Movies – Page 3 – Ash Clifton, Writer

R.I.P. Gene Hackman

My parents divorced when I was a little kid. My mom was struggling with mental illness (undiagnosed, at the time) and so I went to live with my father and his new wife, my step-mother Eileen. I saw my mom mostly on the weekends, and we would invariably go to the movies. I probably saw over fifty movies in the theater per year, all with my mom.

I seldom went to the movies with my father, and even more seldomly when it was just the two of us. The last time I remember was in 1992. Eileen was out-of-town with my brother and sister, so Dad and I went to see Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. It’s a great movie, and both my father and I loved it. We especially admired Gene Hackman’s performance as the villainous sheriff Little Bill Daggett, who, as Hackman himself revealed, is a kind of precursor to the modern right-wing movement.

My dad and I went out to dinner after the movie, and we shared our favorite moments from the film. It’s one of my fondest memories. I thought of it this morning when I read that Hackman had died. And I thought of something else, too. It occurred to me that the last movie I saw alone with my mother was also a Gene Hackman film, 1985’s Twice in a Lifetime. It’s about as different a film from Unforgiven as one can possibly imagine, with Hackman playing a completely different kind of character. And yet, it was still Hackman. Still low-key. Still forceful. Still brilliant.

What are the odds that the two last movies I saw with each of my parents alone were both Hackman films? Pretty good, actually. He was in a lot of movies. In fact, you could argue that he was the most versatile, compelling, and attractive character actor in Hollywood history. He played villains and heroes, and everything in between, across genres from action to mystery to sci-fi. In Twice in a Lifetime, he played an unassuming everyman who, on the tail-end of middle-age, leaves his wife to make a new start. He was also Lex Luthor in Superman. And Pop-eye Doyle in The French Connection. And the blind guy in Young Frankenstein.

Being a writer of mysteries, I’m particularly fond of Authur Penn’s 1975 film Night Moves, in which Hackman played a world-weary P.I. searching for a missing girl. It’s one of trademark, understated performances, and yet it crackles with energy. That was his gift.

Godspeed, Mr. Hackman…!!!

The Scientist Hero: Our Newest Cinema Archetype

One of my favorite movies of the last twenty years is Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It’s a science-fiction/adventure movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who becomes stranded on Mars after his comrades leave him for dead. Marooned on a barren, hostile world, he has to use his brains and ingenuity to survive until his friends come back to rescue him. By the end of the movie, he has survived dust storms, explosions, freezing temperatures, and starvation.

How does he overcome all these challenges?

Science.

The story is familiar, of course. It has many antecedents, including with the original stranded-on-an-island novel, Robinson Crusoe, and also (more directly) to a great B-movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars. In that classic 1964 cheese-fest, the hero survives by finding a Martian cave full of air where plants still grow, water still flows, and there’s a steady source of light (which is never explained). He even befriends an alien who is also trapped on the planet.

R.I.P. David Lynch

It has been a week since David Lynch passed away, and many great tributes have already been written about him. I’m tempted to say that I needed a week to process his passing and figure out what I wanted to say about him, but the truth is I was just too damned busy to write anything. In fact, I knew instantly what I wanted to say—simply, that Lynch was a very important person in my life, and in the lives of many of my friends.

I was a college English major in 1986 when Blue Velvet came out, and it hit me and my circle of arty friends like an atomic blast. I already knew of Lynch’s work (I was one of the few kids to see The Elephant Man, and in an actual movie theater, no less), and I knew that he was a director of enormous visual and thematic power. But even I was unprepared for Blue Velvet. On the one hand, it’s a murder mystery, an homage to the noir films of the 1950s in which an unsuspecting suburban kid discovers a hidden world of violence, evil, and, (of course) depraved sexuality. On the other hand, it’s a surrealist vision of the inner world of a modern young man (and, probably, many young women). I was roughly the same age as the main character, Jeffrey Beaumont, in 1986, and so the film had special resonance. I felt like the landscape of my own imagination was a strange blend of the beautiful and the grotesque—often in the same image. And that’s exactly what the film captures, somehow.

What I’m Reading: “Codename Nemo”

( *** Spoilers Below ***)

When most people think of the archetypal techno-thriller writer, they probably think of Tom Clancy. He didn’t invent the genre, but with the publication of his 1984 mega-hit The Hunt for Red October, he took it to a whole new level of mainstream popularity. Henceforth, the pop lit shelves in bookstores and airport gift shops across the countries would be filled with works by Clancy and an army of his imitators.

And why not? The techno-thriller novel combines aspects of several other genres, including “caper” fiction (a group of determined men taking on a seeming impossible mission), science fiction (the “techno” part is often so cutting-edge that it is more like sci-fi), mysteries (there is always a hidden bad guy in the mix), and, of course, thrillers (duh).

I kept thinking of The Hunt for Red October as I read an excellent history book recently, Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and the Elusive Enigma Machine by Charles Lachman. It recounts the fantastical story of a visionary naval captain, Daniel Gallery, who comes up with a hare-brained plan to capture a German U-boat. He developed the idea while stationed at a naval base in Iceland, seeing the damage that U-boats could wreak. He also learned how to sink them.

Perfect Films: “Thief”

Author’s Note: Michael Mann’s first feature film, Thief, is on-sale for dirt-cheap on Prime Video at the moment. So, I thought I’d re-post a short essay I wrote about it on my old blog some years ago. Enjoy!

When my son and I went to New York City over the summer, we stayed in Queens, just a few blocks from the Museum of the Moving Image. We spent most of our time in Manhattan, doing the tourist thing, and I never got around to the seeing the Museum. I regret this, and not only because it’s supposed to be a really cool place.

As fate would have it, I later found out that the film being screened at the Museum that week was Michael Mann’s first feature, Thief. It’s a fabulously entertaining crime thriller starring James Caan (a Bronx native) in one of the best performances of his long career. Caan plays Frank (we never learn his last name), a Chicago businessman by day and a high-end burglar by night. Like many heroes in Mann’s films, Frank is guy with a score to settle; he spent much of his youth in jail on trumped-up charges, and now stealing is his way of making for lost time.

What I’m Reading: “I am Spartacus”

(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.) I don’t want to jinx the man, but the fact that Kirk Douglas still lives is an unmitigated source of joy for me. If you believe, as I do, that movie stars become movie stars because of some internal life-force, whose aura is palpable even when projected onto a silver screen, then Kirk Douglas seems like the best proof of this theory.

At 101, Douglas is a living bridge to Hollywood’s second Golden Age—the 1940s to late 1950s. A bone fide movie start by 1949, Douglas was, along with other mavericks like Burt Lancaster, one of the first major actors to become a power-player in his own right. In an era when the Hollywood studio system traded actors like cattle, he formed his own studio and made his own films. He fostered young writers and directors—most notably, a brilliant, aloof young filmmaker named Stanley Kubrick.

Ten Things I Love About “Forbidden Planet”

Author’s Note: A few days ago I saw that a remake of the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet is in the works. So, I thought I’d repost a short essay I wrote about it some years back on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes. Enjoy!

The first DVD I bought was Blade Runner. The second was Forbidden Planet. This latter film is a science fiction classic from Hollywood’s second golden age, 1956 (the same year that John Ford’s landmark film The Searchers was released). Perhaps the definitive pulp sci-fi movie, it’s got everything you might expect: stalwart heroes, spaceships, lasers, aliens, a teen-aged hottie, a mad scientist, and even a talking robot.

And monsters, of course. Monsters from the Id.

Ever since I first saw Forbidden Planet on TV when I was kid, I’ve loved it. Here are ten reasons why…

1.) Altair IV

Forbidden Planet is, to my knowledge, the first Hollywood movie to depict human beings landing a spaceship on a planet of another star. This was a fairly landmark achievement in the history of science fiction cinema, made even better by the film’s two art directors, Cedric Gibbons and Arthur Lonergan. In their vision, Altair becomes a green- and blue-tinged desert, not unlike that of John Ford’s American Southwest. Considering this was done with matte paintings and other pre-CGI effects, it’s amazing how good the landscapes are, so desolate and full of foreboding. It’s a prefiguration of all the wild worlds of Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on, yet to come.

What I’m Listening To: “Sorcerer”

One of my favorite films of all time is Michael Mann’s first feature, 1981’s Thief. That movie was not only the beginning of my life-long love of Mann’s movies, but also with the soundscapes of the German band Tangerine Dream, who composed the score.

When I saw the movie, I had never heard of Tangerine Dream, and thus had no idea that they were one of the iconic avant-guarde bands of the 1970s, producing legendary albums like Phaedra and Zeit. All I knew was their music was hypnotic and unbelievably powerful.

In fact, Tangerine Dream was sort of the Hans Zimmer of their day, creating some of truly great soundtracks. One of their other great scores was for William Friedkin’s 1977 suspense film Sorcerer. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out. Nominally a thriller, it’s about four guys from totally different backgrounds, all hiding in out from the law in South America. When a local oil platform catches fire, the guys are offered a big payday if they will drive two trucks full of leaky nitroglycerin through the mountains to put the fire out. That’s the stated plot of the film. I have a theory, however, that its really about four guys who are in hell and just don’t realize it yet. They all have much to atone for, and each suffers and grows (or fails to grow) in his own way.

The score brilliantly evokes that sense of menace and evil that lies just around the corner. It’s a great piece to listen to when you’re in a dark and somewhat demented state of mind (or if you want to be in one, for whatever reason).

R.I.P. Teri Garr

There is a great tradition in American comedy of very smart women playing very dumb women (usually, dumb blonds). It goes back to at least the 1930s with the duo of George Burns and Gracie Allen, and probably much further than that.

So, it’s not terribly surprising that the brilliant actress Teri Garr was best known for playing a stereotypical “dumb blond”. Specifically, she played Inga, Dr. Frankenstein’s (that’s FRAH-ken-steen‘s) lab assistant in Mel Brooks’s classic Young Frankenstein. The film is one of the funniest ever made, and Garr’s performance is one of the funniest things in it. It’s a masterpiece of physical humor, timing, and delivery, not to mention a great, fake German accent.

The doc falls in love with her by the end of the film, and the same can be said for many of the viewers. It’s safe to say that the film wouldn’t have been half as good without her.

Godspeed, Ms. Garr…!!!

Five Great Movies about the Press

I’ve been meaning to write a post listing some great movies about the press. Normally, I would make this a “top-10” list, but the fact is that I couldn’t think of that many, unless I resorted to some cheating (yes, Citizen Kane involves the muckraking journalism of the early 1900s, but you can’t really call it a movie about the press). So, here’s my list, from great to greatest…

The Paper

Ron Howard’s 1994 film The Paper focuses on one frantic day in the newsroom of a major metropolitan newspaper. The day begins with a high-profile murder, for which two young African-American men are arrested. Michael Keaton, Glenn Close, and Robert Duvall are the editors who are fighting to uncover the truth—before deadline. The Paper is a bit broad compared to the other entries on my list, but it’s still a fine movie with a great story.