YOUR 20TH CENTURY BOY: VELVET GOLDMINE

You make me act real gone, you make me trawl along
I had to ravish your capsule, suck you dry
Feel the teeth in your bone, heal ya head with my own
Why if I don't have you home, we'll have to fight alone
Hang all together

Velvet Goldmine, you stroke me like the rain
Snake it, take it, panther princess you must stay
Velvet Goldmine, naked on your chain
I'll be your king volcano right for you again and again
My Velvet Goldmine

--David Bowie, “Velvet Goldmine”

Released as a B-side to “Space Oddity” when Bowie re-released it in '75, “Velvet Goldmine” had been gathering dust for a while by that point. Its original lyrics were rumored to be along the lines of “I have lots and lots of sex with dudes” and spent four minutes being totally blunt about it and not couching it in euphemism at all. Even in '71, which was Bowie's prime wearing-a-dress-on-his-album-covers period and winking at the line “Gotta make way for the homo superior” in “Oh! You Pretty Things,” the original lyrics to “Velvet Goldmine” were a little too much, so he backed off and dressed everything up in euphemism and threw in the line about “panther princess” for plausible deniability and all that. But still, “Velvet Goldmine” is totally about having sex with dudes, which is why when Todd Haynes made his movie about glam rock, he used it for his title.

Velvet Goldmine is very much a movie about having sex with dudes. There's this locket or something with that gets passed down from Oscar Wilde to the Marc Bolan/Little Richard character (the movie has that kind of poetic approach to history), to the Iggy Pop character, to Christian Bale's journalist character. One reading of the movie could lead one to believe that it has some sort of mythic power of gay, but considering Todd Haynes' background in semiotics it could very well just be a signifier of fabulousness, and it is pretty fucking fabulous. Then again, so is glam rock.

Arising as it did in the early '70s, when the gay rights movement was making strides, and when world events had gotten upsetting enough that a move from weed to cocaine was necessary to keep spirits up (and the resultant cynicism, plasticity, glibness, and obsession with surface that resulted from that shift), glam rock both informed and was informed by popular culture. It was very much about posing, looking fabulous, acting incredibly fabulous, and doing a whole fucking goddamn hell of a lot of cocaine.

In very broad strokes, it started with Marc Bolan wearing glitter and a boa and making a couple mindblowing pop records, continued and got really really big when David Bowie saw Bolan's glitter and boas and raised him science-fiction aesthetics—teasing the idea of space alien as metaphor for sexual otherness—and epic theatrical scope, and eventually split into having a visual, presentational influence on disco and a musical influence on metal and punk (while metalheads and punks fucking hated each other in the 70s, they all liked Bowie). A little over five years after arriving in its massive decadent glory, glam rock died the death, with Marc Bolan's literal death in a car crash, and David Bowie quitting cocaine, moving on from rock 'n' roll, and becoming exclusively hetero again.

This last apparently sat badly with Todd Haynes, as Velvet Goldmine is very critical of the Bowie character, Brian Slade. He's a pretty enigma who charms his way into the hearts of his tragically enamored manager, his American wife, the Iggy Pop character Curt Wild, and gay teenagers (notably Christian Bale's character) who see him perform and listen to his music and go “That's me!” Eventually, he goes crazy on blow, fakes his own death, and then emerges in the 80s as an unrecognizable pop singer whose music supports a Ronald Reagan-inspired US president.

The story is structured, a la Citizen Kane and Eddie and the Cruisers (Velvet Goldmine pretty much exactly splits the difference in quality), around a journalist trying to piece together a story about an enigmatic figure, with a series of interview subjects. Haynes does a lot of jumping around in time, and doesn't do a lot of hand-holding with regards to which character is which, instead relying on visuals and moments to evoke emotional reactions, not a bad way to approach making a movie about glam rock.

It's a fun movie. Form and content are one, as it's long, decadent, gloriously self-indulgent (I remember thinking, the scene where “Bowie” first sees “Iggy” perform live and Ewan McGregor as “Iggy” is freaking out on drugs and jumps out of his leather pants and starts wagging his dick at the audience, “I can just see Todd Haynes being like, 'Damn, sorry, Ewan, the lighting was fucked up, man, you're gonna have to wave your dick around for a thirtieth take, I'm really sorry.'”) The performances are all pretty solid. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in his breakout role as “Bowie” does a good job being pretty, inscrutable, and snotty. Ewan McGregor is awesome as “Iggy,” hiding his wounded sensitivity behind bluster, swagger, and drugs. Christian Bale is a little gnomic as the journalist, as he isn't really given much to do beyond being gay and British. Toni Collette is her usual awesome self as the former Mrs. “Bowie,” as is Eddie Izzard in a non-drag turn as the Evil White Guy In a Suit with whom “Bowie” signs and who encourages “Bowie” to fuck over everyone who got him where he is. But the most fun performances come early on, when the manager is telling Christian Bale about “Bowie” before he was a star, and there's this one scene where the manager and a bunch of middle-aged English homosexuals have a conversation in Polari with English subtitles. That scene is fucking great, and it's a sign that Todd Haynes knows his history.

Velvet Goldmine is not exactly short on similar signs (or signifiers either. Zing! Tip your waitress!) Just about everything in the movie is a reference to something. The Bowie character being named Brian “Slade” is a reference to the band Slade. His drummer has the same name as Marc Bolan's drummer. There are Stooges and Velvet Underground references all over the place (Ewan McGregor's character, though I called him the “Iggy” character earlier, has trace amounts of Lou Reed floating around as well). The “present day” stuff all takes place in 1984; Diamond Dogs, anyone?

And the soundtrack . . . oh, dear God the soundtrack. For some bizarre reason, David Bowie objected to being portrayed as a Machiavellian closet case and refused to grant permission for his songs to be used in the movie, though this actually helped the movie be more of a universal thing about glam rock, with Roxy Music and T. Rex covers standing in nicely. A couple different “supergroups” were assembled to perform those covers, one of which had Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead performing with just about everybody from Roxy Music except Bryan Ferry (though Thom does a fucking great Bryan Ferry impersonation; wonders never cease).

Despite the unfriendly Bowie euphemisms, Velvet Goldmine isn't an angry movie. Its attitude toward Bowie feels more like “you used to be all right . . . what happened?” (sorry, I can never mention Radiohead just once) and its attitude and Haynes' toward glam rock is kind of a wistful, nostalgic, “that shooting star sure was gorgeous” feeling. And of course, like any fleeting moment in the past, making a movie about it means everyone who sees the movie gets to share in that moment. Maybe some of them'll even buy some records. I know this movie is how I started listening to Roxy Music and T. Rex, and I fucking love them. And it's not like my love for Bowie's music got shook by Velvet Goldmine. It helped that the movie had no pretenses to being literal, naturalistic reportage, and it also helped that Bowie's real-life “conservative” 80s pop records were really fucking good (well, Scary Monsters and Let's Dance both were).

Velvet Goldmine may be kind of a mess, but it's a gorgeous mess. It's obsessed with surface, and scared that there's nothing underneath (okay, law of threes, now we're done with the Radiohead). And man oh man does it bring the gay. This movie brings the gay like a Jason Statham movie brings ownage. Dudes who want to fuck dudes go right ahead and fuck dudes. And in between fucking other dudes, they go full speed ahead on the fabulousness. Whether or not the gay is your thing, you gotta give it up to these cats, especially Ewan McGregor (whose penis should have won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar when he whips it out during “T.V. Eye,” just for the reaction shot of Jonathan Rhys Meyers going “Wow, I really want to suck that.”) Hell, it's not just Ewan McGregor, this whole movie's gayness has its dick out. And goddammit, Todd Haynes, you get a fucking round of applause for that. Good job, dude.


This post is dedicated to the passage last night of same-sex marriage in New York state. One love.

LOVING CUP

In honor of Sly's upcoming picture The Expendables—
—and the 2010 World Cup, today we discuss Victory (aka Escape to Victory outside the US). A late-period John Huston picture, a middle-period Michael Caine picture, and a way way early Sly picture (he'd only done the first two Rockys and Nighthawks at that point, not even any Rambos yet), Victory is one of those movies that stacks the deck against itself by doing a lot of really dumb and lazy things and yet still ends up being a lot of fun.

As cool as John Huston, Michael Caine, and Sly can be separately, the meeting of these three particular minds are not the main attraction in Victory. Coming as it did at the tail-end of the last time America briefly tried to get into association football, a very respectable roster of real-life footballers were cast—Bobby Moore, captain of the fabled 1966 England World Cup champions; Argentine Osvaldo Ardiles, member of the 1978 World Cup champion side; spectacularly talented Polish midfielder Kazimerz Deyna; Belgian Paul Van Himst; a whole bunch of dudes from the then-successful Ipswich Town F.C.; and, last but certainly not least, arguably the most talented but inarguably the most stylish player in the history of the sport, Edison Arantes do Nascimento, nom de guerre Pelé. Watching these dudes ball is the coolest thing about Victory, and the editing is skillful enough that the actors don't get too embarrassed (Michael Caine actually looks pretty good, but boy, if Sly was in goal in a real game with actual players, his side would get fucked by like 12).

The plot is pretty simple. It's WWII. A bunch of guys in a POW camp get roped into playing an exhibition game against a Nazi all-star squad. Michael Caine, who had played for West Ham before the war, assumes the role of player-manager, and dumbass American POW Sly tries to get on the team, except he's so fucking bad they want nothing to do with him. Also, for some reason, this POW camp has the highest all-time great footballer/regular guy ratio like ever, so their team kinda fucking rules, to the point where the Germans have to cheat and deliberately injure them to stay in the game. Meanwhile, nice-guy Nazi camp commandant Max von Sydow (for real? The nice-guy Nazi? Again? Fucking the only thing that's missing is when Sly makes contact with the French Resistance he doesn't meet a hooker with a heart of gold and a lovable scamp of an orphan) is a man of culture and honor and a fanatic football fan, and cuts the footballers slack whenever he can, most notably when a trainload of emaciated dudes show up from a really fucked up Ukranian camp, and Michael Caine and Sly say “they're on our team” even though they can barely walk, because the guys on the team get hot meals and blankets and stuff.

Sly gets his way onto the team because he's been in contact with the French Resistance (who want to bust everyone out at halftime of the big game), and so they break the arm of the actually good goalkeeper and Sly miraculously gets to the point where he can actually stop the occasional goal. They thus go into the match, only to find that the Nazis are cheating like motherfuckers and have the refs totally on their side. At this point, our heroes all collectively go “hey, wait, we're all international football stars, these assholes are just a bunch of fucking Nazis.” They create a strategy every bit as revolutionary as the beautiful “Total Football” introduced by the Dutch international side in the 70s, this one revolutionary in its simplicity. I call it “Totally Rad Football,” since it consists entirely of lobbing passes over the middle for Pelé to do slow-motion bicycle kicks (taking advantage of the Nazis being so racist that they don't want to get anywhere near a black guy, thus giving him the space to do a bicycle kick) and plays where the keeper gives Pelé the ball right at the box and then Pelé dribbles the ball the length of the field, weaving in and out of the entire Nazi defense, and concluding with Pelé blasting a goal past the final hapless Nazi dipshit. It's basically the equivalent of the offense the Cavs have been running the past few years with Lebron: give Lebron the basketball, get out video camera, do Zen exercise to prevent skull from exploding.

It's not really a spoiler to say the good guys win the game in the end of Victory. I mean, look at the fucking team they're rolling out on the field. Even a past-his-prime Pelé was a bad motherfucker (when he joined the New York Cosmos in the 70s he—and to a slightly lesser extent, fellow gods Carlos Alberto, Franz Beckenbauer, and Giorgio Chinaglia—was good enough to make Americans briefly care about soccer, no mean feat), not to mention the other dudes on the team. The Nazis had to cheat to have any kind of advantage. However, the fact that they stuck around to finish the game when La Resistance was going to break them out at halftime kind of is, but everyone went so apeshit when they won that they were able to escape anyway, with a smiling Max von Sydow tacitly giving permission.

Speaking of which, let us now address the two main flaws with this movie, both listed in the above paragraph:


What the fuck is wrong with these assholes? La Resistance went to all that trouble to break them out at halftime. Do you really want to waste the one time a French person made a plan that actually worked?

Well. This is a tricky question, because it doesn't have an answer that's backed up by logic or reason, but it does nonetheless have an irrefutable answer. Why did they stick around to finish the game and risk getting chucked back in the POW camp? BECAUSE THAT IS HOW MEN DO THINGS. Men do things the hard way because occasionally, as a man, you need to flex your nuts, do something really fucking stupid, get away with it, and spend the rest of your life raising a pint and telling your friends “Remember when [feat of testicular grandeur] happened? That fuckin' ruled.” BECAUSE THIS IS THE WAY OF MEN. And anyway, Sly was the one cookin' up the plan with La Resistance, and he looked so fuckin' stupid in a beret with his shirt on (a travesty he soon corrected with the Rambo cycle) that one can hardly be faulted for doubting him.


Seriously, what the fuck is it with movies and the so-called “good Nazi?” This archetype is yucky, apocryphal, and lets a bunch of pussies who wouldn't openly stand up for what was right off the hook.

This is a much better question. Now and then there are stories about cats who would subvert from within (if Tom Cruise's Valkyrie thing actually existed—which I firmly deny; that movie was an acid flashback I had while watching the History Channel—it would count as one of these) and who were kind of all right. I always take those with a big grain of salt; actually, of all people, Quentin Tarantino nailed the reality of the “Good Nazi” in Inglourious Basterds—when Christoph Waltz gives up Hitler and the whole high command to Brad Pitt and BJ Novak, his motivations are so oily, and he himself is revealed to be such a fucking choad about it that the ends (truth, justice, American way, et al) do not justify the means (some Nazi cunt backstabbing his friends). If you were such a good guy, when Adolf and company came to you and said, “Hey, we want you to be a Nazi, and if you don't go for it we'll fucking kill you,” you would reply, “Kill me then, you swine, for yours is not a world in which I care to live,” BECAUSE THAT IS HOW MEN so on and so forth. Unfair? Sure, dying probably sucks, but when your only other choice is being a Nazi, it's the only acceptable option.

Now, with all that being said, the logical follow-up question is, “Why are you letting Victory and Max von Sydow off the hook, considering that this is one of the dumbest examples of the Good Nazi character in the history of cinema?” The answer is the Max von Sydow Corollary, to wit: Max von Sydow is so awesome he can get away with literally anything. One of the things about the Hollywood New Wave of the 70s was that all the young egomaniac cokeheads running around with cameras all had a great respect for European cinema, and Max von Sydow was one of the icons of same.

When Americans started bringing him over here to be in movies, it was almost like Max von Sydow told them, “Give me only the dumbest, most underwritten roles. Give me the generic European villain. Cast me as an ethnicity only Helen Keller could think I really was. No matter what the difficulty curve, I will fucking own that shit because I am fucking Max von Sydow. I played chess with Death. Recognize, mortals.” This theory is borne out by his role in Three Days of the Condor, where he shows up, says like two words the whole movie, the only explanation of who he is is like two lines about “the Alsatian gentleman” (an awesome character name, by the by), lets Robert Redford live almost as a fuck you, and splits. And holy FUCK is Max von Sydow awesome in Three Days of the Condor. It's all him. None of it is in the script.

For a more modern example, take Minority Report. Minority Report is a damn fine entertainment and an SF movie to be reckoned with, although it completely derails in the third act, but it does have one weird touch—Max von Sydow plays a government bureaucrat named Lamar Burgess. Now, you might think, hmm, a government bureaucrat named Lamar Burgess, that sounds like a Fred Dalton Thompson part . . . wow, did Max von Sydow learn how to do a Southern accent? Well, maybe, if his accent was southern Sweden. Yeah, Max von Sydow is swaggering around that whole fuckin' picture not even bothering to pretend to be an American, which turns out to be an exercise in Hollywood semiotics much like in The Fugitive, with the Euro accent being the signifier of villainy. Did it matter? Hell no. As stated above, Max von Sydow can do whatever the fuck he wants and he's still awesome. He's so awesome he was fucking married to Barbara Hershey in Hannah and Her Sisters, back when Barbara Hershey was one of the two or three hottest women who ever existed. He was sullen, and old, but still so fuckin' cool that she doesn't even leave him til like the end of the picture.

Which brings us to Victory. Max von Sydow is the one person in the universe who can get away with this dumb “oh, I'm from the old aristocracy, and I'm cultured, but man I love football and through my love of football I'll be revealed to be an all right guy” character, whose entire sympathy shroud unravels if you start pulling at the “Yeah, but what about all that 'Wir messen die Juden auschrotten' business?” thread. His ability to pull this role off has nothing to do with moral justification. It has to do with being Max von fucking Sydow. I like to think he took this role because it was so stupid. And maybe so he could hang out on set while all those awesome football scenes were being shot.

Other movies to watch in the agonizing hours between World Cup matches:

Mean Machine, Vinnie Jones' football remake of handegg classic The Longest Yard.

Bend it Like Beckham, which is cute and fun and has pretty girls in it.

Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, for the real-life story of arguably the most talent-loaded team in the history of sports.

Offside, about a bunch of Iranian girls who get thrown in jail for trying to watch football (not as much of a bummer as it sounds).

Rudo y Cursi, for your Gael García Bernal/Diego Luna/Alfonso & Carlos Cuarón fix.


All right, y'all. Time to get back to Australia/Germany, and figure out how the fuck we drew with England yesterday (that goal the English keeper let in . . . wow . . .) I leave you with this:

HE'S DEAD? THAT'LL MAKE HIM EASY TO CATCH!

Careful readers of this blog will note that the author—although a cineaste of the highest sophistication who can talk UFA, Cahiers du Cinema, film semiotics and the like with the best of them—has a distinct predilection for movies with hairy testicles that kick ass. Wavering as I do between high- and low-brow impluses, I do love movies that straddle the divide. This past year had several have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too pictures, among them Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which blended good old-fashioned scalp those motherfuckers violence with (pleasantly surprisingly) sophisticated metahistory and metacinema.

But QT, despite his love for disreputable trash culture, still has cred with tweedy types, at least the ones who don't puke whenever someone pricks their finger onscreen. And after almost 20 years (seriously, Reservoir Dogs was 1992 . . . I wonder if I can find a good wheelchair on eBay . . .) we're used to QT sitting on that fence. I however, in the interests of science, must insist that we find a much less likely example of a hybrid between brows low and high.

I propose that we look at a movie from the director of the Chuck Norris vehicle Code of Silence, the Steven Seagal vehicles Above the Law and Under Siege, and the better but still disreputable Gene Hackman thriller The Package. Andrew Davis, in all the aforementioned movies with the exception of Under Siege, displays a vivid, familiar sense of the city of Chicago, and frequently employs the same local character actors in small parts, including the lovely and talented Joe Kosala—


—and the single best actor in the history of cinema at playing blue-collar dudes from Chicago, Mr. Ron Dean.

(Note: if any of you mention that he played Emilio Estevez' dad in The Breakfast Club, I will put my foot so far up your ass we'll look like a Guillermo Del Toro FX shot)

Proudly scruffy track record aside, Andrew Davis had always been a director of rather more skill than the average dipshit who pays the rent directing Chuck Norris/Steven Seagal movies. And thus, Warner Bros hired him to direct . . .

The Fugitive is a classic Warner Bros picture (per the same Aljean Harmetz quote I used when talking about Casablanca: “nearly every Warner Bros picture was an exception to the auteur theory”) in that the studio, rather than giving over too much trust to one of those wacky auteur types who're always talking about that homocommie “creative control” horseshit, hired a team of writers and a guy who could direct—and who had a solid, stylish sense of the place where the movie was set—but wouldn't start shit, cast the most reliable movie star of his generation, sat back, and made money.

For all the crap Hollywood churns out, and they sure do put out Augean stables levels of crap, occasionally they strike gold. Their rate of success is low enough that the odd gem now and again is more an accident than anything else, but high enough that you can't completely write the studios off. The Fugitive came out at a time in my life when I was just starting to get really cranky about Hollywood and fancied myself solely into foreign and independent cinema, and forced me to reassess that stance. Any force powerful enough to get a teenager to admit he's wrong is probably capable of vaporizing planets.

The Fugitive is based on a very popular television series from the 1960s that I've never seen. (The phrase “popular television series that I've never seen” is almost redundant; I'm still only up to season 2 of Lost.) The movie stars Harrison Ford as Richard Kimball, successful Chicago vascular surgeon, whose wife is murdered. Harrison Ford tells homicide detectives Joe Kosala and Ron Dean that a one-armed man is responsible. Detectives Kosala and Dean are skeptical. So is the rest of the criminal justice system: Harrison Ford is indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death before the end of the opening credits. Sure, they fudge things a bit so the credits are longer than they usually are, but the fact that they railroad him that fast is reinforced by the fact that you don't see Andrew Davis' director credit until Harrison Ford is getting on the bus to prison, which fucking rules ass.

On the bus, things quickly go a bit squiffy (in the parlance of Martin Freeman in Hot Fuzz) and the other convicts try to shank the guards and bust out. One of the guards picks that moment to conduct an experiment in practical physics, namely blowing the back of the driver's head off with an errant shotgun blast and seeing how long it takes before the bus crashes.

The result: not very long. The bus goes somersaulting down a hill onto some train tracks. Harrison Ford, the first guard who got shanked, the retard guard with the shotgun, and poorly socialized convict Eddie Bo Smith, Jr. are the only ones to survive the experiment. Then, at just about the most perfectly timed moment ever, a train appears. Fuck. Harrison Ford asks for help getting the wounded guard out, but the other guard and the other convict are all every man for himself and stuff, leaving Harrison Ford to nobly extract the guy from the crushed bus, cutting timing so close that he has to leap from the top of the bus right before it gets hit by the train (a fucking really cool stunt). The train then derails and Harrison Ford has to haul ass to keep from being run over (a fucking really cool stunt). All this after Harrison Ford got his side ripped open in the crash. No rest for the weary.

That whole bus crash/train crash sequence is easily one of the holyfuckdidthatjusthappenest action sequences ever. None of that pansy-ass CGI nonsense, not even too much green screen, just straight up stunt work. It leads to an aftermath that Tommy Lee Jones, upon arrival at the scene, accurately assesses: “My my my. What. A. Mess.”

A brief pause is necessary before we continue. Tommy Lee Jones is cooler in this movie than just about anybody ever has been before or since. And I'm not just talking in movies. Not only does he have a lot of great lines—and he sure got hooked up in that regard—but he delivers them with such style. His US Marshal Sam Gerard is a cranky bastard, an extremely intelligent cranky bastard with a fierce sense of purpose: he is going to catch you, dead, alive, maimed, in one piece, whatever, but you are getting caught. He's one of my favorite movie characters ever, because under the right circumstances you could have a hell of a time having a beer with him but if you piss him off you will get your shit fucking destroyed.

Okay, let's continue. Tommy Lee Jones and his team of extremely competent wiseasses (including Joe Pantoliano and no fewer than two Lost castaways) descend upon the scene, calmly assessing and looking with disfavor upon the local sheriffs, who have their less-intelligent heads up their provincial asses. Tommy Lee Jones will have none of this foolishness:

Tommy Lee Jones: Sheriff Rawlins, with all due respect, I'd like to suggest checkpoints on a 15 mile radius out here on I-57, I-24, and on route 13 out of Chester--
Sheriff Rawlins: Whoa whoa whoa. The prisoners are all dead and all checkpoints are gonna do is get a lotta good people frantic around here and flood my office with calls.
Tommy Lee Jones (best deadpan ever): Well shit, sheriff, I'd hate to see that happen so I guess I'll just take over your investigation.
Sheriff Rawlins (sputters for like a year, then): On what authority?
Tommy Lee Jones: Governor of the state of Illinois, United States Marshal's office, 5th District, Northern Illinois.

And what, motherfucker? Man, Tommy Lee Jones' performance in this movie is good. And he only just got started too. Once the chain of command is readjusted, the sheriff tries to recover his vacant nutsack by making a lame crack about Wyatt Earp, but Tommy Lee just sighs at this display of inferior wit and sends every cop in the Midwest after Harrison Ford.

AND SO THE CHASE BEGINS. The pursuit is masterfully constructed; you never get the feeling that Harrison Ford is any farther than like two, maybe three inches away from getting arrested, and that's when things are relaxed. He busts into a hospital, steals an old guy's food, patches up his wound, shaves his beard, steals some doctor threads, and on his way out, runs into a cop.

Cop: Hey, Doc. Have you seen [reads description of Harrison Ford off the Wanted poster]?
Harrison Ford: Every time I look in the mirror, pal. Except for the beard of course.
Cop nods.
Harrison Ford walks away.
Cop: Hey, Doc!
Harrison Ford shits a brick.
The cop gestures to Harrison Ford's open fly.
Harrison Ford exhales, does up his zipper, and fucks off.

Then, right as Harrison Ford is leaving the hospital, the paramedics are bringing in the wounded guard from the train wreck. Harrison Ford hollers some shit to the paramedics so the ER doctors can save the guard's life, then he steals an ambulance.

Tommy Lee Jones, a smidge disappointed that Harrison Ford has decided to escape with such absence of subtlety, starts chasing him in a helicopter. They corner Harrison Ford in the tunnels by this big-ass dam. Then, this classic exchange:

Harrison Ford: I didn't kill my wife!
Tommy Lee Jones: I don't care!

Fuck, man, was an Oscar enough for this performance? We couldn't knight him? That'd be cool, Sir Tommy Lee Jones, with his Texas accent. Maybe sainthood: St. Tommy Lee Jones, patron saint of character actors whose dicks drag the ground, martyred by D. Bowes for doing Men in Black 3 in 2013.

So, Harrison Ford is in a tight spot. The cool thing about having been in as many movies as he had by this point, and playing as many guys who kicked as much ass as he had, is that he had a lot of experience to draw on. He thus takes a page out of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and takes a leap of faith off the dam. Tommy Lee Jones, having been too busy filming The Package in 1989 to have seen Last Crusade, didn't see it coming, and gets pissed off, angrily barking at his by-now enormous coterie of cops to dredge the river looking for the (presumably dead) Harrison Ford.

This was one of the two things critics whined about in The Fugitive. “But anyone who tried jumping off that dam would have been killed!” they argued. Nuh uh, foolish mortal. Harrison Ford doesn't get killed. He didn't asphyxiate in that bullshit Jabba the Hut shrink-wrapped him in in Empire. The (other) Replicants didn't kill him in Blade Runner. The Amish didn't kill him for being a douchebag in Witness. Neither the Nazis nor all those racist Indian stereotypes in Temple of Doom managed to kill Indiana Jones (only George Lucas managed to kill Indiana Jones). Hell, Sean fuckin Bean, 006 himself, motherfuckin Boromir motherfucker, couldn't even kill Harrison Ford in Patriot Games. Some wimpy ass hundred-foot drop into heavy currents with probably a lot of sharp rocks and shit all over the place isn't going to do it.

The chase continues, though Harrison Ford has a bit more breathing room. He colors his hair (the inspiration for one of the top 5 all-time great quotes in my “only white guy in the movie theater” career at the old Metropolitan in downtown Brooklyn: “Son, Han Solo uses Dark & Natural, nigga!”) and catches a ride from a friendly woman.

This leads to the other thing critics complained about: the next scene when, without mentioning anyone's name, the Marshals all sit around talking about how they just closed in on a fugitive who “shacked up with some babe.” It transpires that the the fugitive they kill in the ensuing pursuit (as Tommy Lee Jones later explains, “He was trying to kill one of my kids [read: Marshals], sir”) was not Harrison Ford, but the belligerent Eddie Bo Smith, Jr.

Harrison Ford comes back to Chicago. He contacts his lawyer, and the Marshals, having tapped the phone, listen in. An entertaining exchange ensues wherein Tommy Lee Jones looks at this one random marshal like he has a tentacle coming out of his head for suggesting that the train they hear in the background sounds elevated (“You must have ears like an eagle.”) They listen to the tape a few more times, and isolate the sound of the train conductor saying the name of a stop on the El.

Tommy Lee Jones: I knew that was an elevated train.

Though the Marshals know he's in Chicago, Harrison Ford still manages to lay low, renting out an apartment from a Polish woman and her dickhead son, contacting old friend Jeroen Krabbe, and getting started on infiltrating a hospital to look for the one-armed man.

Minor aside here, regarding Hollywood semiotics. Jeroen Krabbe's name in this movie is Charles Nichols. Good solid WASP name. A guy named Charles Nichols, living in Chicago, who is a hotshot doctor at a hospital, is going to have a neutral American accent, and how recently he got rich will determine how much Midwest creeps into it. Follow me so far? Jeroen Krabbe in this movie has a really fuckin thick Dutch accent. He's awesome, no argument there. But he's the only guy in the movie with a Euro accent. His character would not have a Dutch accent. That is, if what they were going for is realism. I submit the theory that Andrew Davis, underrated director that he is, wanted to semiotically clue the audience in that Jeroen Krabbe was the bad guy . . . because a Euro accent is a signifier of villainy. Ah, that $150k liberal arts education was totally fucking worth it . . .

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Jeroen Krabbe is totally nice to Harrison Ford at first, the first person he encounters from his old life who is (his lawyer dicks him over almost enthusiastically). So, with Jeroen Krabbe's help, Harrison Ford gets the ball rolling finding out who the hell the one-armed man was. (“I know he looks like Andreas Katsulas, but I need more than that to go on . . .”) He infiltrates the hospital, poses as a janitor, and gets a list of dudes with the same prosthetic arm as Andreas Katsulas, simplifying his search.

He also inadvertently gets ensnared by Julianne Moore (who gets third billing, before she was famous, for being in two scenes . . . something I never quite understood, not that I minded or anything) to take some kid on a stretcher somewhere. Harrison Ford is unable to suppress his old doctor instincts, and checks the kid's chest X-ray, discovering that the kid was misdiagnosed. Harrison Ford then takes the kid where he should be, displaying some good Harrison Ford bedside manner along the way.

But Julianne Moore saw the janitor checking out the chest film. And Julianne Moore may be a lot of things (hot, talented, red-haired) but dumb is not one of them. So she yoinks Harrison Ford's fake janitor badge and snitches him to Tommy Lee Jones. After a scene where it randomly becomes apparent that Julianne Moore and Tommy Lee Jones really want to shtup, Tommy Lee Jones and Joe Pantoliano stumble upon the prosthetics department, and realize Harrison Ford's been looking for something in there.

Cue the next great chase sequence in the picture. Harrison Ford, in one of the ballsiest moves ever, goes to visit who he thinks is Andreas Katsulas . . . in jail. With cops fucking everywhere. Talk about suspense. Harrison Ford, though, takes advantage of his experience in cinema—he knows that even the couple times he played bad guys (in The Conversation and Apocalypse Now) he still got away with it, so he knows he'll get away with it this time. And he does; he sits down and the prisoner comes out . . . but it's not Andreas Katsulas, it's some black guy with a cool fro. Although the guy points out, “You got me down here, might as well talk about somethin'. Ain't no cable in this damn place,” Harrison Ford respectfully excuses himself so the ninety billion cops in the fucking building don't bust him, and makes his way as stealthily out as he can.

But not even Harrison Ford can sneak by Tommy Lee Jones. Tommy Lee Jones and his guys chase Harrison Ford (who must have hurt his leg at some point, he's limping like fuck during this whole chase, which actually adds to the suspense). When Harrison Ford manages to get on the other side of the bulletproof emergency doors, Tommy Lee Jones shoots to kill, which kind of surprises Harrison Ford, but not enough that he can't get out and disappear into the St. Patrick's Day parade.

In fairly short order, Harrison Ford finds Andreas Katsulas. It turns out Andreas Katsulas is the security guy for a pharmaceutical company Harrison Ford has encountered a while back. Their big experimental drug had been fucking people up, and Harrison Ford had found out how badly it had been fucking people up, so the pharmaceutical company decided to fuck him up. (Note: there is no better villain—since they're all run by evil white guys in suits—than a pharmaceutical company, except maybe a Nazi who kicks puppies and plays basketball for Duke.)

Now that he knows (or so he thinks) the truth, Harrison Ford leaves a couple oblique clues for Tommy Lee Jones, who determines almost immediately what a choad Andreas Katsulas is (he has also, proleptically, gotten off on an awkward, adversarial foot with Jeroen Krabbe). Unfortunately, Harrison Ford doesn't realize that the guy he thinks is behind everything was murdered and posthumously framed at the order of his old pal Jeroen Krabbe. (Here's where being cynical and kind of racist would have helped, but no, Harrison Ford only plays good guys).

And so, the Big Finish. Harrison Ford beats the shit out of Andreas Katsulas and pistol-whips him into unconsciousness, but the cop who Andreas Katsulas shoots right before this gets blamed on Harrison Ford, so Joe Kosala, Ron Dean, and the entire trigger-happy Chicago PD go running after Harrison Ford with erections. Harrison Ford, though, having realized Jeroen Krabbe is the bad guy swaggers into the medical conference where he's giving the keynote speech, and drops some J'Accuse. His voice shaking in that “I am Harrison Ford and I am acting” way we know and love, our hero calls Jeroen Krabbe out and basically does everything except slap him in the face with a glove. They go into the other room and commence beating the shit out of each other. The fight spills out all over the hotel, a messy but well-filmed affair. Jeroen Krabbe gives Joe Pantoliano a nasty headache, but Tommy Lee Jones calls out to Harrison Ford that he knows he's innocent and Jeroen Krabbe is the bad guy. This angers our villain, who draws down on Tommy Lee Jones with Joe Pantoliano's gun before Harrison Ford tire-irons him a few times. Our hero and his Javert have a moment.

Tommy Lee Jones: It's over. (Pause) And you know I'm glad? I need the rest.

And all is well. Kind of. Harrison Ford's wife is still dead. He's going to need a bit of R&R before he can go back to being a doctor, if he can indeed bring himself to after this ordeal. But the dudes who fucked up his life have been punished. Sometimes that's all you can really ask for.

I've watched The Fugitive dozens of times since its release. When I was in college, it was a bit of a cult thing for us. The James Newton Howard music that played over a helicopter shot of the El after Joe Pantoliano says “If I fell down these stairs, I'd be a goner. I'd be dead” inspired some (very bad) freestyle rapping after I said one time, “Jay-Z should remix this as Big Pimpin' part II” and my friend Steve coined the immortal couplet “Cuz I'm the Fugitive/So lick my spooge-a-tive.”

The Fugitive gave Andrew Davis' career a bit of a boost. He would go on to direct the eminently respectable (if not all that great) Dial M for Murder remake A Perfect Murder with Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Viggo. Then he went and fucked it up by directing a late-period Arnold vehicle (something must have happened to Arnold on True Lies, because boy did his career suck after that. The Sixth Day was good, but it wasn't that good) and now who the fuck knows what he's up to, because Ron Dean did those NFL commercials a couple years ago and hit the big time and now Andrew Davis is without his secret weapon. Clearly, if Andrew Davis had directed a buddy comedy with Joe Kosala and Ron Dean as the leads, none of this bullshit would have happened.

The best part about The Fugitive is that you can watch it over and over and over and over and it still stays just as good. In fact, knowing that Tommy Lee Jones is just a guy doing his job and not a villain makes it even better. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that the sequel is worth watching. The kid with the ponytail gets killed in it, and that's fucking bullshit. Also, not having Joe Kosala around to ask, “So, de scraytches on yer neck Dack . . . did de one arm gey do dat?” fucks things up. In fact, any movie that doesn't have Joe Kosala and Ron Dean walking around Chicago-ing is just fucking missing something. You heard it here first.

KATHRYN BIGELOW: GODDESS

Oscar season is upon us. I’m trying to give a shit, but it’s a little harder than in past years. I’m trying to gradually see as many of the nominated pictures as I can, but I’m usually either too broke or busy to make it out to the theater. My younger selves would have been shocked to hear that, as long as it’s been that I’ve been on my “hiatus,” there has only really been one movie that it really drove me nuts I couldn’t see: The Hurt Locker.

There were multiple reasons, some of them kind of obvious—the deliriously good press it got, the fact that someone apparently finally made a good Iraq movie, the prospect of seeing stuff blow up—but the main reason is this: ever since the middle of my adolescence I’ve been half in love with Kathryn Bigelow.

In many ways, she’s absolutely perfect (and not just for the reasons clearly on display in the photo to the left). A woman who directs action movies (including the legendary Point Break)? Command me, mistress. As an action director who is a woman, it’s tempting, and almost reflexive, to say that she’s a woman in a man’s game, only the fact of her bringing a woman’s perspective to typically male material makes her unique. Even though I love action movies dearly, I will admit under duress that most action directors are kind of interchangeable—anyone who claims they can tell the difference between, say, Simon West and Stephen Sommers without looking at the credits is probably full of shit. But no one else out there right now could make a Kathryn Bigelow picture. Even Mimi Leder, making pictures like The Peacemaker and Deep Impact, comes off a little “girlier,” to use the first word that comes to mind and that kind of misses the point. Kathryn Bigelow pictures, with only two exceptions I can think of, have male protagonists and deal with “male” issues in a very adrenalized, terse way.

An overview of her career, with more spoilers than a motherfucker because it’s a holiday and I ain’t got time to euphemize:


The Set-Up (1978)

Getting the ol’ career off to a flying start: 20 minutes of Gary Busey and some other dude beating the shit out of each other while two semioticians comment on the action. Did I mention I’m in love with this woman?

The Loveless (1982? 1984?)

Haven’t seen this one, but it’s a biker picture with Willem Dafoe, about incest, apparently. I nominate that last line for worst pun of the year.

Near Dark (1987)

A beautifully shot, original take on vampire movies. Adrian Pasdar meets a cute, pale girl who bites him on the neck both physically and emotionally. Cute pale girl introduces him to Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen. Adrian Pasdar, poor bastard, is a bit too genteel for their company, or for Jenette Goldstein or that creepy kid vampire either, but shit doesn’t really get raw until the vampires decide they want to kill Adrian Pasdar’s paw and sis.

So stylish, so brilliantly paced, so few extraneous touches that’s almost a shame that the ultimate resolution is so dishonest. Vampirism isn’t supposed to have a cure. Oh, well. You go see a subversive genre picture, you shouldn’t complain when conventions get subverted. That’s the only one that lands badly, though.


Blue Steel (1990)

Slightly better than the average “cop vs. psycho” picture, mainly due to the signature visual style. Jamie Lee Curtis (?) plays an NYPD rookie who puts a few well-placed holes in a convenience store robber, only to have psycho yuppie Ron Silver—a convenience store patron—make off with the robber’s gun, landing Jamie Lee in all kinds of trouble way beyond being miscast. Ron Silver starts shooting women, attempting to romance Jamie Lee, and eventually drawing the ire of Clancy Brown (another cop, in one terrific wig), who also romances Jamie Lee. It feels a bit dated now, since formula pictures don’t tend to age well, but the almost sexual fascination with guns is interesting, making this less than torturous for anyone looking to do the whole Bigelow oeuvre, at least if you’re not squeamish about violence and the instruments thereof.


Point Break (1991)

I have never been able to maintain a straight face while talking about this movie, and I don’t intend to start now. The story of blue flamer quarterback punk Johnny Utah (Keanu) of the Federal Bureau of Inarticulation and his quest to win the heart of . . . ahem, arrest, right, arrest . . . bank-robbing surf guru Bodhi (Swayze). He attempts to win the heart of lesbian surfer Lori Petty . . . wait, she’s supposed to be straight in this? What the fuck . . .?

Anyway. There’s enough quotably retarded dialogue in Point Break to fill several happy lifetimes:

“That’s Bodhi, they call him Bodhisattva.”

“Bodhi, this is your fucking wake-up call, man . . . I . . . am an F . . . B . . . I . . . agent!”
“I know, isn’t it wild?”

“I caught my first tube today. Sir.”

“Listen you snot-nose little shit, I was takin' shrapnel in Khe Sanh
when you were crappin' in your hands and rubbin' it on your face!”
Later:
“Let me tell you something, Harp. I was in this bureau while you were still
popping zits on your funny face and jacking off to the lingerie section of the
Sears catalog.”

“Utah . . . get me two.”
Then: “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass end out of a dead rhino, I shoulda had you get me three of these things.”

“Back off, Warchild, seriously.”

Et cetera. Ad infinitum.

Also notable for being one of the earlier signs that Gary Busey was duckfucking out of his mind rather than just one of those guys who gets typecast.

Prefigures The Hurt Locker in a few weird ways: a) a character study about adrenaline junkies, b) a slightly detached, amused, and pretty accurate look at male friendships, c) cool handheld camerawork in an alley chase scene.

Very few movies consistently make me as purely happy as Point Break does, even if I’m two parts laughing at it to eight parts laughing with it. Most of the stupid shit is the writers’ fault and the fact that the two leads aren’t exactly De Niro and Pacino, although I’ll stop short of saying that Keanu and Swayze are shitty actors. The many weird choices they respectively make in this are part of its warped charm. The director has to take a lot of credit here for realizing she wasn’t making a serious Method-actor movie and just letting the goofballs run with it. (Speaking of goofballs, the amount of coffee John C. McGinley must have drunk in this rivals the amount of coke they did making Scarface).


Strange Days (1995)

Written by her (already) ex-husband James Cameron—who has apparently directed a couple of pictures, according to my sources—this is kind of a cultural artifact, part of the mid-90s post-cyberpunk hiccup in SF. Taking place in the buildup to New Year’s Eve 1999, the story’s about a black market dealer in virtual reality clips (Ralph Fiennes), who gets caught up in an LAPD cover-up of the murder of an influential rapper, which a prostitute recorded. As with most cyberpunk proper, there’s a heavy noir influence, down to the twisty plot, treacherous friends, and femme(s) fatale.

At the time it came out, Strange Days got a lot of really good reviews but tanked at the box office. Sometimes when that happens it’s because either the critics or the public fucked up, sometimes it’s both, which is the case here. The critics were a little too quick to praise Cameron’s script (when he, as was his wont, covered a lot of the same territory William Gibson and Neal Stephenson already had not too long before, but with shittier dialogue and more reductive morality; JC’s considerable strengths lay elsewhere).

One of the most interesting things about Strange Days to me has always been the fact that one of the first things guys want to do with the virtual reality is experience what it’s like to be a woman, kind of a mirror image of what Kathryn Bigelow does so often as a director: put herself inside the male mind. Also, Angela Bassett’s character in a movie by a guy director would have been a lot more likely to be eye candy and implausible at ass-kicking time (though, to J. Cameron’s credit, he does write strong women).

This still doesn’t explain Juliette Lewis being a shrill retard and it being impossible to figure out why Ralph Fiennes is so tragically in love with her. Or, now that you mention it, what the fuck Ralph Fiennes, of all people, is doing in this movie. It’s not fair that the guy should have to play upright Brits all the time just because he is one, but he doesn’t play a convincing sleazeball (and anyway, he gets to play Voldemort, he isn't allowed to complain anymore). This was a part crying out for Gary Oldman, if you needed a Brit in the lead.

Minor quibbles aside: this movie was the start of my crush on Kathryn Bigelow. The 16 year old me was quite taken with the fact that a woman directed this movie. Then I saw a picture of her, and all bets were off. What the hell, let’s have another.

The Weight of Water (2000)

Didn’t see. Didn’t even realize my girl directed this until I was looking at her imdb page while writing this post. Due to having worked in bookstores, and my resultant problem with Oprah Book Club books, I’ll probably give this one a miss.


K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)

Meh.


The Hurt Locker (2009)

The first good non-documentary about the Iraq war, precisely because it’s not trying to be political, it’s about characters, specifically, the guys who try to keep bombs from blowing up. Oddly, it’s fairly suspenseful. It’s suspenseful to the point that I chewed through one of my bedsheets, watching it on DVD. I kept mumbling shit to the characters, i.e. “watch it!” “What the fuck are you doing?” “Oh no . . . oh no . . . oh man, that’s not good . . .” (the situation they were in, not the movie, the movie is very good).

I say, what the hell, let’s nominate this for a shitload of Oscars. Let’s give Jeremy Renner the Richard Jenkins Memorial “none of the fuckers who vote for the Oscars knows who the guy is, but he was awesome and probably better than all four of the other guys put together” nomination (even though Richard Jenkins isn’t dead, the point is, none of the shitheads who didn’t vote for him in The Visitor because they didn’t see it knows that). Lets give Kathryn a nomination because then I’ll get to see her on TV a whole lot and that’ll make me happy. Let’s give that English guy a nomination for cinematography. Let’s throw Anthony Mackie a Best Supporting Actor nom, cuz he was fuckin’ great too. And hell, while we’re at it, let’s give Guy Pearce a Lifetime Achievement Award for finally being presentably butch.

The one thing The Hurt Locker has against it, as far as actually winning all these Oscars I want it nominated for, is that it’s pretty fuckin’ dark. The main character is kind of an asshole. The explosions aren’t fun, they’re really disturbing. When Guy Pearce dies in the beginning, you see him jumping out of the way of the explosion like guys always do in action movies, and they get up a second later, dust themselves off, say something wry, and continue in pursuit of the bad guy. Only Guy Pearce doesn’t get up. That’s the first sign: you’re on your own, moviegoer. More than any theatrical feature I’ve seen in fuck knows how long, The Hurt Locker makes you feel like you’re there. And Iraq is not one of the most fun theres to be.

The thing The Hurt Locker has going for it is that it’s fucking incredible. I’ll admit, as an imperfectly progressive guy, that a large part of my long-standing crush on Kathryn Bigelow has always been due to her being hot. But when she comes through like this—“Hi, guys, I’m back . . . oh, by the way, have fun trying to make a better movie about war ever again, motherfuckers”—it lends a certain moral credibility. Talent is sexy. By that standard alone we should all bow down. And give her the fucking Oscar.