The Greatest

Film: Ali
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Every now and then, an actor known for fluff pieces, comedies, or summer blockbuster actiony pablum pulls off a role that demonstrates that he or she is deserving of a lot more respect. Such I the case with Will Smith and Ali. You could argue that Smith attempted to do this with the previous year’s The Legend of Bagger Vance. But it was Ali where Smith showed his chops. Of course, he immediately went back to summer blockbusters and sequels, but every now and then, Smith pulls out a performance that shows he’s better than a lot of his films. For what it’s worth, the same thing could be said about Jamie Foxx in this film, too.

Ali, like most biopics worth the time and effort, doesn’t cover the entire life of its subject, but focuses instead on the most interesting part of the subject’s life. In the case of Muhammad Ali (Will Smith) this means skipping his amateur career and jumping directly into his two fights with Sonny Liston (Michael Bennt), his conversion to Islam, his relationship with Malcolm X (Mario Van Peebles) and his troubles with the draft, legal battles, and eventual release from his military obligations and reinstatement of his boxing license. The film covers Ali’s first fight with Joe Frazier (James Toney) and concludes with Ali’s recapturing of the world heavyweight title in his fight against George Foreman (Charles Shufford) in the now-legendary Rumble in the Jungle. The film wisely avoids dealing with Ali’s decline, later years, and suffering from Parkinson’s disease. No, we get Ali in his prime, the Ali that was a force of nature as much as he was a force in boxing.

Smoke 'Em if You've Got 'Em

Film: The Insider
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

It’s interesting to see the moment an actor’s career makes a change. For Russell Crowe, one could argue pretty successfully that that moment came in 1997 with L.A. Confidential. For my money, though, you need to go a couple of years further into the future and his role in The Insider. There was always a touch of dirt on his characters before this role, but here he plays a man who puts his life, his family, his career, and everything else on the line for principle. I think it’s a stronger argument to suggest that Hollywood started taking him seriously as an actor rather than just a leading man who sells tickets when he finally took a role that wasn’t playing an inherently sexy character.

And strangely, the whole time I watched this film it felt like a Ron Howard film in everything but the soundtrack. I’m not sure why I had to constantly remind myself that this was a film directed by Michael Mann, whom I typically love. I have no reason for this—it’s just the way it is.

...Get Out of the Kitchen

Film: Heat
Format: DVD from NetFlix on big ol’ television.

Some movies get an audience by trading on the plot, some on the special effects, some on a popular license. Plenty of movies gain an audience by shilling the stars of the film. Few had the sort of star bank as did Michael Mann’s Heat, the first film to feature Al Pacino and Robert De Niro on screen together. That’s the sort of thing that makes a film geek drool.

Fortunately, Heat lives up to the hype. But we’ve got a long way to go to get to the end of this. After all, this is a Michael Mann crime film, which means that we’re going to spend a good deal of time in the personal lives of the principle characters. It’s also a film that clocks in at just under three hours, so we’re going to get a lot of it. But, since it’s a Michael Mann crime film, we’re also in for a good ride.

Off Script: The Keep

Film: The Keep
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen

Odd horror movies are a fun place to look for known actors after the fact. The 1983 supernatural horror film The Keep, for instance, features a host of actors in the relatively early stages of their film careers—actors who have since gone on to be noteworthy, award winning names. There is a real joy in seeing someone you know from recent films in a much younger incarnation.

The movie takes place during World War II. The Germans have moved into Romania and a group have moved into an ancient keep (of the title) as a place to set up shop. The keep is large, well-protected, and otherwise impressive, so it seems a natural place for them to use as a headquarters. Upon arrival, they discover that there is a series of nickel crosses embedded in the walls, and they are warned not to touch them.

Head Trips

Films: Manhunter, Naked Lunch
Format: DVDs from Rockford Public Library on middlin’-sized living room television

Sometimes plans don’t work out. My original plan for the night was to do a Hannibal Lector double feature—the original screen adaptation of the character as well as the most famous version of the character. Sadly, my VCR ate my tape of Silence of the Lambs immediately after I finished watching Manhunter. But we adapt, we change, we do something else instead. So rather than making today about Hannibal the Cannibal, I’ve decided instead to look at the weird and the offbeat.

Manhunter, as mentioned above, is the first film ever made featuring the character of Hannibal. This is not the character you are expecting if all you’ve seen is Silence of the Lambs. For starters, in this film, his name is spelled Lecktor. Second, and critical, is that in this film the bad doctor is played by noted actor Brian Cox, of whom I am a huge fan.

If you are a Hannibal fan, this is a story you’ve seen before, because it was remade as Red Dragon, which is also the name of the book the film is based on. It is, much like Silence, the story of an FBI agent trailing a serial killer and getting help from the depraved killer in prison. The agent here is William Graham (William Peterson), who is also the man who caught Lecktor in the first place. The case caused Graham to break with reality and retire from the Bureau. Graham’s specialty was (and to some extent still is) profiling. To profile killers, though, he needs to get deep inside their mind, essentially seeing what they see, and in some cases becoming what they become.

Graham is pulled from retirement by Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina), who needs help with a new serial killer. The killer is known by the FBI as the Tooth Fairy because he bites his victims. His victims are entire families, always cut down in a group during the full moon. Based on two crime scenes, the FBI knows quite a bit about the man (who is disturbingly played by Tom Noonan). They know he is very tall and blonde; they know his shoe size and his fascination with the lunar phase. What they don’t know is how he chooses his victims or where he will strike next.

Enlisted in finding the killer is a reporter for a National Enquirer-style paper called the Tattler. The reporter, played by Stephen Lang, is a creep and willing to do anything for a story. More important for Graham, the FBI discovers that the Tooth Fairy has been corresponding with Lecktor through the Tattler’s personal ads. To get the killer into the open, Graham feeds Lang false information, which leads to a terrifying confrontation between the reporter and the killer—one of the great scenes in the film.

While Graham and team become frustrated by the lack of movement on their case, the Tooth Fairy’s real identity—Francis Dollarhyde—has a change in his own life. While on the one hand he believes himself to be becoming something more than he was through his killings, he also finds someone who he believes can make him happy. This is Reba McClane (Joan Allen), who works at the same film processing studio he does, despite her being blind. Francis connects with her, but also feels betrayed by her, and puts her into his sites just as Graham begins to understand precisely what motivates the man.

It’s a good story. The real selling point, though, is a very different take on the Hannibal character. Cox isn’t in the film much, but he casts a long shadow over it. We gain terrific insight into the man when he uses his one phone call a week to discover the home address of Graham and his family, and then sends an encrypted message to the Tooth Fairy telling him to find and destroy Graham’s wife and son. He is a very different take on the character than is Anthony Hopkins’s version. Cox’s Lecktor is cold and calculating. He is filled with equal parts feigned innocence and malice disguised by concern. It’s such a different take that his version was overwhelmed by that of Hopkins in later films.

As for Naked Lunch, you tell me. The book it is loosely based on, or at least named after, was thought to be unfilmable until David Cronenberg attempted it. He evidently found it unfilmable as well and included several other books by Burroughs as well as aspects of Burroughs’s real life into something that is less a narrative and more an two-hour long fever dream of hallucination.

Bill Lee (Peter Weller) is an exterminator whose wife Joan (Judy Davis) has become addicted to the bug powder he uses to kill roaches. Bill himself is showing signs of addiction to the bug powder himself and begins to have significant hallucinations that center around gigantic bugs, many of which manifest themselves as bug-machine hybrids.

One day, Lee comes home to find his wife having sex with one of his friends while another friend reads droning poetry. Lee has been instructed by one of his hallucinatory giant bugs to kill his wife (and to make it…tasty…), so he shoots her in the head while playing “William Tell.” He flees, at least in his mind, to a place called Interzone, which is also the headquarters of an organization called Interzone Incorporated.

It seems that Lee is an agent for the bugs, and has been sent to Interzone to write reports on his typewriter, which is also a giant bug, and also his contact for the agency he works for. However, in the real world, it turns out that he has been mailing his “reports” to one of his friends, who has shown it to a publisher, who wants to publish it under the name of Naked Lunch. Along the way, Lee also encounters Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who might be a doctor and might also be in charge of a drug running conspiracy, shipping a drug called “black meat” made from gigantic Brazilian aquatic centipedes. He encounters Joan Frost, who is a dead ringer (no pun intended) for his dead wife. This Joan is married to Tom Frost (Ian Holm), who might be an Interzone agent, or could be just a hallucination.

The film is both real and unreal, existing in the real world as well as the vaguely Arabic Interzone of Bill Lee’s subconscious mind. I don’t get it. I’m also not sure if I like it. This is the second time I’ve watched this film, and just like the first time, it gave me a headache that required multiple ibuprofen to conquer.

I can’t make it make sense. I defy anyone to—even Cronenberg.

Why to watch Manhunter: The original take on Hannibal Lec(k)t(o)r.
Why not to watch: Thirty minutes of Inna-Gadda-Da-Vita.

Why to watch Naked Lunch: I don’t know.
Why not to watch: I don’t know this, either.

Playing Against Type

Film: Collateral
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.

Certain actors play certain roles. I won’t say that every actor is typecast, but some actors seem to gravitate to particular roles more than other actors do. For instance, Humphrey Bogart generally played tough guys, and usually tough guys who were, deep down, straight and narrow. It’s always interesting when an actor goes against type—Bogart playing a money-mad paranoiac in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for instance, makes the film additionally noteworthy. One of the great shock moments in Once Upon a Time in the West comes when everyone’s lovable nice guy, Henry Fonda, shoots a 10-year-old kid in cold blood.

There’s a Tom Cruise type. His characters are generally heroic in some sense. They are often flawed characters, but the flaw comes from an external source. In The Last Samurai, for instance, he plays an alcoholic, but the character is driven to drink by the wholesale slaughter of natives. In Minority Report, he plays a drug addict, but the character is driven to drugs by the abduction and death of his son. In Valkyrie he plays a Nazi, but a Nazi trying to assassinate Hitler. So, when Tom Cruise plays against type, the results are going to be at least interesting.

Collateral is just such a movie. Cruise plays Vincent, a hired killer working for a drug dealer. Vincent needs to eliminate five people in one night to make sure that a pending trial doesn’t happen. He needs to take out some informants and a number of people otherwise connected to the case. His hapless assistant in all of this is a cab driver named Max (Jamie Foxx), who is just going about his nightly rounds, driving fares from one side of L.A. to the other.

Max is a man with a dream. He tells his first fare, a prosecuting attorney (Jada Pinkett Smith), that cab driving is a temporary thing for him—he plans on starting his own limousine company when he works up the right investors and client list. Eventually, he hopes to create something he’ll call Island Limousine, a party in a car where the clients will want to stay with him rather than get out at the airport.

We discover a lot of things about Max in this initial cab ride. He’s very good at his job and he reads people very well. We learn later that he’s been cab driving for a dozen years, and is really no closer to making his dream come true than he was the first day he started driving.

It’s Max’s misfortune that he accepts Vincent as a fare. Vincent asks Max to stay with him for the night, offering him about double his nightly take if he does. Vincent claims that he has to see a series of people about a real estate deal, and that this will take him all over town. Max agrees, only to discover at the first stop that the real estate being talked about is six feet underground and generally has a tombstone over it. Vincent’s first victim falls through a window and onto Max’s cab.

Max, naturally, balks at this, but Vincent and his gun are fairly insistent that Max stay the course and drive Vincent to his series of hits. Max does, but attempts to thwart Vincent at every opportunity, taking calculated risks to get help or attract attention, all of which backfire in very bad ways.

As the night continues, several things happen. First, we discover that Vincent is as good at reading people as Max is. We discover that Vincent also is a lover of free-form jazz music. We learn that he is as good at what he does as Max is. Most importantly, Max is sucked further and further into Vincent’s world as the night goes on, not ever becoming complicit in Vincent’s crimes, but skating closer and closer to that edge with every mile he drives.

While Collateral is a good action movie, it’s better as a character study of these two men. Vincent is simply doing his job, but continually justifies his actions with his nihilism. Max wants to survive to see his limousine company happen, but has never given himself the impetus to do anything other than what he’s already doing. As the two men learn something about each other, they (and we) also learn quite a bit about themselves. The closer they get to the end of the night, the closer they get to a showdown between them, Vincent simply covering his own tracks and Max fighting not only for his life, but also for his soul.

Is it a great movie? I’m not sure. Since it’s no longer in the book, my guess is it showed up for a cup of coffee and vanished just as quickly. It’s a smart movie, though—Michael Mann films generally are—and definitely worth watching. It’s probably for the best that it was removed from the list though, as I can’t think of a specific reason it needs to be seen, other than the fact that Tom Cruise, while he often plays a bad-ass, rarely plays a bad guy. He does it convincingly here, and that’s something to see.

*** SPOILER TIME ***

What bothers me about the film is that it becomes a neat, pat package. Max’s first fare turns out to be Vincent’s last potential victim. That sort of bookending feels too planned out to me—too coincidental to be anything other than something directly out of a movie, which of course this is. That Max acts at the end to save Annie the lawyer rather than himself is a little disappointing. When it became evident that she was the last person on the list, I wasn’t shocked. Instead, I just sighed, figuring that sort of neat package was par for the Hollywood course.

*** END SPOILERS ***

Why to watch Collateral: Tom Cruise is a stone-cold killer.
Why not to watch: The bow that wraps this package does so too neatly.