THE CRAZY BOMB

Mel Gibson's shenanigans the past few years make me feel like Emilio Estevez in Repo Man, in the scene where the Circle Jerks are fuckin' around as the lounge act and Emilio Estevez says “I can't believe I used to like these guys.” So it is with Mel. Starting roughly with the Jesus picture and continuing at a breakneck pace through “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” and now the soon-to-be-immortal “if you get raped by a pack of niggers, it will be your fault,” (listen at RadarOnline) Mel Gibson is doing his best to piss on his once-mighty legacy as a movie star.

But let's look at that legacy again. I'm not talking about some lame-ass revisionist history shit, pretending that we never liked Mel, because that's bullshit, we all liked Mel. Mel was Mad Max, for shit's stake. Martin Riggs. William “they cannae teck aer FREEEEEEDOM!” Wallace (to differentiate from the historical William Wallace, whose accent I hope wasn't as fake). And, because this wouldn't be Movies by Bowes™ without my passionate advocacy of something weird, Mel was Payback (“Would Payback back down?” --Homer Simpson) and Payback is one of the most underrated THIS IS HOW THINGS ARE DONE IN THE WORLD OF MEN pictures like ever. No, we're not going to pretend we never liked Mel. What we are going to do is figure out whether we should have seen this bullshit coming.

Much like I once determined with the latest cutting-edge metrics which movies in the James Bond canon existed and which ones didn't, today's task is going picture by picture through Mel's career and figuring out how much real crazy made its way into the performance/direction. Then, we will determine whether that performance/direction was a true harbinger of Mel going apeshit. And then we're going to go audition for a web series and go see an awesome play about vampires. Oh, wait, that's just me. Well, you'll figure something out.


Mad Max (1979)

Real Crazy quotient: It's right there in the title. A bunch of leather queens who drive really fast kill Mel's wife and kid and Mel goes so fucking crazy chasing them down with his amazing muscle car that they had to retitle the movie after how crazy he was. This was largely acting—and Mel always was a pretty good actor, if a bit idiosyncratic—but some real crazy seeps through, like in a lot of those climactic bits, you see this brief glint in Mel's eyes as he's running them down with his car where you're like, “Wow, Mel was young back then, but he was still crazy, fo sho.”

Harbinger of apeshit: Kind of; it's more like once you already knew he was going to go apeshit, you go back and watch the first Mad Max and it's like “yeah, makes sense.”


Gallipoli (1981)

Real Crazy quotient: Not that high. Gallipoli is a fucking amazing movie, an early notch in director Peter Weir's “I make pictures you never even thought about making until I made them and then you were like 'oh yeah . . .'” belt. Mel is a down-on-his-luck dude in Western Australia who joins the British army with his buddy in World War I, gets cynical and then dead (one assumes, even though the final freeze frame is of the other guy). What's crazy about this movie is how much it makes you cry. Holy shit.

Harbinger of apeshit: No.


Mad Max 2, aka The Road Warrior (1981)

Real Crazy quotient: Through the motherfucking roof. Though he doesn't get as much chance to emote as he does in the first one, Mel bleeds crazy out his pores in this fucking movie. One perspective would be to say he's a good actor, so fully embodying a wild-eyed loner in the post-Peak Oil desert, but another would be, when my dad took me to see this in the theater (I'm relying on his account, I was three), I took one look at Mel and said “Dad, that man is crazy.” My dad said, “Well, he's acting. His character is named Mad Max.” And I said, “That's not acting. That man is crazy.” So yeah.

Harbinger of apeshit: No, of course not, Mel running around the desert getting tortured by leather queens isn't a sign of his bizarre Catholic masochism and homophobia. No way. Fuck outta here.


The Year of Living Dangerously (1984)

Real Crazy quotient: Nil. Here's Peter Weir fucking up my whole thesis again by making another good movie where Mel is a normal guy. At least he managed to make Master & Commander before my dad (a huge Aubrey/Maturin fan) died so we could have an urgent conversation about how awesome it was.

Harbinger of apeshit: Subtle, but Mel's acting style is twitchy enough that you're like, “homeboy's either on a whole lotta fuckin coke or he's intrinsically a little nuts.”


The Bounty (1984)

Real Crazy quotient: Hard to say. Fletcher Christian wasn't crazy, he was just kind of a shithead. His descendants on Pitcairn Island sure turned out crazy, though: after devolving into an inbred culture of rapist pedophiles, the whole male population of the island got thrown in jail a couple years ago. I say we blame Mel Gibson. Why not? Kick 'em when they're down.

Harbinger of apeshit: In reality? No. For the sake of an unmotivated, vituperative attack? Sure.


Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Real Crazy quotient: Just because Tina Turner and everybody else in the movie was crazier than he was in this doesn't mean Mel still wasn't heretofore theoretical levels of crazy. The movie itself will drive the audience insane; anyone who's seen Thunderdome too many times has found him/herself abruptly blurting out “Two men enter . . . one man leave” every time a head-to-head competition of any sort is underway. But just because he's in good company doesn't mean Mel's not fuckin cuckoo for cocoa puffs.

Harbinger of apeshit: Again, his character is named Mad Max, and Mel was so good that if it wasn't for the next movie on this list, he would have been Mark Hamill-welded to this character.


Lethal Weapon (1987)

Real Crazy quotient: Hooooooooo boy. A full-length post on the Lethal Weapon series is forthcoming at some point, so I'll let one scene suffice. Early on, Mel, an undercover narc, is negotiating the purchase of a fair amount of cocaine. The dudes tell him it's a hundred. Mel, with childlike innocence, gets out his wallet and starts counting out twenties, tens, and fives, before the main dude says “Forget it, you dumb shit! One hundred thousand. One hundred thousand dollars.” Mel giggles and reveals that he's a cop, leading the one guy to say “That badge ain't real. You ain't real.” One of the other guys chimes in, “You sure are one crazy son of a bitch.” And Mel goes: “Crazy? You wanna see crazy?” and he goes into this out-of-fuckin-nowhere Three Stooges thing, slapping the guys in the face as he pulls his heat, saying, “That's a real badge, I'm a real cop, and this is a real fuckin' gun.” Badass? Unquestionably. Does Martin Riggs' dick drag the ground? Absolutely. Is he crazier than a shithouse rat? Dude, the shithouse rat looks sane next to Mel.

Harbinger of apeshit: This is where Mel really ran the freak flag up the pole for the first time. In the Mad Max series, the movies themselves were so weird (they were, after all, made on Australia, and yes, I said on Australia, because Australia is another planet) that Mel could plausibly have been a product of his environment. Not here. They specifically contrast him with Danny Glover's upwardly mobile middle class family so that he looks even crazier, but when you're in a movie with Gary Busey and you're still the craziest motherfucker in the movie . . .


Tequila Sunrise (1988)

Real Crazy quotient: Extremely low, making this a very good performance by Mel. The movie is kinda meh—a product of Robert Towne's Hiroshima-esque ego detonation that convinced him he could direct—but Mel, Kurt Russell, and Michelle Pfeiffer are all good in it.

Harbinger of apeshit: Nope.


Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

Real Crazy quotient: Mel at first seems to have chilled out a little bit (he's still charging into danger with guns blazing, but more rationally) but when the South African “we heff deeplomateec immyooooneteh, you gutdem keffirs” consulate/drug smuggling operation decides to dispose of the angelic Patsy Kensit, with whom Mel has had universe-shattering sex and fallen in love, Mel gets fucking scary. He pulls down the fucking stilt house with his fucking pickup truck, all the while shouting all kinds of incoherent grunting and shit.

Harbinger of apeshit: Mel pulling down the stilt house with his pickup truck is the perfect metaphor for what he did to his career by publicly discussing the Jewish question.

(Ed. note: 3 and 4 will not be discussed; as Riggs got cuddly and caricatured, no real crazy was on display)


Air America (1990)

Real Crazy quotient: Mel Gibson. Robert Downey Jr. No holds barred duel to the death. Weapons? Sheer insanity in the Gibson corner. Drug-fueled insanity in the Downey corner. Only one will make it out victorious. It's the Crazy Cup! The movie sucks, but it's fun watching Mel and Downey interact, because they're both so clearly out of their fucking minds.

Harbinger of apeshit: Mel plays a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam war who's buying black-market guns to sell at a profit. When that seems comparatively sane, you are fucking not.


Hamlet (1990)

Real Crazy quotient: High. The Mel-ancholy Dane is one caffeinated prince. This is actually one of the best roles to determine how batzo Mel is, because contrast him with Olivier and you see how barely-in-control Mel is in this. He's still pretty fucking good, and this is one of the better movie Hamlets (beats the hell out of Kenneth Branagh's unexpurgated fapfest)

Harbinger of apeshit: This isn't a harbinger, this is apeshit.


Forever Young (1992)

Real Crazy quotient: Mel did this movie. The prosecution rests.

Harbinger of apeshit: Could have been his agent's fault.


The Man Without a Face (1993)

Real Crazy quotient: Mel directed and played a disfigured man who shuns the world at large. The first glaring sign that Mel was struggling with being famous, because come the fuck on, that's barely even a fucking metaphor.

Harbinger of apeshit: Uh huh. It makes perfect sense in retrospect thinking about this movie, itself notable for not being violent at all, that in ten years, its director/star would direct a movie about Jesus Christ that was so violent it made Quentin Tarantino cry for his mommy.


Maverick (1994)

Real Crazy quotient: Mel must have been on his meds.

Harbinger of apeshit: Nope.


Braveheart (1995)

Real Crazy quotient: Kinda hard to tell, because Mel's playing a guy in 13th century Scotland, and that's kind of a double helix of crazy. The High Middle Ages are so named because everybody acted so goofy, historians were forced to conclude that they were on drugs, and Scottish people are famously fookin' daft. The movie is, however, three hours long, brutally violent, and features Mel and retinue mooning the English, risking anal penetration by a flaming arrow. That's either crazy or stupid, hard to say which.

Harbinger of apeshit: Kind of. Mel was still capable of seeming mainstream crazy at this point, as evidenced by the Oscars.


Ransom (1996)

Real Crazy quotient: Somewhere, Ayn Rand is fingering herself—Mel plays a billionaire who, when his kid is kidnapped, issues an ultimatum to the kidnappers. Anytime Ayn Rand is invoked, we are in the presence of The Crazy (and the fact that Mel proved that he'd be great as Hank Rearden in a movie of Atlas Shrugged just digs his hole even further).

Harbinger of apeshit: Well . . . apeshit is perhaps the wrong term. Mel is very controlled in this, but that just makes him seem all the crazier, with the bizarre way he behaves.


Conspiracy Theory (1997)

Real Crazy quotient: This movie has Dubai skyscraper-sized levels of irony. Here Mel (as Mel) pretends to be sane to play a “crazy” character (lines his apartment in tinfoil and compulsively buys copies of The Catcher in the Rye) who actually is sane but was driven crazy by evil white guys in suits, which is really weird because in real life Mel politically supports evil white guys in suits, but could be a metaphor for Mel blaming the movie business for driving him nuts by forcing him to accept large sums of money to appear in movies that lots of people like. Or he could have just been paying the grocery bill for his ninety million kids.

Harbinger of apeshit: It would take years and cost millions of lives to untangle the knot of irony to come to any definitive conclusion, and it's really not a good enough movie to be worth studying to that degree.


Payback (1999)

Real Crazy quotient: High, but in the service of awesome. Mel plays Richard “Donald E. Westlake” Stark's antihero Parker (here renamed Porter), who is shot in the back, ripped off, and left for dead by his girl and his best friend, who are fucking. Mel gets himself patched up and goes about getting his money back. Everyone thinks he wants all the money, but he just wants his share. Then everybody's like “why are you brutally killing the entire underworld of this city to get that tiny an amount of money back.” And Mel is like BECAUSE THAT IS THE WAY OF MEN, YOU SWINE, HONOR MEANS SOMETHING. Mel gets the living shit beaten out of him, as per custom, but here it's even worse than usual. Still, this movie fucking rules, and although Mel is crazy, it's not a scary crazy, it's a HEED MY ROAR FOR I AM MAN crazy.

Harbinger of apeshit: And yet, the brutal masochism on display as Mel is shot and beaten practically beyond recognition is a glaring sign that our hero has problems.


The Million Dollar Hotel (2000)

Real Crazy quotient: Another one where signing the contract is proof of insanity.

Harbinger of apeshit: As a domino in a sequence, yes. Payback led to this, and this led to . . .


The Patriot (2000)

Real Crazy quotient: Toned down from reality, believe it or not. The guy Mel's character is based on would ambush British soldiers and torture them to death. The part where Mel goes crazy is kind of rote at this point. It doesn't feel organic at all, leaving students of Mel Gibson Apeshit Syndrome to conclude that Mel was going through a sane period and had to force it for the movie. Or Robert Rodat's script really could have been that bad (Robert Rodat was trying to win a bet that he couldn't write a script even worse than Saving Private Ryan; he won).

Harbinger of apeshit: Still, as phoned-in as Mel's performance was, he oozes crazy. They should have made a movie about the real guy, Mel would have fit perfectly in that part.


Signs (2002)

Real Crazy quotient: Not applicable. M. Night's script is so fucking terrible, and he is so hideously awful at directing actors (his setups are pretty cool, and his editing would be too if he had anything that wasn't fucking retarded to cut to in his shitshow screenplays) that it is impossible to gauge anything about Mel as an actor or a person from this role, where he keeps the same grimly constipated expression on his face for the whole eight hours. (Checks imdb) HOLY FUCK THIS MOVIE WAS ONLY AN HOUR FORTY FIVE? Jesus Christ.


The Passion of the Christ (2004)

Oh, hey! That segue wrote itself. Ha ha ha . . . oh, I amuse myself.

Real Crazy quotient: Oh, where to begin? Making a movie about Jesus isn't that bad an idea, actually. He's pretty famous. And a lot of what He actually did and said has been garbled over the years, so even though I say irreverent things about Him a fair bit, I'm still being polite and capitalizing the H and I totally went to see this in the theater. Writing all the dialogue in Aramaic and Latin? Ballsy . . . nuts, but ballsy. But making a two-and-a-quarter hour movie where you torture the living shit out of the guy who you (literally) worship? A little crazy. And Mel making a point of playing the hand that hammered the nails through JC's hands and feet? That's really fucking weird. Yes, I'm willing to concede that I don't understand Catholics, but the Catholics I know drink a lot and get guilty about having sex with girls, which though neurotic still makes sense. Mel's kinda Catholic is a different brand of Communion wafer. Oh, yeah, and the Jews don't really look too good in this picture. Seriously, their prosthetic noses make them look like fucking Snuffleupagus, and they practically pop boners when Jeez gets tortured. Still, that shot where God sheds one tear and we follow the raindrop down to earth and that smash cut to the storm beginning is pretty fucking sweet.

Harbinger of apeshit: This is the dawn of Mel's Public Apeshit epoch. You can go on about all the weird religious shit and the Jew-bashing all you want, the craziest thing about this movie was that Mel spent something like thirty million of his own bucks to make it. Sure, he made half a billion back, so that's in the crazy like a fox column but holy shit. Spending thirty million bucks on a movie in Aramaic where the most popular religious guy in the world gets his fucking ass kicked for over two hours? Fuck, Mel.


Apocalypto (2006)

Real Crazy quotient: Uhh . . . a movie about the Maya (in Maya) where the hero is being chased by a bunch of half-naked people who want to cut his heart out? And it's a metaphor for how Western society is eating itself from within? Sure, let's be understated and call it crazy. Jaguar Paw is fucking badass though.

Harbinger of apeshit: Oh, that bird's still singin', and it's still in key, my friends.


After this research, I think it's safe to conclude that Mel's always been a little nuts. And he probably always was this nuts; remember, at the height of his fame, he was known as being one of the more private movie stars in the biz. A lot of times, what seems like a movie star going nuts is a case of a movie star who was already nuts changing management or something. Look at Tom Cruise. He didn't start jumping on couches until his PR rep said fuck it because she didn't want to be pressured into being a Scientologist anymore. So who knows what the deal with Mel is. It's just a shame that the crazy is all he'll be remembered for in the future. (EDIT 7/12/10: And it just keeps getting better/worse . . .)

WELL, MY NAME IS JIM, BUT MOST PEOPLE CALL ME . . . JIM

I've had Westerns on the brain lately. It should come as no surprise to anyone who frequents this small, bombastic, foul-mouthed corner of the Interwebs that my favorite Westerns are ones that either fuck with the myths or point, giggle, and make fart noises in the direction of those myths. This is partly because one of the cornerstones in the foundation of my theory that evil white guys in suits are going to kill us all comes from the genocide of the Native Americans: evil white guys in suits did kill them all. But it's also partly because anyone who takes him/herself too seriously is gonna get a stern fucking-with from yours truly, and holy shit do people in Westerns take themselves too seriously. This notion that white people needed to own everything from Massachussetts to California because God willed it, bitch please. God's been fucking slipping for a while now; that whole business about coming down to earth in the person of a hippie reform rabbi and trolling the Italians was ill-considered, and it's all been downhill from there.

Speaking of Italians, until Sergio Leone figured out that throwing meticulous wide-screen compositions, Ennio Morricone scores, Clint Eastwood, and Claudia Cardinale into a picture was a recipe for awesome au jus, I wouldn't have really cared about Westerns apart from humming “Deutschland Uber Alles” whenever John Wayne squinted into the camera. Sergio was the reason I started watching John Ford movies and reluctantly admitting they were the tits. But the movie that got me watching retarded run-of-the-mill Westerns was Blazing Saddles.

Blazing Saddles has been one of my favorite movies for just about my entire life. When I was a kid, I liked all the farting and stuff, but I reached a point where I thought watching a whole bunch of Westerns would help me get a few of the subtler jokes. This pretty much led to me wasting a lot of fucking time watching shitty Westerns, and forming the opinion that Blazing Saddles is the single greatest meta-Western of all time.

At his peak, Mel Brooks had the advantage of perfect timing: he was a seasoned comedy-writing veteran, who had the benefit of beginning his career as a movie director at a time when all the old restrictions were disappearing. He also had an impressive knowledge of the history of cinema, and a deft feel for not only written language but cinematic language as well (in this regard, his one equal as a director of movie comedies is Woody Allen).

Before he—ironically, given the inspiration of this post—started taking himself too seriously and making self-indulgent mistakes like casting himself as the lead in High Anxiety, thinking anyone would give a shit about Silent Movie, and getting himself confused with Ernst Lubitsch with the remake of To Be Or Not To Be, Mel Brooks directed three of the finest screen comedies ever: The Producers (the one with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, not the awkwardly filmed one with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane), Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein (which will the subject of its own post sometime).

The Producers certainly Goes There in terms of content (though diluted a bit now, I remember very fondly seeing “Springtime For Hitler” for the first time and going, “Wow, Mel Brooks has fucking balls”) and Young Frankenstein has about a hundred of the funniest one-liners and sight gags ever, but Blazing Saddles is fucking insane. Blazing Saddles is what happens when you take your friend with Asperger's, give him a five-strip of industrial-strength acid, and put him in a Western double-feature with a theater full of Borscht Belt comedians.

Blazing Saddles opens with the evil white guys' field grunts bossing around a bunch of railroad workers (“The way you was lolly-gaggin ya'd think it was a hundred and twenty degrees . . . cain't be much more than a hundred and fourteen! HAHAHAHA!”) before suggesting to the black railroad workers that they could lift morale if they sang a “good ol' nigger work song.”

This is a reminder, if one is required, that this movie was made in 1974, before political correctness. Even by 1974, though, it was a rare picture that came right out and saturation n-bombed as much as Blazing Saddles does, let alone as hilariously.

Anyway, the black railroad workers turn to each other, murmuring “a nigger work song . . .?” before Cleavon Little steps to the front and, hat over heart (and barely keeping a straight face) starts singing “I Get a Kick Out of You” by Cole Porter. The bosses' dudes get pissed, and start teaching the railroad workers a “real” song (“Camptown Races”) before Slim Pickens shows up and empties a couple warning shots of awesome—“What in the wide wide world o' sports is a-goin' on here? I hired you people to try to get a little track laid, not jump around like a bunch of Kansas City faggots!”—before instructing his dudes to check reports that there's some quicksand up ahead of where they're trying to put the railroad, and to not waste horses but rather “send over a coupla niggers.” Cleavon Little and his buddy are selected as the requested advance team, and sure enough there's a big thing of quicksand ahead. Slim Pickens reluctantly saves Cleavon Little and his associate, but not before rescuing the expensive piece of equipment they rode in on. Cleavon Little, not one to take such insults lightly, smacks Slim Pickens over the head with a shovel.

It is thus that villain (Evil? Check. White guy? Check. Suit? Check) Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) decides that the railroad is going to have to go through idyllic Western everytown Rock Ridge, where everyone's name is Johnson, and where Dmitri Tiomkinesque High Noon-ass music emanates from the very air. The awesome thing about Hedley Lamarr (aside from his name) is that he's too much of a pussy to just declare eminent domain and gank the town. He hatches a scheme, so nefarious, so deliciously wicked, so sensuously evil that he is clearly a movie villain (the real-life evil white guys just said “fuck you” and eminent domained that shit): he will convince the people of Rock Ridge to voluntarily vacate the land so he can buy it cheap. That's not the best part, though. The way he's gonna do this is by appointing Cleavon Little as sheriff.

Cleavon Little, happy to not be hung by the neck until dead for banjaxing Slim Pickens, approaches his new job in style—Gucci saddlebags, Count Basie himself appearing in a cameo to conduct his theme music—only to find that the meek, mild-mannered white townfolk don't like African Americans. OH NOES! He rides into town, in total silence. The fanfare the town had prepared for their new sheriff, abandoned as they gape at Cleavon Little in shock. As he delivers his prepared speech (“Excuse me while I whip this out.” [women scream in terror; he produces a sheet of paper, everyone sighs, kinda disappointed]) they recover and start pointing guns at him, leaving Cleavon Little to improvise some vaudeville minstrel act to distract everyone.

An ally soon presents himself in the form of Gene Wilder (Mel Brooks deserves to be hailed as a god for his selection of a black guy and a Jew as the heroes of his Western, if nothing else; bravo, sir, bra-fucking-vo!), a drunk tank inmate. He turns out to be legendary gunslinger The Waco Kid, and “must have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille.” (Ed. Note: Cecil B. DeMille is still regarded by purists as the real record holder, as Roland Emmerich's modern-day record was revealed to have been aided by performance enhancing drugs) The Waco Kid turned to drink after being challenged to a gunfight by a little kid. Realizing the folly of his ways, he laid his guns down and walked away. But . . . “Little bastard shot me in the ass!” And from there it was drink.

Cleavon Little tells Gene Wilder about how he came to be out West in a story that manages to make an incredibly profound statement about the history of the American West in the form of a Jewish joke: as his family's wagon train was set upon by Indians, they were spared by Yiddish-speaking Indian chief Mel Brooks (“Shvartzes! Tsayt ist meshuggeh . . .”) who bids them safe passage. Sure it's a funny joke, but like George Bernard Shaw said, when a thing is funny, look for the truth. The Indians kind of were the Jews of North America. The genius here, though, is that rather than getting all somber about it, Mel Brooks goes, “fuck it, what happened to us both was so awful, let's have a laugh.” And that makes the point even better.

After bonding over their pasts, Cleavon Little cleans Gene Wilder up and appoints him to the role of deputy (historical accuracy note: blurry line between law enforcement and criminal in Old West) and soon the two are smoking joints that make Gene Wilder's voice helium squeaky, in what may very well be the best throwaway weed smoking joke in the history of cinema.

Cleavon Little manages to escape being killed by the townspeople, although they still call him the n-word. This leaves Hedley Lamarr to come up with a new, even more nefarious plan: foil Cleavon Little with a white chick. Not just any white chick . . . a German white chick. Madeleine Kahn, as cabaret star Lilli von Shtup.

Yeah, sure that combination of actor and character is fuckup-proof, but holy living shit Madeleine Kahn is hilarious with her Elmer Fudd-in-drag-doing-Dietrich accent. Hedley Lamarr preps her to make sure she's ready to seduce and destroy Cleavon Little, and even though Gene Wilder warns Cleavon Little it could be a trap, he goes backstage into the spider's web anyway. And fucks her brains out. And the next morning, has her wrapped around his finger, helplessly enthralled with his forbidden, exotic sexuality.

At wit's end, Hedley Lamarr demands that Slim Pickens think of something. (This in itself is an indicator of how dire the situation must have been for Hedley . . . asking Slim Pickens to think?) After a round of bean-induced farting—the Odessa steps sequence of fart humor—Slim Pickens' retard right-hand man, the one who tried to teach Cleavon Little how to sing Camptown Races in the beginning, comes up with the idea of sending in monosyllabic strongman Mongo (former football player and future Webster dad Alex Karras). Slim Pickens is in awe of the cruelty of this notion, and sends in Mongo.

Mongo rides into town, scares the fucking shit out of everybody (“Mongo! Santa Maria!”) and, in one of the greatest “Oh shit that is just wrong and I should not be laughing hahahahahahahahahahaha” moments in cinema, knocks a horse unconscious with one punch just because. Cleavon Little has to think quickly, and again resorts to a vaudeville minstrel bit (Mel Brooks knows how to hoist fucked-up traditions on their own petard like nobody's business), blowing Mongo up with a candygram bomb (“The bitch was inventin' the candygram . . . I probably won't even get credit for it . . .”)

Surprisingly, Cleavon Little getting the better of Mongo makes Mongo a fiercely devoted ally, and Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder are able to get some broad strokes of Hedley Lamarr's plan out of Mongo, though details are in short supply, because “Mongo only pawn in game of life.” (historical accuracy note: evil white guys in suits employing and willing to sacrifice physically gifted proletarians to carry out their dastardly will)

After a bit of intelligence gathering by the sheriff's department, it transpires that Hedley Lamarr is raising an army of “rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperadoes, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, half-wits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers, and Methodists” to tear Rock Ridge a new asshole. The townspeople have by now reluctantly accepted Cleavon Little as a guy who gets things done, but when he comes up with a plan to construct a copy of Rock Ridge to mislead the bad guys—and once all the bad guys are in the fake town, blowing them to hell with dynamite—there's a bit of resistance. Because, part of the plan is that Cleavon Little wants to bring all his old buddies from the railroad to help with the construction. Cleavon Little insists “You'd do it for Randolph Scott.” This point is, of course, uncontestable. Eventually, Olsen Johnson (David “The Big Lebowski” Huddleston) offers a compromise with one of my favorite lines of all time:

“We'll give some land to the niggers and the chinks . . . but we don't want the Irish!”

Cleavon Little refuses to budge, and Huddleston smiles and says “Fuck it, they can stay!” So, having racially harmonized, everyone bands together as one to hornswoggle the baddies. The plan goes pretty well—one anachronistic gag involving a toll booth leads to Slim Pickens' classic “Somebody's gonna have to go back and get a shitload of dimes!”—until the bad guys figure out that the fake Rock Ridge is fake. At this point all hell breaks loose, and a massive fight ensues.

So massive, in fact, that it breaks the fourth wall. This is why Blazing Saddles is holy to me. Mel Brooks takes the trope of the big showdown at the end of the Western and takes it to the most duckfuckingly insane extreme ever. The scruffy Western brawlers accidentally crash through a flimsy wall into the set of a musical being directed by a fabulous (and fabulous) Dom DeLuise. When he gets all up in Slim Pickens' grill about what the fuck he's doing on a closed set, Slim Pickens puts the little poof in his place—“Piss on you, I'm workin' for Mel Brooks!”—and then puts his lights out. The all-male cast is not pleased:

“He hit Buddy! Get him, girls!”

And the fight just gets bigger. It spills into the commissary, right after an actor made up in Hitler says “They lose me right afta the bunka scene” in Noo Yawk-ese. Eventually, Hedley Lamarr runs across the street from the Warner Bros lot and hails a cab, instructing it to “get me off this picture.”

The ultimate showdown between Cleavon Little and Hedley Lamarr takes place at the premiere of Blazing Saddles at Grauman's Chinese (of course), and Cleavon Little shoots Hedley Lamarr in the balls, leaving him time to make one more joke about Hedy Lamarr before expiring.

Back in Rock Ridge (the transition makes perfect sense, somehow), the townspeople are begging Cleavon Little to stay, but he, like all good Western heroes, has to ride off into the sunset. He asks Gene Wilder if he'll ride off into the sunset with him. And so they do. Out to where their limo is waiting for them, and they get off their horses, into the limo, and ride off.

Critics, at the time of Blazing Saddles' release, sniffed that it was vulgar, structurally scattershot, messy, and generally proved themselves to be sticks in the mud. The movie is, indisputably, out of its motherfucking mind, and did inspire a lot of vulgar comedies that weren't as smart or as good, but Blazing Saddles is an unqualified masterpiece, and an essay on the Western every bit as brilliant as Godard's on the gangster picture in Breathless, and Blazing Saddles has a lot more dick and fart jokes than Breathless. That's another thing. For fuck's sake Blazing Saddles invented the fart joke. The best part about fart jokes is that they make uptight film faggots make the “who farted?” face, and you, as a less uptight film faggot, can point out the irony that a fart joke produces, in them, the same result as a fart. And then you can laugh, because farting is funny.

It is a little sad that Mel Brooks later fell off the rails, but before he did he made Young Frankenstein, which holy fucking shit is Young Frankenstein fucking funny. More on that at a later date, but it, Blazing Saddles, and The Producers make up for all the misfires that followed. And then there's Spaceballs, and Spaceballs is special. So that's four of the funniest pictures ever made, and some really funny shit in some of the less perfect ones. Mel Brooks did okay for himself, but Blazing Saddles is the apex. Never before have balls, intellect, a mastery of cinema history and technique, and The Funny met, given each other the finger, rode around on horses, told each other Jewish jokes, and faded into the night quite like they did there.

WHY ARE THINGS SO HEAVY IN THE FUTURE? IS THERE A PROBLEM WITH THE EARTH'S GRAVITATIONAL PULL?

It's the 4th of July! Woo-hoo! America, FUCK YEAH!!!

How to celebrate the good ol' Etats Unis? A 10,000 word post on Roland Emmerich's Independence Day, complete with multiple digressions linking Emmerich's German-ness with Leni Riefenstahl's, complete with sub-digressions about Miroslav Klose's heroic two-goal performance against Paraguay? Nah. That kind of thing—even to someone as long-winded as me—is better written about than actually written.

We are, however, obligated to deconstruct the very idea of America through the prism of cinema, since it is the 4th of July, and there is a whole lot of insight into America to be gained through its movies. One thing you notice after watching a couple dozen (or hundred, or thousand) American movies is our (neurotic?) need to rewrite the past. Whether this is because, quantitatively, we don't have much of one, or qualitatively that what we have had has involved a whole lot of blowing shit up and killing brown people for specious moral reasons, is up for debate. What is certain is that we sure do it a lot, in part because we have, as yet, not invented a time machine with which to go back and actually change the inconvenient parts of the past. Which brings us to Back to the Future (momentarily, before that leads to a cynical digression, sorry about the ADD), released 25 years ago today.

Robert Zemeckis is one of the vanguards of the post-Spielberg cinematic look back to simpler structures and themes, and more complex special effects. In conceiving Back to the Future, his intent, at least in part, was to play with the idea of the 1950s as a more innocent time than the present, which has been a meme since the 60s, when the kids all started growing their hair long and smoking marijuana cigarettes. Clearly, before all the children went insane, they must have been sane. Right? American Graffiti was one of the first pictures to posit this; American Graffiti is a terrible movie but appealed to a middle-brow conservative sensibility that looked at long hair, drugs, and every Beatles album from Rubber Soul onward as a sign that the world was coming to an end. From there forth, an awful lot of movies romanticizing the 50s came along, and people went to see them and sighed about the good old days.

We must clear the air here. The “good old days” is a trick of memory. There are no good old days. The good old days sucked. People have been people since they hunted mastodons and painted on caves. Our vocabularies might be bigger (debatable, from some of the subway conversations I've overheard since my fucking iPod died) and we may have cooler gadgets, (again, debatable . . . stupid excessively mortal iPods), but we're still people. Old people always think young people are the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and young people always think old people are boring, despotic retards. Thus has it ever been, thus it ever shall be. There was never any magical epoch when it was else. Nostalgia is a lie.

What makes Back to the Future so cool (among other things) is that it plays with nostalgia but has enough perspective to equivocate. The 50s are portrayed as kind of cool, but imperfect (which I'm sure was the case if you were a middle-class white teenager in California), and the 80s are laid bare as kind of fucking ridiculous but all in all not that bad (a little more charitable than my first-hand assessment, but Zemeckis is less cerebral and cranky than me). And its verdict on teenagers is that they've always been impetuous, horny shitheads, which is spot on.

The two sequels deal, respectively, with the future and the Old West, two other important time periods for those who would take America's pulse. Between the 50s, the future, and the Old West, you have the trinity of Americans trying to feel better about themselves. While only the fantasia of the Western and the outright lie of 50's nostalgia are provable bullshit, people like Robert Heinlein imagined a future where can-do capitalists, benevolent corporations, and an omnipotent military would extend manifest destiny not just to North America but to the universe (which given our dearth of people who actually know how to make things and a military that could really use a nap, seems unlikely).

Bob Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale play with these ideas too. While their satire on futurism is weakened by one lame “the Japanese are buying our country” joke that manages to avoid total lameness by not being that mean-spirited, they make a couple funny observations about bullies in the future being artificially enhanced, sodas costing $100, the utter absurdity of being nostalgic about the 80s (less ridiculous in the movie than it is in real life—nice work, Bobs), and the goddamn clock tower STILL not being fixed. The crowning achievement is in the third movie, though, where they take on the most mythologized period in American history and points out that the epic characters of the myths were really a bunch of illiterate, unhygenic psychopaths (Billy the Kid, for instance, was a bland Irish guy who killed a couple people and was catapulted to fame because Pat Garrett cashed in by writing a heavily-embellished book; ya think the crazed desire for celebrity started with reality shows? Dream on, blind man). Thomas F. Wilson's dumb bully character, repeated in each epoch as a different iteration in the same family tree, was the Old West outlaw. Hey, I love John Wayne too, all's I'm saying is, if John Wayne was really around in the Old West, he wouldn't have needed a gun, he could have kept order by smacking the bad guys with his cock.

However on point los Bobs might have been with their observations about nostalgia, they were brief. The main focus, in all three movies, was the tightly constructed narrative, wherein Michael J. Fox tries not to rupture the space-time continuum in whatever time period he found himself in. That he does so mostly in a DeLorean is just fucking awesome. Look at this:

It's too bad John DeLorean got framed by the government and his car company went tits up, because holy shit that thing is cool. Between him and Preston Tucker . . . why, it's as if the American automotive industry has a sinister tendency to fuck over anyone who threatens their incompetent, corrupt hegemony!

Anyhow. The movies:


Back to the Future (1985)

Amiable Everydork Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is your average kid: he likes loud electric guitars, his cute girlfriend, and big fuckin' trucks. His family is a mess: his mom's a drunk, his dad is Crispin Glover, and his siblings are doughy and trashy. Out of dorkiness, societal alienation, narrative expediency, or all of the above, he pals around with straight up mad scientist Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd), who on the fateful night of October 26th, 1985 (my 7th birthday! Thanks, Bob and Bob!), summons his teenage sidekick to the mall parking lot in the middle of the night. To test his new toy:

Marty: Wait a minute, wait a minute, Doc, are you telling me you made a time machine . . . out of a DeLorean?
Doc: The way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?

And that's why Doc Brown is awesome. If you're going to break the laws of physics (which takes balls: when you break the laws of physics, the alien cops are the LAPD and you're Rodney King, and they don't use nightsticks, dude, they use space shit) do it in a really cool way.

Doc explains how the time machine works: to travel in time, you need a lot of power. 1.21 jigawatts worth, in point of fact (the awesome fictional measurement “jigawatt” was the result of Christopher Lloyd mispronouncing “gigawatt”), and the only way to generate 1.21 jigawatts is with plutonium. Marty is a little nonplussed at this, and alarmed by the fact that Doc stole this plutonium from a bunch of Libyan terrorists who wanted him to make them a nuke. Lo and behold, the terrorists show up and gun Doc down, leaving Marty to drive away in the DeLorean. However, Marty forgets that the “flux capacitor” is turned on, and when the speedometer hits 88 mph, a whole bunch of flashing lights happen and Marty's running over a pine tree. A whole bunch of confusing shit happens, including a kid thinking Marty's an alien and the kid's dad chasing Marty with a shotgun, before Marty realizes . . . I'm in the 50s.

He bumbles around trying to make sense of things, but in so doing Marty inadvertently interferes with his parents meeting for the first time. This leads to Marty's mom (Lea Thompson) falling for Marty instead of Marty's dad. (Ed. Note: the Bobs get much respect for throwing an Oedipal complex subplot in the middle of an 80s teen movie) Marty tries to track down the 50s-vintage Doc Brown for help. Although Doc is initially skeptical—

Doc Brown: Tell me, Future Boy, who's President of the United States in 1985?
Marty: Ronald Reagan.
Doc Brown: Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis? I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady? And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury!

—he eventually realizes Marty's telling the truth. This is why mad scientists are more useful than civilians.

Doc Brown explains a lot of bullshit time-travel science to Marty (bullshit because it's based on the premise that time is linear, which it's not, although linear time travel is the only kind of time travel that works for narrative, because it's the only kind of time travel that has any kind of dramatic stakes, and the Bobs care more about making the movie work than they do about science anyway), the upshot of which is that Marty has to somehow make his mom fall in love with his dad, otherwise Marty will vanish from existence in a time-travel paradox (just turn off the part of your brain that passed science class and you'll be fine). This is why the Bobs are awesome, they know how to keep the end simple (boy has to meet girl) and the means complicated (Marty has to invent skateboarding and rock 'n' roll to bring his parents together).

On top of having to insure his ongoing existence, Marty also has to try to get back to the 80s, which involves leadfooting the DeLorean through downtown at the exact moment a bolt of lightning destroys the town clock, and save Doc from being killed by the Libyans. With this hectic to-do list, Marty has quite a time of it, and Bob Zemeckis does the best job of anyone not named Spielberg (who, as executive producer/sifu, must have smiled and told Zemeckis “you have done well, grasshopper”) of keeping the pace white-knuckle/edge of the seat while still keeping the visual compositions and narrative coherent (Ed. Note: gratuitous swipe at Michael Bay and Joel Schumacher redacted for length), making the third act of Back to the Future one of the most masterfully suspenseful and enjoyable ever committed to film. Of course everything works out okay, but that's the Hollywood sleight-of-hand: managing to make you genuinely wonder whether the inevitable is actually going to happen. And, to repeat, just about the only cat better than Zemeckis at that trick is Spielberg, and Spielberg is a fucking god at that.

When Marty arrives back home in the 80s, he discovers that not only did he manage to set things right, he set things more right than they were before: his dad, instead of a spineless homo/Martian nerd, is a successful, tennis-playing SF author. Mom's no longer a fatalistic lush, she's the picture of the healthy, happy, upper middle class housewife. The siblings are go-getters. The truck that Marty couldn't afford is in the garage. And bully Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) is now the cringing subordinate who waxes the McFly automobiles. And all it took was that awesome scene when Crispin Glover, having taken to heart some of Michael J. Fox's “man up and grow some balls” bluster, punches Biff out.

However, right when Marty is about to take his cute girlfriend for a spin in his new truck, a flamboyantly dressed Doc Brown (who Marty does manage to save) shows up, empties the contents of the McFly garbage cans into the flux capacitor—having come up with a more practical and funny power source than plutonium—and tells Marty that they have to go to the future! Marty goes along with it, but:

Marty: Better back up, Doc, I don't think we have enough road to get up to 88.
Doc: Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.

And the DeLorean levitates into the fucking air and FLIES AWAY. Game, set, match: Zemeckis. Blatant entree to the sequel? Sure, but man that fuckin car looked dope flying into the camera in that last flash of light.


Back to the Future II (1989)

Picks up right where the first one left off, except Marty's girlfriend suddenly looks a lot more like Elisabeth Shue (due to Elisabeth Shue having been cast as a replacement). They have to head to the future to keep something fucked up from happening with Marty's kids. Forget the illogic of treating something in the future as though it's already happened (we shut off the science class part of the brain in the first movie, remember?) we gotta fly that DeLorean into 2015 and set shit straight!

Among some not-half-bad jokey-jokes like the Cubs winning the World Series—a feat even more implausible than time travel—and Steven Spielberg's kid directing Jaws 19, Marty finds time to save his son from being bullied into being a patsy for a bank robbery by Biff's cybernetically enhanced psycho grandson, explore the joys of hoverboarding in Nikes with power laces (seriously, our nerds have five fucking years left to deliver on the cybernetic enhancements, hoverboards, and power laces; step it up, motherfuckers) and come up with a plot to buy a sports almanac, use the DeLorean to drive to a bookie, and profit. Doc is appalled by this plan and has Marty throw the book out.

Only superannuated Biff finds the book and steals the DeLorean, so when Doc drops Marty off back in 1985, it's a 1985 where Nixon is in his 5th term as president (h/t to Watchmen), violence, pollution, fascism AND anarchy (all dystopia stops are pulled out) reign, and Biff is the most powerful man in America. And he's married to Marty's mom. And Marty's dad is dead. Fuck.

Marty bluffs his way into Biff's confidence, discovering that the sports almanac is the cornerstone of Biff's fortune and resultant power, and while not able to steal it, figures out that he and Doc can steal the almanac back in the 50s.

So now Marty's gotta skulk around and not be seen by anyone, least of all his former self, lest one of Doc's hilariously wordy doom scenarios involving the very fabric of space-time being torn asunder and the universe turning inside out and ceasing to exist occur. Everything gets very convoluted, and there are a few too many suspense cocktease moments, making Back to the Future II not quite as good as the first (for one, it's way too fuckin' dark; yes, the guy who considers Fight Club, Sid and Nancy, and A Clockwork Orange comedies is calling a Bob Zemeckis picture too dark, deal with the irony) but not without merit. As connective tissue between Parts I and III, it's invaluable, and the future sequence and 50s sequence are both well-done, but man, that alternate reality 1985 is a fuckin misfire.


Back to the Future III (1990)

Since Doc time-warped into the 1880s at the end of II, and Marty finds out that Doc gets shot in the back by Biff ancestor Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen, Marty has to enlist 50s Doc to get him back to the past. Hilariously, 50s Doc dresses Marty in 50s “Western” clothes (all the meta-pop-cultural UR DOIN IT RONG moments in the trilogy are great, but this one is the best) that, upon his arrival in the 1880s, have everybody laughing their asses off and firing live ammunition at him.

Of course, Marty runs into his own ancestors, who like his future kids in II, are all played by him, and here in III they give him the opportunity to do one seriously fucking funny Irish accent. The McFlys help outfit Marty in slightly more era-appopriate clothing, and, adopting the alias “Clint Eastwood” (the fact that Marty's favorite Westerns are spaghetti Westerns is a beautiful touch) he sets out to find Doc.

Doc has been busy establishing himself as a local eccentric (aggregate effort expended in so doing: nil) and building machines the size of a room that produce one brown ice cube. He and Marty rescue Mary Steenburgen from a legendary fate as “that schoolteacher who was killed in a stagecoach accident,” and Doc instantly falls ass-over-teakettle in love. This creates the dilemma: Doc doesn't want to go back home, he just wants to be with Mary Steenburgen (naturally), but if Marty's learned anything in his travels through time, it's that two weirdos from the future hanging out too long in the 1880s are gonna get lit the fuck up by some anti-intellectual element at some point or other, be they Tannen or no. That, and the fact that Elisabeth Shue is still waiting for him in the future (and they probably still haven't shtupped yet, since that was what Marty wanted the truck for in the first movie back before she was even Elisabeth Shue, and he hasn't had a moment alone with her since) gives Marty the urge for going. Doc resists (naturally, Mary Steenburgen is quite the catch; on top of everything else she's as big a nerd as Doc is) for a while but eventually comes to the grim realization that he's a man out of time and must go. But first he goes down to the bar.

Doc (holding a shot of whiskey): In the future, we don't need horses. We have motorized carriages called automobiles.
(Everybody in the place laughs their ass off)
Random 1880s dude: If everybody's got one of these auto-whats-its, does anybody walk or run anymore?
Doc: Of course we run, but for recreation. (At the crowd's confusion at the big word) For fun.
Random 1880s dude: Run for fun? What the hell kinda fun is that?
(Ed. Note: the random 1880s dude has a solid fucking point)

In one of the picture's best jokes, it turns out Doc's just been sitting there holding the first shot the bartender poured him, he hasn't even drunk anything yet. Marty arrives and Doc slams the shot, immediately passing the fuck out. Mad Dog Tannen is on his way to get into a gunfight with Marty, and Marty wants to get Doc the hell out of the 1880s before this happens, only Doc takes a while to wake up, even with the bartender's spectacularly disgusting hangover cure, so Marty has to get into a gunfight with Mad Dog, which he wins, and then hauls ass with Doc.

Now, Mary Steenburgen got pretty pissed when Doc told her he was from the future, assuming that he was telling her a whopper to avoid having to break up with her on the level (part of what makes Mary Steenburgen so appealing in this is that she's smart, and what the fuck would you say if someone told you they were from the future?) But goddammit she loves the crazy bastard, so she chases the train Marty and Doc have jerry-rigged to push the DeLorean up to 88 mph to go back home. There's a thrilling, edge-of-the-seat chase sequence, and Doc ends up “stuck” in 1885 with Mary Steenburgen, and Marty arrives back in 1985 alone, and without a DeLorean, which gets fucking destroyed by a train two seconds after he gets back.

Resigned to the fact that he's never going to see Doc again, Marty heads home, gets made fun of by his brother for his 1880s clothes, shrugs it off, and goes for that long-awaited truck ride with Elisabeth Shue. En route, he gets challenged to the drag race (by an asshole played by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea) that ends up wrecking his life in the 2nd movie, only he says, “fuck it” and lets the challenge go. Marty's learned something in his travels through time!

Although it's kind of cool, and it's nice to see Doc again, it is a little stupid when he and Mary Steenburgen and their kids Jules and Verne arrive in our dimension in a time-machine locomotive, and a lot stupid when the locomotive levitates and flies away after Marty and Doc have a brief word. But hey, it's always hard to say goodbye, which is why so many end-of-trilogy or end-of-series scenes are stupid (the prosecution presents the Ewok love-in at the end of Jedi and the last ten minutes of Lost for your review, and rests its case) and enough goodwill was built up over the course of the series that one dumb last scene (that isn't even that dumb) isn't the end of the world.


The Back to the Future series is a weird place to look for incisive commentary on the American character, but it's all there, done by someone (Bob Zemeckis) who is not a deep, brooding, intellectual, and who minus the millions of dollars and geeky fascination with audiovisual technology is probably a pretty normal, regular guy. The story of the Americans and who they are needs to be told by an American, which in a way really means a non-deep, non-brooding, non-intellectual Normal Regular Guy. The way someone like Bob Zemeckis points out things like “Hey, you know, people in the 50s were excessively weirded out by black people” and “Gosh, a warped perception of the past formed to too great an extent by pop culture leads inexorably to forgetting that certain universal truths about the human condition are constant . . . gee whiz” is different from (and more effective than) the excessively windy and didactic way someone like me would do it. Although armed with different rhetorical and critical devices, I can still respect the guy for being concise and on-point with his observations, all within the context of a (mostly) wildly entertaining movie trilogy.

Happy 4th, my friends!

THE VACANT THRONE

Traditionally, when a king would die without an heir, various aspirants would get out swords and start assassinating each other until one was sitting on a throne trying to find serfs to mop up all the blood. While messy, this method of figuring out who was in charge had the distinct advantage of being completely unambiguous. You always knew who was king, and he'd stay king until someone better at sword fighting came along.

At the dawn of the 21st century, most power struggles were settled less violently, although one in particular—involving violence—was in desperate need of resolution. Arnold Schwarzenegger, once a behemoth the likes of which action cinema had never before seen (and probably will never see again), was in decline. By 2000, Arnold had not made a good movie in over half a decade. The action movie had evolved into a medium populated by real actors. Large men with muscles suddenly found themselves facing cinematic obsolescence, not that most large men with muscles know what those words mean, but still. The situation was fucking dire, my friends. Tom Cruise (Tom fucking Cruise!) was what passed for an action star. A man who could not, by a blind man, be described as either large or muscular.

Enter Vin Diesel. Born Vincenzo Gasolina in a small weightlifting village in southern Sicily, Diesel arrived in America, discovered the aesthetic value of the shaved head, and supported himself as a bouncer while patiently awaiting movie stardom. The road was not without obstacles. Steven Spielberg allegedly cast Vincenzo in Saving Private Ryan, although no one remembers anything about that movie except the jaw-dropping D-Day sequence, the fucktarded script, Barry Pepper quoting scripture, Tom Hanks liking Edith Piaf, and the scene when the Nazi slowly and quietly disembowels Adam Goldberg, so Vincenzo's claims to be in it cannot be verified. Then came Pitch Black, a good movie, about as close to low-budget SF and hard SF as we've seen on a movie screen in some time . . . the only problem is “we” consists of me and those four other people who smoked weed to it. Fortunately, one of those other four people was Rob Cohen, who put Vincenzo in The Fast and the Furious. The Fast and the Furious was fun, but not reeeeeeally an action movie, though the car stunts are fun, and Vincenzo was certainly sufficiently muscular. Action movie or no, it was nonetheless a big enough success to lead to Vincenzo's first legitimate campaign for the throne: xXx.

Released in the summer of 2002, xXx could not have been timed better. The power vacuum in the realm of Big, Dumb Movies Where Shit Blows Up had reached a point where the vacuum was threatening to create a singularity that would kill us all. We needed a movie that was big, that was kind of dumb (but not too dumb), and where a whole lot of shit blew the fuck up. We needed a guy who wasn't really that great an actor, with large muscles, to star in this movie. And goddammit we needed it right then.

Behold the glory that is xXx: we open with a man in a tuxedo being chased around what looks like (and is) Prague. Some scruffy dudes with guns are chasing him, but he shows some James Bond moves, and eludes the scruffy dudes . . . but in so doing ends up in the middle of a Rammstein concert. The man in the tuxedo finds himself out of his element to a profound degree, attempting to make his way through the fornicating teenagers, to hear himself think over the sounds of men painted silver breathing fire in German. These attempts are all for naught: the bad guys kill him, and that's that.

Back in the ol' U S of A, a heavily scarred Samuel L. Jackson makes his way into a top-secret intelligence agency HQ, and states his theory that continuing to use operatives like the man in the tuxedo to bring down the anarchist “punks” (now you know better than to go to metal concerts if you're a real punk, young man; if I ever catch you doing that again, go right to your room with no heroin) is bound to end in failure. Samuel L. proposes that they send in low-lives, greaseballs, fuckfaces, shitheads. People, in short, like one Vincenzo Gasolina, esquire.

Enter Vincenzo, portraying an extreme sports star named Xander Cage (whose neck tattoo, xXx, gives the picture its name). He steals the bright red sports car of a douchebag politician (the rear bumper bears the sticker “Skateboarding Is A Crime!”), rigs it with webcams, and growls an anti-authoritarian diatribe extolling the cultural merit of video games, among other things, before concluding with the piece de resistance of this performance art installation, driving the car off a high bridge, transfiguring it into a flaming wreck, while Vincenzo comfortably bungee-jumps to safety.

(Something subtle that I'm mildly embarrassed that I picked up on: Tony Hawk is Vincenzo's getaway driver for the stunt. Yes, the most famous skateboarder in the world, a man worth millions of dollars from his licensed skateboarding video games, the one “extreme sports” star that civilians can reliably name, this is Vincenzo's getaway driver. That one brief shot of Tony Hawk nervously making sure Vincenzo is in the car before stomping the fucking gas and getting the fuck outta there, more than anything that has yet transpired, firmly establishes Vincenzo as a badass of sufficient degree that badasses we previously thought to be supreme still defer to him.)

Of course, party's at Vincenzo's. A half dozen or so extreme sports dudes show up in cameos, paying tribute to the king, and Vincenzo, it must be said, has sufficient swagger to pull this bit off. It is perfectly plausible that he is the emperor of this realm. He's on top of the world. He has to retain a staff of four to walk stooped over making sure his dick doesn't drag the ground. He's—oh, wow, the power just went out and masked men in black rappelled through the windows with machine guns. Party's over! The masked men knock Vincenzo unconscious.

He comes to in a coffee shop, where Vincenzo, being a smart guy, notices a whole bunch of shit awry. When one of the other coffee shop patrons holds the place up, Vincenzo calmly disarms him and puts his foot in the attempted robber's ass. Samuel L. applauds, revealing that the whole charade was a test to see if Vincenzo had It, which he did. Time for him to be knocked out again, for test #2.

Vincenzo and a bunch of other macho assholes wake up on a plane, which lands and drops them off in what appears to be the middle of nowhere in Colombia. Vincenzo, bored off his balls, is convinced that this is just another test with no consequences, so he surrenders to a Jeep full of heavily armed narcoterrorists. Who take him to a big dirty warehouse-type place, and string him up from the ceiling to await the arrival of Danny Trejo and his machete.

Vincenzo displays little respect for Danny Trejo (which would normally be unseemly for a guy playing his first action lead . . . but Vincenzo passes the real test, to wit, still appearing to have balls while appearing in the same frame as Danny Trejo, another very subtle claim to the throne for our Vincenzo) before experiencing his first moment of fear in the movie when he realizes that Danny Trejo has real blood on his machete. Some quick thinking and athletic display of upper body strength results in Vincenzo killing Danny Trejo and having to make a quick exit.

Helicopters start flying around all over the place, hundreds of dudes with machine guns start yammering in Spanish and chasing Vincenzo, who finds a dirt bike with which he tries to get out. Lots of shit blows up (amen) and Vincenzo's stunt double does a lot of really cool shit with the bike, eventually jumping the outer razor wire fence with a gigantic explosion at his back. All that effort, all for naught: Samuel L. and what appears to be the entire US military sweep in and lock shit down.

Vincenzo is miffed that Samuel L. put him and the other shitheads on the plane into such a dangerous situation. Samuel L. counters with a harsh but fair argument: that all Vincenzo's outlaw web hijinks (it would appear stealing politicians' sports cars was but the tip of the iceberg) would merit a long stay in a federal prison. Cue Samuel L. displaying his nonpareil ability to make utterly retarded, banal text sound awesome through sheer force of Samuel L.ness:

You ever watch lions at the zoo? You can always tell which ones were captured in the wild by the look in their eyes. The wild cat. She remembers running across the plain, the thrill of the hunt. Four hundred pounds of killing fury, locked in a box. But after a while, their eyes start to glaze over, and you can tell their soul has died. The same thing happens to a man. Leavenworth Federal Penetentiary is no joke. They'll take a wild man like you and throw him in solitary just for the fun of it. No more mountains to board, no more oceans to surf. Just a 6-by-8 cell with no window and only a bucket to shit in. You can avoid all of that by doing me this small favor.

Vincenzo reluctantly grants that favor, going to work for the Shadowy Dudes In Suits With A Large Weapons Budget agency for Samuel L. and soon finds himself on a plane to Prague, entrusted with the task of buying a bunch of stolen cars from the Russian bad guy. Vincenzo meets his Prague PD liaison, who foolishly gives Vincenzo some 'tude, before taking him to the bad guy's nightclub.

Upon arrival, Vincenzo wastes no time swaggering right up to the bad guy and earning his trust by ratting out the Prague cop (which he was not expecting) and discovering that one of the main henchmen is a huge extreme sports fan and especially a fan of one Xander Cage, which pleases Vincenzo greatly, and he spends the night happily getting fucked up with the bad guys and pretending that he doesn't want to fuck some Jesus into Asia Argento, the bad guy's financial officer/arm candy.

Pause for brief discourse on what elevates an awesome action movie over the run of the mill. Truly awesome action movies have original touches. The shit blows up in new ways. The cars chase in new ways. The premise is still simplistic, sure, but it doesn't insult your intelligence (Russian anarchists wanting to nuke Prague? Hey, sure. Because at all costs, in the name of Premier Havel WE MUST DEFEND PRAGUE!) And, especially nowadays, the girl needs to be cool. Girls don't come much cooler than Asia Argento. This was a point of contention with the date I took to xXx: she called me sleazy for finding Asia hot, and I called her an uptight yuppie with no taste for the exotic. I didn't bother to get into the “Hey, she's Dario's daughter” aspect, since uptight yuppies don't know shit about Dario, and in any case she stopped talking to me after I called her an uptight yuppie. Not having to talk gave me plenty of time to sigh over Asia. Just having her around at all keeps xXx from being a generic action picture.

Vincenzo uploads a staggering amount of information about the bad guys to the Agency, which leads Samuel L. to renege on his promise that he'd let Vincenzo go after this one op. Turns out, they've never had anyone get in this deep before. Vincenzo, pissed, growls “Next time you want someone to save the world, find someone who likes it the way it is.”

So he hangs out with the baddies a bit more, flirts with Asia a bit more, stages the murder of his Prague cop contact to cement his cover, and tries to convince Samuel L. to not just send in a sweeper team to kill everyone. In this last, Vincenzo (trying to protect Asia) errs greatly, since the Prague cop gets pissed and rats Vincenzo out to the baddies.

Vincenzo discovers that Asia is an undercover as well, and the two of them team up. The baddies find them out, and Vincenzo has to escape an avalanche on snowboard and blow a bunch of cars up. Asia witnesses the cruelty of the villains, who nerve-gas a room full of scientists for the hell of it; the main baddie laughs uproariously as the poor scientists slowly die.

Vincenzo's gadget guy supplies him with a tricked-out muscle car, in which Vincenzo and Asia pursue the boat the baddies have put the nerve gas bomb on; once it gets to downtown Prague, boom. This necessitates fancy driving, very cool stunts, and the requisite “is he dead? Is there any question more disingenuous in this kind of action movie?” moment for a bit of drama before Vincenzo emerges, victorious but wet. He and Asia run away to the South Pacific where they have, the movie implies, the awesomest sex in the history of sex while Samuel L. tries to get Vincenzo's attention for a new mission. Roll credits. Hell yes.

By rights, Vincenzo should have had the inside track to the throne based solely on this role. A challenger appeared the following year, when The Rock made The Rundown, in which Arnold appears as himself in a club, briefly says what's up to The Rock in a clear-cut “I pass the crown to you” moment. Of course, this means war. Or, more accurately, would have meant war if Vincenzo really gave a fuck. The smart move would have been, one more non-xXx picture, maybe a sequel to The Fast and the Furious, get that franchise going, then another xXx movie. Instead, Vincenzo pulls this “I want to be a real actor” fuckology, refuses to do 2 Fast 2 Furious, refuses to a sequel to xXx, and bizarrely does a sequel to Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick (with like twenty times the budget, that tanked because the four of us who saw Pitch Black weren't much of a fan base; Riddick is okay if you're high, but otherwise utterly tarded).

So Vincenzo took himself out of the game, and they went ahead and made a sequel to xXx without him. I was suspicious, and missed it in the theater (along with everyone else: xXx: State of the Union was one of the most expensive flops of all time), but a while later my mom started insisting enthusiastically that it was actually awesome and that I should see it. I did . . . and lo and behold, it's almost as great as the first one is!

I barely even remember the plot to xXx: State of the Union. I know bad guys break into Langley and machine gun all the “good” guy intelligence agency dudes (considering that going Columbine on CIA headquarters after the Iraq clusterfuck had its appeal as a concept, it took a bit of effort to recalibrate my emotional reaction to this opener) and that Samuel L. and the gadget guy decide, in the wake of Xander Cage's death (fatal “I want more money for the sequel than you're willing to pay”-itis) to get the next best thing to Vincenzo: Ice Cube.

Considering that Ice Cube came straight outta Compton, was affiliated with a gang called Niggaz With Attitudes, and that if you fuck with him, the police are gonna have to come get him off your ass, he's called off with a sawed-off, squeezes the trigger and bodies are hauled off, and so on, this choice makes a great deal of sense. We are, after all, talking of a man whose idea of a good day is one where he needn't use his AK. The only problem is, Cube is in a super high maximum security prison, the kind of place that no one has ever escaped from except in a stupid action movie. Samuel L. Jackson takes advantage of a long and storied career having granted him metanarrative powers of perception, and realizes that they're in a stupid action movie, and springs Cube in a sequence that left Cube's stunt man breathing very heavily.

Once Cube is out, he has to stop Willem Defoe from assassinating the president and assuming power in a coup d'etat (because Willem Defoe is fucking old school, motherfucker). Stopping Willem Defoe involves almost shtupping a white chick, enlisting Xzibit's chop shop to make some tanks, carjacking a couple dudes who were unknowingly transporting a shitload of guns, and generally turning Washington DC into a war zone at the climax, where a heavily tanned, lounge lizard president (picture a cross between George Hamilton, J.T. Walsh, and Rudy Giuliani) narrowly escapes getting got due to the razor-sharp eye-hand coordination of Cube's stunt double. After a (no bullshit) thrilling chase sequence aboard a high-speed train in which Cube's stunt double squares the fuck off with Willem Defoe and unceremoniously sends him to the next life, the natural order of the world is restored, Cube is no longer a fugitive (I think . . . he's either still a fugitive or decides to live the life of an anonymous nomad to set up a sequel that never came) and Xzibit's chop-shop girl loves him.

I would never claim that xXx: State of the Union is not utter and complete bullshit. It's really dumb and effects-heavy, but the effects are pretty good, and in the four scenes in the movie where it's really Cube and not his stunt double, Cube is pretty good (especially when he pulls a fully-realized Southern lobbyist character out of his ass in the scene where he almost shtups the white chick, who turns out to be evil). Willem Defoe is good, because he has a magical ability to overact in shitty movies and not look like an asshole (To Live and Die in LA was a notable exception to this, because he was too young and insufficiently leathery), and Xzibit is quite fun, repeating "If it's got wheels, we can jack it," as a mantra; Cube later welcomes him to "the first tank-jacking in history" (they steal a tank at one point) and Xzibit is suitably respectful of the historical significance.

But, in the end, Cube is not Vincenzo Gasolina. Do not, please, misinterpret this as a slight against Cube. The man is a giant, and in the right picture (Boyz N The Hood, Three Kings) is an extremely capable character actor. But there's something about the way Vincenzo swaggered through that first picture, that immortal, untouchable growling godhood, that Cube can never hope to replicate. Cube acts, Vincenzo merely is. It certainly helped that the script to the first movie was better (Vincenzo had the advantage of timeless text like “Stop thinking Prague police, start thinking PlayStation—blow shit up!”) and in scenes where it was unclear whether Vincenzo was staring off into middle distance trying to remember his lines or trying to look worldly, pensive, and alienated, you could look at the other side of the frame and see Prague.

The difference, in the end, between xXx and its sequel is not great in terms of enjoyment, even if it is in quality. For those moods where you're like “I want to see an action movie with balls,” xXx fits the bill perfectly. For those “I want to see something that kind of sucks but will surprise me at how little it actually, in fact, does suck and actually is kind of good when all is said and done” moods, the sequel fits, though that is, admittedly, quite a nuanced mood, and rarer. Extreme care must be taken to not watch xXx: State of the Union in any kind of wistful mood, as an inevitable sighing “what might have been” regarding Vincenzo's failed bid for the throne may take hold.

Vincenzo Gasolina: the once and (probably not) future king. The throne is still vacant, since The Rock is making kids' movies. And The Expendables looks to be replacing the monarchy with a Politburo: who's the alpha badass among Sly, Arnold, Bruce, Statham, Jet, Dolph, Danny Trejo, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, and Steve Austin (Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts don't count)? We shall see. But we will most likely have to remember kings only in our dreams.

JUST A GANGSTER, I SUPPOSE

One might not immediately cite 1990 as a particularly notable year in the history of cinema. It was, after all, the year Dances With Wolves dominated the Oscars, with its lush visuals, its masturbatory, self-satisfied PC politics, its massive overlength. Flying under the radar that year were a number of fine pictures, four of which we will be discussing today, since they made 1990 an extremely notable year in the history of the gangster movie.

Usually, confluent trends in cinema are due to societal influence of some sort. The fact that 1990 saw so many different types of gangster movies might—amateur sociology alert—have something to do with the brazen, swaggering, felonious Wall Street culture of the 80s. It might just be that four (actually five if you count Ethan Coen) directors really liked gangster movies. Whatever the cause, the point is four awesome gangster movies came out in 1990.

Like any genre, gangster movies have evolved over time. Raoul Walsh basically invented the genre in 1915 with Regeneration. Shot on location in the Bowery, it's about as close as you can get to seeing what the milieu of Gangs of New York was actually like, as real gangs still prowled the neighborhood. From there, movie gangsters morphed into Paul Muni, then Cagney/Edward G. Robinson, then endless ripoffs of Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, then the paradigm shift/Shakespearean facelift performed by Dr. Francis Coppola, then Scorsese's hyper-realistic, autobiographical take on the genre, still the predominant mode in the gangster picture in 1990. Then Quentin Tarantino taught gangsters how to listen to Madonna and watch The Partridge Family, Guy Ritchie's take was awl roight, innit, then David Chase recast them in a bathrobe in their driveway, lumbering to pick up the morning's Newark Star-Ledger. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, back to 1990.

Our quartet each represents a different approach to the genre, each historically significant:


The Moody Character Piece—State of Grace

I talked about this one a bit in my St. Patrick's Day post, so rather than be redundant, let's focus on Phil Joanou's direction. The pace is deliberate (read: slow, if you're not in the mood) to give the actors all the time they need to make character choices (“I'm Irish . . . I'm drunk . . . I'm fatalistic . . . I need to brood decoratively . . .”) and the compositions, while serving the same end of not crowding the actors and giving them room to move, instead make the picture feel kind of emotionally neutral (and the lack of urgency in the editing reinforces that feeling of neutrality, and even detachment).

This would all be a critique of Phil Joanou's directing if the performances weren't all so fucking good. Sean Penn overdoes it a bit, as is his custom, but he's still pretty spectacular in this. Gary Oldman of course is Gary Oldman and nothing more need be said; he also overacts, but getting on Gary Oldman for overacting is like getting on water for being wet. Ed Harris, no stranger to overacting himself, keeps it pretty well in check here, and successfully conveys that his character's ruthlessness is due to weakness.

The psychological, Method acting approach to the gangster genre works if your purpose is examining the whys and wherefores behind gangsterism, or in State of Grace's case, the role of the gangster as the last, doomed line of defense against gentrification. The Westies were the most feared gang in New York, but they were no match for yuppies.


The Auteursploitation Picture—King of New York

King of New York is a decent companion piece to State of Grace, as both are “decline and fall of the gangster empire” narratives, and both have a similarly grim, moderato pace. One area in which King of New York is the clear superior, though, is in the overacting competition.

Remember, I'm not saying “overacting” as an insult, and remember also, King of New York stars Christopher Walken, perhaps the most flamboyantly strange actor ever seen on the silver screen. As drug kingpin Frank White, Walken is at his apex. Frank White is the king of New York, to the point where in a wonderful bit of irony, just about every black rapper from New York has, at some point or other since 1990, declared himself to be Frank White.

King of New York starts with Frank White's release from prison. Frank returns to a city where his lieutenant, Larry (pre-Laurence) Fishburne, is informed “nobody even talks to you goddamn motherfucking coños anymore.” Larry, aided by chemist Steve Buscemi and that one weird guy who just shouts shit in a coked-up rage all the time, rebut this assertion with a hail of gunfire and steal the gentleman's drugs.

The gangsters in King of New York always have half-dressed beautiful women lounging around, and the way you can tell Walken's the boss of bosses is that his half-dressed women are more beautiful than the other gangsters'. His headquarters, where all his women lounge around, is the Plaza hotel, another conspicuous sign that Walken is cooler than everyone else.

Walken attempts to diversify into the legitimate world, where he hobnobs with Pete Hamill (playing himself) and politicians, but the cops (led by a scenery chewing David Caruso and his earnest young protegé Wesley Snipes) are dead set on putting Walken back in jail, as they regard his release to be a crime in itself.

However he might crave acceptance in the straight world, Walken still has a drug empire to reconquer, which requires some doomed-from-the-start negotiations with a deliciously reptilian Chinese guy who sits around watching Expressionist horror movies with his (far too clothed for true gangster credibility) women and his henchmen. When business falls apart after the Chinese guy tells him “I didn't realize how fucking crazy you really are,” Walken and company are forced to resort to machine guns, which maneuver eradicates the Chinatown contingent.

David Caruso and the cops eventually decide that the only way to beat Walken is at his own game (which is to say, a machine gun battle), although Victor Argo (in the movie's only understated performance, and maybe its best) demurs and refuses to be party to such methods. Caruso and entourage succeed in killing a whole bunch of Walken's guys, including Larry Fishburne, though it costs poor Wesley Snipes his life, as well as a fresh-faced, recently married rookie's. Walken gets his retribution by drive-by blasting David Caruso at Wesley's funeral, leaving Victor Argo to arrest Walken, who mortally wounds Victor Argo, though he himself is mortally wounded by Victor Argo. Walken dies quietly in a cab in Times Square.

Director Abel Ferrara is very much an auteur, whose major theme is Catholic guilt, with subthemes sin and retribution, and because of his personal preoccupations, his bad men never get away with what they've done; they've sinned and ultimately must repent. So, although Walken is the King of New York, the king must die. Long live the king. And by God, long live King of New York. Few movies are as unrelentingly grim and violent, but even fewer are as fascinatingly badass. Anyone Biggie Smalls was willing to defer to in the badass department (the titular king, Frank White) is a force to be fucking reckoned with.


The Classicist Approach—Miller's Crossing

Of the movies in discussion today, the first that can unironically be branded a masterpiece is Miller's Crossing (also discussed briefly on St. Paddy's). Joel and Ethan Coen, in their nearly three-decade career, have made a half-dozen of the finest motion pictures of their generation, and to date have only directed one bad movie (Intolerable Cruelty, where they had to make chicken salad out of someone else's chickenshit script). Their finest, I submit—even better than Fargo, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, or No Country For Old Men—is Miller's Crossing.

Borrowing from Dashiell Hammett, Damon Runyon, and Grand Guignol, Miller's Crossing is an incredibly stylized, intricately constructed, unabashedly unpleasant work of genius. Gabriel Byrne stars as Tom Reagan, loyal right hand to political boss (read: gangster) Albert Finney, who is having trouble with “ethical” Jon Polito and his right hand, the terrifying Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman). Despite his loyalty, Gabriel Byrne is still fucking Albert Finney's woman, the hard-as-nails Marcia Gay Harden, whose brother, Jon Turturro, is number one on Jon Polito's to-kill list because “ethically, he's a little shaky” (an elegant understatement from an inelegant man).

So, in order to protect Albert Finney's interests, Gabriel Byrne has to disclose his affair with Marcia Gay Harden, thus prompting his exile from Albert Finney's inner circle (said exile accomplished by Albert Finney beating the shit out of him in public and throwing him down a flight of stairs), which leads to Gabriel Byrne having to go work for Jon Polito, whereupon Gabriel Byrne subtly subverts Jon Polito's organization from within, leading Jon Polito to kill Eddie Dane, after which John Turturro kills Jon Polito and Gabriel Byrne kills John Turturro, unfortunately ruining his chances at ever getting Marcia Gay Harden back but nonetheless being forgiven by Albert Finney. Exhale.

As compelling as the twisty, double-cross-laden plot is, and as gorgeous as the camerawork is (the Coens have always collaborated with the best DP's, first Barry Sonnenfeld then Roger Deakins and Emmanuel Lubezki), what makes Miller's Crossing so special is the dialogue. Basically, just read this whole page.

Of course, the scene with Albert Finney, the tommy gun, the burning house, and “Danny Boy” is the stuff of standing ovations. The fact that one of the greatest scenes ever in movies isn't even overwhelmingly the best scene in the movie is a testament to how fucking amazing Miller's Crossing is. The fact that an even better gangster movie was released in the same year is a reason to regard that other gangster movie with awe.


The Real—Goodfellas

“As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster.” --Henry Hill
“I grew up with the gangsters and the priests . . . now, as a director, I'm both.” --Martin Scorsese

It all seems so effortless. It looks like it's really happening. It's arguably the best picture in one of the most storied careers in cinema, Martin Scorsese's. Based on the memoir Wise Guy by real-life gangster Henry Hill, Goodfellas (the name change was due to there being a TV show at the time called Wiseguy, which you should see if you haven't) covers thirty years in The Life, following Henry Hill from wide-eyed kid parking cars at a Mob cabstand to high-flying coke dealer to state's witness testifying against all his friends.

By this point, practically every scene in Goodfellas has entered the realm of myth, so recapping is unnecessary. As awesome as the whole movie is, two scenes stand out. They're Scorsese at his very best, and Scorsese at his best is exciting and important:

(1) The steadicam shot when Henry takes Karen to the Copa for the first time. We start outside, see the huge fuckin line, and Karen starts to say something about “wow, we're going to have to wait” only to have Henry tell her, we don't have to wait, it's better this way, as he hustles her through the service entrance. Now, the obvious reason why this shot is awesome is that it's all in one take, with dozens of people choreographed perfectly even before we get into the main room of the Copa and they produce a table from outta nowhere and all that. But the less obvious reason is that this shot is the ENTIRE MOVIE in microcosm: Henry the gangster is taking his girl out on a date, showing her the glamor of the gangster's life, but in so doing has to drag her through the less-than-glamorous underbelly of the club where you get a glimpse of where, metaphorically speaking, the sausages are made. The fact that you don't really notice that until the thirtieth time you see the movie leaves you feeling it's all a bit of an adventure, and that Ray Liotta famously bashes himself in the nuts about two-thirds of the way through the shot but gamely keeps going further deepens the metaphor. Now, my favorite part of the whole thing, the very end, when Henry and Karen are sitting down, and a waiter brings over a bottle saying, “This is from Mr. Tony over there,” and there's that pan over to a table full of friendly, gesticulating gangsters. Martin Scorsese is so cool he can make a camera move funny. That shit has me dying, every time.

(2) Billy Batts' coming-home party. This one isn't about the flashy camerawork, this is just the fucking apex of acting and directing. Joe Pesci, as Tommy, comes into Henry's bar with a girlfriend, not realizing that Billy Batts is in there with some henchmen. Tommy doesn't like Billy Batts. Billy Batts reminds Tommy, in a very demeaning way, that he used to be a shoeshine boy, all the while pretending that he's being friendly. He is, however, reminding a lesser gangster, one who has not been “made,” who the alpha greaseball is. Now. By this point in the movie we've had it firmly established for us that Joe Pesci is motherfucking crazy as a fucking shithouse rat. While he may rationally give a fuck that Billy Batts is a made man and he isn't, when Billy Batts suicidally keeps fucking with him, Joe Pesci's rational side gradually dissipates, until the coup de grace: “NOW GO HOME AND GET YOUR FUCKIN' SHINEBOX.” Joe Pesci slams the glass he's holding to the ground and goes nuts; Henry and Jimmy only just get him out of the bar before he launches himself at Billy's whole henchmen coterie.

Of course, that's not the end of it. Joe Pesci comes back, and he and De Niro jump on Billy. Character revelation: Joe Pesci is sloppy and all over the place as he beats Billy to death, whereas De Niro calmly and methodically stomps the life out of the guy (a concise portrait of psychopath vs. sociopath; beats the shit outta the DSM-IV, which has the added disadvantage of not being scored to Donovan). The best part about the ending of the scene, where they roll the “dead” Billy Batts in tablecloths and schlep him out to Henry's car, is that it means the scene with Scorsese's mom is coming up next.

That scene, where they're all just sitting around eating dinner at like 4 o'clock in the morning, and Catherine Scorsese shows the boys this amazing, stark painting she did, and De Niro remarks “[he] looks like someone we know,” and starts laughing, because the guy in the painting looks vaguely like Billy Batts, who's in their trunk, right outside . . .

There are so many classic bits in this movie: the “do you think I'm funny?” sequence (which was actually written and directed by Pesci), the whole saga of shooting Spider in the foot and Spider committing suicide by telling Tommy to go fuck himself (later homaged on The Sopranos before it started to suck when Michael Imperioli, who played Spider, goes into a bakery and shoots some guy in the foot, telling him “It happens!”), “Don't let the sauce stick!”, Kevin Corrigan's perfectly calibrated “thaw fuuuuck atta he” (translation: “Get the fuck out of here”) when Ray Liotta tells him about the helicopters, etc etc etc.

And, on a personal note, my 7th grade basketball coach is in the movie, playing himself, as the guy toward the end who haggles with Henry and Karen over the witness protection program thing. When I was in high school, one of his sons made “High School athlete of the week” in the New York Post, and the opening of the piece went something like, “Occasionally, the phone will ring. Sean will pick it up and the voice on the other end of the line will say, 'It's Wilt Chamberlain.' When that happens, Sean calls for his father: 'Dad! It's Henry Hill!'” Priceless stuff, that.

It's pretty fucking hard to conceive of a movie as good as Goodfellas. Of the top 5 or so movies of all time, Goodfellas is probably the most entertaining of the lot, and certainly has the best soundtrack. It's a beautiful movie about something ugly, the gangster and the priest in perfect balance. And it taught me the word “fucko.” For that alone, Goodfellas is a classic.


Now, astute cineastes will probably point out “Hey, there was a fifth notable gangster movie released in 1990.” And I, being generous, will indulge you and agree:


The Misfire—The Godfather, Part III

The whole meme about Sofia Coppola ruining this is a little overblown. The other problems (no Robert Duvall, and giving all his screen time to Diane Keaton, historically the weakest link in the saga, casting people like George Hamilton and Eli Wallach, who while both awesome do not fucking belong here, the central story—about power struggles in the Vatican—being so dense that you need footnotes to figure out who's how) overshadow poor Sofia, who was fated to be a director, anyway. When you have a movie where you're supposed to consider Andy Garcia ascending to the throne as a harbinger of doom, you have a very problematic movie.


In fairly short order after 1990, Tarantino would remake the gangster movie in his own image, leaving the quartet and change I mentioned today as the swan song of an era of crime cinema. It's surprising how not dated any of the four are (well, not so much Goodfellas, movies that good don't get dated), how even though they belong to the past, they're still in a language we understand in the present. We could stand, in this self-conscious (post)modern age, to take a page out of these pictures' book (if the metaphor police call, you never saw me) and remember what made them great. And hey, a 20th anniversary is always a good excuse to watch something.