PLEASE ALLOW ME TO CORRECT A MISCONCEPTION

The reason why posting around these parts has been a little sparse has nothing to do with my terribly glamorous paying gigs at Premiere and Tor. No, you would think that the idea of getting paid to nerd out would cut back on my time to wax psycho-philosophic around these parts. But you would be wrong.

The real reason I'm not blogging as much is because I'm working on a feature-length adaptation of this:


I'm in talks with Dan Aykroyd to play the guy and Arianna Huffington to play the hostess. Both will be flown in from the 80s for this project.

THIS IS NO LONGER A RESEARCH PROJECT

John McTiernan's going to prison. Fuck. Oh, well, instead of dwelling on the present, let's revisit his happier days.

THIS BLOG POST IS THE EARLY FRONT-RUNNER FOR BEST BLOG POST OF 2010

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: DELIGHT AND CONFUSION

The fine folks at tor.com have been kind enough to hire me to follow The Hollywood Reporter's Twitter feed and find stuff to geek out about (which is to say, what I do anyway), with this fine piece of concise snark being the first of hopefully many. I'm very pleased with this situation, and charmed by the extremely nice way they asked me to get by with "50% less swear words." Out of gratitude, I countered with an offer to do without them at all. Because I don't fucking need to curse.

Now, onto that hazy, poorly-defined, less interesting part of the world that isn't all about me: this weekend, this comes out:

It may be a while before I get to actually see it, but I'm extremely interested to see what David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin have managed to with this. Not to put too fine a point on it, but when I first heard someone was making a movie about Facebook, I reacted about the same as I did when I heard that Ridley Scott was making a movie out of Monopoly: "What the fuck are you talking about? If you're kidding, that's not funny, and if you're not kidding, I wish to acquire surplus Russian nuclear warheads."

The punchline is, people are coming back from screenings comparing this picture to fucking Citizen Kane, and calling it and the Colin Firth thing where he plays George VI the two Oscar frontrunners. Now I've been hangin' around this here Internet for a long time, long enough to know how to spot a troll a mile away. And I wouldn't put it past someone like [name of group redacted] who hang out on [name of messageboard redacted], the most popular board on [name of website redacted] (Ed. Note: redactions mandated due to Rules 1&2 of the Internet; if you don't know what they are, look them up. Behind seven proxies) to have cooked this up, much like they did the Scientology protests, in a diverting bit of IRL trolling. But no. These people talking up The Social Network are fucking serious. Voices as diverse as Roger Ebert and my old buddy Hudak are united in bestowing four stars (out of four) on it. So there's that.

I, personally, am in shock that this movie exists. What makes this startup different from all other startups? I'm going to go in to see it with an open mind, and fully willing to accept it as good. But seriously. You didn't make the Scooby-Doo "who farted" face the first time you heard this movie was good? You be lyin', byetch.

THE ONLY TRUE CURRENCY IN THIS BANKRUPT WORLD IS WHAT YOU SHARE WITH SOMEONE ELSE WHEN YOU'RE UNCOOL

The title is my favorite line from a movie that dropped ten years ago this month, Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. Based on a variety of experiences Crowe had as a teenager in the 70s writing for Rolling Stone, Almost Famous is only partly about what it's about. The story, yes, follows a kid who bullshits his way into a freelance gig at Rolling Stone and goes on tour with a band, but it's not about the rock 'n' roll scene, it's about, as Fairuza Balk's “Band Aid” character puts it, “truly [loving] some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much it hurts.” Almost Famous is, ultimately, about its sincerity and being unafraid to look uncool.

This was why, upon its release, most of the negative reviews gave Cameron Crowe shit for not putting in enough scenes where everyone sat around wearing sunglasses and shooting heroin or some such bullshit. If you'll recall, September of 2000 was a very low point in music. Rock 'n' roll was on life support, and what few rock stars were left were not a whole lot of fun: the last paradigm shift in American rock 'n' roll, the largely media-created Seattle thing circa 1991-2 (one of the major cultural artifacts of which was Cameron Crowe's own Singles), had established the role of the modern rock star as a sensitive, humorlessly progressive mumbler (see Vedder, Eddie). Drugs were taken, if at all, in moderation—and even when a Kurt Cobain came along to keep the proud tradition of heroin addiction alive, he fucked everything up by being genuinely tortured instead of milking minor emotional slights to make cheesy, lighter-in-the-air ballads. The British had a pop music renaissance in the mid-90s but only produced one good God Almighty coked-out-of-their-scrotum rock 'n' roll band—Oasis—and they went full retard on their third album, before breaking up for the first of about thirty times and ceasing to make epic rock 'n' roll. It was thus that a considerable number of American music fans began to turn nostalgia for the 70s into a fetish: the days when Led Zeppelin made groupies fuck sharks, Keith Richards got busted for heroin every week, Rod Stewart gave so many blowjobs he had to have his stomach pumped, et cetera (Ed. Note: none of those things actually happened). Making a movie about rock 'n' roll, set in the 70s, was thus expected to be wall-to-wall sex and drugs, and Cameron Crowe not delivering on everyone's grimiest fantasies was considered to be an artistic and moral shortcoming; Almost Famous bombed at the box office and was treated condescendingly at best by the hipper, more pretentious critics (though their mainstream, square counterparts all dug it).

This is a failure of criticism of any kind, and a very common one—blaming the work in question (movie, or play, or book, or album, or video game, etc etc) for not being what the critic wants it to be, rather than evaluating what it is. Movies about music are really asking for it from critics—people who love movies can be total jagoffs about their favorite movies (ahem), but the hundred most obnoxiously sanctimonious subjective opinions declared to be objective fact have all been about music. These two loci of masturbatory douchiness collide and form the perfect storm of being an asshole. I, clearly, have forgotten to duct-tape my windows (so to speak), and I'm digressing.

The reason I get so bent out of shape about people knocking Almost Famous for somehow lacking balls because it wasn't just three hours of people doing drugs and fucking is that it is much, much harder to be sincere that it is to be cool. I would maintain that Almost Famous has more balls for not succumbing to the temptation to throw tits and lines of coke all over the place. It's a story about the Cameron Crowe character (Patrick Fugit) managing to keep his sincere, innocent love for music despite the best attempts of musicians to make him a bitter old cynical bastard (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Love for music has no objective connection to tits and cocaine.

Fittingly enough, the movie opens with the event that made Patrick Fugit—as a little kid—a music lover. His sister (Zooey Deschanel before she was Zooey Deschanel), tiring of the ascetic, kooky leftie lifestyle enforced by mom Frances McDormand (who is ridiculously good in this), leaves home to be an airline stewardess, and leaves her records with her brother. Records like Pet Sounds and Blue are found therein (the collection he leafs through are Cameron Crowe's own from when he was that age).

Fast forward a few years and Patrick Fugit is an earnest nerd who listens to a radio interview with legendary critic and editor Lester Bangs (the above-mentioned bitter old cynical bastard P.S. Hoffman) where Bangs spouts off about how the Doors suck and how he likes The Guess Who more because they aren't as pretentious and about how Iggy Pop rules. Fugit senses a kindred spirit and sends writing samples to PSH/Bangs, who sees some promise and sends Fugit off with some cynical, pragmatic advice to go review a Black Sabbath concert. However, the advice is all he gives Fugit; the kid has no ticket or backstage pass or anything. It is here that he meets a group of young women who share his love of music, but whose love of musicians is a bit more, shall we say, tangible: the “Band-Aids.”

Care is taken to differentiate the Band-Aids (Fairuza Balk, Anna Paquin, Bijou Phillips, and Kate Hudson) from the stereotype of the groupie. In this story, which is about the love of music, theirs is but another way to show that love. Sure, they go on tour with rock stars, get high with rock stars, and fuck rock stars, but their claim that it's about the music is not disingenuous. The way Fairuza Balk bellows that stupid Robert Plant “Does anyone remember laughter?” line, you know she means it. (Almost Famous embraces the apparent contradiction of recognizing how ridiculous rock 'n' roll can be while at the same time loving it unconditionally).

Though his meeting the Band-Aids will prove fortuitous (and result in falling head over heels for Kate Hudson), Fugit still isn't allowed backstage without a pass or ticket until opening act Stillwater shows up, massively late. Fugit, desperate, compliments the band on a song of theirs. The band, won over by his enthusiasm and eloquence, invites him backstage as their guest.

Fugit's eyes get wide as he befriends both Band-Aid Penny Lane (Kate Hudson in, it must be said, a deliriously overrated performance) and Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup). He ends up turning in a piece on Stillwater to PSH, who gets worried and warns him about the dangers of getting seduced by the cool.

However, his piece on Stillwater brings Fugit to the attention of Rolling Stone, whose editor hires him to do a piece on Stillwater for them. The catch is, they don't know he's only 15, because Fugit took the liberty of bullshitting them so they'd take him more seriously. Whoops. Frances McDormand lets him go with extreme reluctance, and so young Fugit joins the circus.

The band is a bit uneasy about having Fugit around. Singer Jason Lee calls him “the enemy” while simultaneously going off on hilariously vacuous self-important rock star monologues that he, on some level, hopes Fugit will transcribe and make him look cool. (Even the cool people in this movie aren't cool). Billy Crudup is much more diplomatic with the kid, but still resists all Fugit's efforts to sit down with him and do a proper interview.

The tour unfolds with gentle emphasis on the drudgery of it all (and one hilarious scene where Frances McDormand starts lecturing Billy Crudup over the phone and eventually concludes by giving the speechless Crudup an inspirational quote from Goethe and telling him “I'm glad we talked”). Gradually we see some internal band conflicts come to the surface. Most rock 'n' roll bands worth their salt have tension between the singer and the guitarist, but Stillwater's problem is relatively novel: this time it's the guitarist who's the good-looking one and gets all the attention and the chicks, and it's the singer who's jealous.

Tensions come to a head in Kansas when the band take delivery of a few boxes of t-shirts with their likenesses on the front. Except Billy Crudup is the only one in focus, and he's massively larger compared to the rest of the band. Jason Lee, as a cursory review of his other roles will attest, does not suffer slights quietly, and the band has a big screaming shitfit that concludes with Billy Crudup storming off in a huff looking for something or someone “real.” Fugit, half looking for something interesting to write about and half looking to protect him, follows Billy Crudup.

They end up at a house party thrown by a bunch of high school kids who are all like, “Whoa, shit, a portmanteau of Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, Peter Frampton, Glenn Frey and Allen Collins just showed up at my house, far out.” Billy Crudup happily accepts a tab of acid and proceeds to very urgently tell the kids at the party how real they are, in a way that bizarrely reminds me of the way John Turturro carries on about “the common man” in Barton Fink, except the kids don't pull a John Goodman and start fucking up his trip by bellowing about the life of the mind, they offer to let Billy Crudup watch a snake eat a mouse. Patrick Fugit, in a panic, calls up Stillwater's manager and asks him what to expect from someone on acid.

“I AM A GOLDEN GOD!” —Billy Crudup, on the roof of the house (haha he's peaking while standing on the peak of the roof . . . haha . . . ha . . . coughcough)

Well, that solves that mystery. Billy Crudup, convinced this is his last night on earth, tells Fugit to record his last words for posterity (the final candidates are “I'm on drugs!” and “I dig music”) before splashing unceremoniously into the swimming pool. Stillwater's manager arrives to throw a blanket around the half-naked, shivering, extremely embarrassed Billy Crudup and shleps him onto the tour bus, promising the kids a return to Topeka on the next tour.

Then, another scene a lot of people rolled their eyes at that I will defend to the death. Largely due to that weird scene in Magnolia where everyone sings the Aimee Mann song, people were walking around rolling their eyes when Almost Famous came out and saying “God, every movie has a scene where everyone sings some song, God, it's so tired.” These people, of course, can suck my dick. Two movies are not every movie. The other thing is, the scene in Almost Famous is an illustration of the movie's central theme: love of music. It does so perfectly, in that it uses a song that is both extremely uncool and magically fucking good: “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John. Let the record reflect that I have slow-danced in a bar to “Tiny Dancer,” I have made amends with previously antagonistic colleagues to “Tiny Dancer,” and by God, I have had sex to “Tiny Dancer.” My relationship with this song is not unique. It's just one of those songs. Everyone—except Elton fans—has the same progression with it:

Curiosity—“Hey, this song is awesome, who is this?”
Shock—“This is Elton John?”
Denial—“Get the fuck out of here, it can't be Elton John, this is actually good.”
Acceptance—“God damn . . . this song is really good.”
Nirvana—“Hey, did we just spontaneously start having sex because this song is so awesome? We did? Wow, this song rules.”

It's true. You can make fun of me all you like; I'll just give you the finger.

The way the scene unfolds is especially nice. Everyone's sitting there goofing on Billy Crudup, then someone starts singing the song. Then another voice joins in. Then another. Eventually everyone's singing, a way of being like, “Hey, man, we have our differences, but we love you. Join us.” And right at the best fucking part of the whole song, Billy starts wailing along with everyone else. Game, set, match, Crowe: music brings people together. Conclusive proof.

But all this harmony will, inevitably, be short-lived. A new manager comes in, played by an unrecognizable (because he doesn't suck) Jimmy Fallon, to introduce a more professional influence into the band's midst. He gives them all a proto-yuppie speech about the industry being a business and blah blah blah and, in one of Cameron Crowe's cutesy little reminders that he's telling this story 25+ years after the fact, drops the priceless line “If you think Mick Jagger will still be out there trying to be a rock star at age fifty, then you are sadly, sadly mistaken.” See, you know Mick is still a rock star at age 67, I know Mick is still a rock star at 67, but Jimmy Fallon doesn't. Because he's a dipshit! Bahahahahaha! Don't forget to tip your waitress!

There's another complication: Kate Hudson, who is—contrary to her own best instincts—deeply in love with Billy Crudup, has to leave the tour before his actual girlfriend shows up. Billy Crudup, looking to appear cool in a poker game with the road managers of several popular bands, starts flexing his nuts and “bets” Kate Hudson, losing her kind of sort of on purpose. Fugit, who witnesses this, is disgusted, and tells Kate Hudson (who he's madly in love with). She's devastated and welches on the deal to go with the band to follow Stillwater to New York.

This, of course, ends badly. Kate Hudson confronts Billy Crudup, who pretends not to know her. She goes back to her hotel to OD, but Fugit saves her. In gratitude, she tells him her real name that she never tells anyone.

Fugit returns to the tour, and their plane (a sign they've hit the big time and are going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone) promptly hits shitty weather and it looks like, in grand rock star tradition, they're all about to die in a plane crash. This prompts a round of truth-telling: Jason Lee confesses he fucked Billy Crudup's “real” girlfriend (who's there with them), and Billy Crudup gets all indignant, and Jason Lee is all like “you were the one fuckin around with that groupie [Kate Hudson] for the whole tour!” at which point Fugit jumps in, outraged, and lectures them about the shitty way they treat their biggest fans, concluding with a passionate declaration of his love for Kate Hudson. This shocks everyone speechless, then the drummer, in his only line in the movie, chimes in:

“Fuck it . . . I'm gay!”

At which point the turbulence immediately ends and everything's fine.

Fugit leaves the tour in San Francisco, and Billy Crudup tells Fugit to write whatever he wants. Fugit turns in a piece to Rolling Stone that acquiesces to the band's desire to “make us look cool” (there's that yearning again . . .) but that the editors consider weak and sycophantic. Fugit asks Phil Hoffman for advice, which is “be honest and unmerciful.” Since he's still stratospherically pissed about the way Billy Crudup treated Kate Hudson, Fugit tears the band a new asshole, putting in every last embarrassing (but true) detail. This is more what Rolling Stone is looking for. Unfortunately, during their fact-checking process, the band flatly denies everything, putting Fugit in the shitter. He runs into his sister, now a stewardess, living the dream, and, dejected, Fugit heads home to San Diego.

Fairuza Balk runs into a guilty Billy Crudup in Miami, and piles on some more guilt telling him about Kate Hudson's OD and so forth, and how Fugit saved her, and about how shitty it was that the band dogged Fugit like that. Crudup, looking to fix things, calls up Kate Hudson and asks for her address so he can visit and fix everything by saying I'm sorry or something retarded. Kate Hudson plays a trick on him, giving him Fugit's address instead.

Billy Crudup shows up to a flabbergasted Zooey Deschanel, a gently scolding and weirdly awkwardly star-struck Frances McDormand (man she's good in this; the character's well-written and everything but she knocks it outta the fuckin park), and one pissed off Fugit. Crudup explains that he's called Rolling Stone and told them the truth, so Fugit's piece is going to run, and expresses remorse for mistreating Kate Hudson. By way of accepting, Fugit sits him down and finally does the interview he's been trying to get for the whole movie.

Fugit: “What do you love about music?”
Crudup: “To begin with . . . everything.”

And there's your movie, right there. Sappy, perhaps, but unabashedly sincere. Unafraid to seem uncool. Yet, somehow, through the sincerity and the passion that comes with it, all the cooler for being uncool.

Cameron Crowe's critical legacy has suffered a bit in the last ten years due to having directed Vanilla Sky, which started off kind of promising, then stumbled around the beginning of act two and faceplanted at the beginning of act three, and Elizabethtown, which had no such promise and sucked start to finish. Fortunately, he will always have the script to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which is amazingly good. As a director, he'll always have the iconic John Cusack/boombox/Peter Gabriel moment, as well as the underrated Jerry Maguire (underrated primarily because all anyone remembers is the scene where Cuba hollers “Show me the money!” over and over, and they forget that it's actually a really well-constructed story about Tom Cruise's self-discovery, and that Tom Cruise is really good in it). And Almost Famous.

One wonders whether Almost Famous wouldn't have been a bigger hit if Brad Pitt—for whom Cameron Crowe wrote the Billy Crudup part—had agreed to do it. Then again, Brad's been in a flop or two his own self (remember, Fight Club didn't turn a profit til DVD) and he dropped out of the movie because he didn't get the character or the movie, so it was probably all for the best. Instead, the movie ended up with no stars, no desire whatsoever to appear cool, and no hobbits or lasers. It did, however, find a second life on DVD and cable, so all was not lost, and Cameron Crowe won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (the classic consolation prize Oscar).

Kate Hudson's performance, which owed most of its acclaim to a well-written part and Crowe's camera being in love with her, did not take home a statue, thus sparing the Academy the indignity of having to hear the words “Academy Award winner Kate Hudson” in the trailer for How To Confuse Matthew McConaughey with Josh Lucas in 10 Days.

Patrick Fugit caught some shit for his ponderous line readings—and he certainly hasn't done much since—but in this picture he's exactly the right nerd for the job (maybe because he grew up with people teasing him by pronouncing his name “fuck it” . . . trust me, as someone whose name is uncomfortably close to “bozo” I feel the cat's pain).

Almost Famous is not in any danger of being forgotten. It doesn't quite fit the usual definition of “overlooked gem,” what with the Oscar and the omnipresence on cable there for a few years. On its tenth anniversary, all I'm saying is let's celebrate a picture that isn't lighting its pants on fire trying to be cool. Let's hail the (regrettably rare) proverbial good “write what you know” picture. Fuck it, let's celebrate music. Hold me closer, tiny dancer. Lay me down in sheets of linen. You had a busy day today.

(Ed. Note: Fuck you, that song is awesome)

YOU MADE THE RAIN BLACK

Sir Ridley Scott has won wild praise over the course of his 30+ year career, mainly for a handful of the most visually stunning pictures anyone's ever seen. The bulk of the praise—deservedly—goes to Alien, Blade Runner, and to a lesser extent Gladiator (which has far more detractors than the other two, but don't front, in 2000 Gladiator gave your eyes a hard-on too). Sir Ridley has made his share of shitty movies, to be sure, but everything he's ever done looks really cool, and unlike some hit-or-miss directors, his career isn't divided into “awesome” and “crap.” There are tiers to his career. There are straight-up masterpieces like Alien and Blade Runner. There are pictures like Gladiator that fall just a hair short due to minor foibles (in Gladiator's case, overlength, multiple climaxes, and an extremely polarizing Joaquin Phoenix performance, itself related to another foible, brazen fictionalizing of real-life characters). There are a few other substrata, then there are the shit-tastic complete failures like his Christopher Columbus and Robin Hood movies and G.I. Jane.

At the level just beneath Gladiator, in the “very good but with one or two glaring fuckups” category is the 1989 Michael Douglas cop vehicle Black Rain. There is a lot of very important data to unpack in that description, to wit:

“1989”: Unironic mullets, hideous ties, lots and lots of smoking, and a lot of what now comes off as quaint, primitive culture shock.

“Michael Douglas”: There will be bad hair (it's not quite a mullet, but it's close), mediocre but intense acting, and absolutely every other character in the movie will be told to go fuck themselves at least five times. And, of course, there will be Michael Douglas Face, that unique and wonderful facial expression—captured here in elegantly framed medium closeup—that foretells intense anger and an incipient sloppy attempt to kick ass. Fortunately in Black Rain, the occasionally disturbing psycho-sexual (sexual psycho?) component to Michael Douglas Face (see Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Disclosure) is absent.

“Cop vehicle”: A genre that operated under many hard and fast rules, among which—the hero MUST be divorced, MUST have a drinking problem and at least one other self-destructive habit (in Michael Douglas' case, gambling on himself in outlaw motorcycle races underneath the FDR Drive), he MUST be in trouble with Internal Affairs, and he must be just racist enough that it's not implausible that he get over it by the end of the movie.

Most movies' attitude toward police is stunning when you stop to think about it: the hero is always some wild renegade fuckup, and he's venerated for being under the influence (or at the very least, after effects) of controlled substances at work. Internal Affairs are invariably portrayed as needle-dick killjoy assholes who exist only to keep the “hero” from “doing it his way” to bring the bad guys down. This started, as with the entire cop movie genre, in Dirty Harry, when Four-Eyes tells Clint they have to let the killer go because Clint violated procedure. While you're clearly supposed to sympathize with Clint here, you're also not being told that he's right; procedures are the way they are to protect the innocent, not impede the cops' ability to catch the guilty. Dirty Harry was a 70s movie. The fact that Clint's way was unacceptable to the PD wasn't a sign that the PD was wrong, just an indication of Clint's alienation from it and from civilized society in general. Remember, he throws his badge in the water after he lights up Scorpio at the end. Sequels notwithstanding, Clint's ass was gone off the force at the end of that picture, and he accepted it as reality. That little detail—you know, the fucking climax of the movie—got lost in all the subsequent ripoffs.

All the above being said, and true, Black Rain needn't bear the burden of 80s cop cinema's collective sins. Michael Douglas is not portrayed as a particularly good, or even nice, guy (this is a widely repeated complaint about the movie). Also, he doesn't necessarily get away with everything at the end: even though (I got your fuckin spoiler alert hangin right here) Michael Douglas skates with the Japanese cops at the end, you still get the distinct impression that Internal Affairs will be waiting for him when he gets off the plane in New York, stroking boners and assuring our rule-breaking antihero that there will be no lube.

The final complaint, in re: plotting, is that the story's still a little murky. There's this whole business with this pre-op looking Japanese chick in a sequin dress that lasts most of the movie, but it's never made clear who she is, whose side she's on, and indeed whether or not she committed the murder in the nightclub. This is but a trifle, as eventually it's kind of explained. Sufficiently for this movie, anyway.

Now, on to why Black Rain rules fucking ass: like the rest of Sir Ridley's pictures, Black Rain is stunning visually, and is all the more enjoyable for looking cool for the sake of looking cool. In nearly every single scene, there's steam rising from something or other. There's lots of flashing neon. Dudes bust out swords. Actually . . . fuck, Ridley visually reps his entire career to date in this!

The Duellists—dudes with swords; Michael Douglas has a pissed-off expression on his face the whole picture just like Harvey Keitel.
Alien—Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia are trapped on a long aircraft ride with a monster (Sato).
Blade Runner—steam, neon, Asian people, the odd slow-mo shot for no apparent reason (not employed to as cool effect in Black Rain, alas)
Legend—largely crappy reviews
Someone to Watch Over Me—the first few minutes of Black Rain make Queens look non-shitty. just like in STWOM, proof in itself of Sir Ridley's nonpareil mastery of cinema's visual potential.

Michael Douglas is introduced to the audience, over the first few scenes, as a loner motorcycle enthusiast, adrenaline junkie gambler, divorced dad, friend and partner of slick-dressing sharpster Andy Garcia, and target of an Internal Affairs investigation (and, like he would in Basic Instinct, he has an apartment with a view so awesome that it's no wonder IA's wondering how he's paying the rent). His inability to restrain himself from going off on the IA dudes leads Michael Douglas to join Andy Garcia for a liquid lunch.

Michael Douglas happens to be drinking his lunch at the same restaurant where a bunch of Mafia guys are breaking bread with some Japanese businessmen. Several other Japanese guys enter with machine guns, accompanying a tall, charismatic dude with a nasty growl and a nightmare-inducing stare. This is Sato. He is very bad indeed, and demonstrates this by knifing one of the Japanese guys in the heart, slitting the other's throat, and absconding with a mysterious box the elder Japanese guy had with him.

A shootout and foot chase through the Meatpacking District ensues. Why the Meatpacking District? Because cobblestone streets look cool and there are a lot of manholes for Sir Ridley to shoot steam up through, which also looks cool. Not to mention, when Michael Douglas chases Sato into a meat locker, you can see their breath, and there are all those big swinging pieces of meat. After Andy Garcia comes up with his gun at just the right moment, our heroes bust Sato.

Because at this point in the plot it's necessary to relocate to Japan, the Japanese embassy puts pressure on the State Department, and through the bureaucratic law of fecal gravity, Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia are tasked with bringing Sato back to Japan, where he's done many worse things than knifing a couple dudes in broad daylight. Thinking Sato doesn't speak English, Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia talk freely, revealing their deep bond of friendship, which trumps even Andy Garcia's disapproval of the corruption in which Michael Douglas is ensnared. Sato hears all, and files it away for later.

Sato then turns the table on our protagonists, having some guys from his crew show up at the airport pretending to be cops. Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia, not knowing any better, turn him over. This, naturally, pisses off the real cops, who are about to send their dumb asses back to America before Michael Douglas manages to truculently convince them to stay and aid in the attempt to recapture Sato. The Osaka fuzz assigns Masahiro Masimoto (Takakura Ken), to watchdog them and make sure they behave.

Takakura Ken turns in a massively badass performance as Mas, managing to be a square straight arrow who plays by the rules without being an annoying, sanctimonious dickhead. The way he plays Mas is a constant balancing act: managing to register his horror and disgust at Michael Douglas' boorishness without ever being anything over than crisply polite. Take this exchange, before their formal introduction.

Michael Douglas: Just hope they got a nip in this building who speaks fuckin' English.
Mas (turning to Michael Douglas, introducing himself): Assistant Inspector Matsumoto Masahiro, Osaka Prefecture Police. (pause) And I do speak fuckin' English.

The way he delivers the line is what puts it over. His inflection is flat, with just the slightest bit of edge to the last part. And it proves a point that all cultures built on restraint (like Sir Ridley's native England as well as Japan) have known since the dawn of time: you can own the shit out of somebody much more effectively through cold, crisp politeness than you can by roaring, waving your fucking tentacles, and stuffing virgins into your mouth like an American.

In fairly short order, Michael Douglas starts finding clues that lead him to believe that there's some kind of counterfeiting conspiracy going on and, inevitably, running afoul of the Osaka cops, who consider him—not without reason—to be a borderline subhuman boor. He also encounters a blonde nightclub owner and possible madam, played by Kate Capshaw, perhaps the movie's most massive handicap.

I'm sure she's a lovely person—Steven Spielberg certainly thinks so—but man, every scene she's in in this grinds to a halt. Her line readings are really weird; there's always like a second's pause before she speaks, and her inflections are all stylized like she's trying so hard to be Barbra Stanwyck her head's about to explode. Oddly enough, Sharon Stone—herself no slouch in the shitty acting department—could have played this role in her sleep, even though she was a touch too young when Black Rain came out, and she also wasn't famous at that point because Paul Verhoeven had yet to work his Dutch fetishist's magic on her. There were any number of blondes (her being a blonde is semiotically important, this being Japan after all) who could have played this role and not sucked, but hey, such is life. Sometimes roles get miscast, not the end of the universe.

Especially not with the fairly intriguing plot about Yakuza intrigue and East-West culture clash unfolding. Michael Douglas clashes with Mas over what Mas thinks is Michael Douglas living down to his rep and stealing some money from a crime scene, only what Michael Douglas is actually doing is proving that it's counterfeit by the way it burns. He gets off the hook by demonstrating to Mas' boss Ohashi (who's awesome in this, and who led me one time when very drunk to willfully misspell his name as O'Hashi and make a tortured joke about the omnipresence of Irish police, even in the East; I guess you had to have been there).

Andy Garcia tries to reconcile with Mas, who was, after all, acting in good faith and on prior knowledge of Michael Douglas' corruption troubles. Michael Douglas is having none of this, so while Andy Garcia and Mas get shitfaced and hop up on stage to sing a Ray Charles song, Michael Douglas has a talk with Kate Capshaw about Sato's war with a Yakuza Godfather named Sugai.

Walking home drunk, Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia encounter a lone motorcyclist (motorcycles keep popping up all over this picture as a signifier of lawlessness, making Michael Douglas' ultimate takedown of Sato after a motorcycle chase an affirmation of the belief that in order to catch the criminal, a cop must be part criminal himself—see Thomas Harris' Red Dragon). Andy Garcia holds up his overcoat for the motorcyclist to try to catch (as he does in his first scene with Michael Douglas at the beginning of the movie, where he snatches it away at the last second). Because he's so drunk he was just singing Ray Charles songs at a Japanese nightclub, Andy Garcia's reflexes are slow and the guy catches it. Instead of giving it back, he lures Andy Garcia into a trap where Sato ultimately cuts his fucking head off with a wazikashi (another clever bit of symbolism, cutting off Michael Douglas' partner's head with the traditional “companion” sword to the katana).

Michael Douglas is devastated, and expresses this in the acceptable masculine fashion, staring off into middle distance on a rainy night. Somehow, Kate Capshaw randomly knows exactly where he's going to be (remember, this is before cell phones, he couldn't just text her saying meet me at the Bridge of Existential Contemplation), and takes him back to her place. Less implausibly—he is, after all, a cop—Mas finds Michael Douglas there and, under the pretense of it being a tradition, lets Michael Douglas have Andy Garcia's gun so he can go renegade and kick some ass.

Michael Douglas and Mas bond while staking out the ladyboi in the sequined dress. After a tensely filmed pursuit sequence, one of Sato's dudes leads Michael Douglas and Mas to a big intimidating-looking steel mill. (Why a steel mill? Because it looks cool, shut up). There they witness a meeting between Sato and Sugai where Sato lays out his terms for truce: he wants territory of his own, and to be recognized as an equal by the other Yakuza Godfathers. Sugai, in turn, insists that Sato atone for his American-style fuckery, but the summit is interrupted when Michael Douglas accidentally lets his presence be known (fuckin' Americans, can't take the fucktards anywhere) and Sato's dudes fan out for a round of “Let's mindfuck the gaijin,” the most popular game show in Japan.

At this point, we must acknowledge one of the coolest things in Black Rain—the voice casting of the Japanese actors. They all look perfect too, but holy mother of linguistic God these fucking guys sound cool speaking Japanese. They all sound like Tom Waits chainsmoking and reading the Hagakure into a mic with the sound mixer dropping out whatever treble is left. The rises and dips in volume are like music. Even if all they're saying is “Wow Michael Douglas is an asshole” or “Pass the salt,” it sure sounds cool, proving that not knowing what someone's saying is one of the most important elements in finding it interesting.

The hijinks at the steel mill end up pissing Ohashi off to the point where he deports Michael Douglas and suspends Mas. Michael Douglas manages to very cleverly make his way off the plane and—despite not being able to read the Osaka phone book—over to Mas' house, where he tries to convince Mas to storm the castle and kill everybody with him. Mas tries to explain concepts like honor and shame to Michael Douglas, but the movie's way too short for a task that massive, so Michael Douglas goes and tracks down Sugai with almost suicidal brazenness. Showing great character growth, Michael Douglas manages some humility in this scene—even if it is an act to achieve a goal, even thinking to play it that way took some actual humility—and convinces Sugai let him take out Sato, since as an outsider he's got nothing to do with Yakuza politics.

From there, it's down to the requisite action climax, which has several outstanding and wonderfully surprising elements. No, I'm not talking about the painfully predictable Matsumoto ex machina moment where Mas shows up and kills the guy right when he's about to kill Michael Douglas and quotes back a retarded, vague Michael Douglas line from earlier. I'm talking primarily about these two guys:

Al Leong

Back in the late 80s, if you wanted to be a cool movie, it was absolutely mandatory that you have Al Leong. Behold this partial CV: Big Trouble in Little China, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, They Live, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Death Warrant, Rapid Fire. In every single one of those fine, fine motion pictures except one, Al Leong showed up, was a badass of gargantuan proportions, flashed that magnificent facial hair and those terrific martial arts skills, and then he got his motherfuckin ass killed by the good guy. The only thing I've ever seen Al Leong in where he doesn't get his motherfuckin ass killed by the good guy is Bill & Ted, and that's because people don't get killed in Bill & Ted. Al was probably really out of sorts on that set: “Hey, when do I get killed?” “You don't get killed in this picture.” “Wait, what? There are movies where I don't get killed? [Ed. Note: Al even, stunningly, played the good guy in a little-seen 1989 movie called Cage.] Fuck, call my agent, there's been a mistake.”

But there's more than just Al Leong. Oh yes. Behold:

Professor Toru Tanaka

The Professor was one of a very select few—maybe the only non-extra—to ever be killed by both Chuck Norris and Arnold. While the Professor's cinematic career was less consistently glorious than Al Leong's (there was surprisingly little overlap between their careers, considering that it seemed like they were both in every action movie in the 80s; their only collaborations other than Black Rain were episodes of The A-Team and The Fall Guy, two big favorites of my youth, as well as fucktard scripture The Last Action Hero, and the hideously stupid and boring Jeff Speakman vehicle The Perfect Weapon) you always knew that even if the movie sucked, the Professor's scene(s) could be relied on for a soupcon of awesomeness. Getting his start as a wrestling “heel” (read: bad guy), the Professor went on to be the big guy in every shitass action movie where the hero gulps and goes “oh fuck I'm gonna have a job beating this guy.” Black Rain didn't see the full realization of the Professor's ass-kicking potential (he saved his best for Arnold and Chuck), but make no mistake: Black Rain fucking has Al Leong and the fucking Professor. In the same movie. That's a fistful of style points right there.


As is often the case in the collective Leong/Tanaka oeuvre, they are both killed quickly and messily, and the focus remains on Michael Douglas pursuing Sato, who has, without his creepy stare wavering from Sugai's face for one second, cut off his own pinkie in the infamous Yakuza tradition (I always wondered, if some Yakuza guy starts shit with you, and you see he's short a few fingers, you have to figure he's a total fuckup, right? Not that you'd want to fight even a fuckup Yakuza, but still). Michael Douglas, in the motorcycle chase mentioned earlier, tears ass after Sato through the Japanese countryside.

Because it wasn't enough for the climax to have the subtle signifier of the motorcycle representing the necessity of the cop embracing the outlaw within, the two of them roll around in the mud beating the shit out of each other, making what's usually a metaphor literal. In a sign of personal growth, once Michael Douglas wins, Sato gives him this look like, “Yeah, go ahead motherfucker, impale me on that sharp piece of wood” and Michael Douglas says, “Nuh uh, bitch, me and Mas are going to arrest you.”

The scene when Michael Douglas and Mas perp-walk Sato into Osaka PD headquarters is kind of awesome, because all the Japanese guys in suits' jaws hit the floor to see these two dirty-ass motherfuckers toss the most wanted psycho in the country around like “And what, bitch?” Even Ohashi is like “Hey . . . procedure shmocedure, nice job boys.” And then there's the sentimental ending and that shockingly good Gregg Allman song (don't fuckin look at me, I'm just as surprised as you are).

Ultimately, Black Rain would be just another 80s cop movie, albeit a stylishly filmed one, but for two things. Sure, there's a lot that's cool in this movie: the camerawork, the sound, the murderer's row of awesome character actors (Luis Guzman and John Spencer feature in the NYC bits), all of which outweigh Kate Capshaw's terrible performance and all the cop movie cliches. But the two things that really put Black Rain over the top are Takakura Ken as Mas (who we've already covered), and even more than that, Yusaku Matsuda as Sato. And yes, he's cool enough to have his own action figure.

Sato is, quite simply, number two behind Hans Gruber in the 80s villain pantheon. Yes. He's that fucking good. Matsuda doesn't do a whole lot as Sato, but he doesn't have to. All he has is that oddly terrifying haircut, that slightly shitty posture that makes him look even crazier, and those EYES. There is no ambiguity whatsoever when Sato is pissed at you. His eyes get really big. His lip snarls. Then you're basically fucking dead.

What's scariest about Sato is that he's so insecure. He has a child's need to be the center of attention, and a grown-ass man's ability to kill everything in sight if he doesn't get it. He desperately wants the recognition of the other Yakuza, but is unsure enough that they'll grant it that he just decides to kill all of them. Motherfucker is dangerous, man.

Tragically, Matsuda died of cancer less than two months after Black Rain's release, which would have surely made him an international star. His legacy lives on, as the inspiration for the protagonist in the game Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny, and the model for the protagonist of anime series Cowboy Bebop.

And so there you have it. Black Rain. Look past the Douglas. See the awesome.

DON'T SWALLOW, BILL MURRAY

Happy 60th birthday to one of our finest ever movie stars.