Movies

DVD/Stream of the Week: COCKFIGHTER and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP – two more unforgettable performances byWarren Oates

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Hary Dean Stanton and Warren Oates in COCKFIGHTER
Hary Dean Stanton and Warren Oates in COCKFIGHTER

Last week I wrote about the actor Warren Oates and last night’s Oatesathon on Turner Classic Movies.  I even included the 53-minute 1993 documentary Warren Oates Across the Border.  I hope that I’ve kindled (or rekindled) some interest in Oates, so here are two Warren Oates classics that TCM didn’t play last night.

They are both from cult director Monte Hellman: Two-lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974). There’s a Criterion Collection DVD for Two-Lane Blacktop which is available from Netflix. You can stream Cockfighter on Amazon Instant Video.  Hellman was making low-low-budget exploitation films for Roger Corman, and both of these movies are fine specimens.  In both, Oates plays a tough, bottom-feeding grasper who needs a little too much luck.

Two-lane Blacktop is a car chase/road trip movie that was a vehicle for two rock music stars, James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.  Taylor plays a guy drifting across America and challenging drivers of other souped-up cars to races (The Driver); Wilson plays his mechanic (The Mechanic).  They pick up a comely hitchhiker played by Laurie Bird (The Girl) and challenge the Warren Oates character (G.T.O.) to a road race from New Mexico to Washington, D.C.

Two-lane Blacktop turned out to be the only feature film for both James Taylor and Dennis Wilson.  Taylor is pretty good in a very laconic role.

Laurie Bird made only three films – Two-lane Blacktop, Cockfighter and Annie Hall.  Having worked as a model, she was cast by Hellman to co-star in Two-lane Blacktop, and soon a romance blossomed between the 41-year-old Hellman and the 18-year-old Bird.  Bird also was the movie’s still photographer.  After Cockfighter,  she moved on from Hellman and became Art Garfunkle’s partner.  Before she turned 26, Laurie Bird committed suicide in the NYC apartment that she shared with Garfunkle.  In her very limited movie career, she proved to be an appealing and natural actress.

The only professional lead actor in Two-lane Blacktop was Oates. Of course, he was perfect for the role of G.T.O., a guy masking his insecurities with aggressive braggadocio.

In Cockfighter, Oates isn’t the foil, he’s the main guy.  But he’s still a low-life, a guy with a cockfighting compulsion that threatens to consume everything he has – his money, his family, his home and his sanity – as he bets more and more on his fighting chickens.  For those of us not intimately familiar with this pastime, Cockfighter is a soup-to-nuts procedural on cockfighting.  Warning:  Cockfighter contains the very definition of animal cruelty- lethal cockfights staged for the camera; (you couldn’t make this movie today).

But the whole reason to watch Cockfighter is Warren Oates’ performance as a guy with too much desperation and not enough luck.  (And Harry Dean Stanton and Laurie Bird are in the movie, too.)

Courtesy of the Criterion Collection, here’s the scene in Two-Lane Blacktop that sets up the car race.

IRRATIONAL MAN: not bad, but empty

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IRRATIONAL MAN
Joaquin Phoenix and Parker Posey in IRRATIONAL MAN

Woody Allen’s latest, Irrational Man, is about a burn-out who revives his joie de vivre by committing a very grave crime, in the process self-administering a shot of metaphorical adrenaline.  That’s all there is in Irrational Man, an entirely plot-driven movie.  Skip it.

To be sure, as one would expect with a Woody Allen movie, it is well-acted.  Joaquin Phoenix plays the kind of iconoclastic academic whose womanizing and drinking was part of his dashing charm until he sagged into middle age.  The ever-lively Parker Posey is a faculty member who is bored with her life and her marriage.  Emma Stone plays the precocious but impressionable coed.  Besides the cast, the best thing about Irrational Man is the music, especially a wonderfully raucous version of The In Crowd by the Ramsey Lewis Trio.

Here’s my discussion on Woody Allen and his filmmaking career.  Despite Irrational Man, I’m a fan.

[SPOILER ALERT:  I don’t understand how it’s possible to make a non-exciting movie scene centered around Russian Roulette, but we don’t even momentarily cringe at this one.  Maybe it’s the combination of having to explain what Russian Roulette IS (to a character who had somehow made it to college without hearing of Russian Roulette), and then having the ONE CHARACTER who we all know is going to make it to the climax of the movie pull the trigger at the mid-point.  Yawn.]

Warren Oates: a gift for desperation

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Warren Oates in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA
Warren Oates in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

I love the character actor Warren Oates for his idiosyncratic performances in the period 1969-74 – and this is Warren Oates Week at The Movie Gourmet.  Friday, I’ll write about the upcoming Oatesathon on Monday night, when Turner Classic Movies will be presenting SEVEN Warren Oates movies.  And next week’s DVD.Stream of the Week will feature two Oates cult classics that TCM will be missing.

Oates was one of those actors whose performances always make an impression.  He could turn a stock Western Bad Guy into a memorable character by adding a touch of cowardice, dimwittedness or venality.  In Barquero, he was formidable enough to go gun barrel-to-gun barrel with Lee Van Cleef for 115 minutes.

Oates had a special gift for portraying desperation, so he triumphed in neo-noirs like Chandler, Cockfighter, The Brinks Job and his crowning achievement, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.  By early 1970s,  the counter-culture was bringing lots of screenplay cynicism and anti-hero roles to the movies – both perfect for Oates.

Warren Oates died in 1982 at age 53.  He has 123 acting credits on IMDb, mostly Westerns.  He was a favorite of directors Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman.  Indeed, he is most well-known for playing one of the Gorch brothers in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Sissy Spacek’s father (blown away by teen punk Martin Sheen) in Terence Malick’s Badlands.

Some of Oates’ best work was in 1974 as the leads in Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Hellman’s Cockfighter.   He was also unforgettable in the offbeat Barquero (1970), Hellman’s Two-lane Blacktop (1971) and Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand (1971).

The 53-minute 1993 documentary Warren Oates Across the Border  includes clips of Oates’ work, along with commentary from his widow Teddy Oates, Hellman, and fellow actors Ned Beatty, Robert Culp, Ben Johnson, Peter Fonda, Stacy Keach and Millie Perkins.  Here it is.

TRUE DETECTIVE: second season sooooo disappointingly lame

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Rachel McAdams in the second season of TRUE DETECTIVE
Rachel McAdams in the second season of TRUE DETECTIVE

So my friend Steve emailed me: “If you include the second season of True Detective in your top ten films of the year you should be required to walk around with a paper bag over your head for at least six months.” He was right – True Detective’s second season was disappointingly lame.

I had high hopes because I loved the first season, and creator Nic Pizolatto returned to write this year’s version. The cast seemed promising, too: the story revolved around three cops (Rachel McAdams, Colin Farrell, Taylor Kitsch) from different agencies investigating a corrupt Southern California city. Vince Vaughn played a shady – and once criminal – businessman, with Kelly Reilly as his wife.

But I never really cared about Kitch’s or Vaughn’s characters. The plot was disjointed and, at time, risible. Pizzolato tried to echo Chinatown’s water scandal with a wholly improbable High Speed Rail scheme. The Wife and I were constantly asking each other “Where are they now?” and “Who is that guy?”. There are many ridiculously impossible coincidence and the like, but I just don’t care enough about True Detective to list them.

Rachel McAdams, forced to wear perhaps this year’s worst hairdo, is very good. So is Farrell, who, as he ages, is more and more compelling in dissolute roles. I always appreciate the chance to see Kelly Reilly – she elevates (almost) everything she’s in.

But the 2015 True Detective is a stinker. Don’t waste your time.

THE GIFT: three people revealed

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Rebecca Hall, Jason Bateman and Joel Edgerton in THE GIFT
Rebecca Hall, Jason Bateman and Joel Edgerton in THE GIFT

The character-driven The Gift is more than a satisfying suspense thriller – it’s a well-made and surprisingly thoughtful film that I keep mulling over.  It’s a filmmaking triumph for writer-director-producer-actor Joel Edgerton, the hunky Australian action star (the Navy Seal leader in Zero Dark Thirty).

Simon (Jason Batemen), a take-no-prisoners corporate riser, has moved back to Southern California with his sweetly meek and anxiety-riddled wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall).  In a chance encounter, they meet Gordo (Edgerton), who knew Simon in high school.  Gordo is an odd duck, but the couple feels obligated to meet him socially when he keeps dropping by with welcome gifts.  At first, The Gift seems like a comedy of manners, as Jason and Robyn try to figure out a socially appropriate escape from this awkward entanglement.  But then, the audience senses that Gordo may be dangerously unhinged, and it turns out that Simon and Gordo have more of a past than first apparent.  Things get scary.

Edgerton uses – and even toys with – all the conventions of the suspense thriller – the woman alone, the suspicious noise in the darkened house, the feeling of being watched.  And there’s a cathartic Big Reveal at the end.

But The Gift isn’t a plot-driven shocker – although it works on that level.  Instead it’s a study of the three characters.  Just who is Gordo?  And who is Simon?  And who is Robyn?  None of these characters are what we think at the movie’s start.  Each turns out to be capable of much more than we could imagine.  I particularly liked Bateman’s performance as a guy who is masking his true character through the first half of the movie, but dropping hints along the way.  Hall is as good as she is always, and Edgerton really nails Gordo’s off-putting affect.

And, after you’ve watched The Gift, consider this – just what is the gift in the title?

LISTEN TO ME MARLON: the pain and the truth in his own words

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LISTEN TO ME MARLON
LISTEN TO ME MARLON

In the documentary Listen to Me Marlon, we hear Marlon Brando relate his life story in his own words – and we ONLY hear Brando’s words. Director Stevan Riley received access to hundreds of hours of audio tapes – self-recording made by Brando while he was alone – and never heard until now. These recordings, along with recorded Brando interviews and clips, are artfully assembled by Riley, and, together, amount to a deep and apparently truthful self-portrait.

Brando was playful and mischievous and often self-important, and the content of his interviews with journalists aren’t that reliable. But it’s clear that he isn’t BSing in these solitary recordings. He is open about his character flaws and their origin in his family background – a brute of a father and a sweet but erratic alcoholic mother.

Speaking in the third person, Brando describes himself as “a troubled man alone…confused”. Listen to Me Marlon is filled with nuggets:

  • On his upbringing: “My father is never going to come near that child (his first son Christian) because of what he did to me”.
  • On his art: “you want to stop that motion from the popcorn to the mouth. The Truth will do that.”
  • On the womanizing that broke up his first marriage “The beast aspect of my personality held sway”.
  • On the execrable Candy: “the worst movie I ever made” (drawing knowing chuckles from the audience).

Some of the tapes even record self-hypnosis as he battles obesity. And there’s a VERY COOL digitized talking Brando head, swirling around in blue pixels as he expounds.

There are also two outtakes where we SEE Brando’s womanizing in action as he comes on to attractive interviewers. We can recognize the instant that, as he says, he starts “thinking with his penis” and launches his flirtatious charm.

I saw Listen to Me Marlon at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it will screen again this week. Director Riley spoke at the screening, as did noted film historian David Thomson and Brando’s children, Rebecca Brando and Miko Brando.

Rebecca Brando credits Riley for the film’s “humanity” as it treats Brando’s “childhood pain”. Miko Brando pointed out that the flashing lights in some clips came from the bio-feedback machine that Brando used at night. “He went to work as a movie star and came home – not a movie star – just a father”, said Miko, who had just seen the film for the second time.

David Thomson spoke of Brando’s “momentous” and truthful Method as the birth of “genuinely American approach to acting” and its effect on cinema: “the method is made for the close-up” because “if you are agonizing over what to say”, the audience needs to be close enough to see it.

Stevan Riley made the most of his access to the tapes – it’s a masterful job of selection and editing.   Listen to Me Marlon opens tomorrow in theaters, and I expect it to eventually play on Showtime.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES – see the real Oscar winner before the Hollywood version

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Ricardo Darin in THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES
Ricardo Darin in THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES

The superb The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) won the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. The Hollywood remake is coming out this fall, but you should first see the original. The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural set in Argentina with two breathtaking plot twists, original characters, a mature romance and one breathtaking, “how did they do it?” shot. The story centers on a murder in Argentina’s politically turbulent 1970s, but most of the story takes place twenty years later when a retired cop revisits the murder.

Veteran Argentine actor Ricardo Darin shines once again in a Joe Mantegna-type role. Darin leads an excellent cast, including Guillermo Francella, who brings alive the character of Darin’s drunk assistant. Darin’s detective is a solitary guy who retracts into his lair to bang away at a novel. He has feelings for his boss, a tough judge played by Soledad Villamil. Her career and her personal life can’t wait for the detective to get his own stuff together. All three characters throw themselves into solving the murder and, when stymied, are all scarred by the lack of resolution.

The movie is titled after one element that I hadn’t seen before in a crime movie.  And then there are the major plot twists.  The final one is a jaw-dropper.

Director Juan Jose Campanella received justifiable praise for the amazing shot of a police search in a filled and frenzied soccer stadium. It ranks as one of the great single shots of extremely long duration, right up there with the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, the kitchen entrance in Goodfellas and the battle scene in Children of Men. This shot alone makes watching the movie worthwhile.

Filmmaker Billy Ray has remade the Argentine film as Secret in Their Eyes, to be released October 23 starring Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Chiwetelu Ejiofor. Ray is no hack – he’s adapted the screenplays for Shattered Glass (which he also directed), Captain Phillips and the first The Hunger Games. The plot has been turned into a story about thee US federal law enforcement officials and the murder of one of their children; unfortunately, the trailer looks more like a plot-driven Law & Order, with none of the characters as singular or as memorable as in the Argentine original. We shall see.

The Secret in Their Eyes is high on my Best Movies of 2010. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixster.

TRAINWRECK: some raunchy laughs and a surprisingly good LeBron James

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Amy Schumer and LeBron James in TRAINWRECK
Amy Schumer and LeBron James in TRAINWRECK

The comedienne (do we still use that word?) Amy Schumer stars in the bawdy comedy Trainwreck as a gal whose childhood trust and intimacy issues have resulted in a chaotic adult life of wall-banging and random guy-banging.  She gives promiscuity a bad name.  When she finally happens on the perfect guy (Bill Hader), will she sabotage this opportunity?  Schumer herself wrote Trainwreck, which was directed by the current king of lowbrow comedy Judd Apatow.

Trainwreck has plenty of LOL moments, and even some shoulder-quaking laughs.  But it’s two hours long, and that’s too long to sustain the basic jokes here.  Trainwreck has jumped the shark before we get to an improbable celebrity intervention and the Madison Square Garden grand finale.

There are some glimpses of comedic genius here and there, including a brilliant take on the all-night male-female argument – the kind where the woman is amped up in a full-throttle rage and the man keeps fighting to stay awake.  Both men and women in the audience were laughing knowingly.

Trainwreck does benefit from a superb cast.  I always love to see Hader and Brie Larson (good but wasted here).  Tilda Swinton bops in for a turn as a supremely confident and self-absorbed boss.  Pro wrestler John Cena is very good as the first boyfriend, a bodybuilder with some denial issues of his own.  And Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei are very funny in a profoundly bad movie-within-the-movie.

But the real revelation here is LeBron James,who is playing himself as best friend of Hader’s character, an orthopedic surgeon.  LeBron is very, very good – just as good as the real actors.  He has an excellent sense of timing and a lot of natural appeal.  There aren’t that many movie roles for 6-foot 8-inch black men, but LeBron can definitely act.  He’s consistently a joy to watch in Trainwreck.

Amy Schumer delivers a lot of raunchy laughs in Trainwreck, just not two hours worth.  It’s definitely not a really good movie, but it will offer an evening of light laughs on home video.

THE GO-GO BOYS: THE INSIDE STORY OF CANNON FILMS: an improbable, wild ride

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The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films
The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films

The two Israeli filmmakers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus had a very wild ride, and the documentary The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films is their improbable story.  Golan began as a director of Israeli films and his cousin Globus (twelve years younger) became his partner; Golan was the idea man and hands-on producer and Globus secured the financing and handled the business deals.  Together, they produced over 150 movies.

In the early 1960s, they were very successful in Israel, producing many Israeli hits, including the Oscar-nominated Sallah, which won the Golden Globe.  Ambitious, they moved to Hollywood and set up shop with a Roger Cormanesque business model – make lots of cheap exploitation movies.  They hurtled to the top of the action movie genre with movies like Death Wish II, American Ninja and The Delta Force.  Along the way, they introduced us to movie ninjas, Claude Van Dam and Chuck Norris.  The Cannon Group’s signature was the simple revenge story, adorned by naked breasts and vivid explosions.  Soon the Cannon Group was making more movies each year than all the Hollywood major studios combined.

What happened? As Icarus, the ever-aspirational Golan began to seek more mainstream credibility by producing art films and big-budget Hollywood fare.  Cannon paid Sylvester Stallone twice his usual fee to star in their arm wrestling movie Over the Top.  Generally, when a company abandons its tried and true business model…Well, you can guess what happened.

I saw The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.  It doesn’t yet have an US theatrical release date, but I’ll try to let you all know when it’s in theaters or available on DVD or streaming.  Be sure to keep watching The Go-Go Boys right through the ending credits.

THE END OF THE TOUR: smartest road trip movie ever

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Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel in THE END OF THE TOUR
Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel in THE END OF THE TOUR

The brilliantly witty and insightful road trip movie The End of the Tour isn’t great because of what happens on the road – it’s great because we drill into two fascinating characters and see how their relationship evolves (or doesn’t evolve).  Leads Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg are both Oscar-worthy, and The End of the Tour is on my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.

In 1996, David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) is a novelist of modest success, having deeply embraced the New York City writer’s scene, and is supporting himself as a  journalist for Rolling Stone Magazine. Suddenly- and out of nowhere – David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) explodes  on the scene with his masterpiece Infinite Jest and is immediately recognized as a literary genius.  Lipsky is confounded by Wallace’s meteoric rise – and jealous and resentful, too.

Lipsky arranges to accompany Wallace on the last few stops of his book tour and record their conversations, so Lipsky can write a profile of Wallace for Rolling Stone.  It’s clear that Lipsky plans to write a sensationalistic celebrity take down – and Wallace is so odd that there’s plenty of ammunition.

All of this REALLY HAPPENED.  Years later, after Wallace’s death, Lipsky wrote a memoir of the encounters, on which the movie is based.  Eisenberg and Segel got to listen to the tapes of the actual conversations between the two.

The End of the Tour is a battle of wits between two very smart but contrasting guys.    Wallace is new to fame, very personally awkward, not at all confident and gloriously goofy; he seems to be an innocent, but he’s VERY smart and not entirely naive.  Lipsky is all Chip On the Shoulder as he probes for Wallace’s weaknesses.  As different as they are, the two are competitive and snap back and forth, verbally jousting for the entire trip.  At one point, Lipsky accuses Wallace of pretending to be not as smart as he is as a “social strategy”.

As funny as is their repartee, it becomes clear that Wallace is inwardly troubled, and clinging to functionality by his fingernails.  Wallace gets more confident and begins to trust Lipsky, but Lipsky is still predatory, glimpsing into Wallace’s medicine cabinet and chatting up an old flame of Wallace’s.  Still, the intimacy of a road trip forces them to share experiences, which COULD become the basis for a bond.

They even share moments of friendship.  But will they become friends?  Is there real reciprocity between them?

Who has the power here? Wallace has the power of celebrity, and dominates Lipsky’s chosen vocation.  Lipsky has the power to destroy and humiliate Wallace.  Ultimately, as we see in the movie, the person who NEEDS the most will cede the power in the relationship.

Director James Ponsoldt has succeeded in making a brilliantly entertaining drama about two smart guys talking.  There’s never a slow moment.   We’re constantly wondering what is gonna happen.  Ponsoldt has already made two movies that I love – Smashed and The Spectacular Now. No one else has made conversation so compelling since the My Dinner with Andre, and The End of the Tour is much more accessible and fun than that 80s art house hit.

Ponsoldt fills the movie with sublime moments.  In one scene, we see the two watching a movie with two female companions.  In the darkened theater, two characters are focused on the screen and two are gazing at others.  It’s a shot of a couple of seconds, nothing happens, and there’s no dialogue – but the moment is almost a short story in and of itself.

For a true-life drama, The End of the Tour is very funny.  The humor stems from situations (the two rhapsodize on Alanis Morisette, of all people), behavior (Wallace’s peculiarities and Lipsky’s limitless snoopiness) and the very witty dialogue.  There’s a classic moment when Lipsky has Wallace talk on the phone to Lipsky’s wife (Anna Chlumsky) and is very uncomfortable with the results.

What is the funniest line in the movie?  Who wins the battle of wits?  And what’s their relationship at the end?  Those questions propel the audience along the smartest road trip movie ever – The End of the Tour.