I'm Gonna Live Forever

Film: Fame
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

Anyone who knows me knows me knows about my girls pretty quickly. Most parents are proud of their kids, of course, and like most parents, I’m extremely proud of my kids. I think I have reason. My older daughter is 17 and a college junior. She was invited into the dance program during her sophomore year in high school, and she finished high school a year early. My younger daughter was just accepted into the Joffrey Ballet’s five-week summer program, an offer made to 150 students nationwide. So, based on the fact that I live in a world of ballet, jazz, and tap, it’s surprising that it’s taken me this long to get to Fame.

Fame follows four years of students at a New York high school for performing arts. The students spend their mornings working on their specialty—acting, dance, music—and the afternoons on academic subjects. It’s no surprise, though, that this is not going to be a drama about chemistry or English. No, we’re going to be dealing with drama all about, well, acting, dance, and music. We’re presented with a standard variety pack of students with the standard variety pack of issues. To whit:

Off Script: Angel Heart

Film: Angel Heart
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

By the time it wraps up, Angel Heart has gone through almost a half dozen gruesome and grisly murders and has moved from New York to New Orleans. But the film could have essentially been a short feature. We as the audience jump through a lot of hoops and have to keep a lot of plates spinning to get to the final sequence that finally reveals what many of us will deduce from previous scenes. Ultimately, we realize that a great deal of the film could have been handled by extending an early scene instead. Because of this, Angel Heart is about the journey rather than the destination.

Downtrodden private investigator Harold Angel (Mickey Rourke, back when he still had his own face) is contacted by a lawyer named Winesap (Dann Florek) to meet with a client. This client, Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) is an imposing gentleman with a full beard, immaculate black suit, and long, pointed fingernails that intentionally look like claws. Cyphre tells Harry Angel that a singer who was starting to make a name for himself a dozen years previous during World War II has backed out on his contract. He wants Angel to track the man down.

That's Nobody's Business but the Turks'

Film: Midnight Express
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

There are moments in Midnight Express that I remember. I’m positive that I’ve never seen this before, but I’d definitely seen bits and pieces of it, certainly at an age before I was really old enough to understand it and long before it was appropriate for me to see it. Those few early glimpses gave me a pretty good sense that Midnight Express was going to be a tough ride. I was not disappointed in that respect. This is not the kind of movie one sits down to with a happy smile and a bag of popcorn with the hopes of seeing an entertaining film.

Midnight Express is based on the real experiences of Billy Hayes (Brad Davis). Vacationing in Turkey with his girlfriend Susan (Irene Miracle), Billy decides to attempt to smuggle two kilos of hashish out of the country for personal use and to sell to friends. If he got away with it, we wouldn’t have much of a movie. He’s caught before boarding his plane and hauled away. After an abortive escape attempt, Billy is tossed into jail at the whim of the notoriously corrupt Turkish prison system.

Race Relations

Film: Mississippi Burning
Format: DVD from Yorkville Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

I go back and forth on the term “Oscar bait.” There are times when I see the phrase as something just as derogatory as “chick flick” and other times when it feels completely warranted. A film like Mississippi Burning is very much a film made with Oscar in mind. It would be difficult for it not to be. This is a film all about the Civil Rights movement, based loosely on a true story, and featuring a trio of murdered civil rights workers in the deep, deep South. With a halfway decent script and the right performances, the nominations will follow.

It helps to have a hell of a cast. Mississippi Burning features a cast of people who were stars (or at least known) when the film was made and a handful of others who have gone on to pretty nice careers. The cast is the sort of thing a filmmaker would sell his or her soul for: Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand for starters. Toss in Brad Dourif, Michael Rooker, Tobin Bell, Stephen Tobolowski, R. Lee Ermey, and that-guys Kevin Dunn, and Pruitt Taylor Vince, and you have the sort of cast able to give those performances necessary to secure nominations.