The Hot Rock
1972. Directed by the great Peter Yates.
THE SHOT: Robert Redford et alia steal a diamond from a museum, but have a hard time keeping ahold of it. They must plan and execute four different capers in the course of the movie.
TONE: Light, high-spirited 70s realism. Redford breezy and effortlessly charming in the lead, much more so than he is in The Sting, where he comes off as pretty but forced. George Segal, Ron Leibman, Paul Sand, Zero Mostel and Moses Gunn are the colorful eccentrics who provide ethnic New Yorkness to Redford’s WASPy charisma.
SPECIAL FEATURES: Helicopter ride, featuring the World Trade Center under construction.
Paul Sand steals every scene he’s in. What happened to him?
Downtown Theater pillar George Bartinieff appears as a museum guard, as well as (what’s this?) Christopher Guest (really? Christopher Guest? Is that even possible?).
Robert Weil is back as a safety-deposit-box guy, as is Lee Wallace (he plays the Mayor in Pelham, a role he would repeat in Batman, 17 years later).
This was one of my favorite movies when I was 11 years old. I remember the first time it was on TV; back in the days before VCRs, you had to reserve TV time in our family to see what you wanted to see. I told my mom that I wanted to make sure to see The Hot Rock months in advance, and when it finally came on, she was stunned to find it was a caper film. She had thought it was going to be a rock music documentary.
DOES CRIME PAY? Eventually, yes.
Stander
2004. Directed by Bronwyn Hughes.
THE SHOT: Thomas Jane goes from being a guilt-ridden Johannesburg riot-police guy to becoming its most notorious bankrobber.
TONE: Gritty 00s realism.
Good use of locations. Good sense of place. Similar in tone to Butch Cassidy and Bonnie and Clyde, both of which it mentions. Will not achieve the classic status of those films, but who am I to judge.
Old-fashioned bank robberies. Johannesburg, apparently, was unprepared for the likes of Stander. They walk in, take the money, walk out. No one is killed, only a few people injured.
Stander starts out robbing banks to make some kind of political statement. Later, he just does it for the money. Still later, it’s unclear why he keeps it up. The narrative follows a similar course of dissipation.
SPECIAL FEATURES: Several scenes of Thomas Jane nude.
DOES CRIME PAY? For a long time, it does. Stander and his gang apparently robbed 80 or so banks over a period of four years or so. But justice catches up to Thomas Jane on the mean streets of, yes, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Of course, we know now that Thomas Jane went on to clean up the mean streets of Tampa as The Punisher.
The Taking of Pelham 123
1974. Directed by someone named Joseph Sargent.
The direction isn’t bad at all, but Mr. Sargent, who is still among the living, worked mostly in TV afterward. Wonder why.
THE SHOT: Robert Shaw et alia hijack a subway train. They want one MILLION dollars from a cash-strapped New York to let it go. They have an INGENIOUS plan for escape. Or at least I think they do, it’s never explained exactly how it works.
TONE: Pure gritty 70s realism. Almost Dog Day Afternoon in its level of verisimilitude. Complex action and chase scenes in real New York locations, using real New York people and, most impressively, real New York subway stations. A great cast mostly disappears into their roles, which are purely functional. Some of my favorite character actors, including Kenneth McMillan, Julius Harris, Martin Balsam, Jerry Stiler and James Broderick. Iron-Eyes Cody makes an appearance in a subway car ad, and Tony Roberts showboats as a pushy mayoral aide. Robert Weil looks exactly the same in this movie as he does in The Hudsucker Proxy, almost 20 years later. Walther Matthau is the harried, efficient but unimpressed guy trying to stop the crime.
The use of “New York flavor,” involving bickering ethnics, hassled bueraucrats and traffic snarls is well-used. The makers of Die Hard With A Vengeance studied this movie to get the same flavor. Everybody’s got a story, everybody’s got a personal observation. Doesn’t matter how tense the situation is or how tight time is, everyone is going to bicker about tiny little things. It works.
Didn’t realize until now that the whole “criminals calling each other by colors” Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, etc, comes from here and not Reservoir Dogs. Live and learn.
SMALL CONTRIVANCES: In a narrative this tight, anything contrived sticks out a mile. In this case, Martin Balsam has a bad cold. Turns out to be a major plot point. Likewise, one of the subway passengers, we learn, is an undercover cop.
In the biggest cliche of all, one of the hijackers is a trigger-happy psycho. In an inversion of the cliche, he’s played by Gavin McLeod.
DOES CRIME PAY? Heavens no.
Bank Shot
1974. Directed by Gower Champion.
THE SHOT: George C. Scott and his crew will not rob a bank, they will steal a bank. A bank is building a new location and has a temporary bank set up in a mobile home in a mall parking lot. Scott and Co. will jack up the trailer, put it on wheels and tow it away with the guards still in it.
TONE: Cartoonish, garish, abrasive. Gritty 70s realism passed this caper by. Lots of “zany characters.” One wears a straw boater and drives a 20s automobile. One lives with his crazy mother. One is a black radical named Herman X. Scott himself has a lisp for some reason. All these zany touches are announced but never developed.
Bob Balaban is in this, looking all of 16 years old. Close Encounters was three years off. I think he spent the time growing his beard. Joanna Cassidy is also on hand, and is quite funny and refreshing, honestly the most watchable performance in the movie.
REALISM: None. Action is cartoonish and slapsticky. Police procedures make no sense. This is the kind of movie where the protagonist is described as a “genius” and “the best bank-robber in history” but surrounds himself with drooling idiots and takes advice from clowns.
DOES CRIME PAY? No. The money (SPOILER ALERT) goes off a cliff and into the sea. Scott swims from Santa Monica to Samoa (that is not a misprint).
Mean Streets
Know what I hate?
Woman comes home from the grocery store. Bag full of groceries. Has a conversation on the steps. There’s a bit of action involving the bag of groceries.
The grocery bag looks like it’s six weeks old. Looks like it’s been through a dozen rehearsals and takes. It’s all worn and torn and crumpled. Doesn’t look like she came in from the store, looks like she’s a crazy lady who carries the same bag of groceries around for months.
Otherwise, pretty good movie.
Ronin
Or, Heat goes Continental.
More tough guys who don’t talk much, Men who Do what they Gotta Do.
There’s this case, see, this silver case, and De Niro and gang are After the Case. And because this script is by Mamet instead of Mann, the Tough Guys don’t spend the whole movie blabbing about themselves and slobbering over their girlfriends. De Niro gets in a couple of kisses with Natasha McElhone, but otherwise there’s no mushy stuff.
More aphorisms. Ain’t that the thing? It is what it is. That’s the first thing they teach ya.
What’s in the case? What’s in the case? Big mystery. Because the script is by Mamet, We Never Find Out. Why? Because it Doesn’t Matter. Mamet is relishing the chance to write a pure Maguffin.
Whatever it is, the Russians want it, the IRA wants it, De Niro wants it, the CIA wants it.
Turns out? Ice skates.
I don’t get it, but international intrigue often eludes me. I guess they were really nice ice skates.
A veritable who’s who of espionage players. A Mission Impossible guy, a Hunt for Red October guy, a Munich guy (well, many years later) and no fewer than two Bond villains. Just so you know what De Niro is up against. It’s kind of like European Espionage All-Stars vs. De Niro.
I would have thought that De Niro would have already done an espionage picture before this, but no, just gangsters and psychos. Which adds a nice American touch to the picture. “Hey, all you fancy European spy guys! Get a load of Travis Bickle!
Great car chases. Wow. Impressive use of crowds. Hugely sophisticated action sequences. The chase through Paris is quite amazing.
SPOILER ALERT: The sad thing is, they go to all this trouble to get the skates, and then they shoot the skater. Katerina Witt, no less. Man oh man, Nancy Kerrigan thought she faced a desperate opponent.
Heat
Pacino understands that this is an opera, about Men who Do What They Gotta Do and the Women who Love Them.
The script has a lot of plot, even for a three-hour movie, so there isn’t a lot of time for irony. Tough guys announce who they are, what they stand for and what they’re feeling at any given moment. Seems a little counterintuitive for tough guys, but the director is looking to humanize them, to make them accessible to an audience, especially women.
De Niro plays against the poetry of the script, holding back, holding back, holding back. Even when he’s announcing who he is and what he stands for, he makes it seem like he’s not telling you anything. He gets that Dispeptic De Niro look on his face, as if revealing himself makes him literally sick to his stomach. Pacino, on the other hand, goes in the other direction, blowing some lines up to absurd, laugh-inducing proportions. He carries the same sickness inside him, but he directs it outward, even when he’s announcing how he keeps everything inside (because it “Keeps me sharp. (snap) On the edge. (snap) Where I gotta be.”).
The story is preposterous, so the direction is crisp and efficient without drawing attention to itself. That makes the action scenes seem matter-of-fact and human somehow, exciting in a way a “slicker” directing style would not be. Another director might have employed a hundred different devices to “jazz up” the action sequences, but Mann keeps it simple and lets the mayhem of the moment speak for itself.
In a cast full of present and future stars (Dennis Haysbert! Natalie Portman! Wes Studi! Tone Loc! Hank Azaria! Jeremy Piven! Xander Berkeley! Mykelti Williamson! William Fichtner! Jon Voight! Henry Rollins! Danny Trejo [playing the role of “Trejo,” no less]!), Diane Venora has the job of being Pacino’s long-suffering wife. She is given some of the densest, most purple lines in the script (“I have to demean myself with Ralph just to get closure with you,” a moment of sober clarity unheard of in any of my messy breakup scenes) and somehow holds her own.
The Aviator
Martin Scorsese often complains about the limitations of genre, but as I look over his filmography, I’m struck at the number of his movies that could be classified as one genre or another. He has a number of gangster movies, all very different, two religious epics, two sports pictures (my local video store inexplicably puts The Color of Money in “Action”), a couple of costume dramas (I count Gangs of New York as a gangster costume drama, although it’s closer to a historical epic in structure), a thriller, a comedy, and now a Hollywood Biopic.
I mentioned watching The Aviator to a female friend of mine today and she said “Is that the one about the guy who, you know, follows his dream?” And it occurred to me that, well, all Hollywood Biopics are about a Guy who Follows His Dream. I mean, honestly, who would spend $100 million on a 3-hour movie about a guy who doesn’t follow his dreams? Usually, now that I think of it, the guy Follows His Dream but it brings him nothing but grief, and he often dies before his time.
Howard Hughes, of course, didn’t die before his time, but he did the next best thing in biopic terms, which was to have a Bizarre Medical Condition.
TE Lawrence was obsessed with the desert, Gandhi wanted to free India from imperialism, Schindler wanted to save them Jews, and Howard Hughes, according to The Aviator, was obsessed with building airplanes.
Scorsese’s Howard Hughes is obsessed with his airplanes, so we also become obsessed with his airplanes. He cares about the rivets, so we care about the rivets. He gets excited climbing into the cockpit to test a new plane, so we do too. And when he starts falling apart, we feel bad for him, we feel that something has been tragically lost. Scorsese has made the story of one of the 20th century’s most peculiar men into something oddly universal. How did he do that?
I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that only Martin Scorsese could make a movie about a billionaire industrialist playboy and have him come off as a shy, awkward, hard-working, underappreciated outsider.
How did he do that? I would say that he did that by strongly identifying with his protagonist. But how does one identify with Howard Hughes?
Well, I have a little meaningless pocket guide that served as my way through the movie.
Howard Hughes loves planes. Martin Scorsese loves film. (This link is underscored in the first half-hour of the film, where Hughes is shown actually making a movie about planes, in fact actually making a movie in a plane.)
Scorsese presents Hughes as an outsider because that’s what he makes movies about. His movies about societies are always about the outsider who can’t quite make it inside that society, who’s always on the edge, looking in the window, not quite able to understand the way things are done. Even his gangster movies have outsider protagonists; Henry Hill in Goodfellas is Irish, Ace in Casino is Jewish. My dimestore-psychology theory is that Scorsese makes movies about outsiders because even though he was an Italian/American living in Little Italy, he was too small and too sickly to ever fit into that world; the outsider’s POV is the only way he understands things.
So Howard Hughes is presented not as a wealthy captain of industry, but as a misfit loner who bucks the system. He’s an outsider in Hollywood (even though his movies are hits and he’s dating every actress in town), an outsider in aviation (even though he owns a major airline and has expensive military contracts), and an outsider in the human condition (because of his mental problems).
Like Scorsese and his movies, Hughes sweats the details with his airplanes. He knows everything about the engineering of his planes and he knows everyone’s job better than they do. He wants the rivets flush because it will make a difference in the way the plane flies. He’s presented with ten different steering wheels and none of them are quite right.
Hughes Aircraft was a stunning success, but Scorsese only shows the failures. There are two scenes of Hughes actually crashing in his own planes. One is harmless and he walks away from it, the other is horrific and he is crippled for life. In real life, these crashes were mere hiccups in the production of those planes, but in the movie we never see either plane again, as if they never went into production.
I get the feeling that Scorsese is equating Hughes’s crashes with his own crashes. The H-1, for instance, is the plane that beat the air-speed record, but crashed in a beet field. That could be a metaphor for Raging Bull, a movie repeatedly voted as one of the 10 best of all time, yet unwatched in its first release. The XF-11, the crash that crippled Hughes, could be King of Comedy, the movie that put Scorsese in the directoral doghouse for a decade. The Spruce Goose, years in the making, the plane that Hughes finally flew to save his reputation (the flight serves as the climax of the movie) could be The Last Temptation of Christ, the movie Scorsese fought to make for years but finally got off the ground.
The OCD stuff, well, I was going to say that it’s analogous to Scorsese’s asthma, but that’s glib. I was also going to say that instead of OCD, Scorsese has his Catholic Guilt, but I don’t see Scorsese as being crippled by anything these days. Maybe it’s his work ethic, the way that his work kept him from having close relationships in the early part of his life (says the guy who just read a book of interviews with him).
Leonardo DiCaprio, who doesn’t seem to look much like Hughes, does a great job of getting across Hughes’s strengths, so when we see him be weak we feel it. Cate Blanchett utterly vanishes in her portrayal of Katherine Hepburn. Man, what a performance. You look at her and look at her, and you know it’s not Katherine Hepburn, in fact it doesn’t even look that much like Katherine Hepburn, but the fact is that, even in the most intimate scenes, you don’t see Cate Blanchette either. There is some kind of actress up there, playing the role of Katherine Hepburn.
I dare not think too much about what this means, but Scorsese’s Jesus shows up half-way through the movie as an oily, fish-faced scandal-monger.
3121
The new Prince album.
On first listen, it sounds like it doesn’t suck.
Sigh of relief. I suppose it’s too much to ask Prince to change my life again, but it’s been too long.
More to the point, it’s an indicator of my current mood that I thought one of the songs was titled “Te Amo Cortizone.”
UPDATE: False alarm. It does suck.
Prince is really gonna give it to you this time. You want it? ‘Cause he’s gonna give it to you. What is he going to give you? Salvation. Jehovah-style salvation.
Let’s just say, Slow Train Coming it’s not.