The Screengrab : leaving las vegas

A Better Travis Bickle for a Better New Year, and Other Great "Resolutions" Movies

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Today is Twelfth Day, the traditional end to the Christmas season for those of us who need a few days for the hangover to die down before we can start thinking about taking down the lights and chucking the tree out the window. So it's not too late to start thinking about taping some New Year's resolutions to the door of the fridge. Not everyone agrees about how much point there is to making New Year's resolutions; the idea behind them is to make some changes that will make your life better, and the world does not lack for evidence that people don't change. But here at the Screengrab, we think about these thing the same way we think about everything else: as filtered through movies, which is why we don't work for a golfing blog. And in the movies, there is no shortage of evidence that people can change resolve to change their lives. For the better? Eh, sometimes it depends on whether you're living the life or just sitting in the dark, watching it.

THE MOVIE: Taxi Driver (1976)

THE RESOLVER: Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro)

THE RESOLUTION: In his own words: "I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be fifty push-ups each morning, fifty pull-ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight." He also decides to try a new hairstyle.

THE RESULTS: Having turned himself into an urban guerrilla soldier in order to assassinate a presidential candidate, Travis, with a little help from the Secret Service, decides to redirect his energies towards persuading a child prostitute to return to her family in the Midwest after re-decorating the walls of a hotel room and corridor with her pimp's brains. After a period of rest and recovery in the hospital, he returns to work, where he finds that the girl who dumped him on their first date after a disagreement over his taste in movies is sufficiently impressed by the change in him to show up, hanging around his cab with a faraway look in her eyes. Clearly a success, made all the more gratifying by the fact that his hair grew out while he was in a coma and the girl never saw him in his ill-considered new look.

THE MOVIE: The Shining (1980)

THE RESOLVER: Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson)

THE RESOLUTION: To use the time and isolation provided by his new winter job to really sit down and focus on getting some serious writing done. Also, if the masterpiece gets finished early, maybe spend some time examining his relationship with his wife and son.

THE RESULTS: Torrence's breakthrough experimental novel, consisting of 38,000 typographical variations on the same ten-word sentence, didn't make Oprah's Book Club, but both Harold Bloom and David Eggers think it was underrated at the time of its original publication. (Back then, many critics questioned whether it would have been published at all if not for the surrounding news stories about Torrence's untimely death and the events surrounding the break-up of his marriage. Certainly the fact that his agent was able to arrange a six-figure movie deal came as a big surprise.) On the face of it, weighing the good against the no so good, this would appear to be a moderate success. However, thinking long term, it should be noted that the ending of The Shining seems to hint that Jack has been this way before, which in turn may indicate that he'll be back. And when he does, with all the life experience he'll be packing, the next book is sure to be dynamite!

THE MOVIE: Torremolinos 73 (2003)

THE RESOLVER: Alfredo López (Javier Cámara)

THE RESOLUTION: To make a better life for himself and his wife, Carmen (Candela Peña), by becoming a pornographic filmmaker.

This Spanish comedy, which is, or should be, dear to the hearts of all good Nerve readers, is a weirdly charming tribute to the homier side of the sexual revolution and the porno chic era. Alfredo and Carmen aren't the hardened pros of Boogie Nights but budding entrepreneurs trying to ride their mom and pop operation into a higher level of the middle class, and they have amusingly mixed feelings about the discovery that Carmen has become an international porn star. Alfredo, who can't compete with his wife for the camera's attention, tries to compensate by letting his artistic pretensions develop, and the two manage to go out in glory with the bigger-budgeted art-porn flick of the title, which also makes it possible for Carmen to conceive a child with one of her studly co-stars, a develop that delights both Carmen and her loving but infertile husband. By going all the way with his resolution, the lucky Alfredo is able to express himself artistically, enrich himself and his family financially, and strengthen his marriage. Somewhere, Jack Torrence is seething.

THE MOVIE: Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

THE RESOLVER: Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon)

THE RESOLUTION: To end a long-standing and thoroughly enjoyed addiction to drugs, following an unfortunate incident involving a weekend in the woods spent burying a turquoise-faced Heather Graham.

THE RESULTS: Bob trades in a free-wheeling, exciting life as the unquestioned head of a "family" of doper-grifters and a marriage to one of the hottest women in the history of movies (Kelly Lynch) for a sorry, colorless nine-to-five existence and the random wild evening spent being lectured by William S. Burroughs. On the plus side, he is, at twenty-six, a healthy young man, freshly clean and sober, with his whole blooming life laid out ahead of him. On the down side, Max Perlich blows his brains out.

THE MOVIE: Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

THE RESOLVER: Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage)

THE RESOLUTION: To enjoy the exorbitant severance check that he has won as a result of his alcoholism by relocating to a city where the bars never close and drink himself to death

THE RESULTS: A spectacular success. Not only does Ben succeed in drinking himself to death, becoming so liquefied and benumbed that he is able to enjoy having broken glass embedded in every square inch of his naked back, but his glitteringly flamboyant self-destructiveness wins the heart of a fair hooker (Elisabeth Shue), one of those hard-edged but vulnerable blondes made all the more painfully alluring by the emotional and physical wear and tear of her unhappy experience. What's more, in his final scene, in a trope that would test H. P. Lovecraft's ability to suspend his disbelief, he was able to present her with a functioning erection, despite the fact that he was so drunk that his penis was the last remaining part of him that could still stand up. Though it will win us no awards from MADD for saying it, it must be admitted that Leaving Las Vegas makes a much stronger case for getting plowed than Drugstore Cowboy makes for cleaning up your act.

THE MOVIE: Lost in America (1985)

THE RESOLVER: David Howard (Albert Brooks)

THE RESOLUTION: To drop out of society, cash in their savings and the proceeds from the sale of their house to supply them with a $145,000 "nest egg", take to the road (with his wife, Linda, played by Julie Hagerty), and, in his own words: "Touch Indians, see the mountains and the prairies and all the rest of that song."

THE RESULTS: David starts out with a full head of steam but plows into a wall when he and the Missus stop in Vegas with plans to renew their marriage vows. Waking up to discover that Linda has hit the blackjack table and eaten into "the core of the nest egg"--and failing to persuade the casino boss (Garry Marshall) to give them back their money as a goodwill P.R. gesture--David flips out and becomes impossible to live with before settling down to try to start a new life in a trailer home, with Linda taking a job at a burger joint and David working as a crossing guard. After a day of this, he and Linda reconsider their devotion to their new identities as social dropouts and conclude that it would be better for David to return to the bosses he insulted and walked out on "and eat shit." On the most obvious level, it might seem that this resolution ended with a case of clear-cut, absolute failure. On the other hand, the simple fact of it is that most people are what they, deep down, prefer to be, and however much they might wish they were someone else, they don't change. Keeping that in mind, Lost in America can be seen as the story of someone who, in the course of about two weeks, gave it his best shot, found out that he wasn't cut out to be Walt Whitman--which means that he won't spend the rest of his life torturing himself with thoughts about the road not taken--and was able to return to his true path with a minimum of hurt and damage: no harm, no foul. Except that you have to wonder how David would feel right about now, given that he'd be about sixty, and would have spent the last several months watching his retirement fund turn to ash. If Brooks were up for a sequel, it might be scarier than whatever George Romero still has in him.

Oprah's Favorite Things Include Watching Road House

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

We're not so into this trend of giant DVD box sets; they tend to be padded with lots of half-baked featurettes, useless production stills, and other things you'd never pay money for if they weren't all packaged together in a pretty box with a movie you really like. But United Artists just took it to the next level with its 90th Anniversary Prestige Collection — a massive 110-disc set that features ninety films from seven decades. Oprah just named it one of her Favorite Things, which means it will sell like hotcakes. $870 hotcakes to be exact. But let's look at exactly which ninety movies are featured, shall we?

First off, the box set starts with the '40s, leaving out the opportunity to include earlier United Artist benchmarks like Broken Blossoms (1919), The Gold Rush (1925) and Stagecoach (1939).

The '40s/'50s selection, including Marty, Night of the Hunter and Some Like It Hot, is fairly solid — although Rebecca and The African Queen are among the missing.

The '60s brings a bunch of Bond films and some second-tier Billy Wilder. Good picks: The Apartment, In the Heat of the Night, Satyricon, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Midnight Cowboy. Questionable: It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Battle of Britain, I Could Go On Singing. Notable omission: The Graduate.

The '70s has some interesting stuff: Rocky, Annie Hall, The Last Waltz, Carrie, Manhattan, Last Tango in Paris and Lenny would make for a quality weekend of film-watching. But The Pink Panther Strikes Again? Equus? And how much James Bond do we really need? Missing in action: Network and Being There.

By the '80s, things are getting a bit random. Enjoy a triple feature of Heaven's Gate, WarGames and Child's Play! Or alternately, Baby Boom, Raging Bull and Road House! Top it off with the most unnecessary Bond film of them all, the Timothy Dalton vehicle The Living Daylights. No big omissions here, unless you want to count I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

Finally we reach the '90s-'00s, a short selection featuring Bowling for Columbine, the little-seen Pieces of April, The Birdcage, Hotel Rwanda, Leaving Las Vegas, and five others. What, no Showgirls?

Overall, the set feels like a stranger's DVD collection: a few classics, a few childhood favorites, a few questionable selections they probably got for $5 at the drugstore. But it doesn't feel like the collection of a movie buff, nor does it have any particular coherence beyond the name of the studio. If an alien landed on Earth and asked me how to quickly amass an American film collection, I might advise him to get this box set. However, if you live on this planet, you can probably find a better use for your $900. Like, for example, buying forty-five copies of Network. — Gwynne Watkins

That Guy!: Xander Berkeley

Peter Smith — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

This week’s That Guy!, the long-awaited Xander Berkeley, is a groundbreaker in many ways. He’s the first character actor we’ve featured in this spot whose name starts with an X; he’s also the first to have designed his own my-skin-is-falling-off makeup while portraying a person suffering from acute radiation poisoning. But he also follows in some well-traveled paths: he’s the second person we’ve featured to have come to prominence as a cast member of 24, a show that seems to specialize in snatching up talented Hollywood character actors, as evidenced by previous That Gal! Mary Lynn Rajskub and future That Guy! Dennis Haysbert. Like a lot of other contemporary character actors, he’s found steady work as a voiceover specialist (appearing, as has almost every other B-lister in the business, on the Justice League cartoon), and he bankrolls artsy projects like his back-to-back appearances in Timecode and The Cherry Orchard with, er, slightly more pedestrian fare like Barb Wire and The Rock. A favorite of maverick director Alex Cox, Berkeley appeared in three of his films in a row early in his career. His first role was as a grown-up Chris Crawford in the infamous Mommie Dearest, and he’s gone on to make almost seventy feature films in twenty years (his most recent was Seraphim Falls), qualifying him as one of the hardest-working men in show business despite being almost completely unknown to most people who don’t watch 24. Berkeley, a New Yorker by way of Jersey, has specialized, in his latter days, in bland, arrogant schmucks who are up to no good. But he's displayed a terrific range in his remarkably prolific career, playing everything from typical romantic male leads to scene-stealing darkly comic turns, as in his cameo role as a cab driver in Leaving Las Vegas. He’s also almost certainly the only actor we’ve ever featured who has portrayed an eight-armed violinist who robs banks alongside a robotic Soviet vending machine.

Where to see Xander Berkeley at his best:

SID AND NANCY (1986): The first and best of Xander Berkeley’s lengthy collaboration with Alex Cox comes in this desperate, moving biopic of Sex Pistols provocateur Sid Vicious and his clinging, doomstruck girlfriend Nancy Spungeon. Berkeley portrays the drug dealer Bowery Snax, a living symbol of the pathetic degradation of the couple’s final days; when he delivers the line “Sid, Nancy, pull up your pants”, it encapsulates everything sadly wrong with their entire lives as well as an ugly reflection of the day-to-day reality of the junkie.

SAFE (1995): Berkeley’s finest hour came in this Todd Haynes masterpiece of the alienation of affluence. Playing the husband of Julianne Moore’s panic-stricken housewife, he must transition from unlikable standoffish breadwinner to bizarrely sympathetic and utterly confused caregiver, as the woman he married undergoes a transformation neither she nor anyone else can explain or even articulate. It’s a tremendous performance, in some ways the moral center of the film, and in a just world, it would have made him a big star.

AIR FORCE ONE (1997): It’s hard to pick a favorite from Berkeley’s mainstream movie appearances; he’s done good work in, among other films, Terminator 2, Apollo 13, A Few Good Men and Shanghai Noon. Our favorite, though, is probably his rogue Secret Service agent in Air Force One, part of a rash of "fightin’ president" movies in the late 1990s. Not only was it a reunion of sorts with Sid and Nancy’s Gary Oldman, but it was perhaps the pinnacle of his understated snotty jerk roles, even if the script requires him, along with everyone else in the movie, to do far too much yelling.

— Leonard Pierce