By Matt Singer
June 30, 2004
Here are the winners of this year’s haiku contest; once again it was a very difficult choice to select between the many worthy haikus. Thanks for entering and reading, and now on to GBU: YEAR 3. I think this is the year where Robin’s origin gets retold.
4th Place
By Eric P.
“The Last Samurai”
Jaded westerner
Learns ancient samurai code
Survives gattling gun
3rd Place
By Adam W.
Dr. Strangelove: or
How I Learned to Stop Worry-
Ing and Love the Bomb.
2nd Place
By Ron2112
Best reveal ever:
The moment Keyser Soze
Stops walking funny.
1st Place
by Shawn B.
CATWOMAN looks great!
Oh man, who am I kidding?
Ugh, please kill me now.
Good job folks. I’ll be in touch with the winners about their prizes.
THE GOOD
HOPSCOTCH (1980)
Starring Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson
Directed by Ronald Neame
Rated R, 104 minutes.
Available on DVD
Someone recently started a conversation with me with the phrase, “Can I just tell you?” like I was going to reply, “Absolutely not!” It was so peculiarly conversational. You couldn’t possibly write, “Can I just tell you…” and get away with it. It would look absurd.
Can I just tell you? I love Walter Matthau.
No, really now, I do. He’s one of the few actors I can name that I love in every film he’s in. Even in bad movies like EARTHQUAKE, his mere presence makes things a little bit easier to take. I’ve previously reviewed Matthau the action hero, in the 1974 thriller THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (which, I’m just realizing, is curiously missing from the column archive). But in a filmography of almost seventy-five roles there are a lot of great performances we could talk about. He even won an Oscar, for Billy Wilder’s THE FORTUNE COOKIE, for his terrific performance as a shyster lawyer helping his brother-in-law (Jack Lemmon) scam an insurance company.
In a little known, but exceptionally fun movie named HOPSCOTCH, Matthau plays a CIA agent named Miles Kendig. Only Matthau could play the part – a guy who can have a delightful time while the governments of numerous countries try desperately to kill him. Miles, you see, has been put out to pasture by his prick of a boss, Myerson (Ned Beatty, perfectly sleazy), and rather than accept a desk job filing papers for the last years of his life, he decides to shred his personnel file, jaunt to Europe and begin writing his memoirs. Now your memoirs or my memoirs (particularly my memoirs) would be boring and of no concern to anyone on our great planet. But Kendig has been working on classified CIA operations for a couple decades, and this is not the type of information that should be made available to John Q. Bookreader. So Myerson orders Kendig’s replacement, Agent Cutter (Sam Waterston), to track Kendig down before he can finish writing his potentially inflammatory book. But easier said than done against the intelligence of Matthau!
All right, so the flick is kind of cheesy, and innocent to a degree that one could find obnoxious, but it is so much fun. The plot could be played very straight; when you think about it, the story is very similar to THE BOURNE IDENTITY (both were written on novels written several decades ago). But HOPSCOTCH, without being a send-up of the genre, and while maintaining a nice element of suspense, manages to be absolutely hilarious. Matthau as the indefatigable lead certainly helps, as does his partner in crime Isobel (Glenda Jackson), but a lot of it comes from the well-constructed plot. A tossed-off line about Myerson’s unused summer home in Atlanta gives Kendig the idea to hole up there while hopscotching around the globe. When he’s ready to move on to his next spot, he calls Myerson’s goons, bragging about his plans and promising that he’s well fortified in Myerson’s home. So, naturally, the cops and the FBI surround the home and order Kendig to surrender. Little do they know Kendig is already gone, but has left behind a load of fireworks ready to blow. As they explode, the cops react instinctively and fire back to defend themselves, destroying Myerson’s home while the sleazeball looks on in agony. It’s a priceless scene.
There isn’t much greatness in HOPSCOTCH but there is an abundance of goodness. But why must every movie be important? A worthwhile film is any one that sets goals and achieves them. If, as director Ronald Neame states in his introduction to Criterion’s minimal DVD, the film is meant as nothing more than an entertainment, and it succeeds on its terms, then that’s all we can ask for.
Can I just tell you? HOPSCOTCH is worth a rental.
IF YOU LIKED HOPSCOTCH, CHECK OUT: THE IPCRESS FILE (1965), another terrific spy film about an insubordinate agent, starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, a role he’d play again numerous times.
THE BAD
WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S (1989)
Starring Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman
Directed by Ted Kotcheff
Rated PG-13, 97 minutes
Available on VHS & DVD
Children are forgiving audience members. They can turn on you, sure, but they’re not too hard to please. As I sat bored out of my mind, I watched several adorable tots mesmerized by KANGAROO JACK. So to know, as a kid, that a movie is a piece of crap, it’s got to be pretty terrible. And when I was nine years old, I knew WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S was terrible. Fifteen years later, my opinion has not changed.
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Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman play Larry and Richard, two ambitious young newbies at an insurance company run by bigwig Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser). After Larry and Richard discover a fraudulent claim on the books, Bernie invites them to spend the weekend at his Long Island beach house, with the secret intention of having his mob buddies off the two honest workers. Instead, the mob kills Bernie, for sleeping with the mobster’s girl amongst other discretions, just as Larry and Richard arrive at his island paradise. Rather than alerting the authorities they decide, for a variety of reasons to annoying to mention, to continue operating under the premise that Bernie is still alive. These two hot shots are so adept at corpse manipulation that no one can tell the difference, not even the mob hitman who now believes he didn’t kill Bernie and has to start from scratch with the whole whacking thing.
I have two questions about WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S:
1) How did it get a green light?
2) What part of it appealed to enough people to give the film a $30 million box office gross earning it enough to success to merit a sequel?
They are equally perplexing. For the life of me, I cannot conceive of a pitch so mesmerizing that it would convince me that a comedy about a dead corpse being lugged around a tropical paradise on Long Island by two halfwits was worth investing my money in. But someone did it. Someone sat in a room, listened to that and said, “YES! I have $10 million dollars and could invest in a film by a cinematic pioneer or even in social programs that could benefit the underprivileged. But something deep within my soul has been stirred by your touching story of fun and sun and floppy cadavers. Let’s do it! Oh and can we cast Andrew McCarthy in it?” It was the 80s, so maybe cocaine played a role.
Let’s not place all the blame on Hollywood here. After all, rather than reject this piece of cinematic flotsam, we as a society said, “YES! We have $7 to spend on a movie, and can imagine no film better than this enticing saga of romance and comedic wonder. 1 for WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S please!” This was the summer of Tim Burton’s BATMAN, Spike Lee’s DO THE RIGHT THING, and Rob Reiner’s WHEN HARRY MET SALLY and you went to see WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S. Even UHF would have been a better choice.
I did a little research online and found that rigor mortis, the process by which a recently dead body stiffens up and becomes immobilized, occurs after three hours and lasts “for around 36 hours.” Days after Bernie goes belly up, he’s flopping around like a wet noodle in a pot of soup. Besides the fact that it’s lazy, it’s a missed comic opportunity. If we’re going to accept that normally functioning adults can’t tell the difference between a warm body and a cold one, then go way off the deep end and have this thing stiffen up and have poor Larry and Richard have to deal with that. Another comedy rule: easily manipulated dead body, not funny. Rigor mortis dead body, hilarious.
Our government is always on the entertainment industry for badly influencing our children, but the list of offensive materials never includes WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S and I believe it should. Because of this war crime of a movie I can never look at a corpse without getting the urge to drink mai tais and wear flip-flops. You wouldn’t believe how bad I am at wakes now because of what BERNIE has done to me. Worst of all, my computer suffered a complete meltdown while it was sitting in my DVD drive. It may not have been directly responsible, but I suspect it played a role. So up yours Bernie, I hate you and hope you die. Well you’re already dead, so remain dead.
Further examination revealed that in WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S II voodoo doctors reanimated Bernie’s corpse, making it once again practical to wish Bernie dead.
INSTEAD OF WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S, CHECK OUT: ROAD TO PERDITION (2002), because the IMDb recommends that film for fans of WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S. How did they arrive at that conclusion? What possible connection could there be between them?
THE UGLY
TRUCK TURNER (1974)
Starring Isaac Hayes, Nichelle Nichols
Directed by Jonathan Kaplan
Rated R, 91 minutes
Available on VHS & DVD
I would rank seeing Nichelle Nichols – best known as STAR TREK’s Lt. Uhura – as a bitter, foul-mouthed hooker-turned-madam amongst the most pleasantly bizarre things I have seen watching ugly movies. Working for Captain Kirk she was so demure, so refined, yet so sexy in that little miniskirt. In TRUCK TURNER, as the nefarious Dorinda, she’s a full-on bitch, and I won’t lie to you, she’s awfully convincing in the role. And you could hide a loaf of bread in one of her bellbottoms. Thankfully, we have a man like Truck Turner to stop her.
Turner, played by Isaac Hayes is a bounty hunter or “skip tracer” who takes all the jobs nobody else wants (his firm’s motto is “See me and be free!”). He carries a very large gun that he fires constantly and almost never reloads. He is described by one character as “a bulldog with eyes on his ass.” I have no idea what that means.
Hayes isn’t much of an actor but he’s a full-blooded badass; no one else would look quite so good in the wardrobe of denim suits. Truck and his partner Jerry (Alan Weeks) catch a child molester who keeps making racist comments and egging the bail bondsmen on: they wouldn’t be so tough if he didn’t have handcuffs on, etc. Truck promptly takes the cuffs off and beats him to a pulp. That’s some nice skip tracing Truck.
In self-defense, Truck and Jerry – who deserves a cooler nickname since he’s hanging with a guy who goes by the handle “Truck” – kill a bail-jumping pimp named Gator (Paul Harris). Nichols’ Dorinda is Gator’s woman, and she is so devastated by the loss that she calls together all the top pimps in the city and declares a price on Truck’s head: whoever kill him gets Gator’s stable of high-earning whores. Hence the hunter becomes the hunted, or perhaps more accurately, the truck becomes the cargo.
TRUCK TURNER has about a dozen different moods but they all somehow work. The credits run over shots of the ghetto, filled with the horrific real-world conditions of poor African-Americans. The action is slick and intense. Its hero is cool under fire, but Hayes and the screenwriters constantly goof on his gruff persona so we don’t take him too seriously. Rolling out of bed to go to work in his first scene, Truck finds that his girlfriend’s cat has peed all over his outfit (he wears it anyway). Later, after a rough gunfight, Jerry and Truck decompress in a bar. Jerry thoughtfully remarks, “You know, sometimes I think I should give it up.” Truck responds with a loud belch. Later, at Gator’s funeral, attended by all the pimps in the city, one woman is wearing a rainbow colored clown wig, and a pimp who has lost an eye wears a patch that matches his velvet leisure suit. According to the film, “they don’t make pimps like they used to.”
TRUCK also features one of the great car chases in movie history. When Truck and Jerry first spot Gator, he takes off in his pimpmobile and our heroes give chase. In the course of one very long car chase they run over a baby carriage, a flower cart, and the door of one car falls off. Then Gator gets out of his car, flees on foot, loses Truck and Jerry in a water and power plant (beautiful location photography, by the way), steals Truck and Jerry’s car, and drives off. Truck and Jerry commandeer another vehicle at gunpoint, and the chase continues until Gator goes into a bar and gives everyone inside fifty bucks to stop the two dudes coming in after him, whereupon the car chase spontaneously mutates into a bar fight. The whole affair is scored by Isaac Hayes’ awesome wakka-cha-wakka soul music. This one scene is cooler, funnier, and more exciting than 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS in its entirety.
I almost want to rate the film good on the basis of the terrific car chases and score, but there’s definitely an undercurrent of ugly running through most scenes, including Nichols’ tremendous performance. Besides the distasteful undercurrent of anti-women invective (very little respect toward the fairer sex in the film sadly), the costumes, the bizarre humor, the gunfight in a hospital where colostomy bags are spilled, and the sexual seduction using fried chicken, all suggest it’s a little too “out there” to recommend to a mainstream audience. But if you want the coolest blaxploitation you’ll ever see, I think TRUCK TURNER has your name on it.
IF YOU LIKED TRUCK TURNER, CHECK OUT: STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER (1989), with Nichelle Nichols doing a scantily clad dance with fans to distract some evildoers.
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