Belushi (2020)

 Belushi (2020)

Written and Directed by R.J. Cutler

I suppose many will disagree with this one.

Watched this last night. It had an odd effect. Maybe it was because I had just watched Way Out West, one of the better Laurel and Hardy features, but I came away from Belushi thinking he was way less the skilled, funny, performer that I have previously assumed.

None of the stuff from Saturday Night held up much, The Bee, the racist samurai bit, the reclusive Joe Cocker impersonation, “cheeseburger, cheeseburger”, none if these had any appeal or were in the least funny.

It doesn’t appear that he had the depth, interest, or attention span required to craft anything beyond the hollowest of TV sketch comedy. His work is nothing compared to the SCTV crew, like Harold Ramis who he worked with in the Lampoon Radio show, or any of the others on that classic program, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, yet he had some lowest-common-denominator appeal that elevated him to features.

The features and not great either. Animal House has some yahoo drunk male audience appeal. “Whoo Hoo! Party!” But what else?

And The Blues Brothers act is another white man minstrel show that could afford the hire the best sessions musicians of that genre to help sell it pull is off.

As I said I had looked at this stuff after the comedy genius and crafted performance timing of Laurel and Hardy already 20 years into their amazing film career. Belushi is nothing in comparison.

Near the closing of the doc Tony Hendra says something about the American Success story that Belushi was ultimately a victim of. There is nothing behind that success.

Dead at 33. Belushi is just a kind of pathetic mass media character.

Interesting documentary in unintentionally putting all this on display but not burying the truth in empty praise.

King Cohen (2017)

Written & Directed by Steve Mitchell

This is a nicely done, cheerful, documentary about legendary TV/movie writer/director/producer Larry Cohen.

It is cheerful because it tends to focus on the joy, the fun, of filmmaking on the hardscrabble indie edge in the 1970s and early 1980s.
It is also NYC centric. Cohen, classic 1970s movies are set in the city.

We are told and shown examples of Cohen’s knack for stealing location shots in the city. This is when a stripped down, fast moving, production crew just shoots stuff on the streets without establishing permission through the city authorities, such as today’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, or informing bystanders and pedestrians who happen to be there.  Cohen also did not put a lot of planning into stunt coordinating. Fred Williamson, star of Cohen’s 1973 Black Caesar, tells some interesting fun stories about this mode of working with Cohen. He contradicts Cohen’s claim of performing a stunt of jumping from a moving cab before his star agreed to do it. “He’s lying.” says Williamson, smoking a big cigar. It’s very amusing.

Those familiar with Cohen classic 1970s-80s indie feature work, such as It’s Alive (1974) and it’s sequels and Q (1982) might be interested in learning through this documentary that Larry Cohen did a lot of TV writing of popular shows in the 1960’s when very young, in his 20s. These include The Fugitive, The Defenders, and being the creator of Branded (“Scorned as the one who ran, What do you do when you’re branded and you know you’re a man?”), and The Invaders. 

Larry Cohen is interviewed in the movie. He is an interesting personality that only NYC could have produced, likes to talk, is proud of his work. He likes to focus on the positive end of a very difficult business that he managed to succeed in way beyond most others who attempt it.

This is a very entertaining fast paced documentary filled with enthusiasm and joyfulness in the creative process.  
It could serve as an inspiration for young moving image storytellers. 

Backtrack (1990)

Directed by Dennis Hopper

Written by Rachel Kronstadt Mann and Ann Louise Bardach

This is a mob hitman sort of story. In the beginning Jodie Foster’s character accidentally comes upon a mob hit crime scene. After that the mobsters are after her. She has no faith in the cops protecting her after she sees one of the mob guys (played by Dean Stockwell) hanging out in the police station. So she escapes from the cops and the mobsters choosing to take her chances on her own.

The mobsters hire crack hitman Milo (Dennis Hopper) to track her down and eliminate her.

It’s kind of a chase action romance comedy, because Milo falls in love with his target.

It is all a bit preposterous and silly, but fun and shot in interesting locations.

It also contains a basic domination and submission emotional/sexual/love relationship. In a way the movie shows how these types of relationships could work in real life. It is noted that the movie, from 30 years ago, was written by two women. It might be thought of differently and frame this relationship in an entirely different way if it was from a male point of view.

It seems to work in the movie because the male is not at all sophisticated, or intelligent enough that it gets in the way of his basically innocent desires and needs. The woman, although in the movie caught in a bind with him, is far more intelligent. In a scene where he, in an innocent and child-like manner, demands that she put on fetich underwear, hose and garter belt, for him, she jokingly belittles his desire and sees the human pathos in his unselfconscious need that perhaps she can then eroticize to her own pleasure and her desire to be needed. He loves her and needs her in a way that he doesn't need to understand or try to examine, he is innocent and serious. He doesn't second guess love. Doubt can be harmful in relationships.

Otherwise he is quite capable in life, a male protector and quite capable of functioning as a man in the world of action and conflict.

Perhaps this play illustrates how these relationships can function and resolve to a confusing type of equal power.

The movie is interesting in offhandedly showing this.

Hopper's performance is delightfully ridiculous. He is very good in this. Jodie Foster powerful and attractive.

One of Dennis Hopper’s best movies.

Until the End of the World (1991)

 Until the End of the World (1991)

Directed by Wim Wenders

Written by Wim Wenders, Solveig Dommartin, Peter Carey, Michael Almereyda

These are the impressions after watching the 4hr 47min version of the movie. Not in one sitting, but over 20 hours. 

Claire, played by Solveig Dommartin, is a bit at loose ends at the start of it. Well, everyone is at loose ends, the world is. We are told via voiceover that there is a Indian nuclear bomb carrying satellite, up there somewhere, that has gone off course and no telling where it will come down and presumably end the world. So the movie is conceptually rather far fetched and it never backs down from that, rather goes further into areas where it is hard to suspend disbelief or care about the characters.
 

It toys with elements of old Hollywood studio movies. This seems to be a thing with Euro directors of a certain generation. There is a man played by William Hurt who has stolen a head-mounted eye wear brainwave reading device. It’s supposed to let blind people see. 

Clare falls in love with him, loses track of him, and chases around the globe to find him. Then she chases around with him because he is wanted by the CIA for the stolen tech thing.
Her old lover, Sam Neill, chases them around and they all end up in Australia after a couple hours of this with the soft boiled Berlin detective she had hired earlier to find Hurt. The detective wears really nice ties and vests and plays the harmonica. Kind of noir-lite.
Claire’s old boyfriend, Sam Neill, eventually writes a novel and this is the text of the occasional narration from the beginning of it all. There is also a heart of gold bank robber who is also a drummer. His stolen money has financed her globe trotting and chasing of Hurt after the cute meet of running into the bank robber and his partner quite literally in a car accident in the very beginning.
 

(Spoiler alert!!!)

Max von Sydow and Jeanne Moreau are Hurt’s elderly parents, she’s blind and needs the eye thingy which the old man developed and stole from whoever he worked for. The CIA is after him too. But he is a brilliant scientist and continues his work in hiding in a huge cave in Australia that seems to be tricked out with millions of dollars worth of scientific gear and computers which somehow he got out there. It all works because of Claire’s ability to concentrate and blind Jeanne Moreau sees a recording of her daughter and granddaughter. Soon after she dies, being old and stuff. 

Since we have got more movie time and film and money to go through, bored science tech genius von Sydow decides to use his thingy to record people’s dreams instead. All the aboriginal peeps who have been assisting him decide to skedaddle. They were probably the people he got to lug all that crap to the cave. It's one thing making the blind see crappy pixelated videos of their loved ones but the dream recording stuff is the limit. You have to draw the line somewhere. 

Max von Sydow succeeds with this dream recording and Claire and his son Hurt become addicted to carrying around pixelated recordings of their dreams stored in handheld video devices. These are so compelling that they no longer stop and smell the roses or go out to play. 

This is all preposterous because dreams are much more than images. Dreams are what? They are thoughts, emotions, memories, a mixed bag of brain data, not just pictures. No one really knows what they are. But this is a movie and movie makers like to think to themselves as Dream Makers, the Hollywood studios have been called Dream Factories. At any rate it was unbelievable that dreams could be recorded as only video images. 

Anyway it is all kind of a metaphor because Sam Neill is not a dream addict and has spent this time finishing his novel which is all about Claire’s adventures and includes everyone else in the movie. He instantly cures Claire’s dream vid addiction by having her read the novel. That's believable because the novel has to be more interesting than the dream videos and probably this movie too. So what is Wenders trying to tell us here? Forget the movies, his business and go read. It kind of seems like that. Maybe he should have just written it as a novel, skipped the movie, and pocketed the $20 million budget.

Oh yeah and the bomb goes off somewhere in December 1999, the year in which the entire movie is set. It messes up all their digital devices but unfortunately is not the end of the world or the movie. The movie, made in 1990 and 91, then sort of foresees that millennial end of the world when Y2K was supposed to screw up all the computers including those that run nuclear power plants and bring about a sort of end of the world. Never happened. (Maybe some future end of the world will be more successful, global warming?)

The style of the movie is mixed but more indie than big budget Hollywood sci fi. There are some nifty cars here and there. But it’s all a bit ragtag including a horrible off the cuff sort of improv scene that wasted an hour and a half of fine actor Allen Garfield’s day with him playing a used car salesman. That was irritating. He is way better in a rather good Wenders movie from 1982, The State of Things. His bit in this was just a waste and badly done. 

Old Boyfriends (1978)

 Old Boyfriends (1978)

Directed by Joan Tewkesbury
Written by Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader

Dianne is an LA psychologist going through a difficult time. She is retracing her past, driving around the country in her car. She is hunting down old boyfriends, relationships that didn’t work out from years back, even back to junior high school.

The movie has a very good cast of men supporting the nuanced central performance by Talia Shire as Dianne.

What is Dianne after? Is it revenge? It seems to be in the first two reconnecting encounters. First in Colorado with Jeff, Richard Jordan, who she seduces and immediately abandons without a trace. Then in Chicago with Eric, John Belushi, her high school boyfriend. She takes Eric to the old teen parking makeout place where they were as kids and restages a scene that hurt her. This time, in control, it comes out differently.

Things begin to shift for her when she meets up with Wayne played by Keith Carradine. She goes back to the town where she lived in her early years and goes to the home of her old junior high boyfriend there. Here she meets Wayne, the younger brother of the old boyfriend who was killed some years ago in Vietnam. Wayne has been wounded by the loss of his brother who he idolized and looked up to.

Their interaction brings about a shift in Dianne and the path to the resolution of this small but appealingly personal dramatic movie.

There was a scene looking out the window in the neighborhood where she meets Wayne. Something about that shot evoked another small movie set somewhere in the USA in John Huston’s Wise Blood.
There is a tone in movies like this, to quote the great lyrics to The House I Live in by Abel Meeropol, “That’s America to me.”

My Psychedelic Love Story (2020)

 

Directed by Errol Morris

Written by Joanna Harcourt-Smith

In this documentary an old woman tells a rambling, not altogether coherent story of her time as Timothy Leary's hot young rich babe during his rapid decline to eventually becoming a FBI stool pigeon. 

Along the way there are still images from back in the day with standard “psychedelic” filters over them.

There are some sound film clips of Joanna Harcourt-Smith speaking back then. Oddly her Euro speech accent seems noticeably less than it was last year whenever the interviews for this movie were shot.

She tells how she becomes aware of who Leary is rather late in his celebrity career. She says she was pregnant in the bathtub and heard the song Legend of a Mind, one of the less good songs by Moody Blues, the one that goes “Timothy Leary’s dead, No No No No he’s outside, looking in”. It’s about all the swell stuff that Timothy Leary can do for “you”. It is idiotic celebrity deification, something Leary exploited to his own glory. In the song LSD is not mentioned at all but there are descriptions of its effects, all attributed to what Timothy Leary, what he can do for “you”. The song might as well say that the local acid dealer down the street can do these things for “you”.  
At any rate she says in the movie that at that moment she knew it was her destiny to be with Timothy Leary. Since she was a rich young attractive “socialite” she was in the position to make this happen.

In her story she name-drops her way to Timothy Leary. She tells us of hanging out with Keith Richards in some European rich people sun spot and helping to arrange an idea in which the Rolling Stones were going to tour the USA in support of George McGovern in his 1972 presidential campaign. Then they go to DC but the campaign was so defeatist that they couldn’t take up the offer, or something like that. It’s kind of a murky story as are all the rest of her stories of her drugged out life 50 years ago.

So she meets Leary who is then on the lam in Switzerland zooming around in a canary yellow Porsche. She seems quite impressed with this cool daddy sports car.
Being at the idiotic height of his career he decides almost instantly, according to her, that they are in fact destined to be together. He flashes tarot cards which verify this.
They run around Europe eventually coming back to the USA. Leary goes back to prison and she wants to help him to get out. Enter here a guy who is one of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, despite this lofty name, they are the amoral LA surfer drug dealer gangster sector of the LSD distribution scene. (More of their story is in the more lucid documentary Orange Sunshine. By the way there is another documentary on the more wholesome and helpful characters involved with LSD, The Sunshine Makers <2015> about Tim Scully and Nickolas Sand, good guys who made damn good LSD for us.)

Anyway there are more murky stories about ripping off some guy for $10,000 in a phoney(?) drug deal in order to get money to spring Leary. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love guy also arranges for Joanna to help get out of jail by becoming an FBI informant which eventually happens.

The documentary is a reminder of what a narcissistic jerk Leary was or became in the course of acquiring celebrity power, interrupted by USA extreme drugs laws which were partly as result of Leary’s lust for attention and grandstanding. 
All this is recounted through Joanna Harcourt-Smith’s rambling storytelling in this messy documentary.

The Sunshine Makers is a much better movie about more intelligent people on a more wholesome mission to bring the general public the wondrous gift of LSD and the psychedelic experience. They actually helped rather them screwing up the whole thing like celebrity Leary did.   

   

The Mind Snatchers (1972)

 The Mind Snatchers (1972)

Written by Dennis J Reardon (From his play)
& Ron Whyte
Directed by Barnard Girard

This is a little low budget drama which happens to be Christopher Walken’s first leading moving role.
It also features Ron Cox, Joss Ackland, Ralph Meeker and Bette Henritze.

It’s a mind control story, but this time not with drugs, but rather electronic direct interface with the brain.

Walken plays an rebellious individualistic soldier, an army private. He is taken off to an isolated military hospital with very few people around and only two other patients.
He is put in a room with two other soldier patients and spends most of the movie trying to figure out why he is there and what the place is all about.
Ron Cox plays one of the other patients. He’s a rather wild guy and wants to be friendly with Walken’s guy and is revealed to be an aggressive criminal in a disturbing scene. The third man is just a body in the bed, apparently the first one worked on by a military contracted low-key mad doctor played by Joss Ackland. All this under the supervision of uniformed major played by stern Ralph Meeker.

So after all the trying to figure stuff out and escape the place there is a satisfying wrap up of the whole thing in the last 10 minutes where Walken gets to deliver some interesting dialog about what makes him human and ought not to be tampered with by this doctor.

Good little movie for Walken fans and those interested in mind control and MK-ULTRA in the movies,
It was originally titled The Mind Cage which was the title of the play produced in 1970 by Joseph Papp. The Mind Cage is a better title for what goes on in this.