The projector is broken, so no show today. We’ll be back on Monday for Stanley Kubrick Week. The plan is to do a theme week in this space, if not every week, then every other week. So if you’ve got any suggestions, feel free to let us know and we’ll do our best to soup it up. It doesn’t have to only be for an actor or a director. It could be for a cinematographer or just a theme–Worst Date Movies, Laugh-Out-Loud Movies, Best Late Night Movies–you name it.
Whadda ya hear, whadda ya say?
You can get with this:
Or you can get with that:
The Choice is Yours.
I grew up with the Roger Moore Bond but think Connery was vastly superior.
There’s no shortage of good boxing movies. We’ve talked about that in the past. But what about laughs? Welp, dig these two funny boxing scenes from the masters: Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Watching them again, they are a decent example of how different Chaplin and Keaton were stylistically.
First, from City Lights:
And from one of Keaton’s lesser features, The Battling Butler:
Ticket Dealer: [to manager, referring to Homer] That overweight guy wants to see the movie.
Manager: I’m terribly sorry, sir, but I’m afraid our facilities are not equipped to meet your needs.
Homer Simpson: What are you talking about?
Manager: What I’m saying, sir, is that a man of your carriage couldn’t possibly fit in our seats.
Homer Simpson: I can sit in the aisle.
Manager: I’m afraid that would violate the fire code.
Bystander: Hey, Fatty! I’ve got a movie for ya: A Fridge Too Far!
While we’re on the topic of sweet junk…
Popcorn, raisinets, ju ju bes, twizzlers, sour patch kids…
How do you roll when you go to the movies?
I like to strap a feedbag on and eat popcorn like that. Sometimes, I’ll have something chocolate cause I’m a surf n turf kind of guy.
The first rated “R” movie I ever saw in the theater was Neighbors, a not-so-funny John Belushi/Dan Ackroyd comedy. Came around the time of my parent’s separation. The high school daughter of my dad’s best friend took my brother, sister and me. When it was over, I asked her what it meant to pork someone and she refused to tell me, said I’d find out soon enough (which was the opposite of finding out soon enough as far as I was concerned).
A few months later, I saw Shoot the Moon, a relentlessly grim movie about divorce. I was obsessed with seeing it and begged the adults I knew to take me. Finally, I got my cousin Deborah to bring me to see it. It was a heavy movie for an eleven-year-old–it’s a heavy movie for a grown up–but life was heavy at that moment. And much of it rang true–the emotional violence, the sadness, the confusion and messiness of it all.
So? What was your first rated “R” movie? Were your parents uptight or liberal when it came to such things? Whadda ya hear, whadda ya say?
Burt Lancaster had been a movie star for nearly forty years when he appeared in Scottish director Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, but it’s probably the film that first made me a Lancaster fan. I’m sure I’d seen him before on TV – a movie of the week airing of The Island of Dr. Moreau, or on HBO’s heavy rotation of Zulu Dawn – hell, maybe even a Million Dollar Movie broadcast of John Frankenheimer’s excellent thriller, Seven Days In May. Regardless, while I knew the name and face of Burt Lancaster, he’d never meant anything to me until Local Hero hit cable TV a short while after its 1983 release. I was just old enough to appreciate its charms and to become a fan of its legendary star.
Local Hero finds a Houston oil company yuppie, MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), sent to Scotland by his employer, Knox Oil & Gas, to purchase an entire town and its bay for a new refinery. The research and planning has been done, all that’s left is for the deal to be made with the locals. MacIntyre gets the job due in part to last name. However, he confides to his friend that his parents were Hungarian and they adopted the name MacIntyre because they thought it sounded “American.” That detail gives you some sense of the world view of Forsyth’s film.
This is a true gem of a movie: gentle, but pointed, moody, but hopeful and eccentric and funny without trying too hard. Local Hero gives the viewer the illusion of comfort of familiar terrain while actually being quite unlike any other film.
Forsyth, who had already had one sleeper hit the previous year with Gregory’s Girl, has said that without Lancaster’s star power, the film would likely not have been made. Lancaster plays the CEO of Knox Oil, Felix Happer and though he’s on screen far less than Riegert, he creates a truly memorable character. Lancaster was no longer the acrobat or chiseled tough guy of his youth, but he’d grown into an even better actor.
Happer has some of the qualities we’d expect of the CEO of a massive oil company: he’s a narcissist and a bully. However, he’s got a couple of somewhat endearing quirks, most prominently his fascination with astronomy. When MacIntyre visits Happer for last minute instructions on the deal before flying to Scotland, Happer seems only interested in making sure MacIntyre will call him personally at any time if he witnesses anything unusual in the heavens – especially in Virgo. This sets up the beautiful sequence of a drunken MacIntyre’s rapturous phone call to Happer as he witnesses the aurora borealis for the first time.
Lancaster and Riegert both deliver layered, nuanced performances that keep the delicate balance of whimsy and cold reality in play. (Happer may be a boorish oil billionaire, but you’d like to think that if he ran BP, the current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico would never have played out like this.) Lancaster’s comic touch in his dealings with his quite possibly deranged psychoanalyst is especially deft and charming.
In one of Burt Lancaster’s finest roles he had the misfortune, and then the great fortune, to go head-to-head for the audience’s affection with Susan Sarandon’s lemons.
Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980) traces the decay and rebirth of a city and a man as Lou (Burt Lancaster), an aged one-bit-hood who’s sniffed but never tasted a life of crime, bumbles his way into his beautiful neighbor’s screwed-up life. That neighbor is Sally (Susan Sarandon), and her daily work in a casino oyster bar leads to the ritual cleansing of her bare breasts and arms with lemon juice each night. Watching the painstakingly thorough application of said juice through Sally’s kitchen window, we share a voyeur’s perch with Lou from his darkened room next door. Thus begins our identification with Lou–through our common depravity.
The first fifteen minutes spread out silently, setting the plot and place like a gentle ocean wave lapping the shoreline. Such sustained quiet in a film is striking in its own right, but all the more unlikely when you realize it was written by a playwright. This is John Guare’s only attempt at conceiving a project explicitly for the silver screen, and you wonder if he just got bored with the medium because it came so naturally to him.
Louis Malle has juxtaposed much of the opening action with scenes of demolished and decayed buildings. Old Atlantic City was razed and rebuilt with the legalization of gambling in 1976, a metamorphosis etched in the lines of Lou’s rumpled suits. Gone is the city’s axis of organized crime, replaced by the glitz of the legal jackpot and the free-for-all drug trade. Lou is just another decrepit structure, waiting for the wrecking ball. Watching Lou running numbers through the poverty stricken parts of town, or trying to hock a shamefully stolen cigarette case, he seems outside of time–like a guy selling Christmas trees in May.
Flipping Reality The Bird
I probably shouldn’t admit this given that I consider myself relatively well versed in classic cinema, but I’ve seen alarmingly few Burt Lancaster films. In fact, out of the 86 titles listed on his IMDb page, I’ve seen exactly two, and one of them is Field of Dreams. Not that Lancaster’s performance in that flick was unworthy, his Moonlight Graham was the most fully realized character in that film, but by that point Lancaster was 76 and in his final theatrical release.
The other Lancaster film I’ve seen came after my wife and I visited a friend in San Francisco and hit the usual tourist traps including the dormant island prison of Alcatraz. When we got back home, we watched Clint Eastwood’s Escape from Alcatraz (which is exactly what it sounds like, was filmed on location, and matched the description of the real-life events we were given while touring the prison) and Lancaster’s Birdman of Alcatraz, which was shot on stage sets and could more accurately be said to have been “inspired by” rather than “based on” the life of the titular character.
The actual Birdman of Alcatraz was Robert Stroud, a teenage runaway who became a pimp in Alaska and, ten days shy of his 18th birthday in 1909, shot another pimp during a scuffle and was convicted of manslaughter. Various incidents during Stroud’s incarceration, including the murder of a guard, increased his sentence, ultimately to death, but in 1920, his mother appealed to President Woodrow Wilson for a stay of execution and was given one. Stroud instead spent the next 23 years in solitary confinement at Leavenworth Federal Penitentary before being moved to Alcatraz. While at Leavenworth, Stroud took an interest in some injured birds in the courtyard and, over the years, turned himself into one of the leading ornithological minds in the world and the author of the classic text, Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds, among other titles.
The film, released in 1962, a year before Stroud’s death, is a fictionalization of Stroud’s story with Lancaster playing a stoic, heroic version of the brilliant psychopath who wasn’t actually allowed to keep birds after being transferred to Alcatraz in 1943. As biography, it’s bunk. As a tale of rehabilitation and self-motivation, it’s inspirational, thanks largely to the quiet dignity of Lancaster’s performance.
Because “Bitter Smell of Vicious, Cynical Self-Loathing” Would’ve Been a Hard Sell at the Box Office
“I love this dirty town.” That’s the only line from Sweet Smell of Success that I quote on a regular basis, but only because I don’t quite have the presence to pull off “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.” For that, you need Burt Lancaster.
Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most brutal movies I’ve ever seen that includes almost no physical violence at all; it’s just funny enough to keep you from slitting your wrists afterwards, but with humor so cold and sharp you could use it for a razor blade. Anyone who thinks of the 1950s as a Norman Rockwell era of innocence should be sat down in front of this paean to cutthroat cynicism and soul-destroying ambition, then given a nice mug of warm milk and a hug.
Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster, two good-looking actors with charisma to burn, have never been less attractive. It was a brave choice by both of them (and the studio was opposed to Curtis taking the role of smoothly sniveling Sidney Falco, a press agent who’s had all the empathy, dignity, and morality burnt out of him by a lifetime of humiliations), but I think especially by Lancaster. Sidney Falco is at least occasionally pitiable, but Lancaster’s Walter Winchell-esque monster J.J. Hunsecker is one of the least redeemable characters ever committed to film. (See his inclusion on the AFI’s list of all-time movie villains, although that is, now I look at it, one terrible list — if you think Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were the “villains” of Bonnie and Clyde, you missed the whole damn point. And “Man” in Bambi as an all-time villain? Please. But that’s a whole separate post).
I first remember seeing Lancaster in Atlantic City, a favorite VHS rental of my dad’s (mostly for the line “You should’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean back then… it was really something.”). Later I saw him in From Here to Eternity and the cheesy fun western Vera Cruz, with his magnetic appeal on full display, and in the film noir classics Criss Cross and The Killers, where he was a dark, flawed, but handsome and charismatic figure. He is still my definitive Wyatt Earp in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral – which came out in 1957, the same year as Sweet Smell of Success, but takes place in a staggeringly different America. Lancaster was a gorgeous young man, and still quite an eyeful in his forties, but J.J. Hunsucker is too despicable to have even a shred of sex appeal.
Words are the weapons in Sweet Smell of Success (written by Ernest Lehman and blacklisted lefty Clifford Odets, and directed by Alexander Mackendrick), and J.J. Hunsecker is its serial killer; Freddy Kreuger and Mike Myers earn more viewer sympathy. This is all by design, of course, and the merciless screenplay doesn’t pull a single verbal punch:
It’s a dirty job, but I pay clean money for it.
The cat’s in a bag and the bag’s in a river.
Like yourself, he’s got the scruples of a guinea pig and the morals of a gangster.
Son, I don’t relish shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun, so why don’t you just shuffle along?
My right hand hasn’t seen my left hand in thirty years.
Match me, Sidney.
Those last three are Lancaster’s, and only a handful of the movie’s best. (For full effect, of course, the last one needs to be quoted while holding an unlit cigarette). According to rumor the script was brilliantly rewritten by Odets months past deadline, while he was in the midst of a nervous breakdown, and then rushed scene by scene directly from his typewriter to the set.
The movie was shot on location in New York, and I’m not sure you could say it has any affection for the city — really, I’m not sure you could say this movie has any affection for much of anything — but it certainly gets a jolt of jittery energy from its setting. The story could be transplanted to Los Angeles easily enough, I expect, but it wouldn’t be same without the rushing crowds its characters struggle past, or the packed bars and restaurants where glamor and power and desperation and slimy cunning are jostled together.
If Sweet Smell of Success has a flaw, it’s that the female lead, J.J.’s sister Susan, around whom the whole plot turns, is never really developed as a character, at least not compared to the devastatingly etched male leads. But on reflection I believe this is not really a gender issue – not because she’s a woman, but rather because she’s moral and kind. These are not the human facets that Sweet Smell of Success is interested in, and god bless it for that. Nice people are almost never any fun to quote.
…If I stay here I’ll go knuts…
I don’t have a lot of movie memories before Star Wars which came out a few days before I turned six. My grandmother took me to see a Lassie movie at Radio City, but otherwise, Star Wars is the first movie I remember seeing in the theater. I went with my brother and my Old Man. A few years later, The Empire Strikes Back was a seminal summer movie–I saw it seven times in the theater, still a record for me–followed by summer blockbusters like Raiders, E.T., Ghostbusters, and later, Back to the Future.
Summer blockbusters. Which ones were your favorites as a kid (even as a grown kid)?
I’m with a guy who thinks Wyoming is a country. You think you got problems?
John Cazale (left) apparently ad-libbed that line in Dog Day Afternoon. Cazale was in five movies: Godfather I, Godfather II, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter. Pound-for-pound perhaps the greatest movie career in history. And he was terrific in all of them.
Cazale, who died of bone cancer before The Deer Hunter was released, is the subject of a documentary tonight on HBO.
I’m so there.
Have you ever walked out of a movie? First time it happened to me was when my Old Man couldn’t stand Time Bandits and we left the theater–on 86th street near Lexington Ave–half-way through. I saw it again years later and didn’t think it was that bad. I just remember it being muddy and British.
We’ve all sat through movies we don’t like (I think my mom was trying poison me by taking me to see Chariots of Fire), but for me, a bad movie is always easier to take than say, bad theater. Heck, I’ve even sat through movies I hate just so I could get angry–Born on the Fourth of July, Thelma and Louise and The Crying Game come to mind. But I think the only other movie I’ve ever walked out on is Eyes Wide Shut. I went in not expecting much and hung with it for the first hour or so when I found it campy and unintentionally amusing. But finally it got so boring and pretentious that I happily walked out. And I didn’t feel ripped-off, I felt liberated.
So? What movies–if any–have you ever walked out on?
One of Hackman’s better leading roles and probably Arthur Penn’s last very good movie. Featuring a young (and busty) Melanie Griffith:
Yeah, the movie is dated–it’s so Seventies–but hey, it’s Hackman, man. Most certainly worth watching.
Double Features. Remember them? They’ve practically disappeared from the cultural landscape, just like double-headers. I used to go see double features at the old Regency Theater which was on 67th street and Broadway. It was a revival house that played old Hollywood movies. Had a balcony and everything.
Saw twin bills of Marilyn (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch) and Bogart (High Sierra, The Roaring Twenties) and Buster Keaton (Sherlock Jr, Seven Chances) and and the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup, Animal Crackers) there.
When I was 12, I visited my mother’s family in Belgium for the summer. My uncle and his girlfriend took me to the seaside for a few days and I’ll never forget seeing the movie posters for Mad Max II (which was renamed The Road Warrior over here). Raiders was out too but Mad Max II looked like something different altogether, something menacing and sinister.
I eventually saw both Mad Max and The Road Warrior many times on videotape and then on cable. Both movies still scare the bejesus out of me in that way you get scared as a kid, ‘specially if I see them late at night. They are corny in a fantastic way but also filmed in such a tense and seemingly credible manner that I get the willies every time.
A New York City Classic:
My brother, sister and I had bedtime when we were kids, through middle-school if I remember correctly. It got pushed later and later as we got older of course, but my mom was not into letting us stay up late during a school night to watch TV. So we’d start watching a movie and then have to go to bed halfway through. Mom would tuck us in, kiss us goodnight, and then go back to the living room of our small two-bedroom apartment and watch the rest of it.
She filled us in the next morning over breakfast, the story slowly coming back to her as she sipped her coffee, spread a triangle of Laughing Cow on a burnt piece of toast, her face still creased from the sheets, her voice still thick with sleep. Mom came to this country in 1967 from Belgium but never completely lost her French accent. When excited, her voice would get dramatically high, but not in the morning. It wasn’t sing-songy but full of melody, inflection and animation (nothing frustrated her more than watching a woman getting chased by the bad guys in a movie…”Kick him in the balls, kick him in the balls!” she’d say. “I don’t understand why they don’t just kick them in the balls.”)
In re-telling the movie, Ma never cut to the chase. She traced her way back into the story and then proceeded to give us a blow-by-blow account in painstaking detail. Sometimes she’d pause, not remembering the sequence of events, and spend five minutes sorting out what happened. Aloud. I would hang on her words, annoyed by her deliberate pace, not for one minute comprehending the way the female mind worked. I just wanted the payoff. What happened? The important stuff, not details of the scenery and costumes.
One movie that she told us about one morning was Cactus Flower, a movie I’ve never watched, but for a minute or two here or there, since. I like it better in my memory, listening to Mom, who loved Goldie Hawn and Walter Matthau, telling us what went down.
There was something about Goldie Hawn that she could relate to–they both had the ability to be light and fun, and were not afraid to laugh at themselves. They were both adorable when they were young but their looks changed as they got older and their voices got huskier. They were tested by life and proved not to be pushovers. Still, there was something, if not innocent, then refreshing and bubbly about both of them that links them together in my memory. I image that the Goldie Hawn of Cactus Flower brought my mother back to a time that I was too young to remember, when mom was young and new to this country. Before she had kids and her marriage got dark and ugly.
[I’ve wanted to incorporate a regular movie column to the music, art, and food features here at the Banter for more than a minute now, so here goes… My good pal, Matt Blankman, who is mad for movies, will contribute his take, as will some of the other regular Banter contributors. Here’s our debut, cue the lights…Alex Belth]
I’ve spent the last few days enjoying a rare moment of pop culture serendipity which has placed my brain squarely in the 1970s, the decade of my birth. First there’s been Josh Wilker’s fantastic new book Cardboard Gods (which we’ll assume you’re already familiar with to some extent if you’ve been keeping up with the Banter). Josh’s memoir isn’t just largely set in the 1970s, but it’s obviously shaped by it as well, and he sincerely attempts to make sense out of those strange times, how they came to pass and what they meant (and continue to mean) to him.
Soon after seeing Josh do a reading from “Cardboard Gods” last week, I found myself at home watching a new PBS documentary on the John V. Lindsay years (1966-1973) in New York City. To look back at those years now, with clear eyes, one can see many ways that the hope and exuberance of the 1960s gave way to the despair and confusion of the 1970s. How the New Frontier and Great Society faded and left us with gas lines, custom vans, pet rocks and malaise.
Finally, I watched a film from 1971 I’d never seen, The Hospital, which felt like a fictional illustration of so many of the issues present in both the Lindsay doc and Wilker’s book. The Hospital was written by Paddy Chayefsky, who was still enough of a big deal in the early 1970s that he may have been the only screenwriter ever to get his name above the title. Chayefsky’s script was directed by Arthur Hiller, a director who managed to have a lengthy career marked by a number of “big” movies and yet never once seemed to have any discernable personal style. (I’d call him a hack, except he always displayed a knack for comedic timing and knew to trust his script and cast. He may not have been much of an artist, but he wasn’t incompetent.)
[Editor’s Note: Here’s another one from the Pat Jordan vaults, a short, cutting profile of Burt Reynolds, from the late Eighties. While Pat reserves his harshest criticism for himself, but he’s especially hard on jockish, so-called tough guy actors like Reynolds and Tom Selleck. He thought Reynolds wasted his talent and was willfully lazy for easy money and fame.
When this story was published Reyonlds’ publicist called Pat and called him the “evilest man in the world, the anti-christ.” Pat said, “Then I’ll see you in Hell.”
No business like show business. Enjoy.]
By Pat Jordan
It was just a wink. But it defined the rest of his career.
“They told me I couldn’t do it,” he says. “It would break down the wall between the actor and his audience. But the movie was just a cartoon. Smokey and the Bandit. Cotton Candy. I just wanted to say to the audience, I hope you’re having as much fun as I am. So I looked in the camera, and winked.”
Audiences loved it. That conspiratorial wink united them with the actor in his inside joke. This movie was just a lark. He didn’t take it seriously. He wasn’t really acting. He was just partying with friends in front of a camera, and he invited the audience to join in. His fans were so grateful they made his movie one of the biggest grosser of the year, 1977, and they made him a No 1 Box Office Attraction. A Star. But more than that. Their favorite actor. The actor they liked the most. Which was his problem.
“I thought acting was synonymous with being liked,” he says. “I courted my fans. I passionately wanted them to like me. I thought being liked meant I was a good actor.”
The critics weren’t so accepting as his fans. That wink didn’t play well with them. They read into it, not the actor’s good-spirits toward his fans, but his contempt for them, and his craft. It wasn’t an actor’s role to be liked by his fans. It was to entertain them. Just because he was having fun with his friends – Jackie Gleason, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, etc. – in a host of Sophomoric movies (Smokey and the Bandit, Iⅈ Cannonball Run, I&II) that actually did seem to be filmed parties of actors acting silly, that didn’t mean his audiences were having fun. They would have fun only as long as that wink deceived them into believing they were inside those parties. That they were getting drunk, cracking inside jokes, oogling beautiful girls, and crashing expensive cars with the actor and his friends. But the truth was, they weren’t and never would be. They were irrelevant to those parties, except that they made them possible by the vast sums of money they paid to see them on screen. When, and if, they woke to the deceit of that wink, how it made the actor rich at their expense, they’d stop paying to see such movies. Which they did. But not until after they made him a No 1 Box Office Attraction for five consecutive years.
Because I just can’t get me enough of Jeff Bridges, here’s some more on the favorite to win the Best Actor Oscar next weekend…from Manohla Dargis in the Sunday Times:
In the early and mid 1970s he played a wide-eyed boxer, a sly con artist, a moonshiner turned car racer, a squealer turned suicide, a thief and a cattle rustler, working with veterans like John Huston (“Fat City” in 1972) and newcomers like Michael Cimino, who, for his 1974 debut, directed Mr. Bridges alongside Clint Eastwood in the crime story “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.” The critics had started to pay attention. “Sometimes, just on his own,” Pauline Kael wrote of his performance as a stock-car racer in “The Last American Hero” (1973), “Jeff Bridges is enough to make a picture worth seeing.” Notably, she also compared him to Robert De Niro, who was about to set fire to screens in Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.”
“He probably can’t do the outrageous explosive scenes that Robert De Niro brings off in ‘Mean Streets,’ ” she wrote. “But De Niro — a real winner — is best when he’s coming on and showing off. Jeff Bridges just moves into a role and lives in it — so deep in it that the little things seem to come straight from the character’s soul.”
I worked as an assistant film editor on The Big Lebowski which was cut on film and not a computer. During the shoot, our main responsibility in the cutting room was to mark-up the sound track and the picture and synch the footage that was shot the day before–these are called “rushes” or “dailies”, which would be screened for the directors later that day. We’d check the synch by screening the footage on a Steenbeck.
Watching Bridges work was a revelation–he simply was the Dude. Some actors need a bunch of takes before they really hit their stride but Bridges was that character, and in each take he gave a subtle variation on a line reading or a physical gesture. You could tell that he had a background in TV and film and not the theater. His approach and rhythm was different from most everyone else in the movie. He was so natural and extremely intelligent, providing the directors with all the material they’d need to piece together a winning performance.
Back to Dargis now, writing about Lebowski:
Whether shuffling around in a bathrobe or dropping a lighted joint in his lap, Mr. Bridges’s timing is brilliant. But it’s his ability to convey a profound, seemingly limitless sense of empathy that elevate the Dude beyond the usual Coen caricature. By facing every assault — repeated beatings, a friend’s death, the theft of a rug — with little more than an exclamation (“Man!”) and a toke, he and the Dude affirmed that an American hero doesn’t need a punch, just a punch line, something that Judd Apatow’s merry band of potheads know well.
In some respects “The Big Lebowski” was Mr. Bridges’s “Raging Bull,” a defining movie. He never established a long working relationship with a director as Mr. De Niro did with Martin Scorsese. Mr. Bridges has worked with significant filmmakers, just not necessarily in their finest hour. He has made questionable choices, but he has had a breadth of roles that should be the envy of most, and a depth few achieve. And he has staying power. It takes nothing away from his work in “Crazy Heart” to note that the film’s success and profile probably owe something to “Iron Man,” the 2008 blockbuster in which he pulled a Lex Luthor to play the villain and which gave him his highest-profile role in years. He was hilarious, absurd, necessary, and to watch him in that movie as well as in “Crazy Heart” is to be reminded yet again of how he abides.
Dargis singles-out Cutter’s Way (pictured above) and that’s a movie worth watching if you’ve never seen it. Terrific-look. The only drag is watching John Heard chew-up the scenery, but otherwise, it’s a good movie.
Finally, my boy Joey La P, sent me a link to this interview with Bridges on KCRW.
