Road House & Point Break

When I saw the double feature on the Castro Theater calendar, I knew I wanted to go.  It would only be other commitments which could keep me away.  The stars aligned and I was able to see Road House & Point Break at the Castro on May 21.

I was surprised that Road House & Point Break wasn't a Midnites for Maniacs show.  Speaking of which, the Maniac has announced his next show at the Castro.  On June 12, he will show two of John Cusack's best films:  Say Anything & High Fidelity.

Road House starring Patrick Swayze, Ben Gazzara & Kelly Lynch; directed by Rowdy Herrington; (1989)
Point Break starring Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty & Gary Busey; directed by Kathryn Bigelow; (1991)

I have seen both of these films countless times on television but I wanted to see them in the theater.  I suspected that watching them on TV was a inferior experience compared to the big screen.  I was right.

Many people I know have guilty pleasures when it comes to their film watching.  Some hide their preferences; others wear their genre fetish proudly.  For many, this means a love of horror films which is easy to satisfy now - zombies, vampires, torture porn, etc.  Those things bore me.  Some guys like rom-coms which I can take or leave.

For me, I secretly like action films but when I say that, I should say I like the action films from my youth.  The ones today bore me.  I mentioned I was a big fan of The Rock.   Among other films of the era which I occasionally have a hard time owning up to are Road House, Point Break, Die Hard, Predator, The Terminator, Escape From New York, The Warriors, Lethal Weapon, etc.  These films don't play the art house/rep house theaters too often so I was forced to enjoy them in the privacy of my home (thank you TNT and Spike TV).  As they say, everything old is new again.  I think it is time to see a wave of 80s and 90s action films get the retrospective treatment.

Road House is a ridiculous film.  Patrrick Swayze plays Dalton, a legendary "cooler" which is a head bouncer at a bar.  He is recruited to the Double Deuce Bar in Jasper (outside of Kansas City).  Dalton appears to practice tai chi, approaches his job with a Zen like philosophy, smokes cigarettes, fights in a style which looks like MMA, has a degree in philosophy and makes $500 per night in 1989!

The Double Deuce is a real piece of work.  If no one dies, it's considered a good night.  Dalton sets about cleaning the Double Deuce but runs afoul with the local kingpin Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara).  To make matters even worse, Dalton starts dating the Dr. Clay (Kelly Lynch) who used to date Wesley.

Wesley begins a war with Dalton & his allies in town.  It's partly out of jealousy but also to assert his control of the town that Wesley begins an increasingly violent campaign of harassment.  My favorite moment is when Wesley orders one of his goons to get into his monster truck and drove over the new cars in a dealership to teach the recalcitrant dealer a lesson.

Road House was rated R which makes me wonder who the original target audience was.  I was looking for differences between the film and the television broadcasts I have seen.  There is a low level but definite homoerotic overtone to some of the scenes.  There is one scene in particular where Dalton fights to the death with Wesley's toughest henchman (Marshall Teague).  Swayze is shirtless and wearing what looks suspiciously like yoga pants.  Teague is decked out in denim and looks like he came to Jasper straight from hustling on Times Square.  In the middle of the fight, Teague spits out this glorious piece of dialogue:  "I used to fuck guys like you in prison."

I noticed more in the film which is censored from broadcast television.  On their second date, Dalton & the good doctor consummate their relationship.  The doctor is not wearing any underwear & Dalton seems to routinely go commando style.  Wesley probably controls the undergarment racket in town.

Speaking of rackets, how does Wesley get so rich in a podunk town?  He actually brags to Dalton that he has the 7-Eleven franchise and maybe...just maybe...JC Penney is coming to town next year.  Wesley gets 10% of all the business gross in town which probably adds up to hundreds of dollars per month.  Gazzara seems to know he is in the realm of the ridiculousness.  There is an edge to his performance  that suggests he knows that the film is in a state of altered reality.  I saw it in his performances in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie & Buffalo '66 but he uses it to greater effect in Road House because he is the villain.

Swayze plays Dalton straight.  In fact, Swayze swings for the fences as if he was trying to get an Oscar nomination.  He modulates his voice, stares people down, earnestly espouses his philosophies on life and work.  Lynch doesn't show much range but it doesn't really detract from the film.  The only actor who seems to be having a good time is Sam Elliott as Dalton's mentor.  Hands down, the most interesting performance is that of Kevin Tighe as the owner of the Double Deuce.  It appears he was given directions to play the character as if it were a Peter Lorre role.  He comes off as suspicious and vaguely like a child molester.  I say that because I saw him in an episode of Law and Order SVU (the one titled Avatar) and he gave a performance that reminded me a lot of his turn in Road House.

"It's so bad it's good."  I hear that a lot and typically it is so bad that it is bad but for me Road House is the quintessential "it's so bad it's good" movie.  When I was not laughing at inappropriate junctures, I was drawn to the characters and story.

Obviously, the common thread between Road House and Point Break is Patrick Swayze.  However, another actor appeared in both films.  Julie Michaels appears as Denise in Road House.  If you don't remember who Denise is, she is the woman who gets up and does a strip tease at the Double Deuce.  Her exact situation is unclear.  She seems to live at Wesley's house.  Wesley (or his henchmen) seem to beat her up.  Whatever she is to Wesley, he encourages her to do her strip tease to tempt Dalton away from the doctor.  I think she only has one line of dialogue in the film and frankly, her strip tease seems a bit clumsy.

Looking at Michaels' filmography, she has more credits for stunts than acting.  She combines the fight choreography and acting in Point Break.  In a memorable sequence Keanu Reeves and his FBI colleagues raid a house full of meth cooking surf nazis.  A blonde woman is in the shower.  We know this because we can see her silhouette.  When the shooting starts, she becomes a scream queen but at the first opportunity, she starts kicking Keanu's ass...while she is still naked.  Can't blame her; when the bullets fly, you don't have time to put on your clothes.  Her character's name is credited as "Freight Train" although I don't recall her being addressed by that name during the film.

Point Break is definitely a step up from Road House for several reasons.  With all due respect to Rowdy Harrington, he hasn't had the career Kathryn Bigelow has had.  Bigelow seems to understand what makes guys with adrenaline addictions tick and the price they have to pay.  She has shown this is The Hurt Locker, Strange Days and even Zero Dark Thirty where it can be argued that Jessica Chastain's character is forced to adopt the hypermasculine persona of her colleagues.

In Point Break, Swayze plays Bodhi as a sort of disillusioned Dalton who has turned to a life of crime.  Bodhi is the leader of a gang of bank robbers who are given the sobriquet of "The Ex-Presidents."  They wear rubber masks when they rob the banks - Reagan, Nixon, Carter & LBJ.  Bodhi espouses a Zen like philosophy towards surfing and life.  By the way, in real life Swayze was a Buddhist and practiced Transcendental Meditation which is probably why those qualities come through so strongly in some of his characters.

On the trail of Bodhi is the new hot shot FBI academy graduate Johnny Utah (Reeves).  First that is a great name.  I read the writers chose the name  because they were trying to evoke a combination John Unitas and Joe Montana.  Utah played QB at Ohio State.  You would think that would disqualify him from undercover work but this is the movies.  Utah's partner is Angelo Pappas (Gary Busey).  He convinces Utah that the Ex-Presidents are surfers so Utah goes undercover to infiltrate the subculture.  He lies to a female surfer (Lori Petty) to ingratiate himself among the surfing crowd.

After a false start with the aforementioned surf nazis, Utah begins gathering evidence that Bodhi and his surfer buds are the Ex-Presidents.  Following a hellacious chase scene between Utah & Bodhi (always wearing the mask), the fun really starts.  Bodhi introduces Utah to skydiving, kidnaps his girlfriend and forces him to participate in a bank robbery where one of the Ex-Presidents and an off-duty police officer are killed.  This leads to the film's pièce de résistance.  Stuck in an airborne plane without a parachute, Utah jumps out of the aircraft and catches up to Bodhi in mid air.

Bigelow gets some terrific surfing and skydiving footage to give Point Break some extra oomph.  Swayze's hippy-dippy affirmations aren't quite so ridiculous when surfer guru Bodhi says them as opposed to when bar bouncer guru Dalton says them.  Also, watching the two films back-to-back, I notice that Swayze is frequently eclipsed by Gazzara's performance which is arguably the most ostentatious part of Road House.  In contrast, Swayze's Bodhi is clearly more charismatic than Reeves' inscrutable performance as Johnny Utah.  Point Break is a case where you like the villain better than the hero.  In fact, it is only until Bodhi is harassed by Utah that he loses his composure.

By my count, Bigelow hits a home run with three action sequences in the film - the raid on the surf nazis house, the first skydiving sequence which gets great overhead shots of Lake Powell & the aforementioned skydiving sequence which had me wondering how they pulled off that stunt.  If you throw in the surfing scenes, the tense foot chase and bank robbery scenes, Point Break strings together a number of thrilling sequences to make a solid action film.  Johnny Utah's character motivation & screen presence are weak but Swayze & Gary Busey make up for it by commanding the audience's attention when they are on screen.

Enjoy Point Break while you can because they are remaking the film.  When the film comes out, you can never watch the original on TV again.  I've seen it happen with the inferior remakes of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three & The Longest Yard.  I never thought I would be nostalgic for Point Break.

Chronicle of My Mother and Zero Dark Thirty

I saw a double feature at the 4 Star in late February.  At least, I thought it was a double feature.  The movie listing wasn't clear and no one cleared the theater between screenings.  In fact, the turnaround time between the end of Chronicle of My Mother and Zero Dark Thirty was one of the quickest I can  recall.

Chronicle of My Mother starring Kôji Yakusho; directed by Masato Harada; Japanese with subtitles; (2011)  - Official Website
Zero Dark Thirty starring Jessica Chastain; directed by Kathryn Bigelow; (2012) - Official Website

Zero Dark Thirty was the fifth (and to date final) film I saw which was nominated for Best Picture at the 2013 Oscars.  The other nominated films I saw were Argo, Django Unchained, Lincoln & Beasts of the Southern Wild.  Of those five films, Zero Dark Thirty was my favorite.

Zero Dark Thirty tells the near decade long search for Osama bin Laden.  The main character is a CIA operative named Maya (Jessica Chastain).  After surviving an assassination attempt and the Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing as well as having her close friend be killed at the Camp Chapman attack, Maya  becomes obsessed with finding bin Laden.  The highlight of the film is the storming of bin Laden compound Abbottabad by SEAL Team 6 which resulted in bin Laden death.  This operation is told in near real-time  and devoid of the pyrotechnics associated with modern action films.  Even though I knew how it would end, it was still very taut and lasted for 20 minutes or so.  I may be wrong as time seemed to stand still as I was watching the SEALs clear the house room by room.  The fact that Bigelow could maintain my interest when I knew the outcome says a lot about her skills as director.

Another aspect of the film which has received considerable media attention is the torture scenes.  Waterboarding and other forms of "enhanced interrogation" are depicted on screen with what I imagine is quite a bit of reality.  That they yield valuable and actionable intelligence is criticized by some as validating the use of these techniques.  I am of a different opinion because I see so many films.  Zero Dark Thirty is a movie and a fictionalized account of real events.  The use of torture in those scenes added to the dramatic effect of the film and as such I wholly support Bigelow incorporating them in the film.  That has nothing to do with real life.  As much as some would have the public believe that films drive real world actions, I am skeptical.  It certainly doesn't drive me actions.  I've seen countless murders and fights at the movies and I've never killed anyone and haven't been in a fight since I was 10 years old.  To paraphrase René Magritte's famous painting, this is not torture.

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Chronicle of My Mother had the just the hint of an Ozu film.  The camera wasn't static but the film explored the dynamics between three generations of a family with a relatively minimal amount of sentimentality.

The film is based on Yasushi Inoue's autobiographical novel of the same name.  Set over 15 years between the late 1950s and early 1970s, Chronicle of My Mother follows the Igami family.  The patriarch is Kosaku (Kôji Yakusho).  Yakusho is familiar to me from such films as Hara-Kiri, 13 Assassins and Shall We Dance?  Kosaku is dealing with two troublesome women in his life.  He has a strained relationship with his mother (Kiki Kirin) who abandoned him or more accurately put him in the care of her father's mistress at the end or end stages of WWII.  This is still a sore spot for Kosaku whether he cares to admit it or not.  Kosaku is also at loggerheads with his headstrong daughter  Kotoko (Miyazaki Aoi).  Kosaku is an author and the publication of his books seems to be a cottage industry.  He enlists his four daughters to assemble the books and ship them although Kotoko frequently refuses.  Kotoko really resents her father self-centeredness although she has less inhibition about expressing her resentment towards her parent than Kosaku.

As the grandmother slides into dementia, she lives with her son and granddaughters.  Kotoko observes the strained relationship between mother and son as she grows into a young woman.  As the softens towards his aging mother, the daughter hardens towards her implacable father.  Kosaku has a protégé who shows interest in Kotoko to the objection of her father.

The plot meanders without announcing its final destination except the grandmother's death is inevitable.  The plot essentially takes the audience along this family's journey.  Several of the members (one of Kosaku's sisters is memorable) can try one's patience but there is a decency about them and genuine love between them as well as a Japanese sense of practicality.

Without being able to identify exactly what it is about the film which I found appealing (strong acting, period costumes, lush visuals, etc.), the totality of the film made the viewing experience worthwhile.

Vampires at YBCA

In August, the YBCA had a vampire series.

I caught two of the three films in the series.

Near Dark starring Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright and Lance Henriksen; with Bill Paxton; directed by Kathryn Bigelow; (1987)
Vampyr directed by Carl Theodore Dreyer; German with subtitles; (1932)

Originally, the third film in the series was going to be Daughters of Darkness, a well known 1971 film which focuses on the more erotic aspects of the vampire myth. The print was damaged so the film was replaced by Vampire Hookers, a 1978 Filipino production starring John Carradine. I decided to pass.

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Near Dark has achieved cult status since its release. Although Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) did not marry James Cameron until two years after the film was released, the casting seemed like a reunion of Cameron's stock company of actors from the 1980s. The film co-starred Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein who appeared in Cameron's Aliens (1986). Henriksen also appeared in Cameron's The Terminator (1984).

Near Dark stars Adrian Pasdar as an Oklahoma cowboy who is bitten by vampire Jenny Wright. Adrian Pasdar looked so young in the film. He was 23 at the time. I'm only familiar with Pasdar's work in the television series Judging Amy which was 16 years later. The difference in appearance is amazing. If I hadn't had known it was Pasdar, I don't think I would have recognized him.

The film mixes genres which probably led to its cult status. Ostensibly a vampire film, most of the action takes place in present day, small-time Oklahoma and Texas. The characters were described as rockabilly in the program notes. I thought they were closer to PWT. The main appeal of the film is intense performances by Henriksen as the leader of the vampire group, Jenette Goldstein as his jealous lover, Bill Paxton as the sadistic vampire and 12 year old Joshua John Miller as the most cold-blooded vampire of them all. Miller's performance could have served as inspiration for Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire (1994).

By contrast, vampire Jenny Wright is almost normal. Certainly she is the least blood thirsty of the vampires with the exception of newbie Pasdar who cannot overcome his disgust and confusion as to what is happening to him.

Most of the film is filled with the existential angst of the vampires, particularly Wright and Pasdar who resist their nocturnal urges to varying degrees. Eventually, Pasdar's sister becomes the intended victim and he casts his lot with his human family. What follows is some old-school sunlight-on-vampire-skin fu as Joe Bob would put it. In this telling of the tale, vampire skins burns black when exposed to direct sunlight. Prolonged exposure causes them to explode.

The film was entertaining. The interplay between Wright and Pasdar took a backseat to the antics of the vampires. A massacre scene in a bar stays in one's memory as does their escape from the police in broad daylight.

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Vampyr was directed by Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer. His film prior to Vampyr was the classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). The Passion of Joan of Arc with the iconic images of Maria Falconetti as Joan and the grotesque faces of her judges, is surely one of the greatest films ever made. Vampyr didn't live up to expectations, at least mine. I found the film ponderous and dozed off for a bit. The actual vampire elements of the film are ambiguous which leads to more implied horror than on-screen menacing. Dreyer's film is nothing like F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu which I was perhaps subconsciously expecting and comparing against. Some of the imagery is interesting. I particularly liked the drowning of the vampire's assistant in a grain silo or similar structure. The opening scene featured a man in silhouette with a extremely large scythe. Apparently Dreyer filmed with a guaze three feet in front of the camera to achieve the washed-out or dreamy appearance which characterizes the film.