How Does His Hair Look?

There are always two opposing ways to judge a Nic Cage movie. (1) Whether Hammy Nic or Restrained Nic, did he and the right director click? (2) How is his hair? No doubt about it, Bangkok Dangerous, which features Restrained Nic as an assassin named Joe London (genius character name, huh?), has our boy in top-notch hair mode—a horse mane peopled with thick stringy black threads drooping down. Sadly the directorial connection is more fizzle than sizzle, as the Hong Kong Pang Brothers, Danny and Oxide, trot out every bit of whooped-up firepower they can muster, but the movie exacts nothing new, it’s just another version of the same old Hollywood action yawn. Maybe the most off-putting aspect of this stillborn actioneer is the visage that lies beneath the excellent hair-Cage’s face seems frozen in a sort of perpetual voodoo nap, neither alive or dead, neither engaged nor zoning away, its as if he’s lost in the midst of counting all the dough thrown away towards his services in his latest ride on the bad film express.

Cool Hand Newman

While Stuart Rosenberg’s directorial career only held a few highlights (Pocket Money, The Drowning Pool, The Pope of Greenwich Village), he knew well how to work with actors, particularly Paul Newman, who he directed four times, and teamed-up with to make his finest picture, Cool Hand Luke (1967, Warner, 126 minutes, $19.97). Newman is at the height of his powers here, utilizing a physicality equal to Brando’s combined with the wistful soulfulness of James Dean and the outsiderness of Montgomery Clift. Rosenberg and master cinematographer Conrad Hall make sure we don’t miss the Luke/Newman–as-Christ figure implications, but they also combine for an array of visual flourishes that only serve to make this prison/rebel tale more full-bodied. Of course, those of us going through adolescence when this became a television fixture will never forget three of it’s major scenes: the one-on-one scrape up between Newman and Kennedy, the egg-eating contest, and the nerve-tingling country-girl-washing-car-sequence. Any filmgoer worth his or her salt should immediately conjure up both the cadence and the flavor of Strother Martin’s unforgettable line: “What we have here is failure to communicate.”

Japanese Neo-Noir

While High and Low (1963, Criterion, $40, 143 minutes) a quiet, complex, but highly intense neo-noir is not an acknowledged masterpiece, it still shows one of cinema’s finest, Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, operating on all cylinders. The one and only Toshiro Mifune plays a heavily mortgaged old-school factory boss who is faced with the dilemma of opting to pay ransom for his chauffeur’s son, mistakenly kidnapped instead of his own. The film opens with a series of static scenes confined to Mifune’s elite high rise digs that play out with high import, but as the cops-and-robbers plot bleeds into a finely drawn character portrait and a simultaneous acute social commentary, the movie opens up and the pace quickens; the film’s formalized opening subtly nods to the staid Japan of old while the second half trips along the surface of a far more chaotic modern world. Kurosawa’s exposition is unbelievably crisp and the movie plays on with an artful wholeness, a genre piece that tip-toes through the rigidity and permutations of both Japanese contemporary culture and century-old codes while casting a gray shadow of moral complexity.

Rebaked Beans

Roger (King of the B’s) Corman’s original 1975 Death Race 2000, directed with funky eye-winking aplomb by Paul Bartel, was one of those types of future schlockfests that wore it’s self-awareness on it’s gory and greasy sleeves. It was all vroom-vroom, wink-wink, and ha-ha while the cloud of marijuana smoked wafted through the midnight showing. Watching the movie again, it remains a cult treasure, lean, mean, and propelled by a deadpan tone that mocks itself at every B-movie cliché and corner. Corman is listed as one of the multiple producers of his movies’ remake, now simply Death Race, and he has cannily connected himself with writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson, a contempo schlockmeister proudly responsible for the vidgame-to-movie crap classics Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat. Anderson whips through the remake with a rat-a-tat-tat breeziness, with stone headed Jason Statham in the role originated by the forever cool David Carradine, surprisingly helped out by A-listers Joan Allen and Ian MacShane, both juicily slumming on the B-side. It’s a trifle, and no way as much cheeky fun as the original, but it’s a totally entertaining trifle.

Dead Man Acting

Overlong, extremely ponderous, straining towards artfulness, and irritatingly murky, I (among the few I guess), found filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s latest go at the Batman franchise, The Dark Knight, largely disappointing. Despite Nolan’s talents, the movie seems to disdain narrative coherency (characters float in and out, scenes buck up short without achieving any dramatic frisson, while screwing the lid down tighter seems to be the only impetus for the storytelling arc), but the grisly rawness of the tale plus the cutting edge editing make a patented arty downer hiding under the colorful umbrella of box office boffo. All that is, except for Heath Ledger’s virtuosic and exquisitely calculated turn as the Joker. Imbued with a whole extra tone as one of the infamous (and infrequent) cases of a Dead Man Acting, Ledger, wobbling frantically, caked in white powder, muttering maniacally, manages to steal the movie without veering into hammy grandstanding. His full-blown anarchic spirit sticks in yer brain even as the movie dissolves from its own highbrow calculatedness.

Bottom Feeder Time

Weasel. Worm. Rodent. Nightcrawler. Chipmunk. Independent Man. They are all the same. John DePetro, that bastion of radio wisdom, the man with the most acute case of the Napoleonic complex in all of Rhode Island, the guy who has his daily swim around the bottom of the barrel airwaves publicly everyday while he lies heavily at the lowermost of local radio popularity pulls a sixth grade cheating move with the Arbitron ratings and unbelievably lets his wife take the bullet. Funny as it is (didn’t the little fella look screamingly hilarious offering up his pale-faced mea culpa on the local TV news spots?) it’s simultaneously sad and sickening. Since WPRO, in their infinite wisdom (any buzz is good buzz right?), is allowing Mr. Standup to use his tiny feet and tap dance over his wife’s prone body, they ought give him a new grabber of a nickname. How bout Little Johnny Emasculation? Or John “No Balls” DePetro? Those who mistakenly listened to his show of shows have always known he was a low rent circus clown, but we never realized what a truly pathetic creature he’d become.

He Had the Feelin'

Nice title--I Got the Feelin’: James Brown in the 60’s (2008, Shout Factory, $40, 3-discs), and while one of the concerts featured in this three disc set, Man to Man-James Brown Live at the Apollo Theater in 1968, offers a valuable and entertaining look at Soul Brother Number One, it is the documentary The Night James Brown Saved Boston that literally demands a viewing. Brown happened to be scheduled to play the Boston Garden on April 5, 1968, one day after the fatal shooting of Martin Luther King Jr., causing much consternation to the Boston Brahmins and Mayor Kevin (Very) White, as other urban centers had broken out with rioting and they feared bringing a large group of African-Americans into the heart of the city would spell big trouble. Somehow the wise decision was made for Brown to play and to simultaneously televise the gig over the bluest of airwaves, TV public channel WGBH. Brown is magnetic, and in full bloom as a dancing, sweating, talking contradiction: capital seeking artist, dynamic performer, and inner city ambassador, and the performance footage is mesmerizing, particularly when The Godfather of Soul steps in front of the glinty-eyed policemen patrolling the stage and cools out the crowd. For those that only know Brown through the myriad sampling of his oeuvre in hip-hop, this is a must see, and the DVD’s bonus footage includes his incendiary and forever classic T.A.M.I. Show appearance.