Royal Tenenbaums Poem

MARGOT IS ADOPTED by A. Gates

Margot was a runaway
Determined to stay away from home.
She sat in the tub at times
Flipping channels on the TV set with her toes.
Smoking out of the corner of her mouth.
Blowing fabrications into the fan.
Leaving her bearded man
To rendezvous with her novelist boyfriend.
So she sulked and walked in slow motion
Seeming too tired to smile
While Nico talked in a husky tune
So her brother could swoon and depress into death.
Love twisted out of blood,
Too important to screw with.

Wonder Boys Poem

OUTSIDE SCRANTON by A. Gates

James was a boy,
Depressed and lonely.
Happy to go with Tripp
Riding in cars getting high
Enough to eat the box.
Incredible doughnuts.
He stood in the snow
With a quiet voice
Too sad to fake apathy
Telling tall tales about penny arcades in Baltimore.
Taking time to lean his head back against the bar booth
Finishing lines to stories he overheard.
Shouting slurred "knapsack"s into a pretty girl's ears
While she took measures to help him walk.
And he shot the mutt.
Memorized the suicides.
And he's one in a million,
The best writer since The Arsonist's Daughter.
Writing stories about prize fighters and Love Parades,
Earning accolades that come in the form
Of the best professor calling at the top of his lungs
For the lonely and sad student to "take a bow, James!"

Further Thoughts about The Color of Money

I was thinking...maybe Fast Eddie was prideful at the end of the movie. It was a different kind of pride than when he was broken by Forest Whitaker's character. This kind of pride included integrity (forfeiting after playing a fixed match) and character much like the character Fast Eddie said he had gained during the final scene of The Hustler. But he had pride nonetheless. I won't fight that assertion any longer.

The Color of Money

The Color of Money is gold. No kidding. The Hustler is better, but The Color of Money gives its predecessor a run for its money.

The melodrama of the first is toned back. Scorsese puts together a great cast, minus the big pro Cruise battles at a pool hall and in the tournament. When I first saw The Color of Money, I resisted liking it. Paul Newman won his only Best Actor Oscar for the film, and part of me was just bitter he didn't get it for Cool Hand Luke and The Hustler. But Newman deserved his Oscar. His Fast Eddie Felson is older, but not necessarily wiser. He still is suceptible to the rush of the pursuit of the perfect pool shot and knowing you're the best player out there. Newman again shows the rise and fall of pride. But he learns how to pick himself up again. And that's where wisdom gained comes from.

Cruise is great as a player even more cocky and talented than Fast Eddie, if that's possible. When I first saw the movie, I thought his performance was too "out there," too over the top. But it fits. It actually fits. His Vince is over the top, a ball of egotistical energy. His black T-shirt with his name in big white letters across the chest is splendid. It captures the character's drive - to be front and center all the time. I want a "Vince" t-shirt for myself.

Mary Elizabeth Mastriantonio is a spit fire gal with a manipulative streak. Her three way mental match between Vince and Fast Eddie provides most of the drama. She's good and so young. It's weird to think that not too long after she was Ed Harris' wife in The Abyss, still a spit fire, but somehow so much older than in The Color of Money.

Drawbacks: The film's score. I get what soundtracks do. They set the time. They let us know when and where we are. That's why the music in the pool halls and bars works. However, the obvious 80s music pulses throughout the score in driving scenes and the like. I've always thought that a score should be timeless, well mostly timeless. I can't imagine how old Run Lola Run's score will sound in 20 years. Another drawback was short and bitter. Scorsese chooses to slow down to a freeze frame when a newly reinvigorated Fast Eddie leaps out of a swimming pool's water. I get it. He's back. Born anew. Good idea. Poor execution. The short break bumped me from the story. It's corny. Old men bursting out of pools with deep, loud breaths don't really work on a dramatic level for me.

I watched this movie a third time with Andrew Siragusa and my brother. They said they liked the movie because it took a different approach to the ending. They said that instead of the usual change-for-the-better story arc, Fast Eddie Felson and Vince remain approximately the same throughout the film. There are obvious times when each could have turned a corner and gone in a different direction, but they don't take it.

SPOILER:
I agree on the one hand. Vince doesn't change dramatically. If anything, he's more cocky, hardened to the world. But Fast Eddie definitely changes. At the beginning of the film, he's been out of the game for twenty plus years. He watches from a far with a yearning for the fast life again, hustling hustlers for their cash and pride. But he does it by proxy through Vince. He changes. He fights back. He joins the fray, putting himself back into the game. And he has to overcome his pride. It's easy to say he doesn't in fact overcome it. After all, the film ends with him cockily slamming the cue ball into the other balls at the end of the table, saying "I'm back." But I think the tell tale sign that he has in fact overcome his pride comes just prior to this moment. He basically admits that Vince is better than him, and may beat him time after time again, but he won't bail. He can win one. Until he does, he'll take the losses and get right back in the mix to get his win. He's "back" because he learned his lesson. Pride in pool will get you bad if you let it. It took his love away from him in The Hustler. It left him in The Color of Money (schooled by a young hustler played by Forest Whitaker), but he can keep going. He's smarter. Finally, he's wiser. In the end, he wants to teach Vince the lesson he learned. Maybe with some bitterness involved, but still that wisdom that makes Felson better even if Vince has more talent.

****

Some Kind of Wonderful

My biggest complaint with Some Kind of Wonderful is that it's really just Pretty in Pink with a change in genders and ending. The rest is basically the same. I don't really want to argue with the film's fans, but the comparison is easily made. A misfit with good grades and growing pains (Ringwald in PIP, Eric Stoltz in SKOW) falls for a popular kid (Andrew McCarthy in PIP, Lea Thompson in SKOW) with popular friends that don't approve. All the while, the misfit's best friend (Jon Cryer in PIP, Mary Stuart Masterson in SKOW), also a misfit, is in love with them. The misfit ends up with one of them, but the end result flips from one film to the other.

The difference is I didn't care about the characters nearly as much as I did in PIP. As much as I like Stoltz, I couldn't root for him as much as I should have. I didn't care who he ended up with. I didn't care that he told his dad that “I don't want your life” (go Varsity Blues). He seemed nice enough, but the whole “stick up for yourself” thing never reached a satisfying end. It was just a mess. Lesson: to stick up for yourself, get your friends to threaten your enemies.

Pluses: Elias Koteas as a punk high schooler. He's funny. Candace Cameron (D.J. Tanner herself) as Stoltz's precocious little sister. She's funny.

**1/2

Casablanca

Casablanca is a classic for a reason. It is well written and well acted. It's fun and dramatic at the same time. Bogart basically plays the Bogart persona, but that's okay because Bogart is cool. The real thrill is the script. It is full of all these famous lines, but they are truly lines that deliver upon their promises. The film is truly satisfying as entertainment. But real skill is obviously involved in the staging of all this intrigue and character development.

My big complaint is the flashback of Elsa and Rick's romance in Paris. It's the worst acted scene of the film and only takes me out of the incredibly interesting present. I understand that the flashback sets up much of the background of both Rick and Elsa's current personalities, but the execution of the scene is just too much of a bump for me. This, along with the place in the present the flashback occurs, takes me out of the story too much.

But a classic is a classic and no amount of my nitpicking is really going to blemish a film deserving of that designation. Casablanca is just such a film.

****

Killing Zoe

I felt this intense need to see Killing Zoe. It was unexplained. It came fast and serious. I had to see it. My best guess is I wanted to see Eric Stoltz in an edgy movie. I loved the guy in Kicking and Screaming (see that at all costs) and enjoyed him in Mr. Jealousy. But I vaguely remembered him playing the drug dealer in Pulp Fiction and being very, very good at it. So I really, really wanted to see Killing Zoe.

Killing Zoe is directed by Roger Avary, co-writer of Pulp Fiction. That's right! Tarantino didn't do it alone! Avary also directed Rules of Attraction, which I liked and thought improved upon the book it was based upon. So I had hopes for Killing Zoe.

It started off well. There was a strange love scene between Stoltz and Julie Delpy followed by a conversation that was well written. Then Eric entered and the movie lost me. The movie's charm vacated the premises.

My first complaint is that the drugged out trip through the city goes on for way too long. I know what the director was trying to do. He wanted to give hints that Anglade's Eric was not the way Stoltz's Zed remembered him. He was worse. Scarier. Unpredictable. He did it. He just took way too long to do it.

What followed can best be described as a heist gone wrong, but it never really had the edge or suspense of what it attempted to portray. The only character I could really root for was Julie Delpy's, and she was hardly in it. Ditto for Eric Stoltz, although he is arguably the main character. Stoltz does his best, but the movie ends up being a bit of a mess just like Eric, played by Jean-Hugues Anglade. Anglade chews the scenery a bit, but he does get to be part of the film's best moment, when his crazed character snaps a burst of light out of the air.

I was debating myself as to whether what I was watching was actually okay or not for most of the movie. If the film had pulled off a great ending, all would have been forgiven. But the final climax doesn't really satisfy. Some attempts at clever dialogue don't fit with the mess at the end and really detract from any sense of real suspense. And Stoltz just gets the shit beat out of him. Honestly, I just wanted him to do the same to Eric (Anglade's character, not Stoltz).

**

Pretty in Pink

Pretty in Pink is good John Hughes, not grand John Hughes like the Breakfast Club. But good is...well, good. Part of the reason I like Hughes is he writes complicated teenagers. Complicated “villains”...not so much. James Spader delivers a one-note performance as the popular, rich jerk. But he does it so well, I can't really complain.

Molly Ringwald is so good in Hughes movies that I wonder how she fell so far off the map. She's no Meryl Streep, to be sure, but she always played her roles well in her Hughes films. My guess is her talent didn't mature enough to play adult roles. That and adults probably weren't willing to see her in “their” movies.

The adoring weird friend is a common character in Hughes' world, and Jon Cryer delivers a fine performance as Ducky.

I also liked Harry Dean Stanton as Ringwald's dad. The guy's a pro, never playing down to genre that usually didn't let the adult performers shine.

As a writer, Hughes always made a real effort to show how teenagers can be smart, complicated people who we can all relate to. He showed complexity in social classes that often gets glossed over for stereotypes. The guy was good. I miss him. The rumor was that he wrote Maid in Manhattan. If so, I cry. But the guy needs to jump back in and do the teenager thing. Because even if the 80s soundtracks and vocabulary of its main characters must be changed, the issues are still there. And teenage movies can be good again.

My major complaint: The end feels incredibly rushed. All the problems seem to fix themselves in one big whirlwind. The film had earned a better constructed ending.

***1/2

Dead Poets Society

Dead Poets Society is great. It's not perfect, but I cannot really deny it is great. Robin William's performance as an unconventional teacher at a prestigious prep school is ripe for poking fun at, but it is also very good. But the big draw is the crop of burgeoning talent from the young cast. Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles, Robert Sean Leonard, and Gale Hansen (among others) shine as students encouraged to seize the day by Williams and a display case full of alumni. By now, the amazing teacher inspires students subgenre is well established and tired. But it feels fresh in Dead Poets Society. Rather than heart-string pulling at the hands of directors and screenwriters, I felt the story and performances really did the heavy lifting here. The ending is one of my favorites.

Detractions: 1) Running through the snow after the death looks wonderful, but rings false when one character emotionally tries to console another. 2) That score. It doesn't really hold up well to time. It has that heavy feeling late 80s. It's instantly recognizable. But I cringe slightly when I think of its sound during big scenes. 3)The actor who played Cameron was bad. I liked him in Way of the Gun when he was older, but he stuck out like a sore thumb here.

****

Laura

I've been watching quite a few noir films lately. I've noticed a convention of the genre worth noting. There's usually a protagonist looking for something. What they actually find usually ends up to be much more than they had imagined. That's the case with Laura. I like the movie. I just wish I hadn't seen it right after I watched The Third Man because any movie after that would pale in comparison. Laura has some good performances and some wonderfully sharp dialogue, but it isn't as tight of a plot or production as The Maltese Falcon was. The hero and heroine's chemistry was obvious, which helped string me along, but the hero's love obsession never felt real. The guy kind of leaped head first without any real reason or motivation. None of what he (and we as the audience through his investigation) learned was enough to get anybody that hot and bothered about a “dame.”

***