The 2403rd Star – Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) passed away the other day. He made it to 74, who would have thought?

The thing about Hopper for me has always been his ability to hook your attention – even when the quality of the movie might not be … well, you know – stellar.

Hopper’s career was chequered, to say the least. You got the feeling that occasionally he just needed to pay the rent, and I can respect that. There’s no shame in working.

When he was good, on the other hand, he was really good. Some performances stand out by a country mile: Easy Rider (1969) and Blue Velvet (1986) being the ones that pretty much everybody remembers.

But there’s also the very young and clean-faced Goon in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the surprisingly funny Huey Walker in Flashback (1990) opposite Kiefer Sutherland. Hopper’s performance as the father in Rumble Fish (1983) is one of my personal favourites, it seems so effortless. Then again there’s the scene between Hopper and Christopher Walken where they discuss the heredity of being Sicilian in True Romance (1993) which still gives me a big happy. Apocalypse Now (1979) is one of those performances that makes perfect sense too, the crazed gleam in Hopper’s eyes probably not all the way an act.

There’s also Hoosiers (1985), The Indian Runner (1991), Paris Trout (1991), The Osterman Weekend (1983), The American Friend (1977) and Basquiat (1996).

Then, on the other hand … Waterworld (1995), Super Mario Bros. (1993) and Firestarter 2: Rekindled (2002) aren’t exactly shining moments for anyone involved. Like I say – sometimes you just got to pay the rent.

Hopper also directed. Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971) – which was a spectacular failure. Out of the Blue (1980), Colors (1988), Catchfire (1990), The Hot Spot (1990), Chasers (1994) and the short Homeless (2000).

If you look at his career as an actor, he worked with some of the very best directors, and if you look at what he did as a director he worked with some spectacular actors. Directors include Sam Peckingpah, Robert Altman, David Lynch, Sean Penn, Julian Schnabel, Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Ray, George Romero and Wim Wenders. That’s a whole hell of a lot of talent all around.

Hopper also collected modern art and exhibited his own photography and painting.

Squandered talent always kind of angers me and Hopper was lucky in a way that he didn’t fall from grace completely, succumbing to substance abuse early in his career. He did abuse his fare share of substances there for a while, though, and got a sharp awakening and cleaned up his act.

Some actors have this ability to tap into a real dark streak, mainlining something close to evil, and Hopper is one of them. He has been the good guy too, the tough cop, all that, but he is just more in command of the stage when the darkness bleeds through.

Like with most creative souls there’s a restlessness, a sense that there is never world enough, or time. A feeling that you have to rage against the dying of the light. In his best moments Hopper gave the viewer all that and a feeling that there was an active intelligence at work behind it.

I asked around amongst my less film enthusiastic acquaintances about Hopper when the news of his death became public. I asked what they remembered seeing him in, what they thought of him, and the funny thing to me was that no one seemed to like him much. I just went “huh?” because, man I didn’t get that. I guess it makes sense that you don’t like him if all you’ve seen is Blue Velvet, because Booth is not a very likeable guy. Hopper played bad guys, like Booth or Paris Trout, with so much fire and honesty, that it makes sense.

In Apocalypse Now the Photojournalist dances about like a mad monkey on speed, lost in the jungle in so many ways and he delivers the following lines about Kurtz to Marlow: “What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans, man? That he had wisdom? Bullshit, man!”

And there it is.

There was more to him, though.

Hopper’s character Father in Rumble Fish has this lovely dialogue with Rusty James;

-Every now and then, a person comes along, has a different view of the world than does the usual person. It doesn’t make them crazy. I mean… an acute perception, man… that doesn’t, that doesn’t make you crazy.
-Could you talk normal?
-However sometimes… it can drive you crazy, acute perception.
-I wish you’d talk normal ’cause I don’t understand half the garbage you’re saying. You know? You know what I mean?
-No, your mother… is not crazy. And neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother crazy. He’s merely miscast in a play. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river… with the ability to be able to do anything that he wants to do and finding nothing that he wants to do. I mean nothing.

That is one of my favourite pieces of dialogue for whatever strange and intangible reason. It has to do with the setting, the pitch of Hoppers voice and the earnestness, the slight exasperation and the honesty with which he delivers it. Hopper’s character’s rumpled suit, his greasy hair, the stubble and the signs of neglect, all of it tells the story of a man with a sharp intelligence who has fallen from grace and lost his footing due to heartache and heavy drinking.

Hopper doesn’t so much sell a performance as live it.
And that’s how I will remember him.

Mule

Kathryn Who?

Kathryn who?

Back in the day, when I was a younger brute, I wrote a academic essay about Kathryn Bigelow.

It was preceded by a couple of papers, mostly dealing with dystopic themes in Strange Days, female action directors and things of that nature.

The huge, big essay was all about the nature of the vampire myth in Near Dark. It also dealt with concepts found in Bigelow’s work, such as genre, gender, conventions thereof and stylistic traits.

Oh, yeah, I went through all that.

Mostly though, I remember people saying “Kathryn who?” when I told them what I was working on. Bigelow, I would say. Bi-ge-low. Strange Days? No? Blue Steel? Point Break? And usually at Point Break people would say “oh, that Keanu Reeves movie, with the surfing and stuff?”

Yes, that movie. That movie with Keanu Reeves in a wetsuit, yes. And then people would say something along the lines of her movies being bad, or they would comment on the fact that she was a female action director and why would a woman want to do the same thing as a male director anyway – and right about there is where I would start feeling my aneurism tick a countdown right up to the big ka-boom.

It’s true that her movies have this unsettling quality, something along the lines of those murky morals I like so much. Yes, there is always a precedent for everything. And yes, there is more to her movies than big guns and Keanu Reeves in a wetsuit.

The most subtle wranglers of genre convention leave the viewer with that slightly askew feeling that there was something going on there that they didn’t really catch. Bigelow does that. She will give you bad guys so interesting that they themselves forget to be bad. She will give you good guys with enough blood on their hands and such objectionable habits that they could easily cross the line.

The casting choices are always just as interesting. The way she cherry picked the vampires in Near Dark from the crew of Aliens, for instance. Or, Ralph Fiennes as Lenny Nero in Strange Days. It’s just… yeah, interesting.

Personally I think K-19: The Widowmaker is not the most successful movie she’s directed, but looking at the controversy surrounding it, I can see that unsettled feeling was at work there too. For all the things said about it, it was still an American movie about a Russian submarine. As a result directors and producers of K-19 were allowed inside the Russian naval base at the Kola Peninsula as the first Western civilians ever. You can’t tell me that’s not something. I don’t know what, exactly, but something. And it’s a skilfully directed movie about submarine warfare. Directed by a woman.

Strong female characters always abound in Bigelow’s movies, whether it is Vita (Louise LeCavalier) kicking Lenny Nero’s ass, or Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) wearing a lacy bra under her crisply ironed police uniform. The women are not victims, unless they are victims of their circumstance, like the Christenson’s in The Weight of Water. There is really no need to debate that strength, it seems to be pretty much a given, and that’s not something you can say lightly, especially in the action genre.

And now there’s The Hurt Locker. And a whole lot of controversy – is it or isn’t it like that? War? Is it supposed to be like that, look like that? I seem to recall that line of thinking and questioning around another war movie, Apocalypse Now. And there’s controversy on weather the movie should have won at all with Avatar out there. The Oscars aren’t just a popularity contest, people. It’s not just about how many tickets you’ve sold and how much money you’ve made.

Not that that’s not a part of it, sure.

But there is more to it. Thankfully.

So – 6 Oscars, 72 wins and 46 nominations.

Forgive my smirk, I can’t help but feeling a little vindicated.
Where have you been? Is all I can say.
And now I won’t have to answer that “Kathryn who?” anymore.
And it’s Ms. Bigelow to you heathens if you’re only just now joining the party.

Mule

Public Enemies – Dillinger, fedoras and Tommy guns

Public Enemies (2009) directed by Michael Mann stars Johnny Depp as Dillinger, Jason Clark (Red), Stephen Dorff (Homer Van Meter), Channing Tatum (Pretty Boy Floyd), James Russo (Walter), Christian Bale (Melvin Purvis), Billy Crudup (J. Edgar Hoover), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Stephen Graham (Baby Face Nelson), Lili Taylor (Sheriff Lillian Holley), Giovanni Ribisi (Alvin Karpis) and Branka Katic (Anna Sage).

It starts with a prison escape. It is fast and vicious and goes badly wrong as one of the escapees gets shot and never makes it out, left hanging on to Dillinger’s hand while dying as the get away car speeds off. That sets the tone.

This is one of those movies that is going to leave people a little puzzled. I have had that feeling quite a few times when watching Michael Mann’s work. I had it with Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995) and with The Insider (1999). Mann has this obvious thing about surface and visuals and it snags your attention, but you have to be cautious about that kind of thing. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

In Heat there is a specific scene, just a flash of seconds really, where Neil (Robert DeNiro) puts his gun down on a glass tabletop. Ten years later I can call up that scene and that sound with almost perfect recall. It’s a matter of texture and precision and a certain indulgence on the directors part, I suppose. It didn’t propel the action forwards or have any meaning in the larger sense, but it still left an imprint on this viewer that won’t go away.

Here we are dealing with a lead character that a lot of people will have heard of, at least to some extent. We also have a cast of spectacularly good actors, like in Heat and Manhunter (which I still say is the better version of that particular narrative, despite The Silence of the Lambs). There is always going to be the sense that the actors weren’t used to their full potential.

It’s 140 minutes long. It could easily have been twice that to my mind.

The era, the 1930s, lends itself beautifully to the big screen. The guys are in suits and fedoras, the girls are in pretty dresses, the cars have running boards and the weapon of choice is the Tommy gun. If you’ve seen the still frames, you know what I mean. This is as visually appealing as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

We are also dealing with “real life”, although many small facts have been altered to fit the narrative here better. Despite that anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the lead character knows that he was shot to death by the FBI, actually on the night of July 22 in 1934. So we know how this is going to end right from the get go.

It sets up a sense of foreboding and inevitability right from that first prison break. That makes this a grim story for a lot of different reasons. There is also less of a glorification of the bank robbers than you would expect. They take hostages on their way out of banks in order to not get shot at by the law, and even though they mostly leave those people unharmed, they still use them as human shields, which must leave them deeply traumatized.

The representatives of the law are likewise not particularly easy to sympathize with. Hoover seems wound extremely tight and his go-to guy, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) is a very serious young man. There is a rather unpleasant scene where Dillinger’s girl Billie gets slapped around by a G-man, and that leaves you feeling a little nauseous, despite how delicately it is handled.

When Dillinger’s body was lying in the street outside the Biograph theater, many onlookers dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood as a souvenir. This movie doesn’t do that exactly, but it gives you that same sense of distance, surface and grim interest.

It’s not hard to like a movie as consistent and as visually pleasing as this one. There are some very, very good actors at the core of it, the beautiful and talented Marion Cotillard, Johnny Depp playing a more subtle character than I have seen him do in a while, Christian Bale being a supporting actor and so on and so forth with guys like Billy Graham and Giovanni Ribisi.

If you are looking for a caper movie or an action movie, this is not the thing to watch. This is more of a character study. Many of the locations, like the lodge at Little Bohemia in Manitowish are the actual locations where scenes from Dillinger’s life took place. Rumour has it shell casings from that gunfight between the FBI and Dillinger’s gang can still be found in the woods surrounding the lodge. As a character study, though, it takes liberties with the truth as it has been documented.

I highly recommend it, none the less. I recommend it for the obvious tension in the narrative, for the visuals and the stellar cast. My only caution is that the fewer preconceived notions you have of what kind of movie this is the better you will fare and the more you will enjoy it.

Mule

The Hard Word

The Hard Word (2002) directed by Scott Roberts is a an Australian heist movie starring Guy Pearce as Dale, Damien Richardson as Mal and Joel Edgerton as Shane, the three Twentyman brothers. When the movie starts the three brothers are in jail. The warden, their crooked lawyer, Frank (Robert Taylor) and the police are working together so every once in a while the brothers are let out to rob a bank, or a bookie, or whatever target seems suitable.

To make things a little more complicated Dale’s wife Carol (Rachel Griffiths) is cheating on Dale with Frank. Carol comes across as a misguided gold digger, but with a severly shrewd bent.

Okay, so first of all – I really like the idea of an Australian heist movie. It’s got a different look and feel from the American ones, and that comes across really well. Sydney and Melbourne are the main locations, apart from the prison. The dynamic between the brothers is played well, with each of them true to their specific attributes.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Guy Pearce look scruffier, and it works really well.

The action is also works well to a certain point. It’s a pretty classic escalation with the three brothers caught in a situation they can’t get themselves out of. The jobs get progressively bigger, hunting that ‘big score’ that’s going to let them retire.

Dale’s treacherous wife and their crooked Frank the crooker lawyer are in no way lovable, but the quality of the acting makes their interaction at least understandable.

The brothers are sympathetic though, all the way through. The reason they’re allowed to continue their activities is basically because they’re good at what they do and no one gets hurt when they rob people. The last big score is one of those things, though, that requires more people and takes place outside their normal zone of operations and it does, predictably, go wrong.

I’m not going to give away the ending, save to say that this is one of those movies that actually ends twice.

The brothers lose their money, they get ripped off by Frank (and to some extent Carol) and that’s where all this could have ended. It doesn’t though. And that’s too bad.

I get the feeling that we like the Twentyman brothers a little too much to leave them high and dry, so there is a happy ending, after a fashion. But it feels more like an afterthought than a planned ending, if you catch my drift.

The strong points are basically the characterizations and the fact that you get the sense that these are actual people rather than stereotypes. There’s not a lot of hard talk without any follow up and there are a million little details that are really great – like the fact that one of the brothers gets food poisoning from sausages cooked special for him on his birthday in prison, and because of that they almost miss the big job in Melbourne. It’s just one of those stupid things that could happen and that adds a sense of reality to a movie like this one.

I’d recommend it for that alone. It manages to give a unique feel to a movie that could have been terribly trite and tiresome.

Mule