Echo Park (1986)

Apologies to you if a search for information about the Los Angeles neighborhood landed you instead on this movie blog and this entry about the movie titled for and set around Echo Park. No apologies to the people who landed here because they searched 'Austrian body sculptor,' 'pizza delivery man,' or 'singing telegram stripper.'

Watched this movie in hopes of prolonging the good feelings aroused by watching Modern Girls (1986 movies set in LA). Also, this Netflix user review persuaded me:

I saw this movie when it came out, I was delivering pizzas [and] my girlfriend was a stripper [and] it struck close to home. I thought the movie really captured what it's like to be on the margins of the industry. Maybe the bad reviews come from folks who've never been in that position.

The poster art (above) strikes me as superior to the dvd art (below):

Reality is for Dreamers

The movie rates somewhere between the poster art and dvd art.

Jonathan's truck converted to neon pizza-delivery mobile -- Los Angeles fever dream

August flexes at top of stairs to the amusement of May -- Los Angeles fever dream

Echo Park is the story of pizza delivery man and "closet poet" Jonathan, played by Tom Hulce (Milos Forman's titular Amadeus). Echo Park is the story of May, played by Susan Dey (Laurie Partridge in The Partridge Family tv series), the mother of an eight-year-old boy named Henry; she rents Jonathan her spare room. Echo Park is the story of August (Michael Bowen), their Austrian immigrant neighbor who works as a "body sculptor," but dreams of converting star power into battery power, or something. August is described by Jonathan as "out to lunch."

May: I said, at least it's showbiz. I-it's performing,which is more than I can say for bartending. I mean, Marilyn Monroe started out naked, didn't she?
Hugo: Everybody in the world starts out naked, sugar.

Early in the movie, May gets a new job as a singing telegram stripper, and views the job as a career advancement, despite the objections of Jonathan and best friend Gloria (Shirley Jo Finney).

August stars in a viking/dragon-themed commercial for deodorant spray. He and May share a need to make it in Hollywood as entertainers; their romance is an early part of the film.

Jonathan seems content delivering pizzas. He seems genuinely interested in connecting with Henry, and encourages Henry to opt for the name Hank.

Jonathan: I think I know a secret about you Henry. Yep. I think I do. I only just realized it too. I think you hate your name. Nobody, in their right mind, would wanna be called Henry. You know what's a good name for Henry? Hank. Every once in a while there is a Henry called Hank. So hop in Hank, 'cause we gotta go now.

Echo Park feels like an unordinary narrative - not a lot of change or conflict. The movie takes place in a specific, cohabitated environment, and is about people and their relationships with each other. These qualities remind me of Altman and the 70s spirit of filmmaking in America, in movies like Scarecrow and Aloha Bobby and Rose.

Modern Girls (1986)

Modern Girls I chose for its cover and because its Netflix synopsis includes the phrase "It's a night full of wacky '80s action."

The story is by Anita Rosenberg (b. in Cincinnati Ohio), whose only other IMDb credit is a film she wrote and directed called Assault of the Killer Bimbos. Director Jerry Kramer also directed the Styx movie Kilroy Was Here, a segment of Moonwalker with Michael Jackson, and tv movies like Gallagher: We Need a Hero. The soundtrack features Depeche Mode, Chris Isaak, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Floy Joy, The Call, Kommunity FK, Club Nouveau, France Joli, and Toni Basil.

Modern Girls is set in Los Angeles, in clubs and bars and the streets around and between clubs and bars, in downtown, Echo Park, on Melrose Ave and Hollywood Blvd. It's very much a creature of its time, a capsule of the Los Angeles party scene in the mid-80s.

I liked it from the first shot:

And the title sequence:

The story begins when Clifford (Clayton Rohner) arrives at an apartment to pick up his dream date Kelly (Virginia Madsen!), but only her two roommates CeCe (Cynthia Gibb) and Margo (Daphne Zuniga) are home. Cece and Margo convince Clifford to bring them with him to find Kelly at a downtown LA warehouse party, and the movie begins.

CeCe: You know, Cliffie, the hottest nights are the ones where you don't know who you are coming home with, here we are, we don't even know who we are going out with!

What happens isn't terribly interesting, but sometimes it's funny, sometimes surprising; though the greatness is in where the what happens and what the what looks like. The heart of Modern Girls is built from neon, practical lights, hair styles, fashion, romance, and all-night fun.

LA mid-80s cool. Clifford is an outsider to this lifestyle, and through the movie he undergoes a superficial transformation:

Actor Clayton Rohner plays dual roles - the square Clifford and the rockstar Bruno X.

As to say, fashion and hipness don't make you cool, fashion and hipness are manifestations of a pre-existing coolness within a person.

MODERN GIRLS HAS A SCENE INVOLVING LIMBO FUCKING DANCING.

Guncrazy (1992)

Seems like Guncrazy didn't have a significant presence in the theaters (at its widest release it played in nine theaters). This makes sense, Guncrazy feels like a direct-to-video movie. Released in January 1993, the movie was the theatrical debut of music video director Tamra Davis (who, around this time, co-directed Spike Jonze's first music video, Sonic Youth's 100%, and married Mike D of the Beastie Boys). Drew Barrymore, in an early adult-role, co-stars with James LeGros, who had a great role in Van Sant's career-maker Drugstore Cowboy and recently a terrific part in the Todd Haynes Mildred Pierce mini-series.

There aren't as many great moments as I hoped, from the talent involved, but they exist. I struggle to see how the story is much different from other movies about lovers on the run; in fact, Davis and writer Matthew Bright (Forbidden Zone) borrowed the male impotence and gun fetishism themes from the original Gun Crazy (and Bonnie and Clyde). Most entertaining for me was how they amplified the white trash elements.

At the same time, it's considered impolite to ask a movie to be something other than what it is, and Davis did a fine job of fusing romance and feeling with trash and mayhem.

I did enjoy her dissolves, and instances of light poetic touches:

My favorite moments (predictably, maybe) are the hangout moments, like when Joy and Anita dance for Howard. A lot of the time the movie operates as if on rails - with everybody saying their lines and performing their parts to get the movie to where you know it's headed - but every now and then there are bursts of life and moments of laughter. Davis is better in these moments than she is with the violence, which makes sense considering her career path continued toward Billy Madison and Half-Baked.

The movie has a lot of red, I noticed:

The trailer (Anita's home) has red lights too, and at one point Barrymore wears a striking red dress. Red for passion, red for blood and violence, red for anger and extreme feelings.

Pretty crazy to think Barrymore was seventeen when she made Guncrazy. Recently I decided she's a hero of mine - mainly for her endlessly positive life outlook - and she's the reason I watched this movie. Those bursts of life I talked about mainly come from her, whenever she can sneak them into a movie that doesn't deserve them, really.

Montenegro ('81)

"You know you're a very wise dog, and boys must know how to make decisions. I'm going to put poison in your milk. Whatever you do is up to you. You can drink it, or you can leave it alone. Whatever you do is your decision. But if you want my advice don't drink it."

Cracked housewife Marilyn Jordan (Susan Anspach) begins to feel the world in a changed way, in Montenegro, the movie directed and co-written by Dusan Makavejev. She is American, her successful husband Martin (Erland Josephson) is Swedish, and the gypsies she becomes entangled with are, I assume, from Montenegro.

At the time this film was made the name of the country was Socialist Republic of Montenegro. I know so little about the area and what it went through, what Yugoslavia was and how it reached its present form. Seems like the area underwent much unrest and heartache. Makavejev is from Serbia and studied in its capital city Belgrade. His movies are odd visions, and when I watch them I wonder about his life experiences, what he was exposed to, what his culture is like, what his perspective on filmmaking is; when I watch his movies I encounter these qualities, because his creativity is as expansive as it is explosive, and shattered fragments of all these things exist across his work. In other words, I find Makavejev vastly interesting. Not only his early experimental work, not only his masterwork WR: Mysteries of the Organism, but also I found Montenegro irresistible, and I'm a huge fan of The Coca-Cola Kid.

It's cool to watch a movie and wonder about people and places. It's cool when a movie feels like the soul-splatter of an individual. Makavejev is cool. He has a gift for curlicue narratives that wholly embrace chaos. I think Makavejev takes abstractions and gives them surprising concrete shapes. Maybe sometimes too he takes the concrete and stretches it to an abstraction. In Montenegro the unexpected, absurd, quotidian, and erotic are treated with equal seriousness. 

When unusualness occurs it's given full expression and the emotions of the characters seem clear. No matter what happens in a movie, if the emotions of the characters are clear, the audience is able to identify, and experience emotions themselves.

Note: The frame appears oddly cropped on Netflix steaming, like a section of the top is missing. Maybe it was full-frame originally?

Hackers

Tech-films for me represent what sci-fi films or monster films or horror films or whatever else meant to past cinephiles. Tech-films films were where my fantasies merged with reality. Ones I remember fondly are Hackers, Antitrust, Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity, Electric Dreams, and all the rest. Love them.

Hackers is a personal favorite.

It has tech speak

neon

rollerblades

a shirt with a cat

extreme-sport absurdity

attic-trunk fashions

clubs

electrified,

colorized modernity

wtf-in-restrospect technology

and tons of urban coolness.

It begins in Seattle and ends in NYC.

You'd have to watch the movie to see if it's for you. I couldn't talk you into it. It is what it is.

Was PUMPED to see Andrzej Sekula (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, American Psycho, Cube²: Hypercube, Vacancy, Armored) in the credits, as director of photography. Bigger fan of Sekula than director Iain Softley. Softley directed five others movies, can't speak for a single one, never seen them. But. His name is important to me because he made Hackers.

It's super quick, fun, and modern pop art. The story isn't the best part of the movie. The story concerns things like the secret service, a virus, and Zero Cool (the best hacker almost ever at ten years old - except he's caught, arrested, and sentenced [banned from computers and touchtone phones!] and then there's a forward time jump [after which he's in high school and has the raddest friends and life, sweet parties, etc]).

The main badasses are played by Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting) and Angelina Jolie. Matthew Lillard is a buddy hacker who wears rock and roll t-shirts, Wendell Pierce (The Wire) is secret service, Jesse Bradford is grounded by his mom for hacking, Fisher Stevens (he's in both Short Circuits) is computer security/movie's badguy, Laurence Mason is an l33t hacker with a photographic memory, and Renoly Santiago is a hacker so cool he wears cat t-shirts (pictured above).

Director Iain Softley is from London. Not joking when I say I think Softley was on the cutting-edge of cool. I think Hackers is visually layered in a prophetic way and tuned to the the speed of modernity. The soundtrack is mostly electronic, like The Prodigy and Orbital, and uses Underworld (who Boyle would use to greater effect for next year's Trainspotting).

I labeled Hackers crime cinema for blogging purposes, but I think it's much cooler than most crime movies. Wong Kar-wai is beyond Hackers, but I think Hackers is closer to a Wong Kar-wai movie than most other crime movies.

Note: Hackers was undoubtedly shot in widescreen, but formatted full-screen for Netflix.

Gambit ('66)

Things I wrote before I watched Gambit:

My Twitter feed has been fist pumping this movie Gambit, more so in the last couple days, because it's about to expire from Netflix streaming. I'm going to watch it because of the recommendations, it's not the kind of movie I usually go out of my way to watch. This is the Netflix synopsis:

Harry is an elite but clumsy burglar. He meets the partner of his dreams in Nicole, a Eurasian dancer, and they team up for the perfect crime -- to steal a precious sculpture from a billionaire recluse. Unfortunately, nothing goes right.

Words and phrases like 'elite' 'burglar' 'partner' 'team up' 'perfect crime' 'precious sculpture' and 'nothing goes right' don't work for me like they work for other people. Typically they refer to forms of cleverness that I don't enjoy much, that to me feel purely cinematic and cheap, but others see them as richly layered and masterfully crafted or something, I dunno. I'm not being dismissive, I just don't get it - cleverness seems subjective, like beauty.

The movie is directed by British filmmaker Ronald Neame, who was the cinematographer for forty-five movies before directing his first movie. Haven't seen one movie he shot, but I suspect I'd like the following movies based on their titles: To Hell with Hitler, Return to Yesterday, Young Man's Fancy, Let's Be Famous, George Takes the Air (original title: It's in the Air), The Phantom Strikes. He worked with David Lean it appears. It appears he worked on the scripts for Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, and Blithe Spirit, and produced two of those plus Oliver Twist. Blithe Spirit is about to be released by Criterion, I think I'll like it, this is its synopsis from IMDb:

Adapted from a play by Noel Coward, Charles and his second wife Ruth, are haunted by the ghost of his first wife, Elvira. Medium Madame Arcati tries to help things out by contacting the ghost.

Words and phrases like 'Noel Coward' 'haunted' 'ghost of his first wife' 'Elvira' 'medium Madame Arcati' 'help things' and 'contacting the ghost' work for me like they don't work for other people.

Ronald Neame has twenty-six directoral credits, including a short and a movie he was fired from, according to IMDb parentheses. Three of them are on Criterion: Tunes of Glory, The Horse's Mouth, and Hopscotch. I've seen Hopscotch, it's fun and clever grandpa stuff. I think of Walter Matthau as grandpa. In Hopscotch grandpa is always one step ahead of the CIA, he wears disguises and stuff LOL. I'm teasing the movie but the disguises are actually my fav part. Neame also directed the famous Hollywood movie The Poseidon Adventure, which I'd like to watch, but I'm waiting until I go on a cruise.

It's cool that Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine are in Gambit. It's also Alvin Sargent's first movie credit on IMDb.

Things I wrote after I watched Gambit (but no spoilers):

Nicole: Why is it that people who follow people always end up fingering trinkets?

Gambit gave me a palpitating heart and uncontrollable sweats. All while I smiled.

After opening titles and an enjoyable opening song, the story begins with a car-sourced tracking shot, following Nicole (Shirley MacLaine). I suppose you could wonder, "Why is Nicole being followed?" But with her green dress and the way she's walking and the fact that it's Shirley MacLaine, you'd be an idiot.

She enters Cherry Bar.

On stage, Nicole dances. Our perspective has been Harry's (Michael Caine). He and his crime partner observe Nicole for a dance. Her routine finished, Harry walks to Nicole's table and drops some coins in her glass. She follows him to his table. He offers her, for purposes not yet divulged, $5K American. She smokes her cigarette and considers, without saying a word.

Cut to: A TWA plane lands, a curly-mustached man in a turban steps out of a luxury vehicle, and Nicole and Harry exit the plane:

Sold.

And then it gets better.

Harry: Now will you stop asking questions?

Nicole: It's only human to be curious Harry.

Harry: Yes, well as far as I'm concerned you're far too human.

Loved the soundtrack, colors, art design, photography. And Gambit made me feel clever because its cleverness was transparent, discernible. Shared. Gambit reveals the plan to you and then executes the plan. It performs this writing maneuver intelligently, and gifts the audience with insight into its variations on a scheme. The crime elements are mostly backseat to character elements, although there are great moments of crime cinema. This film helped clarify for me that it's not the 'nothing goes right' scenario I dislike, it's that I don't like it when nothing goes right seemingly because the script was written that way. I prefer the influence of life's chaos and/or character trait interference.

What happens in Gambit I won't tell you.

But. Shirley MacLaine KILLS IT. She's really great. I'll say that plans involving humans shouldn't be made without considering human nature; I think bad movies execute their plans single-mindedly, warping their characters into the shape of their plans, and that Gambit knows this but is smarter. In this way it's like a Hitchcockian crime film, but I can't think of a female protagonist from a Hitchock film as likable and relatable as Nicole in Gambit. There are also some Melvillian/Dassinian elements (I invented words).