The Screengrab : road house

Screengrab Review: "Goodbye Solo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Goodbye Solo, the third feature from Ramin Bahrani, the 34-year-old, American-born writer-director of Iranian extraction who was recently inducted by A. O. Scott into the "neo-neo-realism" hall of fame, represents a major leap forward for a filmmaker who wasn't in a bad place to begin with. Shot in Bahrani's home town of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it's one of those rare movies that is hard to discuss, in terms of the story and characters, without making it sound simpler--and more pat--than it is. The title character, Solo (played by Souléymane Sy Savané) is a Sengalese immigrant who's driving a cab while working at fulfilling his dream to become a flight attendant; optimistic and high-spirited, he meets his match in the form of William (Red West), a sturdy-looking old man and the demeanor and expression of someone who once loaned Death twenty bucks and has decided to go ask for his money back. William regularly employs Solo to drive him to the movies, a pilgrimage he seems to be making so he'll have an excuse to talk to the kid who mans the ticket station; one night, he tells Solo that he'd like to schedule an appointment at some future date for Solo to chauffeur him out to a nearby nature spot--a mountain called Blowing Rock, where the wind blows up towards heaven--and leave him there. There's a good tip in it for him.

Part of what sets Bahrani-- who co-wrote Goodbye Solo and his previous film, Chop Shop, with Bahareh Azimi--apart from the run of Hollywood directors is how resistant he is to reducing his characters to pieces in a machine that runs on formula. Having gotten Solo's attention, William finds himself unable to get rid of him. The cabbie, who already has a full plate studying for his flight attendant exam while juggling the demands of a lover (Carmen Leyva) who'd rather he stay grounded and close at hand and the woman's tiny daughter, Alex (Diana Franco Galindo), stays in William's face, calling him "big dog" and trying to show him a good enough time that he'll snap out of his suicidal fixation. He also makes a stab at getting to the bottom of whatever has turned William against life, which is a dry run: Solo does learn a bit more about his favorite passenger, but if Goodbye Solo is packing anything that be given so banal a lable as a "point", it's simply that the forces that drive people can't be summed up in the space of a ninety-minute movie, and that someone who's made up his mind to recede and withdraw, and who has his own damn reasons for it, can't be easily persuaded to change course by all the free beers and childlike smiles in the world.

What sets Bahrani apart from some of the other directors in Scott's neo-neo-realist pantheon, such as Lance Hammer (Ballast) and Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy), is that he can put miserable people on the screen and generate something from their presence that's richer and more complicated than mere pathos or the warm feeling some moviegoers get from feeling sorry for poor people. And as he demonstrated with his nonprofessional leads in both Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, he's also different from some of his alleged peers in that he knows how to get non-actors to behave expressively and to hold the screen, instead of filling a movie with nonprofessionals and inviting the audience to admire how authentically uninteresting they are. In an interview with the director at SpoutBlog, Noralli Ryan Fores described a moment during filming when Galindo pulled Bahrani aside "to ask why it was that [Solo's] character at this moment seemed so sad. 'I don’t know; why do you think he is so sad?' Bahrani asked." That kind of intelligent openness to the mystery of what people are about suffuses the picture. You can taste it even in Michael Simmonds's cinematography, which makes Winston-Salem seem like a place so alive that it seems likely that every bit player would have a story worth telling.

The movie's web site describes Souléymane Sy Savané as a "former flight attendant, high-fashion runway model and African televison star." I don't know what he got up to on African TV, but Savané's performance in this, his first movie, is altogether remarkable. It's earned comparisons to Sally Hawkins's work in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, and it's a similar kind of high-wire feat, in that you may be aware of how easily Solo's cheerful determination to insert himself into other people's lives, whether they want him to or not, because he thinks he can get them to share his affable worldview (and then everything will be all right) could easily make him one irritating son of a bitch. Solo doesn't have as secure a support network or financial status as Happy-Go-Lucky's Poppy, and there are moments when life wipes the smile off Solo's face and leaves him winded. Even then, he never senses what's clear to the audience, which is that his indefatigable good cheer and expansive nature are every bit as mysterious as William's determination to pull defeat out of the jaws of acceptance and possibility--or, as William might see it, to go out on his own terms.

As William, Red West has the most well-worn face, in terms of its exposure to the camera, of anyone who's been in a Bahrani movie to date. The 72-year-old West is best known as a member of the Memphis Mafia, the group of old pals and bodyguards that settled around Elvis Presley. You can catch glimpses of him in Elvis on Tour and Elvis: That's the Way It Is, but long before that, he had broken into movies and TV as a stunt man, with help from actor and Friend of Elvis Nick Adams, who hired West to work on his TV series The Rebel. That eventually led to scads of acting jobs, mostly in small roles, in such movies as Walking Tall and Framed and a shitload of TV. More recently, he appeared in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker, Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune, and Ira Sachs's 40 Shades of Blue, though his most prominent role in a film may have been in the 1989 bad-laugh classic Road House. He's a hard-working pro, and in Goodbye Solo, he looks like an inexplicably magnetic old man who Bahrani lured over from standing in line at the DMV. Nothing in West's catalog of eighty-something movie and TV appearances would give you much reason to think that he could pull off what's asked of him here. William turns out to have a greater tolerance for Solo's company than you might have guessed, and he also turns out to be capable of going from ornery to scary when he feels that Solo's crossed the line. Then the moment passes, and you can see that William has one more trespass to regret, and that it'll be bothering him long after Solo has shrugged it off, which happens pretty much instantaneously. West never overplays his hand, and you can't take your eyes off him. The next time he runs into Elvis, who famously fired him and banished him from his sight a year before the King's death, West can delight his old pard with the news that, of the two of them, he was the one who wound up getting the breakthrough movie role.

Famous Last Words Beyond Thunderdome: Week 2

Paul Clark — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

After the e-Mail fiasco of the first week, the latest round of Famous Last Words got off to a strong start last week. And in keeping with the usual tradition of starting with an easy quote, few of you had any trouble placing the final line of the cult classic Road House. The subject of one of Onion A.V. Club critic Scott Tobias’ most memorable New Cult Canon appreciations to date, Road House is few people's idea of a good movie. Yet it’s got a cheeseball charm that has turned it into a reliable bit of cinematic comfort food- not to mention a basic-cable favorite, even if TNT does bleep out such memorable lines as “I used to fuck guys like you in prison!” Given star Patrick Swayze’s recent health woes, it’s somehow comforting to look back at a time when the Swayz was known less for having cancer than for dropping such Meathead-Zen wisdom as “pain don’t hurt” and “nobody ever wins in a fight” into a movie in which he removes a man’s throat with his bare hands.

This week, we switch gears to something a little more… refined:

“Will you come in please? I wish to talk to you.”

E-Mail your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. Remember, all guesses are due no later than 11:59 PM Eastern on Wednesday night. Good luck!

In Other Blogs: The Top 25 L.A. Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The L.A. Times recently published their list of the 25 Best L.A. Films of the Past 25 Years. Naturally, some of the choices proved controversial (a lot of folks have trouble with the selection of Jackie Brown over Pulp Fiction, for instance), but Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule thinks it’s a decent list. “There were only eight, perhaps nine instances where I felt like the choices could have been replaced, by another film in the director’s filmography, or by another similarly themed film, or just by another movie to replace one that just shouldn't be there at all. For example, I can certainly understand why Boogie Nights is on the list, but it’s ultimately too diffuse and far more conventional than its electric style would suggest. I much prefer P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), a high-wire act in which Anderson gets more directly in touch with his inner Altman and dashes all concerns over whether anyone’s having a good time or not, planting Old Testament visual clues that subliminally lay the groundwork for that shocking rain of frogs. (And speaking of Altman, while I'm not the biggest fan of The Player, I was far happier to see it representing the great director here rather than the dour and sour Short Cuts.)”

The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off yesterday, and Spoutblog has the scoop on the film Paris Hilton doesn’t want you to see. “Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which ‘attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture’ and is also ‘modeled after the 1960s it-girl film Darling.’ Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. ‘From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,’ Powers told me in an email. ‘But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.’… As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, ‘the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.’”

Cinematical is also on the scene in Toronto, and they’ve had a look at The Brothers Bloom. “Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.”

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny makes an interesting connection between Road House and a David Lynch movie. No, not that Road House. “The terrifying physical contrast between the behemoth and a very delicate woman brought to mind a scene from David Lynch's under-appreciated (to my mind, at least) 1992 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. This scene, too, is set in a roadhouse of sorts—the back room of the Bang Bang Bar, which actually, if one line of dialogue is to be believed, is located on the Canadian side of the Canada/U.S. border the structure sits on. As it happens, the road house of Negulsco's film is located near the Canadian border; this turns into a significant plot point once Lily and Pete are trying to escape from the psychotic Jefty, played by Richard Widmark with his then-trademark tetchy intensity… I wonder if Lynch had ever seen Negulsco's film. Some shards of it, it seems, lodged their way into the world of Twin Peaks. The road house as portrayed in the '48 picture is a piece of bygone mid-century Americana that I've always found fascinating—it looks way fun. It's got a bar, a restaurant, a sporting-goods store, and a bowling alley!”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Geekdad weighs in with 10 Movies Needing a Muppet Remake. This guy has put way too much thought into this. “Casablanca - The initial temptation is to cast Kermit as Rick, but I think Kermit is better as the utterly noble Victor Laszlo, with Miss Piggy as Ilsa by his side. Gonzo is much better as Rick, with his internal, and external, conflict between love, revenge, and the right thing to do. Rowlf is Sam, for who else could be? Captain Renault is a tough part to play, but I think Fozzie has the right cavalier attitude for the role.”

DVD Digest for September 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week’s DVD Digest is highlighted by a bumper crop of new TV-on-DVD releases in conjunction with the upcoming fall season. In addition, a large number of Blu-Ray only releases and a crush of new indie films on DVD helps to smooth over the lack of a first-rate “DVD of the Week”-worthy release.

This week’s high-profile new releases on DVD include Ira Sachs’ acclaimed fifties-set drama Married Life (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Norwegian import Reprise (Buena Vista) (click here for Bryan Whitefield’s interview with the filmmaker), and the animated direct-to-DVD Marvel feature Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray). Also, in a strange coincidence, this week also brings the release of four films I caught at Columbus’ Out@Wex series of GLBT films this past spring: Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget (Strand), the coming-of-age drama Water Lilies (Koch), the gender politics comedy Itty Bitty Titty Committee (Wolfe Video), and Lagerfeld Confidential (Koch), a documentary about the fashion designer.

This week’s slate of classics coming to DVD is highlighted by three new Fox Noir releases: Elia Kazan’s Boomerang, Jean Gabin in Moontide, and Road House (no, not that one), which includes a commentary track from Screengrab favorite Kim Morgan. Somewhat less notable is MGM’s 20th Anniversary Edition of the unholy union of Michael J. Fox and Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City.

In the TV-on-DVD department, this week brings Desperate Housewives Season 4 (Disney), Eli Stone Season 1 (Disney), Ghost Whisperer Season 3 (Paramount), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 3 (Fox), Life Season 1 (Universal) starring the ever-underrated Damian Lewis, Supernatural Season 2 (Warner), and The Office Season 4 (Universal).

Finally, this week’s action-heavy Blu-Ray only releases include: Jet Li in Black Mask (Lionsgate), Arnold Schwarzenegger in Eraser (Warner), the Clint Eastwood double feature Every Which Way But Loose (Warner) and The Gauntlet (Warner), Marvel’s animated The Invincible Iron Man (Lionsgate), the killer-virus thriller Outbreak (Warner), Michael Bay’s Transformers (Paramount), and Steven Seagal ridin’ the rails in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (Warner).

Take Five: We Love The '80s

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:30:00 GMT

American moviegoers can't get enough of the 1980s, apparently. Those of us who had to live through it the first time remember it primarily as a time of bad metal, worse sitcoms, and waiting around to see what dumb-ass thing Ronald Reagan would say next, but to the generations that followed, it is a time for richly veined cultural nostalgia. From what we can recollect through the haze of drugs and alcohol that coat our memories of the decade, the hallmark of 1980s cinema was very loud explosions punctuated by the occasional car chase or wise-cracking black transvestite. It's not something we thought anyone would be eager to repeat, and yet there have been, in recent memory, new installments of the Die Hard and Rocky franchises; a new TV series based on The Terminator; an upcoming Indiana Jones picture; and, opening all across the country this Friday, a new Rambo movie. Even the Screengrab is getting into the act, with Gabriel Mckee posting his top ten action heroes who deserve a comeback, many of whom hail from the Decade That Time Refuses To Forget. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em: so says Take Five as we present a fistful of '80s action movies that we. . . well, we don't love, exactly, but we at least look back on with something less than severe brain trauma.

ROCKY III (1982)

Sure, the first movie had heart and soul. And the second movie had a ruthless determination to capitalize on the first movie's heart and soul. But do you know what they didn't have? Do you know what they lacked, which made the third installment unquestionably the best of all the Rocky movies? That's right: MR. T. They didn't have Mr. T, and as such, they suffered, as do all artistic projects not involving Mr. T. Here's a little secret they don't teach you at film school: sure, Citizen Kane might have been the greatest movie of all time — but it would have been even better if it had been able to feature Mr. T yelling at people. And Rocky III, whatever its other faults — and it had hundreds, from its hamhanded TV-movie direction (by Sly himself) to its predictable storyline — at least gave us Mr. T yelling at people in abundance. When his Clubber Lang (a savage, media-loathing brute allegedly inspired by young George Foreman) wasn't yelling at people, he was beating people up, and Rocky III brings us the double pleasure of seeing Sylvester Stallone clobbered by Clubber and Hulk Hogan as "Thunderlips". Just turn it off halfway through.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)

If it wasn't the most exciting or accomplished action movie of the 1980s, it was at least probably the most enjoyable: Big Trouble in Little China was brought to us by an uncharacteristically light-hearted John Carpenter, and worked both as a straight-up pseudo-mystical punch-'em-out and as a loopy parody of same. Carried largely on the back of Kurt Russell's endearing performance as antihero "ol' Jack Burton", a trucker who's chock full of bogus wisdom delivered in a ridiculously over-the-top John Wayne accent. Part of the reason it plays so well as both sincere action and goofy action send-up is because the script was written by W.D. Richter, who originally conceived it as a sequel to his own The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension from two years earlier. Legal and financial issues kept the sequel from being made, but Big Trouble features some of its characteristic touches and clever bits of dialogue. It also features swell performances from a young Kim Cattrall and James Hong, everyone's favorite inscrutable Asian. Besides, how can you not love a movie featuring a wizard named Egg Shen?

ACTION JACKSON (1988)
Where is the love for Sgt. Jericho Jackson, we ask you? Where? This compelling saga of America's forgotten black action hero was released in the same month as Bloodsport, making 1988 — which also brought us Die Hard, Above the Law, Red Heat and They Live — a banner year from cheesy guilty-pleasure action movies. This one had it all: a post-Rocky, pre-Arrested Development Carl Weathers playing a tough Detroit cop who was also an all-American track star and a Harvard-educated attorney; former Prince plaything Vanity making hay while the sun shone as a sex kitten; Sharon Stone, doing the thing that she was best known for doing before everyone all of the sudden decided to take her seriously; and villains Craig T. Nelson and Robert Davi overacting like there was no tomorrow. (Which, for Robert Davi at least, there probably wasn't.) Action Jackson had everything you could have wanted out of a 1980s action flick: a wisecracking tough guy hero, naked dead chicks, tons of explosions, people dying in extremely creative ways, egregious use of narcotics, and a protagonist whose name rhymed! Come back, Carl Weathers, all is forgiven.

BLOODSPORT (1988)

Before Jean-Claude Van Damme was a full-time crazy person, he was America's next big martial arts star. Bloodsport was the movie that put the rubber-groined Belgian on the map, portraying real-life martial arts semi-star Frank Dux. The plot of Bloodsport — well, it's giving it a lot more credit than it deserves to even call it a plot, involving (as does every other martial arts movie ever made) a bunch of well-toned Asians out to kick each other in the face. It's not much for memorable acting, either; Van Damme had already, in his first starring role, perfected the self-satisfied smirk that would carry him through the rest of his career, and while the movie does feature a young Forest Whitaker as a federal agent tasked to stand around looking exasperated, it also features Leah Ayres failing to become America's sweetheart, Donald Gibb trying to make the transition from hooligan to lummox, and Bolo Yeung (the former Bruce Lee nemesis known as Yang Tse) putting in the kind of performance only a trunk full of steroids can deliver. But it does feature some stunning martial arts battles, which is really all you can hope for in a movie like this.

ROAD HOUSE (1989)

In all the calls for a revival of action movie heroes like Rocky, Rambo, Ryan, and Indy, where are the legions of fans clamoring for a return of James Dalton? Patrick Swayze desperately needs something to do, people. Believe it or not, there was once a time when women would line up around the block to get a load of this chunk-headed 'King of the Sleepers' with his shirt off, and nowhere was he more chunk-headed or shirtless than in this deleriously zany action flick about a Zen-influenced tough guy ("Pain don't hurt") who is hired, despite his small stature and philosophy degree from NYU, to act as the bouncer at an out-of-control bar. Directed by a former electrician named Rowdy and co-starring Kelly Lynch at the height of her blondeness, Road House transcends its shortcomings by being so completely indifferent to its own craziness that it chugs along on its own energy with nary a look back. Ben Gazzara is the bad guy in this thing, clearly bombed out of his coconut, and it features the immortal line "I used to fuck guys like you in prison".

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