric; anything was going to seem anticlimactic after Mel Profitt (not to mention Susan Profitt), but Fred Thompson's huckster faux-white supremacist was a little fish (though Paul Guilfoyle's crazed true-believer character was scary and well-played). There was another Mafia arc-let that just seemed like an attempt to recapture the Sonny Steelgrave mojo, but it didn't work.

The show hit a major snag when Ken Wahl broke an ankle in an accident while filming, and had to be written out of the show while he recovered. Unfortunately, this was in the middle of a potentially interesting arc about corruption in the garment industry with Ron Silver and Jerry Lewis, both of whom were awesome on the show (Ed. Note: don't front on Jerry Lewis just because he was a geeked-out doofball when he was young, he was fucking great in The King of Comedy and he was rock-solid on Wiseguy). That couple months unfortunately ended up just killing time til Ken Wahl got back to be Vinnie again.

His next assignment upon return was an investigation of corruption in the music business, in what was by far the funniest plotline on Wiseguy. Its sense of what “real” music is is only marginally more refined than that of Eddie & the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives, but the lower stakes also create a light tone, and the guest stars are all massively clutch: the great Paul Winfield's degenerate gambler character was awesome because he was played by Paul Winfield (Ed. Note: Paul Winfield was awesome), Patti D'Arbanville rules as his wife, Tim Curry is Tim Curry for shit's sake (he plays the oily Brit main baddie, perfect casting if there ever was), and the late, great, Ron Taylor was particularly fun as dissolute songwriter Monroe Blue. Who's Ron Taylor? This guy:



Because the game is the game, Ron Taylor was usually billed as something like “Big Black Guy,” which fucking sucks—I mean, come on, at least “Biggest Black Guy,” come on, people, fucking focus—but we who are truly up on our shit know better. Not only was he part of one of the funnier bits in Trading Places (as one of the two guys who try to intimidate Eddie in jail), he was the voice of Lisa Simpson's saxophone mentor on the motherfucking Simpsons, people. Bow head in reverence, then continue.

Glenn Frey and Debbie Harry were also solid in this storyline, with Glenn Frey (as Vinnie's Virgil in the infernal music biz) a particularly pleasant surprise since we already knew Debbie Harry could act from Hairspray. Paul McCrane (“You're dead . . . WE KILLED YOU!” guy from Robocop as well as, regrettably, Jack Bauer's evil brother on the second-shittiest season of 24) turned in a memorable performance as an ephebophile record producer who was bizarrely kind of an all right guy. All in all, the music arc was the best since season 1.

Then, concluding Wiseguy's run as actual Wiseguy and not the bullshit half-measure that the last, incomplete season was, an arc-let set in a town in Pacific Northwest where weird shit happens and there are serial killers and shit. What's that, you say? Cynical attempt to cash in on the popularity of Twin Peaks, sayest thou? Well au contraire motherfuckers, the first episode of this arc aired two months before Twin Peaks' debut! How's that for some forward thinking on Wiseguy's part, huh?

Actual Twin Peaks similarities are a stretch, at best. Vinnie gets sent to a town in Washington called Lynchboro (part of the confusion), which is being ruled by an autocratic eccentric, who's obsessed with the William Castle picture Mister Sardonicus. (Ed. Note: *pure movie nerd bliss*). He buys the girls he likes at the town brothel Corvettes (no, his name is not Ben Horne, knock that shit off). And the local law enforcement is eccentric to say the least. The town sheriff is David Straithairn—that's right, David Fucking Straithairn, one of the finest American thespians ever to breathe air; man? Nay. LEGEND—who seems to be an all right cat. Vinnie actually gets to infiltrate Lynchboro as a cop for once, and he goes to work for Sheriff Straithairn, only to find out Straithairn's the one who's been killing people, and when cornered he electrocutes himself, just like Sonny Steelgrave. Vinnie has a PTSD meltdown, and a bunch of other stuff happens, none of it terribly plausible (though some things, like Roger Lococco showing up out of nowhere to say what's up, admittedly rule), and the season kind of fizzles out, with Vinnie depressed in Seattle and Frank McPike getting shot. Still, it started out pretty well.

That anticlimax would unfortunately be the end of Wiseguy as a watchable show. Between seasons 3 and 4 Ken Wahl said, “I want this much money,” and held up his hands six feet apart. The evil white guys in suits said, “We want to pay you this much money,” and held their hands up four feet apart. Ken Wahl said “Fuck you evil white guys in suits, I'm going to go be a movie star” (Ed. Note: the historical record now reflect this as the most fucktarded decision by the lead on a series in the history of TV, because David Caruso, once the world-record holder, eventually came back with a memorable-but-not-good performance in the otherwise shittastic Proof of Life and then found new life with a memorable-but-fucking-terrible performance on CSI: Miami; Ken Wahl never had a second act to his career, which sucks, because he's a talented dude, he just had a whole lot of bad luck and some major health problems). And the evil white guys in suits said, “We're going to cast Steven Bauer as a new OCB operative and stay the course.” Only it didn't work. Steven Bauer's awesome—when I finally do a post about Wild Side, I'll expand on that—but Wiseguy is not Wiseguy without the Vinnie-McPike-Lifeguard triad, and the apex of that triangle is Vinnie. Manolo from Scarface is a pale shadow.

And so Wiseguy died the death, but not before being a consistently entertaining series that in its first season was admirably ambitious, and succeeded well enough that it gives Stephen J. Cannell legit credit as an artist. The fact that the last half of that last sentence was written by a human being will make highbrow motherfuckers grow ulcers, so even though it's a slight exaggeration, I'll stand by it.

THIS IS THE WORST TRAILER OF ALL TIME

Okay, it's time to lay down the law. There were some cool things about the 80s. A couple good Talking Heads albums (and Stop Making Sense). Midnight Run. The Untouchables. The Berlin Wall fucked off this mortal coil. But let's not kid ourselves; that was about it. The rest of the decade fucking sucked. Maybe it's all John Hinckley's fault for having shitty aim, maybe it's more complicated than that, maybe I'm being a little severe, but fuck it, this is a fiat from the Minister of Culture: 80s nostalgia is hereby punishable by death as of this moment. Why are some of the perfectly reasonable things to remember and enjoy from the 80s being punished? This trailer.

This is one of the single worst things that has ever existed, of any sort, forget movie trailers, or even movies. What has it been, six years since Topher Grace was in a movie? He used to be really fucking good. What the fuck is this fucking bullshit? Seriously. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? WHY DOES THIS EXIST? WHO ARE THE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS? WHERE IS MY FIRING SQUAD? KHAAAAAAAANNNN!!!!!!!

The writers of That 70s Show wrote this picture, so the same people who gave Topher Grace his start will be responsible for his finish as well, which is a far more elegant bit of symmetry than anything that appears in this bullshit fucking trailer. It actually makes perfect sense that the That 70s Show people are responsible for this, with the shallow, stupid substitution of namechecking for historical detail; this almost seems like it was something John Hughes wrote in the depths of a late-80s smack binge that his agent managed to keep quiet, until it was found, punched up by a sitcom writer and directed by those Epic Movie Felcher Seltzerberg fuckfaces.

(Ed. Note: obviously, you can't tell everything about a movie from its trailer. I wouldn't presume to. But goddamnit man. I'm sorry you all had to see this, but we all need to be aware that no matter how bad we think modern culture can get, it can always get worse.)

THE LINK BETWEEN LOVERBOY AND NO WAY OUT

I'm up in Massachussetts, having an absolute fucking blast. I've been reading, writing, listening to tunes, getting into alpha-dominance battles with my mom's cats (man conquers nature, believe it), and of course, watching movies. Two in particular warrant mention, both childhood favorites, that you wouldn't think have anything in common . . . BUT THEY DO. Loverboy. No Way Out. What does a critically-dismissed, little-seen sex comedy that no one (much to their eternal discredit) still gives a fuck about have in common with a stylish, popular thriller that the average civilian remembers only for the limo shtup scene? I'm glad you asked, for the answer is simple: gay panic.

Now, I won't spend too much time sucking my own dick for being progressive, since that image works better as a joke than a reality (I'm not as flexible as I used to be), but I don't get why people trip about the 'mos. I regard the lesbians as natural allies; anyone who knows what it's like to be frustrated by women can drink whiskey with me anytime. Gay guys even more so: I'm a guy, they're guys, no more need be said. Recent years have seen the radical, shocking suggestion that gay people are normal people in movies. Colin Firth in A Single Man, for example: you could have replaced Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult with chicks and it'd basically be the same movie (well, except the whole Julianne Moore “why don't you want me?” subplot wouldn't make as much sense) and Colin Firth would be no less or more awesome (Ed. Note: he's massively awesome in that movie). But the fact that he is gay in it and he's a normal (if really smart and stylish) dude is great; I was actually rooting like hell for him to nail Nicholas Hoult for the whole second half of that movie.

They weren't making pictures like that in the 80s, alas. Progress had advanced to the point where you could mention that homosexuality existed in a movie, but it was this weird thing that freaked straights out. People used AIDS to excuse a lot of homophobic bullshit, but it really boiled down to the problem of your average civilian not realizing that s/he knew a whole lot more gays than s/he thought. And so your average civilian thought of the gays as being either flouncing, lavender jumpsuit-wearing faggots or linebacker-sized baritone broads in combat boots, if they were able to even process the concept. The unknown is always scary.


Loverboy, from veteran director Joan Micklin Silver, is a fairly progressive movie for the late 80s in that it laughs its ass off at gay panic. Young Patrick Dempsey (who, ironically, would go on to star on a TV show called Gay's Homosexuality) starts out the movie as a poseur punk college student with dumbass blond streaks in his hair whose sole use for his textbooks is to smash his hair into those dumbass “punk” spikes. We meet him listening to Edie Brickell (which isn't gay, but it does kind of make him a middle-aged woman) and making sincere but clueless romantic preparations for a quiet romantic evening with his girlfriend. The scene establishes him perfectly as a giant retard whose heart is in the right place.

And then a staggering, awe-inspiring collection of 80s college-movie stereotypes all arrive at Patrick Dempsey's room and throw the massivest fucking dorm room party of all time. Within a minute of their arrival, people are funneling beers, breaking shit, and generally setting a new land speed record for total destruction. It's really pretty awe-inspiring how quickly and totally shit gets fucked up in this scene, as Patrick Dempsey, who tried impotently to get this nuclear decadence flash mob to leave so he could Edie Brickell his way into his lady's vagina (in the Biblical sense), succumbs immediately, and is dancing around shitfaced with a gigantic duck head on (as one does) when said lady, Jenny, arrives. She rather primly objects to her room—they live together—being trashed by the 110th Airborne Booze & Pussy Rangers, and kicks everyone out.

A very hung over Patrick Dempsey wakes up and fights through the taunting of yuppie jagoff Jory to get back in the room and sweet-talk Jenny into forgiving him. She tells him he needs to learn to nut up and not let people walk all over him. Patrick Dempsey assures her he absolutely will. He'll even—pick your jaws up from the floor—tell his father that they're dating. She's quite happy about this, until Patrick Dempsey's father shows up to pick him up for summer vacation, and Patrick Dempsey starts in with some bullshit lie about how Jenny's his tutor. Naturally, she storms out; who the fuck wants a spineless choad like that for a boyfriend, much less one with such retarded hair?

To add to his problems, Patrick Dempsey's hideous academic record (“Oh, those are incompletes. It's cool, I can make those up”) pisses off his blue-collar dad, who runs a construction business, off to the point where he says fuck you I ain't payin for this shit anymore, get a job fucko. Mom Kate Jackson thinks Dad's being a little harsh, but defers to his authority. For now.

Patrick Dempsey then gets a job at a pizza place called Señor Pizza, where he has to wear a hilarious fake mustache and a sombrero strapped to his back. The paychecks are going to be a bit light as well; as co-worker Rick Diesel (Ed. Note: Canadian actor Bernie Coulson, tragically, ensured that he will be called nothing other than Rick Diesel in perpetuity with his hilariously terrible, scenery-chewing performance in Eddie & The Cruisers II: Eddie Lives; sorry, there's nothing I can do about this, it's the rules) informs him, it will take Patrick Dempsey approximately forever to earn a semester's tuition. Patrick Dempsey is, as the kids say, crestfallen, though Rick Diesel exhorts him to appreciate the side benefits of the job, like there being plenty of chicks to flirt with. Rick Diesel demonstrates, putting on his suavest act, only to have his two bubblehead targets fascinated sexually by Italian stud Tony (former Cher boyfriend Rob Camilletti) and utterly oblivious to the Rick Diesel charm. “I can't believe they fall for that Pepe Le Pew shit!” says R. Diesel.

In a lesser movie, it would take Patrick Dempsey the whole movie to grow a pair, but in Loverboy it happens in the middle of Act One: he's out delivering a pizza, bemoaning the loss of his one true love, when he spies a well-dressed woman who smiles at him. Patrick Dempsey ignores the obvious possibility—that she's laughing at the fact that he's driving in a fucking blue Jeep with a sombrero on top—and decides to ask her out in an upscale clothing store. Stupid? Sure, but nonetheless an impressive demonstration of balls. She does, alas, turn him down (in a really mean way: “You're just a boy. I don't date boys”), but the richer, hotter, better-dressed Alex (Barbara Carrera), who owns the place, is impressed by Patrick Dempsey's bravery and starts an impromptu makeover, which is cut short by a traffic cop ticketing the pizza car.

Back at the pizza joint, Patrick Dempsey bemoans the missed opportunity for wild Bond girl sex to an impressed Rick Diesel. Lo and behold, Barbara Carerra is so taken with Patrick Dempsey that she places a massive order that'll take him all day to deliver, bringing him to her fancy hotel room for none other than wild Bond girl sex. Patrick Dempsey calls his parents to tell him he won't be home, as he's crashing with “a guy from work” named Alex. However, Barbara Carrera thinks it'll be funny if she starts sexing Patrick Dempsey while he's talking to his dad, and she's absolutely right, because the last thing Patrick Dempsey's dad hears when the phone call ends is Patrick Dempsey making an orgasm sound . . . with a “guy from work.” Hmmm . . .

Matters are complicated further when Rob Camilletti shows up at Patrick Dempsey's place with a jacket, which Barbara Carrera has bought him and included a note that says “Although you know I prefer you naked, if you must wear something, wear this.” It's signed Alex, and since Patrick Dempsey tells them that the flamboyant, European Rob Camilletti is Alex, the guy from work (Ed. Note: all European people are gay), Patrick Dempsey's dad announces to Kate Jackson, “Our son is a fruit.”

Although Patrick Dempsey is having fun—and wild Bond girl sex—with Barbara Carrera, he confesses to her that his heart belongs to Jenny, and that out of fairness he has to break off the fling. Barbara Carrera is disappointed, and though she's quite fond of young Mr. Dempsey, she nonetheless plays a rather elegant prank on him, extracting a very fond and gentle revenge: she distributes the phone number for Señor Pizza far and wide, with the instructions that all a bored and affluent woman of a certain age need do is ask for “extra anchovies” and personally request Patrick Dempsey, and for $200, Patrick Dempsey will sex her well.

This leads to much hilarity and personal growth for our intrepid hero. After his initial misgivings at becoming a prostitute, he grows to genuinely like his clients, most prominently the trio of Kyoko, who is kept as a trophy/geisha by racist fuckbag Vic Tayback (who sets a new standard in this picture), Kirstie Alley, the doctor wife of philandering doctor Robert Picardo, and Carrie Fisher, the photographer wife of a massive, jacked personal trainer (former NFL lineman Peter Koch) who is similarly shtupping around. They, in turn, are reintroduced to the concept of fun by young Dempsey, who is soon—due to Fred Astaire enthusiast Kirstie Alley's influence—flouncing around the house practicing dance steps, dressing well, appreciating fragrances, and thoroughly freaking his macho father the fuck out. Business starts booming.

Of course, one woman orders a pizza with extra anchovies, and actually wants the pizza, which is both an obligatory joke and a really fucking funny one, leaving Patrick Dempsey to scramble to put his pants on as he runs out the door to a very confused look. The comedy gods demand certain sacrifices.

Patrick Dempsey's boss doesn't seem to give a shit that he's never there, and happily counts money and restocks his anchovy supply. Rick Diesel both covers for Patrick Dempsey and gradually assumes the role of business manager.

Despite that smooth confluence of apathy and complicity on the Señor Pizza front, Patrick Dempsey's blissful run of success as a hooker is bound to end sometime, and it does as he's enjoying an afternoon bath with Kyoko and Vic Tayback comes home unexpectedly. Patrick Dempsey is forced to hide in a storage room where Vic Tayback has shelves and shelves of little toy robots from Japan that he intends to market as a home security system and reap massive filthy lucre. The beat where Patrick Dempsey sees the robots, and they all turn on in a wave and start hollering “VIOLATOR! VIOLATOR! BAD BOY! BAAAAAD DUDE!” and so forth is comedy perfection.

As is the moment when Vic Tayback realizes that Kyoko is getting some side dick because “You're too friggin' cheerful!” He does a little retarded amateur detective work and deduces that Kyoko is fucking Robert Picardo. Vic Tayback, upon confronting Robert Picardo, realizes that he's being cuckolded as well (Robert Picardo noticed that Kirstie Alley had her Fred Astaire records out, and was similarly too friggin' cheerful), and Robert Picardo has the idea that it might be personal trainer Peter Koch. They go over to Peter Koch's house and tire-iron his front door, with Vic Tayback yelling: “COME OUT! YOU, WHO'S BEEN PORKIN' MY WIFE!” (Ed. Note: Best. Syntax. Ever.) The maid, jabbering in Spanish, comes to the door and hands Vic Tayback a silver candleabra. Peter Koch comes home, a wounded giant, distraught by the news that Carrie Fisher, his wife, is cuckolding him as well. The three form an asshole husband triad and put their heads together to figure out just what the fuck (quite literally) is going on.

Eventually, due to Rick Diesel's decision to start letting Patrick Dempsey's clients pay by credit card, the husbands look at credit card bills and see a whole buncha $200 pizza orders. Even they, dumbasses of the highest order, realize that this means that the guy slipping their wives extra anchovies must be the pizza guy.

Meanwhile, Patrick Dempsey's parents are involved in an argument over the severity with which they should be regarding Patrick Dempsey's terminal case of The Gay (Kate Jackson, in typical mom fashion, is all for it, while Dad is devastated) and a series of misunderstandings wherein Kate Jackson has been led to believe that her husband is shtupping his squeaky young secretary (he sort of intended to, but was so shitfaced he just passed out) and having shower threeways with hookers (an accident involving a nicked water main at the building site, combined with Dad's matter-of-fact “Oh, that's just a coupla hookers, honey”). Kirstie Alley, Kate Jackson's doctor, gives her the number for extra anchovies. Patrick Dempsey, needing only one more delivery to make his tuition, goes to “deliver,” only to freak out and ask Rob Camilletti to deliver the pie and tell her “there are no anchovies.” (Rob Camilletti, confused: “But we have many anchovies.”)

Upon being confronted with Rob Camilletti and his “Pepe Le Pew shit,” Kate Jackson can't go through with it and declines Rob Camilletti's polite offer of sex. But, since no woman has ever turned him down before, Rob Camilletti becomes erotically obsessed and the two of them engage in a hilarious car/Vespa chase.

While all this shit is going on, Jenny finally gives in to all the heartfelt phone calls Patrick Dempsey's been making all summer and goes to see him at the pizza shop, only to be told by old rival Jory that Patrick Dempsey's been fucking cougars. Patrick Dempsey is in the process of throwing down with Jory in the parking lot when The Asshole Husband Brigade shows up with ass-kicking intent. They're after “the delivery boy” and are all about to beat nine kinds of shit out of Patrick Dempsey when Vic Tayback (an acquaintance of Patrick Dempsey's dad) stops them. “Wait a minute, it's not him . . . he's a homo!” And they drop Patrick Dempsey and start wildin' on Jory.

Patrick Dempsey tries to smooth things over with Jenny, who nonetheless takes the (admittedly reasonable) position that, hey, you've been schlonging every upper middle class MILF in southern California, dude, I as your girlfriend am mildly displeased with this. Still, he convinces her to accompany him to his parents' anniversary dinner or whatever the hell it is, which naturally becomes the nexus at which the entire cast converges for the climactic confrontation.

After much physical comedy, the following things happen: Patrick Dempsey's parents realize that he's not gay, even though they're totally fine with him being gay; the asshole husbands trash the place; Patrick Dempsey somehow manages to slapstick his way through it all with his ass intact; Vic Tayback's toupee gets set on fire; Rob Camilletti recovers from Kate Jackson's rejection and sweeps the squeaky secretary off her feet; Rick Diesel somehow gets laid without paying for it; a piano smashes the fuck out of a cop car; Patrick Dempsey's dad agrees to pay for him to go back to college and be with Jenny; and all the husbands get arrested.

In a brief epilogue where all the wives bail their husbands out of jail, Peter Koch and Carrie Fisher decide to let bygones be bygones and he carries her off in his big strong arms (if anyone deserves that, it's Carrie Fisher; she looks like she's rather enjoying herself as he carries her offscreen and into bed); Robert Picardo and Kirstie Alley slap each other and then embrace passionately, because they're kinky like that; and Kyoko lets Vic Tayback's ass rot and goes out to enjoy her freedom. Happily ever after.

Loverboy is, I only just realized this time through, a note-perfect, classically constructed farce. There's mistaken identity, a whole lotta dudes' wives get fucked, some good pratfalls, and a happy ending. The act breaks happen at the exact, textbook point where they should, no time is wasted, everything's just right. I don't say this to justify the fact that I've probably seen this movie twenty or thirty times over the years, but because it's true: Loverboy may be the most underrated comedy of the past 25 years. Joan Micklin Silver for the win.



No Way Out, a radically different movie, is similarly underrated. All anyone ever remembers about it are the scene where Kevin Costner gives Sean Young the high hard one in a back of a limo and the “stupid” twist ending. The first is not any more memorable than ten other great scenes in the movie, and the twist ending isn't stupid at all. This is the problem with things that “everybody knows,” most of them are bullshit.

Kevin Costner had a couple years in the 80s where he walked on water, which turned it into wine, the finest wine the world has ever known. The Untouchables, No Way Out, and Bull Durham mark a period of supreme, flawless badassness; three very different movies, three very different roles, three of the mightiest avatars of masculinity committed to celluloid. His was one of the saddest falls from glory in the annals of Hollywood, as he's known more now for directing three-hour, over-budget wankfests, and getting pudgy and humorless. I'm not knocking the pudginess—certainly not after my heroic performance at Thanksgiving dinner—but the humorlessness? Say it ain't so. This was a man whose apex was noted for the twinkle in his eye and the appearance of deft, intelligent wit. You asked him where Nitti was, he told you, “He's in the car.”

Anyway, No Way Out finds Kevin Costner at optimum levels of badass. Actually, let me get a little radical on you here: I think the best way to appreciate No Way Out is to go into the whole fucking picture knowing that he's a Soviet agent, instead of having it sprung on you at the very end. It certainly makes the picture, and Kevin Costner's reactions to stuff, more interesting.

It's not like No Way Out needs help being cool: it opens with a shit-hot helicopter shot starting at the Washington Monument, then slowly pulling back to reveal the Pentagon, then taking us into anonymous Virginia suburbs. With a dope Maurice Jarre synth score. We then cut to an apartment where Kevin Costner is being interrogated by some anonymous dudes. Their identity isn't revealed immediately, but fuck it: they're Soviets. Kevin Costner is one of them. Isn't that already cool as shit? Kevin Costner as a Soviet mole?

The story is told in flashback, how Kevin Costner, resplendent in finest Naval dress uniform, meets glamorous, funny Sean Young at a formal DC to-do. They immediately click, and it's like “Sex. Now.” They hop in the limo and the famous limo fuck scene ensues, followed by an exchange of first names. Sean Young's best girlfriend is Iman, which is almost as hot as the fuck scene. Sean Young sure did look pretty with her clothes off back in the day. Ahem. Where was I . . .

So the vagaries of fate take Kevin Costner off to the Philippines, and to a bit of night-time heroism aboard a Naval vessel in some shit weather, which lands ol' Kevvo in a nice little feature in The Washington Post: “BADASS MOVIE-STAR LOOKIN' DUDE DOES SOME BADASS MOVIE-STAR SHIT.” Secretary of Defense Gene Hackman, after briefly wondering why someone doing a bad Zodiac Motherfucker imitation is writing headlines for The Washington Post, having a highly reptilian meeting with a cracker senator and CIA director Fred Dalton Thompson, and bantering with sociopathic gay aide Will Patton, tells Will Patton to get Kevvo's ass back to Washington. Will Patton, being nothing if not good at his job (doing what Gene Hackman tells him to), complies.

Kevvo returns and immediately starts fucking the hell out of Sean Young at any and every opportunity (being a man of common sense). Gene Hackman has brought him back to DC to spy on the CIA, which is a pretty cool job for anyone, but for a Soviet agent like Kevvo that's got to be like the best fucking job in the world. Kevvo displays a gift for political/intelligence type work (natural, being a Soviet agent; under as deep cover as he is without having been caught, you'd expect him to be good), but not as much of a gift as he has for fucking Sean Young.

There is, however, trouble in paradise. Sean Young is also fucking Gene Hackman, and has grown quite accustomed to the privilege and comfort this affords her. Kevvo bristles, wondering why Sean Young doesn't just bow to the supernatural majesty of his cock and break up with Gene Hackman. Will Patton, since he wants Gene Hackman all for himself, encourages Gene Hackman to break up with Sean Young, causing Gene Hackman to be like “Bitch are you crazy? Have you seen how fuckin' hot she is?”

It's easy to look at No Way Out and go, “Oh, it's the 80s, people didn't know as much about The Gay as they do today, Gene Hackman was unaware Will Patton had The Gay.” I think the truth is a little more complicated than that: I think Gene Hackman knew Will Patton was gay (even if he only knew this subliminally), and that Will Patton was smitten with him, and he used that to get Will Patton to do his every bidding. This kind of selfish, cynical shit is perfectly in keeping with Gene Hackman's political lizard SecDef character.

In fairly short order, Gene Hackman has other stuff on his mind than Will Patton being a 'mo, as he accidentally knocks Sean Young off a balcony to her untimely death. Will Patton suggests that they cover it up and engage in a bit of misdirection, to wit co-opting a DC intelligence community urban legend about a high-ranking Soviet mole named Yuri, and claiming that Yuri killed Sean Young. Gene Hackman, in a panic, goes along with it.

Kevvo comes into work the next day, and they give him his new prime directive: rather than liaising with and spying on the CIA, Kevvo is being put in charge of the hunt for “Yuri” the Soviet spy. Kevvo asks who the dead woman is. Will Patton tells him it's Sean Young. Whereupon Kevvo excuses himself to Gene Hackman's executive washroom and FREAKS THE FUGGOUT.

Let's pause again and remember that Kevvo is a Soviet agent. You're supposed to think that he's freakin the fuggout because he was in love with Sean Young and that he's devastated by her death. Remember, though, he's a military superstar with a shitload of intelligence experience. As far as betraying emotion, let's just say that kind of cat would kick your motherfucking ass at poker. So Kevvo's just gonna melt down like that if all he's upset about is Sean Young? Nuh uh, if all he's upset about is Sean Young, Roger Donaldson (the director) pushes in slowly on Kevvo's face while a tortured look slowly crosses his face. Instead, Kevvo has to leave the room and completely loses control for about a minute. Why?

Because in that moment, everything he's been working for his entire life is in danger of being unraveled due to the capricious decision of one closeted homosexual. He is absolutely fucked. He's double fucked, actually, because he did fuck Sean Young and he actually is a Soviet agent. Will Patton's arbitrary decision to blame Sean Young's death on “Yuri” turned out, ironically, to be damn near accurate as Kevvo/”Yuri” was in Sean Young's house like ten minutes before she got dead. Tell me you wouldn't freak the fuggout at that revelation, you're a liar; I would shit my ass if that happened.

A whole lot of tense, well-filmed thriller stuff ensues, where Kevvo tries to keep one step ahead of anyone finding out that he's “Yuri,” since he is “Yuri,” and wheelchair-bound computer nerd/good pal of Kevvo's George Dzundza does a lot of funny stuff with 80s-vintage computers. Kevvo saves Iman from getting killed by Marshall “Kuato” Bell and the other gorilla-looking death squad motherfucker, and after some fancy thinking and subterfuge manages to create some proof that Gene Hackman knew Sean Young. Unfortunately, Will Patton kills George Dzundza (for knowing too much, since Kevvo confides in Dzundza and Dzundza retardedly tells Will Patton; not only is it really nasty to kill the adorable George Dzundza like that, it perpetuates the nasty implication that you can't trust gays with gossip) and Kevvo gets his arm cut by the gorilla.

When Kevvo finally confronts Gene Hackman with his fabricated evidence bluff, we notice something very interesting. Even though Kevvo knows Gene Hackman killed Sean Young, instead of demanding justice, all he does is ask Gene Hackman to call off the investigation into “Yuri.” Now, knowing that Kevvo is a Soviet agent, it's obvious, he's covering his ass, but why would our upright hero let Gene Hackman off the hook like that? Especially after, when confronted with the evidence that Will Patton's shenanigans went as far as murder, Gene Hackman immediately throws Will Patton under the bus. And Will Patton, devastated, blows his brains out right there.

Kevvo, with everything pinned on Will Patton, splits from the Pentagon and goes driving. Eventually, the big scary dudes from the first scene show up and take Kevvo to his interrogation, whereupon it's finally revealed that Kevvo is a Soviet agent, in a neat bit of irony. End of picture, but first another nice helicopter shot and some more hot Maurice Jarre tuneage.

No Way Out is a solidly scripted, well-directed thriller where Kevin Costner fucking rules. Its one problematic element is the demonic sociopath 'mo Will Patton. They come right out and out him, in the scene where Fred Dalton Thompson and Kevvo's CIA liaison guy are sitting around trying to figure out what the fuck's up with the Sean Young coverup.

Liaison guy: We think she's either David Brice's [Gene Hackman's] or Scott Pritchard's [Will Patton's] mistress. Well, she was seen with both of them. It didn't seem a high priority matter, so my people have been a little lax in following it up.
Fred Dalton Thompson: Well, spilled milk. And you can forget about Pritchard. He's homosexual.
Liaison guy: I'll be damned.
Fred Dalton Thompson: So will he, if you believe the Old Testament.

Now, it's perfectly natural to hear that line and think “Right-wing Christian God Squad bullshit.” But there's something in FDT's tone, a hint of deadpan sarcastic irony, that he's saying that line to be witty rather than because he really believes that.

Either way, even if that exchange is just two guys sitting in a room cracking jokes, there still is the matter of the movie's token gay guy being a creepy, closeted sociopath who kills people all for the unrequited love of Gene Hackman. And it's not like the rest of the movie is some kind of moral message about the dangers of being closeted, or some kind of character study of right-wing gays (there do seem to be a lot of them in Washington these days, but this movie is almost 25 years old . . .) It's a manifestation gay panic, and unlike Loverboy the movie doesn't tell the dummies panicking that they're being retarded. Instead it's just kinda like, yup, the villain's gay. And he kills himself.

Much as I love the rest of the movie, the Will Patton thing sits badly with me. So here, as an antidote, is a much more enlightened parting note:


Peace, y'all.

"NAH . . . YOU CAN HIT ME LATER": MIAMI VICE

Miami Vice, for me, has many happy nostalgic connotations. Not the same ones everyone else has: I was too young to get it when it was actually on the air and thus only saw the one episode where the kid jai alai player got in deep shit and let the ball kill him at the end. No, my happy nostalgic Miami Vice memories date from this couple months back in like 2005 or something when the short-lived Sleuth channel had this uncanny ability to air Miami Vice reruns at the exact time I needed them. It was thus that I became an enormous, near cultish fan of the show. So, rather than it being Miami Vice that made me enjoy Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, it was vice (city) versa.

For a show that is considered so inextricable from the time and place it first aired, Miami Vice holds up surprisingly well (the first 2+ seasons, anyway). In many ways, it was rather ahead of its time, as a TV show that utilized any but the most cursory cinematic technique in storytelling.

As absurd as he became by the end of the show (like whenever the hell it was when that episode with James Brown and the UFO was shat out onto the screen) Don Johnson was fucking awesome at the outset. Sonny Crockett, once upon a time, was a god among men. Don't let's get cause and effect get muddled viz a vis those ridiculous pastel outfits—Sonny Crockett was so fucking cool he could wear that stuff and still be gangsta.

And, as thoroughly as his subsequent career did not exist, Philip Michael Thomas was pretty fuckin badass as Tubbs (and a much better dresser than Crockett). There's a mistaken impression of Tubbs as being a dork because he didn't get laid as often as Crockett and wasn't as blasé about shit, but both of those comparisons are unfair, because nobody got laid as often as Crockett, and the blasé act was an act, Crockett got just as bent of shape about shit as Tubbs, he just hid it better, being a WASP. That's how we do. We are to repression what the French are to wine. Even barring these important distinctions, Philip Michael Thomas would get a lifetime pass simply for the way he said “Calderone.” Certain voices are just meant to say certain words.

Just as important as the terrific lead performances and the clothes was the music. Jan Hammer's theme, and the credit montage with all the pelicans and shit and that building in Miami with the hole in the middle, was iconic (and charted, impressively). Coming as it did in the early years of MTV (and being, as it was, originally pitched as a cop show with an MTV aesthetic), it also featured a number of pop records as a song score. This led to the perplexing situation wherein Phil Collins and Glenn Frey songs actually have positive connotations for me (“In The Air Tonight” will always be the “rolling up to the shootout” song, not the "Tom Cruise hooking up with Rebecca De Mornay on the El" song) for which I hold Miami Vice to be even more awesome.

So, with all this being said, one would think that when I read that Michael Mann was making a movie version with Colin Farrell as Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Tubbs, that my knee-jerk reaction would be “oh, blasphemy.” Well, not so fast there, knee jerker. Michael Mann, despite being responsible for such atomic turds as Public Enemies and Ali, has earned lifetime, unswerveable trust for Heat. Heat was so fucking good Michael Mann could direct a romantic comedy with Dane Cook and Sarah Jessica Parker and I'd go see it.

And, let's not forget, Michael Mann was the showrunner for Miami Vice, and in TV, the showrunner is the auteur. Michael Mann deciding to make a movie about Miami Vice is not some fuckface evil white guy in a suit at some studio being like, “Hurr hurr, let's get paid.” Michael Mann deciding to make a movie about Miami Vice clearly means he's like, “Let's see what Miami Vice means in the modern era, now that a lot of the trends that were beginning in the 80s, such as Miami being the portal between North and South America and a major business hub, have played out.”

Still, you might counter with the argument, “But why do you have to call the movie Miami Vice, since 'Miami Vice' is so inextricably linked to the clothes, the music, and the 80s? Why not just do a new movie about early 21st century Miami?” To that, I riposte: “The comparison of time and place through the eyes of the same characters makes a valuable statement about the differences wrought by two decades of changes in South Florida, and the separate iterations of the character thus have a symbiotic relationship with the setting. NOW GO HOME AND GET YOUR FUCKIN SHINEBOX.”

The movie as shown in theaters is a radically different entity than the one available on home video, and it is so with relatively few changes. Apparently as the result of a panicked eleventh-hour re-edit by Michael Mann right before release, the theatrical version starts by tossing the audience in the deep end of the pool. We open getting smacked in the face by loud music and a tumultuous night out in an exclusive Miami club. We're forced to figure out on our own that these random people in these closeups (is that Colin Farrell in that hideous ponytail? Man, Jamie Foxx looks constipated . . .) are cops running a sting operation on Isaach de Bankole. This sparse approach to exposition in the opener leads to the experience of the rest of the movie as being disorienting, loud, and short on help figuring out what the fuck's going on.

Now, the DVD version, with the only major change being an opening scene where Crockett and Tubbs are racing a fast boat and Herc (sorry, Domenick Lombardozzi, you'll always be Herc, even though you're supposed to be Switek here) is revealed to be undercover trying to crack a prostitution ring, has a completely different feel, and it's entirely because of the tone established by the opener. Even those two lines about sending Herc to go shtup some high-end hookers for God and country, so small a thing, makes the entire rest of the movie more coherent. The rest of the movie is just as short on expository hand-holding as it was before, but it all makes more sense (and I don't say that because I'd already seen it).

So Herc goes in to fuck a couple of Isaach de Bankole's hoes. Suddenly, Crockett and Tubbs are called away by an informant in trouble, and so they have to abort the sting. It turns out the informant has run afoul of some white supremacist meth dealers, who've murdered his family, and when Tubbs informs him of this (with brow-furrowing sincerity on the part of Mr. Foxx) the informant wanders out into traffic and is no more.

Crockett and Tubbs, worried that their cover is blown (the call from the informant wasn't secure), are introduced by Castillo to Special Agent Ciaran Hinds of the FBI (in an interesting scene, since the actor playing Castillo in this is clearly not Hispanic, and Ciaran Hinds' character has a Japanese name; fortunately, repeat viewings enabled me to gloss over this aberration) who works out an arrangement to send Crockett and Tubbs undercover to get next to uberbaddie Jose Yero.

In short order, after Crockett and Tubbs establish their cover in characteristically ballsy and dangerous fashion, they're summoned to Port au Prince for a meeting with the illustrious Mr. Yero, where they find that in spite of his massive wealth and power from the drugs and arms trades, he is merely a middleman for a real uberbaddie named the Archangel, who's so fucking badass he has sex with Gong Li.

Oh yeah, that's right, Gong Li is in this. See what I mean about not doubting Michael Mann? For me, as erotically fascinating as I find repressed women, you can imagine the effect Gong Li had on me as a young teenager in Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. Her relatively thankless role as the Archangel's financial adviser/mistress achieves depth the second Michael Mann points the camera at her, because she's Gong Li and that's the way things are.

Crockett and Tubbs go to work for the Archangel, dealing with Yero. A lot of cool sequences involving fast boats and fancy flying to avoid radar detection ensue. And Crockett—in a nod to the original series—epically trips on his dick by taking up with Gong Li. The good news is, all of us who've been crushing on her since the early 90s get to see her naked in the shower scene. The bad news is . . . Jose Yero finds out and suddenly develops homicidal intent toward Crockett and Tubbs, and starts poking around their cover ID's. Which, naturally, start showing some cracks.

It turns out that Jose Yero does business with the skinheads who fucked over Tubbs' informant at the beginning, and they further fuck with Tubbs by abducting his girlfriend, fellow cop Trudy. Our heroes, in a classic Michael Mann sequence, bust in to the trailer park where she's being held hostage and very concisely and thoroughly kick ass, but not without talkin' a little trash:

Skinhead: [Holding detonator] Shoot me, she dies. Shoot me, go ahead. Fuck it, we can all go. That's cool.
Gina (the Saundra Santiago character): That's not what happens. What will happen is... what will happen is I will put a round at twenty-seven hundred feet per second into the medulla at the base of your brain. And you will be dead from the neck down before your body knows it. Your finger won't even twitch. Only you get dead. So tell me, sport, do you believe that?
Skinhead: Hey, fu—
[Gina shoots him through the head; nice pink mist squib]

But, wouldn't ya know, right when they think they've got Trudy out all safe and sound, another bomb goes off and she's in ICU. That's what makes that sequence so brilliant, that it kicks you in the balls like that.

Naturally, Tubbs is now on the warpath. Jose Yero's gonna get fucked. In another nice nod to the original series, Crockett and Tubbs roll up to the climactic shootout with “In The Air Tonight” playing, though sadly it's a lame “metal” cover, not Phil. (Goddammit, why does Miami Vice make me like Phil Collins? MUST EXTERMINATE!) And they have the shootout, which is the moment when I fell head over heels for Michael Mann as a director, all over again for like the 90th time. This time, the reason was that I suddenly realized that he uses gunshot sound effects AS CHARACTER REVELATION. I know, that's deep, I'll explain. In Heat, the gunshots are loud, but very matter of fact—guns are a tool Bobbert and Val Kilmer and Danny Trejo and Tom Sizemore et al use as part of business, but it's just business. In Collateral, Tom Cruise's gun is fuckin LOUD and fuckin vividly metallic, to highlight Jamie Foxx's alarm and confusion that his fare is a sociopathic hitman. In Miami Vice . . . the gunshots are muted because Crockett and Tubbs have been undercover so long that the whole world is muted, everything is gray, metaphorically speaking (see also the DV cinematography, very muted, very post-hurricane green at night).

So yeah, sound geek nerdgasm, massive shootout, not the best shootout ever, but it's still cool. The way Jamie Foxx comes out of a somersault to blow Jose Yero's abdomen all over the side of the freighter with his shotgun is fairly badass, though the effect is lessened slightly by how awkward Jamie Foxx looks doing it (you can't help but wonder why some skinhead didn't blow him to kingdom come first).

The picture concludes with Crockett looking the other way while Gong Li gets the fuck out of Dodge, and the discovery that the Archangel has vanished into thin air (gotta think about that sequel, ya know). Oh, and Trudy's okay. Roll credits.

There isn't really 140 minutes of plot in Miami Vice, but then again, this is Michael Mann. He likes to let the camera linger, let his actors take their time getting that dialogue out, and so forth. His saving grace is that he's Michael Mann; that kind of leisurely mise en scene is insufferable in someone with smaller balls.

Colin Farrell does damn fine work as Crockett. It's fashionable to hate on Colin Farrell, but it's not his fault his pictures lose money, and there's a limit to the degree his off-camera debauches should color one's opinion of his work. The work is always fairly solid, though he's been known to come up with some fairly ridiculous, never-before-seen-in-nature American accents if his dialect coach slacks off. This time, though, he's all right; he only sounds like he needs to clear his throat.

Jamie Foxx is a little ridiculous as Tubbs, mostly because his “serious” acting style, when he doesn't have a mannered Ray Charles impersonation to hide behind, consists of frowning and whispering a lot. It sounds bizarre to say that an Academy Award winner's performance suffers in comparison to Philip Michael Thomas', but hey . . . Jamie Foxx doesn't have that PMT je ne sais quois.

In the end, the movie version of Miami Vice is a really well shot cop movie, just like the TV version was a really well shot cop show. That the movie values guns and flashy vehicles over fashion and music is a sign of the times, partially because the fashion and music distracted from the fact that the show was a rock-solid cop show. Absolutely everybody did a cameo appearance (Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Pam Grier, Dennis Farina, Wesley Snipes, Stanley Tucci, Willie Nelson, Ian McShane, Luis Guzman, Chris Rock, Richard Belzer, G. Gordon Liddy, Bernard King, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, etc etc ad infinitum).

The movie never reaches the heights the show, at its peak, achieved. It is, however, a thoroughly enjoyable cop picture, and some of the tunes (with the exception of the crappy “In The Air Tonight” cover) are excellent, and, in the case of that Jay-Z/Linkin Park track that's playing in the opening nighclub scene, achieve the same “why the fuck are these sadistic bastards making me like a song by these shitheads (that's directed at Linkin Park, not Hova)?” effect as the Phil Collins/Glenn Frey trolling on the series. At the absolute worst, it's a DVD I can throw on and spend two and a half hours being entertained. And hey, Manohla Dargis agrees with me about how dope this movie is. AND what, motherfucker?

A TALE FROM THE PASTEL FIELDS WHERE WE RAN WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

The death of Corey Haim got me thinking. The only movie of Mr. Haim's I ever saw all the way through was Prayer for the Rollerboys—which actually managed to transcend the limitations of low-budget fucktardery to become not half-bad SF if viewed between the hours of 1 and 3 am—but his passing led to thoughts that had little to do with him and more with the 80s as a whole (even though the aforementioned only movie of his I ever saw came out in the early 90s).

It probably will come as no surprise to careful parsers of my cinematic musings that I'm not one of those 80s-nostalgic types. I was too young to know what was going on for most of the 80s. My memories of having perspective about the world and popular culture start in mid-to-late '88, and they begin with the frustration that I hadn't seen, nor did I have any desire to see, the types of movies my classmates liked (which included the oeuvre of the aforementioned late Mr. Haim). Around this time, some scenes from the movie Awakenings were being shot at my elementary school, which was a late-19th century red brick building that the word “quaint” was invented to describe. Awakenings, we will recall, starred Robin Williams as a shrink trying to get through to deeply fucked-up and borderline comatose patients, one of whom was played by Robert De Niro. It's probably more complicated than that, but I'm not about to watch it again to get my synposis straight; holy God that movie was fucking boring.

The point is, all the other kids were bouncing off the walls excited that Robin Williams was going to be around. Not many had much context for Robert De Niro's presence, since not too many parents of 10 year olds are the sorts who are like, “sure, let's have a family evening at home and have a Taxi Driver/Deer Hunter/Raging Bull/Angel Heart marathon.” Even my mom, with whom I was already seeing many extremely violent movies, was a little wary about letting me see some of those pictures. She had, however, taken me to see Midnight Run, and I fucking loved Midnight Run.

And so it was that when Robin Williams showed up, a whole bunch of kids excitedly flocked over to get a look, and most of them ran past where Robert De Niro was quietly standing, with a bodyguard, signing autographs for a couple older kids and teachers. Shy though I was, I still gulped and blurted out, “Mr. De Niro, I really liked Midnight Run.” And he looked up and gave me The De Niro Face, smiled, and said, “Thank you.”

When I think of the 80s—he said, gradually getting to the point—I think more of movies like Midnight Run than I do the Haim-everse. Both types of pictures are unique to the decade, but the evolution of teen-oriented cinema never interested me as much (I was too young for the 80s ones, and too old for the late 90s retro 80s teen movies) as genres like the buddy comedy. Buddy comedies were born out of the shift in Hollywood in the late 70s and early 80s from director-dominated movies to producer-dominated movies, to wit, the kind of things that make money. A lot of those 70s-era directors who could no longer get astronomical budgets to chase their white whales got a bit cranky about this shift, griping that the scripts they got were formulaic, had happy endings, and all kinds of other horrors (“Jesus Christ, this goddamn thing actually makes sense! Call my agent, get me off this picture.”)

The thing about these—admittedly commercially-motivated—pictures is that there's a lot of intelligence and substance in the best ones. 48 Hrs, for example, is a simple, linear narrative about a cop who semi-legally springs a convict from the joint for a weekend to help track down a cop-killer ex-colleague. But like in the best examples of the genre that would follow, the interplay between the stars is what makes the movie work. 48 Hrs is actually the story of how a perpetually pissed-off, openly racist white cop manages to form a meaningful connection with a hip, talkative black convict. At the end, they're not best friends by any stretch of the imagination, but they understand each other in a way they hadn't at the beginning.

Lethal Weapon will be the subject of its own entire post in the future, so for the moment it will suffice to say that it was a less antagonistic, more audience-palatable version of the same dynamic, two radically different men coming to an understanding. In the case of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, though, the buddies in question ultimately realize that they're symbiotes; Mel Gibson needs to get a lot less crazy and find stability through friendship and love, and Danny Glover needs to loosen up a little and get a little more crazy on occasion.

Now, Midnight Run is both part of this continuum and yet completely different. For one, because Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin are both white, the racial element is no longer present. But De Niro's blue-collar ex-cop bounty hunter is at odds with Grodin's white-collar embezzling accountant in a far more topical way for the 80s: the buddy reconciliation in Midnight Run is about declaring a ceasefire in the Class Wars.

This was one of the most present recurring themes in 80s movies, precisely because the domestic havoc wreaked by the Reagan administration resulted in the summation (provided perfectly in, of all places, New Jack City): “The rich get richer and the poor don't get a fuckin' thing.” Take one of Mr. Haim's most famous movies, The Lost Boys (which, in full disclosure, sucked too hard for me to make it all the way through): even though it's told from the bad guys' point of view in terms of the class war, it's still about how the nice little bourgeois family is menaced by a bunch of scruffy locals. Any number of Molly Ringwald movies involve a choice between the poor guy and the rich guy.

Back to Midnight Run. We're introduced to De Niro stealthily making his way through an apartment building, where an angry black guy with a shotgun expresses antipathy. De Niro dodges several volleys of 12 gauge displeasure, chasing his target into a hallway, where a car smashes the shotgun guy in the balls with its passenger door. Introduce John Ashton, rival bounty hunter, who insists he will be the one to take shotgun guy in. De Niro agrees, then distracts John Ashton and knocks him unconscious with one punch (all that Method training for Raging Bull clearly paid off). Shotgun guy is confused.

Shotgun guy: The fuck goin' on? You guys ain't cops.
De Niro: No, we're ballet dancers.

It transpires that De Niro works for Joe Pantoliano, in what might be his sleaziest performance ever (careful observation of cinema reveals that that is a spine-chilling achievement), the premier slimeball bail-bondsman in Los Angeles. De Niro is a little pissed that Joey Pants was going to pay John Ashton more to bring shotgun guy in, and insists on being paid Ashton's rate. Joey Pants, his essential lack of balls overwhelming his lack of scruples, agrees, and then tries to get De Niro to find an accountant nicknamed The Duke who embezzled $12 million from a Vegas wiseguy who “ran [De Niro] out of Chicago” (where De Niro had been a cop) a number of years prior. De Niro insists on a fee that will enable him to retire and open a coffee shop, and Joey Pants reluctantly agrees.

De Niro puts his police training to good use, figuring out in no time at all that The Duke is in New York. The FBI, led by Special Agent Yaphet Kotto, confront De Niro and brusquely tell him to fuck off and leave The Duke to them. Yaphet Kotto asks whether this is clear.

De Niro: Let me ask you something. Those sunglasses, they're very nice. Do you guys all shop at the same store?
Yaphet Kotto (pissed off at having to reiterate): Do I make myself clear?
De Niro: Can't you guys take a joke?

Clearly, since it was another nine years before Tommy Lee Jones would say “The FBI has no sense of humor that we're aware of.” (Men in Black, 1997) De Niro had no way of knowing that the answer was, in fact, no. On the other hand, being motivated more by his own amusement at his humor than theirs, De Niro shrugs it off, and sets off a terrific running joke by stealing Yaphet Kotto's ID.

In short order, Vegas wiseguy Dennis Farina sends two henchtards after De Niro with a million-dollar offer to turn The Duke over to them. De Niro, though, is poor yet proud, and categorically says no. He then tracks down The Duke in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone, and posing as Yaphet Kotto (though with a new photo on the ID) arrests him.

The Duke is Charles Grodin. Apropos of an earlier topic, Robin Williams was originally supposed to play the part, and you really have to see Midnight Run to see what a fucking disaster that would have been. Robin Williams is, intermittently, quite funny, but in the manner of a pinball full of nitroglycerine and cocaine. Subtlety and understatement have never been his comic strong suits, though bizarrely his dramatic work is very subtle and understated. Sigh. Rather than dwell on how frustrated I am with Robin Williams, let's instead hail Charles Grodin. He plays the Duke as, at first, a neurotic chatterbox who gradually reveals, as layers of pretense are stripped away, an almost intimidating intelligence and fierce instinct for survival.

Describing the torment Charles Grodin puts De Niro through is impossible. I usually throw in more spoilers than a street-racing chop shop, so it's not that I'm suddenly being considerate for people who haven't seen the movie yet. It's that I'd have to quote whole scenes, and they wouldn't even make any sense unless you'd watched the whole movie. Suffice to say that De Niro says “will you shut the fuck up” so often that you can't even put it in the Midnight Run drinking game. You'd be dead before Grodin throws his tantrum and they get kicked off the plane back to LA.

From here, De Niro's objective is simple: get back to Los Angeles before Joey Pants' bond defaults so he can collect his fee. Unfortunately, Charles Grodin's objective is also simple: get the hell away from De Niro so he can disappear again. They have the FBI, the Mafia, and John Ashton following them (Joey Pants having hired him for a fraction of what he offered De Niro in the hopes of getting The Duke back cheap) to further complicate things.

One thing about the cinema of the 80s—across all genres—that's alternately frustrating and reassuring is that the ending is usually a foregone conclusion. In the case of Midnight Run, you know De Niro is going to get his revenge on Dennis Farina for ruining his police career, he's going to get enough money to open his coffee shop, and yet Charles Grodin is going to end up going free. It's how you get there that makes the movie. Suffice to say, the conclusion of Midnight Run, dependent though it is on coincidence, is brilliantly executed and very suspenseful. The good guys win, the bad guys lose.

Martin Brest directed both Midnight Run, and some years previously Beverly Hills Cop as well. He began (in the 70s with pictures like the underrated Going in Style) and ended (in flames in the 00s with Gigli) as an auteur, and it probably really pisses him off that his two biggest hits and enduring classics were for-hire gigs at studios. Both Midnight Run and Beverly Hills Cop display a rare gift for balancing humor and action, using both to the benefit of each. The secret to Midnight Run's and Beverly Hills Cop's success is that in spite of both being absolutely hilarious throughout, both are action movies with funny dialogue, rather than comedies with action sequences.

The other key is good acting. Eddie Murphy, it cannot be overstated, was once the most charismatic movie star on the planet and underneath all the layers of cockiness and schtick is a tremendously gifted actor. This elevated Beverly Hills Cop above the competition. Midnight Run features two better actors, De Niro and Grodin, who meshed perfectly. So many of their scenes together flow so beautifully they seem improvised. By the end, the proletarian cop/bounty-hunter/would-be humble coffee shop owner and the aristocrat with a social conscience reconcile, realizing that in this life they can never be anything but antagonists, but in the next one, in a different world, they have a chance to truly be friends.

Which, tangentially, brings me back to the passing of Corey Haim. He was a man out of time, born a little too late to fully capitalize on the era his talents were made for; as the type of pleasantly handsome, reasonably compelling teen idol tailor-made for movies with foregone conclusions, the second the cynical 90s dawned and suddenly teen idols were angsty rather than pretty, his sun had set. The cult of irony that led to a million sneering David Hasselhoff jokes on VH1 clip shows, reality shows starring Coreys Haim and Feldman, and all other such cruelty (not to mention the drugs), doomed Corey Haim from ever making a legitimate comeback. He would never be taken seriously in this life. Maybe in the next one.


(p.s. the overwrought title of this entry is from the first verse of this song)