Only now does it occur to me... FALLING IN LOVE (1984)

Only now does it occur to me... that I must say a few words about the romantic drama FALLING IN LOVE (1984), which, despite being generally forgotten today, seems to have maintained a small but fierce cult following. 

I could tell you that it stars Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, and that they have been occasionally celebrated for their chemistry here despite De Niro coming across as brooding and sinister even in moments like their Christmas meet-cute, whereupon they accidentally collide with heaping bags of Christmas presents including the clichéd "pair of skis with a bow on it," which, I would wager, is gifted far more often in Hallmark movies than in real life.

I could tell you that it's inspired mostly by David Lean and Noel Coward's seminal BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945),

 

which means that the two are already married, and their long-suffering spouses are played by, respectively, MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE's Jane Kaczmarek

and David Clennon ("Palmer" from John Carpenter's THE THING).

 

I could tell you that it features bit parts by Victor Argo (KING OF NEW YORK, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST), Frances Conroy (SIX FEET UNDER, THE AVIATOR), and Kenneth Welsh ("Windom Earle" on TWIN PEAKS), but in larger supporting roles, it manages to completely waste both multi-Oscar winner Dianne Wiest (HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS) 

 and Harvey Keitel (TAXI DRIVER, RESERVOIR DOGS).

They languish in rote The Best Friend™ roles, dramaturgically existing only when they're on screen, to be used as nothing more than generic sounding boards for the protagonists.

But what I want to tell you about FALLING IN LOVE is that one of Streep and De Niro's first dates takes place in Manhattan's iconic Chinatown.

And that said date leads them to a peculiar 1970s arcade, where they are able to place coins in a machine to... play tic-tac-toe against a live chicken.

 

This was clearly a real, found location (the Chinatown Fair on Mott Street), featuring this incredible bit of bizarro entertainment. I love that the chicken makes its moves from a "Thinkin' Booth."

 

 

 

 

 

I love that De Niro gets in an argument with the chicken because it keeps winning.

 

 

 

 

I love that the prize it pays out is supposedly "a large bag of fortune cookies if you beat the chicken."

 

 

I love that when the chicken defeats you, there's a light-up sign announcing, "BIRD WINS."

 

This feels like something out of Werner Herzog's STROZEK (1978), which features the absurdist closing image of a coin-operated "dancing chicken" machine. 

 

This is the unequivocal high point of FALLING IN LOVE, and on this subject, I'm afraid I cannot be swayed.

See also: my thoughts on the animatronic bar fixture "Dirty Gertie" in Robert Altman's THREE WOMEN (1977).

R.I.P., Nicky Katt

R.I.P., David Lynch

 

Only now does it occur to me... MOTHER'S BOYS (1993)

Only now does it occur to me... that MOTHER'S BOYS (1993) deserves its place in the pantheon of scary-campy "diva gone mad" thrillers, a proud tradition stretching at least from 1964's STRAIT-JACKET to 2019's MA.

Picture it: KRAMER VS. KRAMER, THE STEPFATHER, and SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, mashed together and directed by John Waters as a Hitchcockian thriller... and starring Jamie Lee Curtis!

It must be noted that Jamie Lee, in a rare villainous turn, is decked out as if her style icons are Angelica Huston and Annette Bening in THE GRIFTERS: cool sunglasses, dyed blonde hair in a "sea anemone" cut, and the most wicked blazers this side of a Joan Crawford movie. I mean, look at how Queen JLC elevates the pedestrian act of grocery shopping:

JLC plays "Jude," a mother of three who abruptly left her husband (Peter Gallagher) and kids for reasons the screenplay judges as "um, I dunno... unknowable crazy-woman motivations maybe involving a traumatic childhood?" She didn't leave a note, at any rate.

In the three years since, Gallagher's "Robert"––a primo soap opera archetype, the stiff-upper-lip architect dad who's trying to repair his broken heart––has moved on and is dating Joanne Whalley (WILLOW, NAVY SEALS). She is styled like Jeanne Tripplehorn in the thrillers of this era and in no way deserves the inspired madness which is deposited on her doorstep.

You see, Jamie Lee Curtis shows up out of nowhere––and she wants her family back, her Gallagher back, and Joanne Whalley... dead!

She is willing to use raw sexual/elaborately violent schemes to get what she wants, and I must say that this movie truly has a Joe Eszterhas-ian (BASIC INSTINCT, SHOWGIRLS) understanding of human sensuality. 

There are so many ludicrous happenings in this movie that Dame Vanessa Redgrave (!)

is pushed down a flight of stairs by a her grandson

 ––we're talkin' two, full-body flips––

and it's only, like, the fifth most insane thing to happen in this movie.

What are some others, you might ask? I couldn't dream of giving them all away, but I will say that Jamie Lee gets a bathtub masturbation scene as campy as anything in THE PAPERBOY or the Angela Lansbury workout video.

A personal favorite is when she buys a bunch of sugary cereals for her estranged family (on that grocery trip where she looked so fabulous) and, before she can gift them to her children, she sees them out enjoying a nice dinner with Joanne Whalley (the horror!). She does what any sensible hag-horror-heroine would do and drives into the sunset, sob-steering while she flings entire bags of groceries onto the highway.

To me, this is as iconic as the bunny boiling in FATAL ATTRACTION, Bette Davis' outbursts in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE, and the car burning in WAITING TO EXHALE.

There's melodrama for days, and Jamie Lee does a tremendous job, really giving it 110%––

"I'M STILL THEIR FUCKING MOMMA!"

––even when the three screenwriters let it be known that they have the combined psychological maturity of an adolescent boy who caught a double feature of THE CRUSH and POISON IVY on late nite TV after his parents went to sleep. This all works in the movie's favor, I believe.

Oh man, there's a scene where Jamie Lee tries to show her son her c-section scar in a (seductive?) attempt to manipulate him into becoming THE BAD SEED/THE GOOD SON, so... MOTHER'S BOYS is not without its groaners, I suppose.

Ooh, and there's a very proto-FIGHT CLUB bit where Jamie Lee gets into a fight with herself in Joanne Whalley's office

to make it look like Joanne is the crazy one who attacked her. Nice!

The grand finale involves a beautifully absurd scenario wherein Joanne is tied up and put on trial by "Mother's Boys"

and Jamie Lee orchestrates a murder plot which involves cutting the brakes on someone's car and sending out the family dog to make them swerve to their doom

and it's all camp, beyond camp, and it brought many a smile to my lips.

There's a glossy "taking this seriously" workmanship to the direction by Yves Simoneau (BLIND TRUST, BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE) and a solid supporting cast which includes the aforementioned Vanessa Redgrave as Jamie Lee's mom, John C. McGinley (THE ROCK, SCRUBS, SURVIVING THE GAME, OFFICE SPACE) as a hapless biology teacher

and Joss Ackland (THE APPLE, LETHAL WEAPON 2) as a slimy divorce lawyer.

But, as you would assume, the entire project rides on the commitment and charisma of one Jamie Lee Curtis

Check out those fish earrings, a WANDA reference?

who I've now decided is the hero of this picture and will be awarded full custody. MOTHER'S BOYS, ladies and gentlemen.

Only now does it occur to me... PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION (1998)

Only now does it occur to me...  that by PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION, the saga has truly become the "UP" series of horror films. I'm referring to the famous run of Michael Apted documentaries which follow the same set of children as they grown up in increments of seven years (thus far, from age 7 to age 63).

From the first PHANTASM in 1979 to the this fourth installment in 1998, we've watched A. Michael Baldwin, Angus Scrimm, Reggie Bannister, and Bill Thornbury take an entire twenty year journey. (Just wait until I get to 2016's PHANTASM V.) 

A. Michael Baldwin's "Mike" on the same lost highway in 1979...

 

...and 1998.

With PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION, Coscarelli wanted to take the series back to its roots––that is, surrealistic, melancholy horror which is sometimes so abstract as to be impenetrable. 

 

He also discovered a trove of unused footage from the '79 film, which he inserts here in a time travel scenario. Because it was not originally intended to be used for time travel, it can sometimes feel a little bewildering, but often it carries actual emotional weight.

I love that these movies have become so (needlessly?) complicated that there's basically a prestige TV series-style recap at the beginning of each installment. I love that we see the silhouette of the Tall Man's (Angus Scrimm) iconic bob haircut before we see his face. I love that there's three full minutes of impressionistic imagery before a single word is spoken.

In bringing the series back to its roots, the bulk of the film is meditative, quiet, and bizarre, much closer to video art than franchise filmmaking. Make no mistake, PHANTASM IV is "slow cinema," and the primary filming location of Death Valley lends it a sparse and almost cosmic quality.

Aside from a brief Civil War (!) flashback, complete with historical reenactors as extras, we probably encounter no more than seven or eight faces in this film. It feels simultaneously small and vast.

One sequence in particular––supposedly filmed without permits on Wilshire Boulevard, very early on a Thanksgiving morning––gives us a striking vision of an eerily abandoned Los Angeles which feels way above the PHANTASM pay grade.

 

In our time travel plotline, we reacquaint ourselves with the "DUNE lady" fortune teller, not glimpsed or mentioned since part I.

Her character, used in concert with symbolic/metaphysical origin story of the Tall Man

actually manages to provide some satisfying (albeit dream-logical) closure to the mysteries of the first film (and without a single midi-chlorian).

Speaking of STAR WARS, I have often written about the ways in which the PHANTASM and STAR WARS series mirror each other. Here, there's a quite overt moment as Mike wanders Death Valley 

while the Tall Man's minions skitter around behind him––it's a playful carbon copy of a scene where R2-D2 is stalked by Jawas in the original STAR WARS.

 

In any event, this is all pretty classy, and for the most part has shed any of the "action movie"-leanings we saw in PHANTASMs II and III.

...However, Coscarelli can't help himself––he knows that there are PHANTASM phanatics who live and breathe for all four barrels of Reggie the Ice Cream Man (Reggie Bannister), in a performance I routinely describe as, "What if Clint Howard were the last action hero?"

And so there's essentially a disconnected B-storyline where Reggie does what he does best: explode cars (there's an action scene which feels like an extended homage to the MANIAC COP series),

attempt to seduce out-of-his-league women who end up being evil beings in disguise

and participate in jam sessions (now that's a true PHANTASM '79 throwback!).

Indeed, the film's commitment to jammin' Reggie & Co. is so ironclad that the ending credits song, "Have You Seen It,"

is written and performed by Reggie himself... in a band he calls "Reggie 'B' & the Jizz Wailin' Ya' Doggies." 

Yep, there's a whole album

And indeed, to continue the STAR WARS theme, this rather... inauspicious band name, I believe, does not refer to the Ice Cream Man's ejaculate, but rather to the obscure, sad, and extremely cursed STAR WARS factoid that "jazz" in the STAR WARS universe is referred to as "jizz." And that jazz musicians in the STAR WARS universe are called "jizz wailers." Was this unfortunate name intentionally coarse? Who can say.

Whew. I'd rather not leave you on that note. So, in closing, let's simply remember that "This motion picture is protected under the laws of the United States and other countries. Unauthorized duplication, distribution, or exhibition may result in civil liability, criminal prosecution, and... the wrath of the Tall Man."