Only now does it occur to me... that in his paranoid cloak n' dagger thriller THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, Sydney Pollack inserts a small homage to Italian master of horror Dario Argento.
In a scene where Robert Redford's character is skulking around in black leather gloves, gaining entrance to a New York City apartment building,
Pollack has one of the names on the buzzer (while the trademark black leather gloves are in shot) listed as "Argento."
While Pollack may have drawn some inspiration from our man Dario, I will also add that THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR exerted some discernible influence on another Junta Juleil fave: John Carpenter. In addition to featuring three actors who would go on to work for Carpy––Cliff Robertson (ESCAPE FROM L.A.), John Houseman (THE FOG), and Robert Phalen (HALLOWEEN, STARMAN)––the film's central dynamic, between bookish, on-the-run CIA analyst Robert Redford and his cool, formidable hostage Faye Dunaway,
strongly resembles the tense back and forth between hapless hostage-taker Roddy Piper and his icy-calm ward Meg Foster ("If I don't see what you see, I'm going to see it anyway") from a quite similar scenario in THEY LIVE.
Coming up next: an in-depth review of an Argento flick I haven't yet tackled on this site!
Only now does it occur to me... that WHITE OF THE EYE truly stands alone in the (overflowing) cabinet of '80s horror curiosities. Where else do you get a Tucson, Arizona-set Cannon Film giallo with weird psychedelic fever-dream visuals from Donald Cammell, artistic prodigy and co-director of PERFORMANCE (with Nicolas Roeg)?
Taking the "extreme closeup of the murderer's eyeball" ball from TENEBRE and running with it, WHITE OF THE EYE dashes headfirst into a yuppie soap opera
full of mad (and smooth) visuals from legendary Steadicam operator Larry McConkey (CARLITO'S WAY, AFTER HOURS, KILL BILL, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, GOODFELLAS). It genuinely feels like Dario Argento and Richard Rush collaborated on a Cannon Film. (The most Cannon moment: the line of dialogue "Shove it up your sloppy orifice!" which sounds like it came straight from MURPHY'S LAW.)
Strewn with crazed flashbacks, Route 66 Americana, denim, fur coats, waterbeds, and busted diners,
I think the less I tell you about WHITE OF THE EYE, the better. However, I will say that it does feature two great performances by Cathy Moriarty (RAGING BULL, BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER)
and David Keith (AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMEN, FIRESTARTER).
A weird and wild ride, and I'd recommend it as a solid deep cut for when you've exhausted the catalogues of Argento, Rush, and Roeg and are thirsty for more.
Only now does it occur to me... as a filmgoer who had somehow seen every single one of Adrian Lyne's features (from FLASHDANCE to UNFAITHFUL, from FATAL ATTRACTION to FOXES, from JACOB'S LADDER to INDECENT PROPOSAL), that in not having seen 9 1/2 WEEKS until now, I completely missed the beautiful (?) homage to 9 1/2 WEEKS in one of my favorite scenes in TROLL 2 (1990).
To contextualize: the following sublime scene occurs near the end of Claudio Fragasso's TROLL 2,
(This video has been age-restricted for some unknown reason––if you click on it, skip to 1:44)
wherein witch/goblin queen Creedence Leonore Gielgud (Deborah Reed) approaches an RV containing errant teen Brent (David McConnell). She appears on his TV, "sexy-dance-walk-stumbling" to a rootin'-tootin' MIDI track while clutching an ear of corn. This lures him outside (where in one of the best diegetic sound reveals in film history, the mix reveals the music as actively "playing" outside the RV), prompting him to let her in. She suggests they "heat... it... up" and they proceed to simultaneously gnaw at the ear of corn, which––when confronted with so much raw sexual energy––begins exploding into popcorn, which is heaved in handfuls upon the pair by bored production assistants.
Obviously, you can understand why this scene rules, with or without context. But it turns out––according to me, anyway––that Claudio Fragasso was paying a specific homage to 9 1/2 WEEKS. In one particular scene, Kim Basinger––who is embroiled in a steamy, weird, gross love affair with a Wall Street wackjob––is performing a striptease for said wackjob (naturally, Mickey Rourke).
She does some wacky dancing through some blinds, set to Joe Cocker's cover of Randy Newman's "You Can Leave Your Hat On"
which has inexplicably become some kind of striptease anthem despite possessing all the raw sex appeal of an old mattress stained with hotdog water, or a guy attending night school in a mesh shirt. This song was fired from its job as a roadie for George Thorogood. This song eats mothballs, recreationally. It washes its hair with dish soap. It probably owns a black market human skeleton. This song's girlfriend broke up with it because it wouldn't stop singing "Splish Splash I Was Takin' a Bath" every time it showered. This song eats Chef Boyardee cold, straight out of the can.
Anyway, so Kim continues dancing as Mickey Rourke keeps doing his creepy "aw, shucks" bashful serial killer smile...
uh, got hungry, did you, Mickey? What's that he's shoving into his mouth?
Popcorn.
And then it clicks––that TROLL 2 MIDI track is the fuckin karaoke track of "You Can Leave Your Hat On!" (The key is slightly different but probably not enough to avoid litigation if somebody actually cared.) And there's popcorn in this scene. Claudio Fragasso probably thought he needed a sexy scene in his goblin movie, and because he's a noted Italotrash plagiarist, he likely watched noted "sexy movie" 9 1/2 WEEKS and thought he'd take all the proper ingredients one needs for a sexy scene and simply reassemble them: gyrating body, Joe Cocker track, popcorn––let's call it a day!
For all of these years, I had been enjoying TROLL 2's inexplicable fusion of rootin'-tootin' MIDI music, corn, and sexy lurching movements without realizing that it was an homage to Adrian Lyne. Beautifully done all around, folks.
My latest Swedish art film/Yacht Rock-inspired humor piece, "The Film Treatment for Ingmar Bergman’s Escape (The Piña Colada Song)," may be read online at McSweeney's Internet Tendency.
Only now does it occur to me... that PERFECT STRANGERS made a TWIN PEAKS joke at a very intriguing time. In this particular episode, Larry (Mark Linn-Baker) has become convinced that his cousin Balki's (Bronson Pinchot) girlfriend Mary Ann is a "black widow killer" and has murdered her roommate, Jenifer. When Larry is proven wrong on this count (and not for the last time), Balki says,
"Now that you've solved the Jennifer 'murder,' maybe you can figure out who killed Laura Palmer?"
This is an obvious reference to the iconic central mystery of TWIN PEAKS' first season: Who killed Laura Palmer? (Incidentally, ABC aired both TWIN PEAKS and PERFECT STRANGERS.) However, what makes this joke especially interesting––as it's the only TWIN PEAKS reference on PERFECT STRANGERS, so far as I can ascertain––is the timing. This episode was shot on September 26, 1990 (four days before the premiere of TWIN PEAKS' second season), suggesting that it was perhaps an intra-ABC cross-promotional idea. TWIN PEAKS went on to reveal Laura Palmer's killer in a David Lynch-directed episode (2x7), which aired on November 10. Then, this PERFECT STRANGERS episode ultimately aired on November 30 to viewers who, by then, would already have known who had killed Laura Palmer. The very next day, December 1, saw the airing of the TWIN PEAKS episode (2x9) which tied up the arc of Laura's killer and answered some lingering questions (some!) about the nature of the murder. Is all of this useless information? I mean, probably. But that's sorta this site's bread and butter, amirite?
Only now does it occur to me... that VIRTUOSITY (1995) is perhaps Ridley Scott's favorite movie.
What––you don't believe me? That a film directed by Brett Leonard (THE LAWNMOWER MAN, SIEGFRIED AND ROY: THE MAGIC BOX, Billy Idol's "Shock to the System" music video) would be Ridley's fave? I promise I'll convince you. But first, some background.
Penned by underrated genre scribe Eric Bernt (SURVIVING THE GAME, ROMEO IS BLEEDING), it's a post-DEMOLITION MAN/GHOST IN THE MACHINE cyberpunk fable of a murderous A.I.––in this case, a virtual "serial killer" training program (Russell Crowe)––who escapes into the real world to battle his nemesis, a jailed and hardboiled cop (Denzel Washington). I'd say that it draws some tonal inspiration from Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER and BLACK RAIN––for instance, there's a scene where Crowe's A.I. come-to-life encounters an older, bartender-model robot (Kevin Loreque, in a great, butoh-adjacent performance),
and is made so existentially uncomfortable that he "retires" him, á la BLADE RUNNER:
In general, I must note that this movie is majestically entertaining. Allow me to submit, for your consideration, a scene where Russell Crowe jaunts down the street in a '90s zoot suit while homaging SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and receives his very first high-five––a moment which calls for serious and immediate contemplation.
Or this scene, where Russell Crowe rocks out, in concert, with some theremin-style 1990s musical accoutrement.
The film features John Waters'-own Traci Lords as a cyberpunk nightclub singer,
and even brings us the mind-boggling occurrence of a Debbie Harry/non-David Byrne Talking Heads song called "No Talking Just Head" which, I guess, attempts to subtly satirize the Talking Heads' existence while mostly sounding like an ersatz Nine Inch Nails banger. This plays over the end credits and just feels like the perfect capper for the madness we've just witnessed.
But I don't want to stray too far from my main point, which is that "VIRTUOSITY is Ridley Scott's favorite movie." Now, I may have amply demonstrated the "whys"and "hows"of VIRTUOSITY becoming someone's favorite movie, but I haven't fully illustrated the Scott connection.
You're probably thinking: Oh, yeah, you're going to remind us that Ridley Scott is a maniac for Russell Crowe and casts him in all of his movies. He even cast Crowe and Denzel Washington in AMERICAN GANGSTER (2007), and reversed their roles, with Crowe as the cop pursuing Washington's criminal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you're absolutely right, I think that's a point worth discussing. But I sense you pushing back already.
Well, that's not enough to prove your hypothesis, buddy––you're making a serious claim about Sir Ridley Scott's rarefied tastes, and you don't have the receipts!
I hear your skepticism. I hear it loud and clear. But what if I told you that most of the supporting roles also had a latter-day Scott connection? Stephen Spinella ended up in the Scott-produced NUMB3ERS... and Junta Juleil Hall-O-Famer William Forsythe (THE ROCK, EXTREME PREJUDICE)
appeared in the Scott-produced MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE... the great William Fichtner (GO, HEAT, DRIVE ANGRY, THE DARK KNIGHT)
was also later cast by Scott in BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001). (Oh yeah, and in this screencap, Fichtner appears next to none other than Louise "Nurse Ratched" Fletcher.) Who's to say that he didn't bring these folks into the Scott fold because he was such a VIRTUOSITY fanatic?
I am. These are all working actors, bub––having them pop up in a subsequent Scott project doesn't prove diddly.
Okay, I can accept that. But how about a canister of primordial, life-giving goo which lends Russell Crowe's A.I. a corporeal form:
isn't that exactly like the "concept of Alien life" promulgated by the Engineers in Scott's PROMETHEUS (2012)?
Maybe, but it's not terribly original here, nor in PROMETHEUS. You gotta give me something more substantial.
Alright, here it is: Russell Crowe bursts into an ultimate fighting championship––a modern gladiatorial game, if you will, not unlike Scott's GLADIATOR (2000)––and backflops (that's correct, it's more of a backflop than a backflip) into the ring, and offers not one, but two General Maximus-meets-Vince McMahon"Are you entertained?" gestures to the crowd.
Roll the tape:
Well, that's pretty spot-on, actually, you might be saying. Say, this is all pretty weird. Is it possible that Ridley Scott really does love VIRTUOSITY above all other films?
To which, I say––well, 1995 was a good year. Not "a good year" like Ridley Scott's 2006 Russell Crowe-vehicle wine-country drama "A GOOD YEAR," but a good year nonetheless:
