The Screengrab : raul julia

The Letdowns: Tequila Sunrise (1988)

Nick Schager — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:30:00 GMT

In this recurring column, we revisit (and reconsider) eagerly anticipated films that didn’t seem to fulfill their pre-release promise.

Having cemented his place in the screenwriting pantheon with 1974’s Academy Award-winning Chinatown, Robert Towne embarked on a directorial career with 1982’s reasonably well-received lesbian track-and-field saga Personal Best. For his second behind-the-camera outing, however, the writer/director returned to the terrain that had nabbed him Oscar gold, as 1988’s Tequila Sunrise was, like Chinatown, a knotty, star-studded L.A. noir full of shifting allegiances and difficult-to-decipher truths. Or, at least, that was the heritage responsible for the rather considerable hype that preceded Towne’s sophomore effort. Unfortunately, such comparisons now seem by and large superficial, given that the film – despite some sleek cinematography by Conrad L. Hall, a comfortable familiarity with its City of Angels cops-and-crooks milieu, and the participation of Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, Michelle Pfeiffer, and the late, great J.T. Walsh and Raul Julia – turned out to be a striking example of a project with the ingredients for greatness that nonetheless came out half-baked.

A tale of best friends on opposite sides of the law who wind up at personal and professional odds, Tequila Sunrise charts the friction between high school buds Mac (Gibson) and Nick (Russell), the former a big shot drug dealer trying to ditch the business (for barely explicated reasons), and the latter an LAPD lieutenant who wants to keep Mac from prison but still feels compelled to nail him to the wall. Towne suitably sets up these tense dynamics, yet the central love triangle the two blood brothers eventually form with restaurant hostess Jo Ann (Pfeiffer) never gets off the ground, mainly because Towne, rather than fleshing out Jo Anne, simply reduces her to a lazy narrative pawn dressed up like an ‘80s department store mannequin. This doesn’t make her appear any less silly than Russell’s Nick, whose slicked-back hair was Towne’s deliberate nod to the coiffure of then-L.A. Lakers coach Pat Riley (whom, astonishingly, he even thought about casting). But unlike his co-stars, Russell at least has a character with clear, identifiable personality traits.

Matching Pfeiffer’s blandness, Gibson, in one of the least charismatic performances of his career, seems totally unsure of who Mac actually is, a situation caused in part by Towne’s preposterous conception of the character as a family-first average Joe without a dastardly bone in his body. The result is that Gibson mutes his every line, action and reaction to the point that Mac’s behavior seems solely spurred by the logistical plot demands of Towne’s talk-heavy, energy-deficient script. An occasional bit of sharp dialogue helps balance out the more groan-worthy hardboiled utterances about loyalty and friendship, just as Russell’s morally dubious Nick provides sporadic life to the lethargically paced proceedings. Yet whenever Tequila Sunrise seems poised to hit a vigorous noir groove, the writer/director shoots himself in the foot, whether it’s his clumsily self-conscious expressionistic imagery (such as a shot of Mac and Nick silhouetted against the sunset while sitting on a beach swing set) or, worst of all, a blaring saxophone-scored sex scene between Gibson and Pfeifer that’s literally, embarrassingly “steamy.”

Precursors: "Street Fighter"

Nick Schager — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Anyone even remotely interested in this weekend’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is likely too busy mashing buttons playing the new Street Fighter 4 to actually spend time revisiting the videogame-turned-film saga’s first American installment. Nonetheless, for those who prefer their Street Fighter in cinematic form and/or adore big-screen fiascos, there are few entries in the Jean-Claude Van Damme canon that are funnier than 1994’s Street Fighter, in which the Muscles From Brussels attempts to breathe life into that icon of 2-D crew-cutted U.S. military might, Colonel Guile. Van Damme’s turn is typically cartoonish and one-note, which makes perfect sense given that he’s embodying an arcade game character with virtually no personality traits. Even by the actor’s low standards, though, there’s still something startlingly wooden about his attempts to approximate the flip-kicking Guile's trademark combat maneuvers. To be fair to the once-popular action star, though, the film’s level of unintentional hilarity wouldn’t be quite as high as it is were it not also for the participation of the late Raul Julia as last-level villain General Bison, a performance at once riotous for its over-the-top lameness (“For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday”) and depressing for its status as the ignominious end to Julia’s respected career.

(Note: If the following clip doesn’t move you, you may be dead inside):

DVD Digest for February 10, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With St. Valentine’s Day less than a week away, you’d think studios would start rolling out some of their romantic classics on DVD. But I’m seeing very little of that this week, unless of course your idea of romance is vastly different than mine…

DVDs of the Week: But then, for me, nothing says romance like a pair of movies from surrealist master Luis Bunuel. This week brings two of his favorites, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, courtesy of the folks at Criterion. The Exterminating Angel is the known quantity for me, a wicked satire of bourgeois manners, in which a group of upper-crusters finds itself unable to leave following a dinner party, which brings them no end of trouble. Simon, Bunuel’s telling of the story of an ascetic who stood atop a remote pillar to prove his love for God, is one I’ve yet to see (do I smell a future Reviews By Request?), but its DVD release is no less noteworthy. The films, made during Bunuel’s sojourn in Mexico, have been given the deluxe Criterion treatment, with new transfers, documentaries, new interviews with actress Sylvia Pinal and others, and more.

Other noteworthy this week is Janus’ Essential Art House: Volume 2, which includes The 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Pygmalion, La Strada, Ikiru, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in single-disc editions, also available separately. In addition, Lionsgate is releasing new editions of the Wallace and Gromit short films, A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Finally- and I can’t in good conscience call this a classic, though it’s not new- Universal’s got the “Extreme Edition” of the final film from the great Raul Julia, Street Fighter (also Blu-Ray). So if you enjoy things that suck, set aside money for that one.

If newer movies are more your speed, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Courtney Hunt’s double Oscar nominee Frozen River (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products; Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in Soul Men (Genius Products); Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a pair of very different showbiz satires, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? (Magnolia), and Bruce Campbell directing Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce (Image, also Blu-Ray). Also this week, a quartet of curious films from fascinating filmmakers: Oliver Stone’s W. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Spike Lee’s WW2 drama Miracle at St. Anna (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (Buena Vista); and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (E1 Entertainment Distribution), allegedly the master’s final film. Oddly enough, the Rohmer looks to be the most romantic movie in this week’s column. Don’t know if your Dirty Dancing-loving special lady would go for it though…

Finally, a pretty action-packed and bloody lineup of Blu-Ray only releases this week: Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull (MGM); David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Warner); a pair of John Grisham adaptations, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief (both Warner); a double feature starring The Rock, Doom (Universal) and The Rundown (Universal); and two of Onion AV Club critic Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon picks, Donnie Darko (Fox) and The Boondock Saints (Fox). Also, Milos Forman’s Amadeus: The Director’s Cut (Warner) and the table-tennis comedy Ping Pong Playa (Image).

Oh, and Pretty Woman (Disney).

Tribeca Film Festival Reviews: "Playing" and "Theater of War"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho's Playing is an experimental documentary that sounds like a dumb stunt but plays as a fascinating study in the nature of acting and storytelling. The movie opens with the text of an ad Coutinho placed in the newspaper that amounted to an open call for any women in Rio de Janeiro over eighteen "with stories to tell." He filmed them talking about their lives and then brought in a succession of actresses, who studied these monologues and then, using their own words, delivered their own versions of the stories. The trick is that in the finished film, Coutinho cut together the best of both material-- the original speakers and the actresses doing their "interpretations" of them-- without clearly identifying for the audience which is which. Sometimes a scene will end with a woman revealing herself to be an actress by commenting on what she's just done; sometimes, as in the case of a woman who talks about how she sees her relationship with her grown daughter reflected in Finding Nemo, we get to see the original speaker's words alongside those of the actress who "plays" them; sometimes we never find out. At its simplest, the movie reveals a lot about "real life" and theater and how they complement and comment on each other. (A number of the women who seem to be describing their own experiences tear up very easily. However, an actress shows the director the tool she would have used if he'd insisted that she cry during her performance and explains that though she was prepared to use it, she preferred not to because it's her observation that when people really feel like crying, that's when they hold back their tears.) It also shows how thin the line between the two can be. Coutinho has taken a device that could have been used to cook up one more dopey illusion vs. reality game and made something substantial with it.

Another documentary in the festival, Theater of War, is also meant to be about theater and its application to the real world, which is here defined as torn-from-the-headlines big issues. Thinking about how the movie defines theater sort of makes my head hurt. The director, John Walter, made How to Draw a Bunny, an ugly-looking but endlessly fascinating video documentary about the prankster pop artist Ray Johnson. Theater, a behind-the-scenes look at a 2006 Public Theater production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, is much slicker-looking and about half as interesting. The material about Brecht's life and the writing and original production of the play is enough to make you think it would be great to see a real documentary about that sometime, preferably one that's less slavish in its worship of the playwright and that manages to get by without the contributions of this film's resident Brecht scholar, Jay Cantor, a man who has the rare distinction of having written bad novels about both Che Guevara and Krazy Kat. But the film's prime attraction is supposed to be the chance to see the Public Theater production coming together and to see a glimpse of the "process" of its star, Meryl Streep.

Streep comes across as a very nice woman, and she gets points for allowing herself to be filmed at rehearsals wearing a T-shirt that says "DIVA" across the front, but the big unanswered question raised by Theater of War is why this production was made. When the Public Theater's artistic director tells the camera that the Iraq war is an all-encompassing issue like the Vietnam war, and that he just knew he had to put on "an adaptation" of Mother Courage by Tony Kushner starring Meryl Streep, it just sounds as if he's saying that, in order to appear to be saying something about an important contemporary subject, he just had to have the biggest New York playwright to whom he had access custom-design a big classic play that could seem to be commenting on the subject, with the Official Big New York Stage Actress in the lead. Nothing that comes after that really dispels this impression, whether it's seeing the composer who's been hired to compose new songs in a sort of Brecht-Weill tailor them to the singing abilities of the stars, or the costume designer explain that she's throwing together styles of dress from many different periods and cultures so as not to appear to be commenting on any specific time or place, or watching the prop guys deliver on the director George C. Wolfe's passionate desire to have a jeep that can be driven onstage. (The Public Theater Mother Courage finally opened to loud hype and mixed reviews, with a "translation" by Kushner that included sitcom snappers and lines directed at the Bush administration.) The biggest shocker in the movie comes very early, when Tony Kushner, talking about his early years in New York in the mid-seventies as a theater student from Lousiana, and how he was able to feed his culture jones seeing things like the celebrated Public Theater production of The Threepenny Opera with Raul Julia and Ellen Greene and the whole of Wagner's Ring cycle "for no money." (There were gasps in the audience.) The subtext of Theater of War is the story of how some gifted people who were able to learn their craft and make their names in the last years when New York was affordable for young artists now collaborate, probably with the best of intentions, in the work of maintaining the illusion that this rich man's playground of a city is still a vital culture center by staging effects-heavy, glitzy shows whose point seems to be that Bertolt Brecht had George W. Bush's number. The punchline is that the Tony Kushner of 1975 might not be able to get into these shows, and to his credit, he might not want to.

New Street Fighter Movie Cast

Peter Smith — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

One of the great cinematic experiences of my life was seeing Street Fighter: The Movie in theaters back in 1994. Rather than try to describe the thrill, I'll just suggest you watch this clip:

Besides being one of the best bad movies of all time, Street Fighter has the distinction of having embarrassed poor ol' Raul Julia to death. Fourteen years later, the videogame franchise isn't as popular as it was in the '90s, but with two new games on the horizon, the brand's poised for a rebirth, which must be why they're trampling on sacred ground with a new Street Fighter movie. Smallville's Kristen Kreuk takes the lead as Chun-Li (Ming-Na Wen in the original, far from The Joy Luck Club); the cast also includes Michael Clark Duncan, Neal McDonough, Chris Klein and "Taboo from the Black Eyed Peas." No word on who'll supplant Jean-Claude Van Damme as All-American flag-waver Guile, but we hope it's someone with an equally heavy French accent. For more comic Street Fighter goodness, be sure to check out CollegeHumor.com's spectacular web series, Street Fighter: The Later Years. If it's all lost on you, you may be my mother, who once wondered aloud why no one would make a game called Street Poet II.