Only now does it occur to me... CLEOPATRA JONES (1973)

Only now does it occur to me.... that Shelley Winters' name––writ in the 'CLEOPATRA JONES font' and projected against a Tatooine-esque Turkish landscape––might have inspired the iconic STAR WARS main title.

This was 1973, a full two years before STAR WARS went into production, and while font designer Suzy Rice has explained her influences, isn't it possible that some subliminal memory of seeing Shelley Winters' name so stylishly depicted could have played a small role in one of the most recognizable movie fonts ever made? I'm gonna go ahead and say yes, because it makes me happy.

A few quick thoughts on CLEOPATRA JONES and why it's worth your time: Tamara Dobson (CHAINED HEAT, NORMAN... IS THAT YOU?) is Cleopatra Jones, a fabulous, kung fu-savvy, dirtbike enthusiast, stunt-driver, crack shot DEA Agent who is introduced to us while overseeing an air strike on poppy fields in Turkey.


 It's a special breed of film that begins with exploding flowers.

Later, we learn she has a ridiculous customized Corvette Stingray (see also: Mark Hamill's in CORVETTE SUMMER) with low-key U.S. Government vanity plates

and a specially-built hydraulic roof that automatically lifts up when she opens her door so that her afro remains unmussed.

Her boyfriend is the sensitive community organizer Bernie Casey (THE RUNNING MAN, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH),

pictured here, as he should be, in an amazing glamour headshot that happens to be decorating Cleo's wicked bachelorette pad/lounge.

Her nemesis is Shelley Winters as the drug kingpin, "Mommy" (to whom the aforementioned Turkish poppy fields belonged), a raging, racist, lesbian who wears a different wig in every scene and delivers a high-hag horror-worthy performance, chewing not merely the scenery, but entire tableaux, co-stars and all.

And yes, on the far right, that is perennial 1970s/Charles Bronson-baddie, Paul Koslo,

whose own, humble, scenery-chewing skills cannot compete with the mistress.

Elsewhere, we have Cleopatra Jones laying down some JCVD-style, high-kicking smack 

on Bruce Glover-lookalike and DELIVERANCE rapist Bill McKinney...

...we have one of the finest comebacks in film history from character actor legend Antonio Fargas (FOXY BROWN, SHAFT) who, when asked if he is willing to cross Shelley Winters' "Mommy" responds:




...and finally, I must tip my hat to a film that not only has the balls to make Shelley Winters its lead villain in a performance that might prompt even Divine to advise "maybe you should tone it down a notch," but also is bold enough to end with a show-stopping kung fu battle/fistfight between Shelley and Tamara Dobson.

Amen.

Film Review: LOOSE CANNONS (1990, Bob Clark)

Stars: ? of 5.
Running Time: 94 minutes.
Tag-line: "A comedy with personality... lots of them."
Notable Cast or Crew: Gene Hackman (THE CONVERSATION, UNFORGIVEN), Dan Aykroyd (DOCTOR DETROIT, GHOSTBUSTERS, DRIVING MISS DAISY), Dom DeLuise (THE CANNONBALL RUN, MUNCHIE), Ronny Cox (ROBOCOP, TOTAL RECALL, DELIVERANCE), Robert Prosky (CHRISTINE, LAST ACTION HERO, GREMLINS 2), Paul Koslo (VANISHING POINT, FREEBIE AND THE BEAN, ROBOT JOX), Leon Rippy (STARGATE, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER), David Alan Grier (IN LIVING COLOR, JUMANJI), Tobin Bell ("Jigsaw" in the SAW movies), Bill Fagerbakke (Mick Garris' THE STAND, SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS).  Music by Paul Zaza (PROM NIGHT, PORKY'S).  Written by Richard Matheson (THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, I AM LEGEND, THE TWILIGHT ZONE), Richard Christian Matheson (THREE O' CLOCK HIGH, AMAZING STORIES), and Bob Clark (BLACK CHRISTMAS, A CHRISTMAS STORY, PORKY'S).
Best One-liner: "Humpty Dumpty's back on the wall!"

How do we imagine our art will be digested?  At the perfect time and place, by the perfect audience?  When I was eleven years old, I watched AMERICAN GRAFFITI, because I loved George Lucas and his STAR WARS.  I liked it, but didn't really get it.  I wasn't old enough.  Saw it again when I was nineteen.  I was beginning to understand.  Take Noah Baumbach's KICKING AND SCREAMING: it's a film about listless college graduates entering the real world.  I rented it with my friends, on VHS, the last week of college before commencement.  We loved it, but I didn't realize how hard it could hit until I watched it four months later, scraping along in a dirty, rented room.  I don't think they should assign THE GREAT GATSBY to high school kids.  I don't think you can properly unravel it until you've had a dream and tried to chase it.
Naturally, all of this begs the question: when is the proper time to watch LOOSE CANNONS?

LOOSE CANNONS purports to be a loose and zany collection of scenes arranged into a buddy cop comedy involving split personalities.

Indeed, the film itself suffers from multiple personality disorder: it is produced by Aaron Spelling and René Dupont; the former built a television empire founded on garish, bourgeois romantic fantasy (THE LOVE BOAT, MELROSE PLACE, DYNASTY, BEVERLY HILLS 90210, SUNSET BEACH, etc.) and the latter produced films for Charles Chaplin and Stanley Kubrick (A KING IN NEW YORK and LOLITA, respectively).  It is written by horror/sci-fi legend Richard Matheson (who wrote some of the best TWILIGHT ZONES and serious novels like SOMEWHERE IN TIME and WHAT DREAMS MAY COME) and his son, Richard Christian Matheson.  It is directed and co-written by Bob Clark, who brought us family fare like A CHRISTMAS STORY, teen sex comedies like PORKY'S, holiday slashers like BLACK CHRISTMAS, and indescribable musical trainwrecks like RHINESTONE.  It stars an A-list dramatic actor (Gene Hackman) and a (then) A-list comedic actor (Dan Aykroyd).

It co-stars Dom DeLuise and an entire battery of "that guy!" character actors from gritty crime flicks of the 70s and 80s.  It features a soundtrack from Paul Zaza, who oversaw the horror-disco-sanity of PROM NIGHT.  The plot involves Nazi sex tapes and S&M and one-liners and mental illness––hey, what is this, anyway?  Who was this made for?  Who was meant to digest it? And when? 

In 1990, Siskel and Ebert described it as "the cop-buddy comedy that hits new lows in an undisputed field."  It was a financial failure, recouping only $5 million of a $15 million budget.  In 2015, it holds a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.  As far as I know, it has not secured a cult following in the interim, even among bad movie aficionados.  For twenty-five years, unmoored, adrift, LOOSE CANNONS has not found its audience.  It has not yet discovered its proper time and place.  How does one judge such a film?  I'm not even quite sure it is a film; it may very well be a ghost on the haunt.

Gene Hackman's cat is named "Camus."  Dan Aykroyd is afraid to go to an S&M club, "not that I'm a Trudy Prudy or anything like that."

Do we blame this for EXIT TO EDEN? 

The club has go-go dancers wearing KISS-style body paint and this is distressing to Dan Aykroyd.

Aykroyd says "I always annoy people.  I don't mean to."  It is something of an understatement.

At different points throughout the film, Aykroyd "becomes" The Road Runner, Scotty for STAR TREK, The Cowardly Lion, and The Wicked Witch.  It is explained that he is only this way because he was tortured by a Columbian named "Armando."

We, however, were tortured by a Canadian named Aykroyd?

Aykroyd and Hackman drive around in a battered old station wagon full of kitty litter.

 "I have a hole in my ass."  ––"That's why they call you an asshole!"
 
Later, the station wagon smashes into a stack of crates filled with chickens.

 Gene Hackman wields a blunderbuss.
 
Dom DeLuise appears, looking like latter-day Orson Welles, wearing a King of Hearts costume

and, later, vests made from the upholstery of grandmothers' couches.

He exclaims "They're fucking with the wrong Jew this time!"

This is because he's involved in a international conspiracy searching for a snuff/pornographic/ritual sex-suicide film starring Adolf Hitler and the guy (Robert Prosky) who's going to be the next German chancellor.


"I saw a movie, XXX-style, only this one starred Hitler and a couple of other guys!" 

Paul Koslo plays a Nazi, who waves a gun around and does Nazi things.

Ronny Cox plays an FBI handler, who sure has his hands full with these two.

David Alan Grier shows up and tries to pretend he's not actually in the movie.

"How do you know the killer's German," asks Gene Hackman.  "Because there's no peepee hole on the boxers," says Dan Aykroyd.

Dom DeLuise is rolled around in a wheelchair.  This is supposed to make us smile because he is a fat man.  It actually makes us smile because Dom DeLuise is a warm and sympathetic human being who inspires warm feelings everywhere he goes.

We begin to wonder if GHOSTBUSTERS would have been insufferable if it didn't also have Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson.

"Let me know if you ever find yourself, kid, cause I'd love to meet you," says Gene Hackman.

And somewhere between it's first and ninety-fourth minute, the film ends.  What was it?  I 'm not sure.  It all happened so fast, officer...

So when and where was LOOSE CANNONS' proper time and place?  If I had watched it on some other evening, at some other point in my life, would it have really "clicked" with me?  For all I know, this film is a triggering device for some as-of-yet-unhatched MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE-style plot, and that's it's proper time and place.  Or perhaps it was Calgary in 2013, when frames from a discarded reel of LOOSE CANNONS were discovered in a Canadian landfill, prompting an employee to believe he'd stumbled upon the remains of an actual snuff film.  It was finally determined to be a staged murder when Calgary police realized the man doing the murdering was Dan Aykroyd.

His name cleared, Aykroyd said "The movie should have been left in the landfill where it belongs."

Perhaps that is it's time and place.  This impossible confluence of writers, actors, and producers––arthouse, grindhouse, and studio system alike––converging on a genre that was mostly played out by 1990, on a film that was seen and loved by almost no one.  Rotting away, unseen, unsung...  Perhaps this landfill copy of LOOSE CANNONS, this temporary piece of crime scene evidence, ought to be screened as-is, DECASIA-style, as an art installation piece reminding us of this fine line between fiction and non-fiction, between sanity and madness.  What's the half-life of celluloid?  We'd better screen it while there's still something left, before we can no longer properly loop the reel across the spools and project.  Maybe the cannons are loose, not because they're a hot-doggin' cop and his mentally ill partner; maybe they're loose because the cannons are fleeting, life is fleeting, the cannons are slip, slipping away.

LOOSE CANNONS, ladies and gentlemen.

–Sean Gill

Only now does it occur to me... HEAVEN'S GATE (1980)

Only now does it occur to me... that I'm not sure if a movie has ever been packed with as many beloved character actors as HEAVEN'S GATE, and I'll even include THE LONGEST DAY, COP LAND, THE EXPENDABLES, THE PLAYER, and MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS in consideration.

There's so much to say about HEAVEN'S GATE.  Probably too much.  From its tumultuous production that basically destroyed United Artists to its hideous reception to its latter-day critical re-evaluation to the Johnson County War on which it is based– one could fill a volume.  (And people have.)  In the end, I'd say it's an ambitious film which flirts with genius, is bogged down by poor pacing, but consistently holds the viewer spellbound with gorgeous Western imagery (courtesy of master cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond) even when the narrative begins to dawdle. 

So set aside nearly four hours and give it a try– I'd say it's worth the time for the curious, the Western fan, the cinematography aficionado, or the character actor die-hard.  But more on that in a minute.  Then, see FINAL CUT: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF HEAVEN'S GATE (available in eight parts on YouTube here), and go ahead and read this interview with Cimino himself for a little taste of the outlandish (and possibly insane) creature who lurks beneath the surface of this genuinely talented and occasionally virtuosic director.

But for now, fasten your seatbelts, and prepare for a whirlwind tour of character actors, the sheer magnitude of whom may even give you whiplash: 

Coming up on the left here is Eastwood crony Geoffrey Lewis (10 TO MIDNIGHT, MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL, DOUBLE IMPACT, BRONCO BILLY, 'SALEM'S LOT, MAVERICK) looking like the live action mountain man version of "Pigpen" from peanuts.

Attached to Geoffrey Lewis is a hand.  And in that hand is a tongue.  And that tongue is attached to...

...Mickey Rourke?  

 

Lookin' pretty young there, Mickey!  Good show.

Down the road a spell is Terry O'Quinn (THE STEPFATHER, BLIND FURY, THE X-FILES, SILVER BULLET, THE ROCKETEER, "John Locke" on LOST)

He's got his hair still, and is playing a baseball-luvin' member of the U.S. Calvary.  In a strange tie-in with his character on LOST, he's got an injured leg and is carrying an important and mysterious "list" of names.

Continuing on with our journey, here's Richard Masur (IT, THE THING, LICENSE TO DRIVE, MR. BOOGEDY, RENT-A-COP, RISKY BUSINESS, MY GIRL)

chomping on a corn cob pipe, giving his all to his colorful brogue, and looking about as intense as he's ever looked (no small feat for a man generally typecast as "suburban dad").

Over on the right here, to the left of that presumably 19th Century malt liquor is edgy queen of French cinema Isabelle Huppert (THE PIANO TEACHER, AMOUR, I HEART HUCKABEE, COUP DE TORCHON, LA CEREMONIE, Hal Hartley's AMATEUR).

Up here behind the beard is Brad Dourif (CHILD'S PLAY, WISE BLOOD, ALIEN: RESURRECTION, DEADWOOD, THE TWO TOWERS, DUNE, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, THE EXORCIST III, BLUE VELVET, GRIM PRAIRIE TALES)

and sure he doesn't have much to do, but it's a modern-day Western, so we had to have Brad Dourif in some kind of old-timey spectacles.  I think it should be written into the SAG paperwork.

Around the bend in the proto-pimp costume is Bronson heavy Paul Koslo (THE OMEGA MAN, VANISHING POINT, THE STONE KILLER, MR. MAJESTYK, CLEOPATRA JONES, FREEBIE AND THE BEAN, LOVE AND BULLETS).

Then, over in that train with the fur hat and the lip carpet is Sam Waterston (THE KILLING FIELDS, THE GREAT GATSBY, SERIAL MOM, LAW AND ORDER, CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, CAPRICORN ONE)

who finally gets to play a bad guy, and to great effect!

Over to the side there, you can see a Kris Kristofferson (PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, CONVOY, FLASHPOINT, BIG-TOP PEE-WEE, BLADE, and star of CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT, the only feature Arnold Schwarzenegger ever directed) in his natural habitat.

And wait– who's that in the shadows behind him?  Why, it's the film debut of Willem Dafoe (THE LOVELESS, WILD AT HEART, ANTICHRIST, SPIDERMAN, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, EXISTENZ, BODY OF EVIDENCE, BOONDOCK SAINTS, THE ENGLISH PATIENT).  He's just an extra, but, hot damn!

Down the path a spell is none other than Jeff Bridges (TRON, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, CUTTER'S WAY, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, KING KONG '76, STARMAN, THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT).

He's got a great intensity here in a supporting role– and supposedly when production wrapped, one of the many "cabin" sets were up for grabs, so Bridges swooped in, disassembled it, and reconstructed it on his ranch property!

Over in this glen is Christopher Walken (THE DEER HUNTER, ANNIE HALL, KING OF NEW YORK, THE DEAD ZONE, A VIEW TO A KILL, MCBAIN, BATMAN RETURNS, WAYNE'S WORLD 2, NEW ROSE HOTEL, KANGAROO JACK)

and I'll yes indeed shut my big mouth, shitpoke!  Another fine Walken badass role.

And then right here, if he'll put down the flask long enough for you to get a clear look– is none other than John Hurt (THE ELEPHANT MAN, I CLAUDIUS, ALIEN, THE HIT, 1984, THE STORYTELLER, KING RALPH, DOGVILLE, MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, DEAD MAN, HELLBOY, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY '11)!

He delivers an eccentric performance, dripping with pathos.  Like every other John Hurt performance!  The man is never anything less than superlative.

Then, upon examining the end credits, I realized that one of my favorites, Tom Noonan (MANHUNTER, HEAT, THE MONSTER SQUAD, THE LAST ACTION HERO, ROBOCOP 2, THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, DAMAGES), was in the film as "Jake," and I didn't notice him!  To be fair, he may have been standing around the back with a beard and hat on, and I'm sure I would have seen him if I'd been looking in advance, but allow me to repeat this sentiment:  there were so many character actors that I missed Tom Noonan.

Whew!  I'm impressed.  I hope you've enjoyed this breakneck tour of character actors.  And perhaps in closing, it begs to be asked:  where the hell was Harry Dean Stanton?