Author: Jim McLennan

Dir: Mike Figgis
Star: Wesley Snipes, Nastassja Kinski, Ming-Na Wen, Kyle McLachlan

“The woman she plays resembles a star, With one look, she lights up Wesley’s night. She is fragile and yet a hunter, dominating and perhaps dangerous.”
— Mike Figgis

The original idea for the film was by notorious sleaze-master Joe Eszterhas, who sold a four-page outline for $4 million in 1994, at a point when his star was still high after the huge success of Basic Instinct. Initially, the plan was for Adrian Lyne to direct but he bailed the following year, opting to kill his career with Lolita instead. Mike Figgis, then a hot property after Leaving Las Vegas. came on board, and with Eszterhas no longer in Hollywood’s good graces, after bombs like Jade and Showgirls, Figgis was given permission for a rewrite. And I mean, a radical one. According to the LA Times, the first 65 pages of Eszterhas’s version”are given over to an Olympic decathlon-style sexual encounter between the couple, with almost as much trash talk about sex as sex itself.” After reading the final shooting script, the original author requested the removal of his name – though Eszterhas kept the cash, naturally.

The final version had advertising director Max Carlyle (Snipes) on business in New York, when he encounters a literal rocket-scientist, Karen (Kinski), by chance. After he misses his flight, he ends up attending a concert with her, and the pair then have to handle a mugging attempt on the streets back to the hotel. Max chivalrously agrees to sit with Karen, but the inevitable happens: which would be the film’s title, if you hadn’t already guessed. Returning to Los Angeles and wife Mimi (Wen), Max is restless and distracted, though keeps quiet about his East coast escapade. However, he can’t hide forever, and when he and Mimi return to New York, where Max’s former best friend Charlie (Robert Downey, Jr.) is dying of AIDS, it turns out Karen is now married to Charlie’s brother, Vernon (McLachlan). Awkward…

There’s a three-act structure here. The first depicts the combination of circumstances which lead to Max and Karen hooking up. The second has the impact of this on Max, as he gradually realizes he is not as satisfied with his life as he initially states in his opening monologue to the camera. The third is, by and large, an extremely extended death scene for Charlie, stretched out over more than 30 minutes, and the impact this has on Max, who comes to the conclusion that existence is too short to spend with the wrong person, and seeks to rekindle things with Karen. Everything comes to a point at Charlie’s wake, where that spark becomes a bit of a raging inferno, but there’s a twist which, it has to be said, did not ring true, and seems like the kind of thing which only occurs in Hollywood movies [the same goes for Karen marrying the brother of Max’s best friend. Really, what are the odds?]. It does, however, set up a final coda, that tidies up the loose ends of the various relationships adequately, though I fear for their longer-term survival chances.

If I’ve some doubts about the plot, these are somewhat countered by fine performances all round. It’s a fairly high-profile cast assembled by Figgis, likely helped by his recent Oscar nominations for writing and directing Leaving Las Vegas: Downey was at the height of his legal troubles, but was, according the director, no problem on the set here. Other names you may recognize include Julian Sands. Amanda Donohoe, Ione Skye, Xander Berkeley and Saffron Burrows – Figgis himself cameos as a hotel clerk. Good performances from these names are unsurprising: getting them from Snipes is rather more so. Much as I love Wesley – Blade 2 is one of my favorite action/horror movies of all time and Demolition Man is another classic – he’s likely known far less for his acting, than his conviction on federal tax evasion charges. Here, he is certainly portrayed in a sympathetic manner – not that you could really blame any man for cheating on his wife with Nastassja – and I liked how the script took its time putting him in bed with Karen. It wasn’t a case of just a drunken fumble, but the glacially inevitable result (given the film’s title) of a number of unfortunate decisions, each of them likely entirely innocuous on their own.

Kinski was always the director’s first choice, and if anyone is going to be the agent that could destroy a marriage, albeit unwittingly, she’s a fine selection. But I wonder about the wisdom of the choice somewhat, paired with an African-American actor like Snipes. This introduces an inter-racial element to proceedings, enhanced by Wen’s presence as Max’s wife, to which the film is completely oblivious. While refreshing in many ways, it’s an elephant in the room which needed to be addressed. Instead, the film heads off into a lot of footage of Charlie sinking into death: at the time this was originally released, as a young and single man, this was the segment that stuck with me most. However, in hindsight, and now as a happily-married person, it seems unnecessarily melodramatic, though Downey’s performance remains good. From my current perspective, it’s Max’s decision to sabotage everyone else’s happiness in pursuit of his own which is most troubling, coming over as selfish, and only salvaged by the freakishly convenient way things turn out.

Despite solid acting, it’s not much of a surprise the film was a critical and commercial flop. While Leaving Las Vegas is 89% fresh at RottenTomatoes.com and made back nine times its (small) budget at the North American box-office, Stand took in barely one-tenth of its $24 million cost, with only 28% of reviews being positive. For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it , “an astonishingly dopey middle-age male fantasy,” and that’s fair criticism. Whatever flaws may have been in the original script submitted by Joe Eszterhas, they can hardly have been any more glaring that the ones present here. This demonstrates one of the potential problems when directors decide they can write better than writers, especially when no-one apparently dares yank the reins and tell them otherwise.

Dir: Antonio Tibaldi
Star: Ryan Phillippe, John Savage, Nastassja Kinski, Jenny Lewis

When you’re shooting with her, she becomes a bit more complicated… When she shoots, she becomes not self-conscious, but insecure and the insecurity makes her self-conscious. It’s not like she’s self-conscious when she’s acting. She’s got amazing instincts and I think she’s very good, but I think she’s extremely insecure, so she wants to know how she did at the end of the take.
— Antonio Tibaldi

There are some films which are pretty much unremittingly depressing from the beginning to the end, a downward spiral of gloom, doom and depression, where things get worse at virtually every turn. Dancer in the Dark. Requiem for a Dream. And the masterwork of “Oh god, what’s the point of living?” cinema, Grave of the Fireflies. This isn’t quite up to the level of the last-named, but certainly deserves to sit among the second tier of slash-your-wrists movies. It plays like a particularly scuzzy episode of Jerry Springer: you’d probably find a picture of the West family in the dictionary, next to the word “dysfunctional.” This is mostly due to father Ray (Savage), who came back from a stint in the Vietnam war both physically damaged and mentally disturbed. He spends his nights hanging out in the bar which he runs along with his wife, Kate (Kinski), skirting the edge of trouble – such as his involvement in the “accidental” death of a stranger who seems to be looking for Ray.

They have three children, all boys. There’s Jimmy (Phillipe), a high-school baseball star, who wants desperately to get out of the hell in which he finds himself, and has a college scholarship which would accomplish this. Except, he knows all too well that it would abandon his two younger brothers, Mikey and Mark, to the whims of their father, from which Jimmy currently does all he can to protect them. The resulting tension causes Jimmy to break up with his girlfriend, Traci (Lewis), but worse is to follow, for Jimmy tells her that Mikey and Mark aren’t actually his brothers: they are his sons, the result of an incestuous relationship with his mother. Initially, I though that was the “truth” Ray demands is revealed to Jimmy, but turns out there’s more. For not long after that revelation, Jimmy vanishes, with everyone presuming he left town. Except there’s also a new arrival in town. The stranger who died in the bar turns out to have been a private detective, working on behalf of a woman, who suffered an extremely traumatic experience of her own, 19 years previously, believes Ray responsible, and is now in town, seeking payback.

I can’t argue with the performances here, in particular Savage, who certainly lives up to his name, depicting a character who seems perpetually on the edge of lethal violence, in a way that reminded me of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Everyone else is left tiptoeing around him on eggshells, uncertain of what might set him off, and the viewer is similarly on edge. More than once, I found myself holding my breath with a grimace on my face, genuinely concerned for his family and what he might do to them. Phillippe is also solid, which was a surprise, considering at that point in his career, he was more familiar for mindless teen fodder such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cruel Intentions (the latter isn’t bad, but still is unfit to lick the boots of the film it updates, Dangerous Liaisons). He does spend rather more time than you’d expect with his shirt off; maybe it was some kind of contractual thing.

Some aspects of the film did prove problematic, though it’s hard to discuss these without getting into spoilers – and that would be a shame, since knowing the wallop of these twists would rob the film of a significant chunk of raw power. Let’s just say, I’m left wondering how much Kate was involved in what happened. There’s an awful lot that she must have known about, yet apparently kept hidden from Jimmy, and you also have to wonder what kind of twisted mind-set made the incestuous relationship even remotely credible. There may be an element of shared trauma between mother and son involved? But the concept of her being an innocent bystander to the acts of her deranged husband doesn’t seem a perfect match for the facts which are eventually revealed. Also I’m unsure about the time period in which this is set: there seems a disconnect between the ages of the protagonists e.g. the “Vietnam vet” background of Ray, coupled with the ages of the three children and Kate being much younger than her husband.

As a character, Kate does come off as rather passive, which is a little disappointing: of the three main characters, she is probably the least memorable, and doesn’t get to demonstrate anything like the same degree of intensity. Of course, subsequent events involving her father add an entirely different spin to the appearance of Nastassja Kinski in a film about an incestuous family. Damn, there’s a dark part of me that wishes the makers of this had cast Klaus in John Savage’s role. Interestingly, while Nastassja was “our very first casting idea and choice,” according to the director, it was Nastassja who suggested Savage for the role. Of course, she’d worked with him before, on Maria’s Lovers, with their relationship there hardly any less dysfunctional. Tibaldi added, “They certainly used knowing each other and being comfortable with one another in this movie.”

Ironically, I note that on this film’s IMDb page, the “People who liked this also liked…” section, offers as its first suggestion, a documentary entitled Incest: A Family Tragedy. While hardly inappropriate, this doesn’t really seem like the sort of film which would trigger thoughts along the “Hey, let’s watch another one!” lines. Indeed, if you genuinely “liked” this – in the sense of this being your #1 choice for a Saturday night flick, rather than one which you perhaps appreciated, maybe respected and then consigned somewhere to the back of your collection – then I would probably recommend some kind of therapy.

Dir: Ivan Reitman
Star: Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Nastassja Kinski

“To whom it may concern. For years, I’ve thought about killing myself. It’s the only thing that has kept me going. But something always held me back.” Those are the first lines in the film we hear said by Dale Putley –  the character played by Robin Williams. Needless to say, given events since, watching the scene from a late-2014 perspective gives it an entirely different tone, derailing the comedic tone of the film in an extremely jarring fashion. It never recovers, though it’s hard to tell whether that’s a result of this unfortunate early faux-pas, or simply because it isn’t very good. Mind you, I speak as someone with a very low Robin Williams threshold: comedy, to me, requires more than gurning and funny accents.

This was, therefore, one of the films in the Kinskiography where I was not eagerly anticipating a revisit, especially as her role is ancillary: she kicks the plot off, then more or less vanishes for the next 80 minutes. She plays Collette Andrews, married for sixteen years and with a young son, Scott. When he runs away, and her husband won’t go after him, she reaches back into history, contacting her pre-nuptial boyfriend, Jack Lawrence (Crystal). Collette tells him about the situation – oh, and by the way, he’s Scott’s real father. When he defers, she goes to Dale – interrupting the suicide attempt when he, literally, has the gun in his mouth – and tells him the same thing. The two potential baby daddies meet up, and form an odd couple, Dale’s straight-laced lawyer contrasting with the emotional hippieness of Dale.

Scott is discovered trailing around the country with his girlfriend, following the band Sugar Ray – yeah, that doesn’t date this movie horribly at all… – but is also in trouble. He took $5,000 from a pair of drug-dealers (one of whom is played by Jared Harris of Mad Men), supposedly to make a buy, but then spent in on a diamond choker for his girlfriend. Who doesn’t like him very much. Pretty much a litany of bad decisions all round. Fortunately, these are not really bad drug-dealers, and can be disposed of, for plot purposes, with no more than a couple of head-butts from Jack. Meanwhile, his wife (Louis-Dreyus, in a performance nominated for a Golden Raspberry, and she does appear to be channeling the wooden spirit of Andie McDowell) is initially concerned by his apparent disappearance, but even more disturbed when she finds him hanging out in a hotel-room with a strange man and a teenage boy.

It isn’t a very successful comedy, with few if any likeable characters: Jack is perhaps the closest, but his flaws are numerous [though it helps that, every time he speak, I had an image in my head of Mike Wazowski]. Dale is insufferable and Scott is your typical whiny teenager who believes the entire world revolves round them: have the former chasing the latter, and I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s quote about fox-hunting: “The unspeakable chasing the uneatable“.  Meanwhile, Colette’s husband does so little, he could have been erased entirely, since his sole purpose is to get rolled down a hill in a PortaPotty. It’s also based on a premise which is at best, manipulative, and at worst, downright cruel. Colette’s behavior is particularly indefensible: showing up out of the blue after 17 years to tell a former boyfriend he has a kid is questionable – and when, as here, you don’t even know if that’s actually the case, it becomes… Well, more than a bit cunty, frankly. The moral conclusions apparently reached by the film are a) all women are deceitful bitches, and b) it is perfectly fine to lie to somebody, if it makes them feel good, even if they know you’re lying. Yeah. About that…

I was a little surprised to find out, this was a remake of a French film, Les Compères [released in English-speaking countries, inexplicably, as ComDads]. It had Pierre Richard is Williams’ role, and Gérard Depardieu in Crystal’s, though the latter was an investigative journalist, rather than a lawyer. I haven’t seen it, so can’t saw whether or not it stands up any better. It would certainly be hard-pushed to be much worse, and the Internet concurs, with the IMDb scoring the original a full two points higher than the remake – and, for the latter, I think the score of 5.0 is being more than generous. This is somewhat of a surprise, as the writers here, Babaloo Mandez and Lowell Ganz, wrote for Crystal on other occasions, to much better effect, in particular scripting City Slickers. Director Reitman also has a solid track-record, most notably the two Ghostbusters films. You’d certainly expect better here.

The soundtrack includes a lot of songs which were probably top of the hit-parade at the time, but seem little more than tracks for a spinoff album, since they add little or nothing to the film’s atmosphere. I should also mention the particularly bizarre cameo by Mel Gibson as a body piercer that occurs at a rock concert near the end.  Seems he dropped by the set while filming Lethal Weapon 4 elsewhere on the Warner Bros. lot. Overall, this can only be recommended if you have a far higher appreciation for the work of Williams than I do. While I hate to speak ill of the dead, seeing him “ad-libbing” a stream of potential father figures in front of the mirror reminded me precisely of why I find him far more annoying than entertaining, especially in “zany hilarity” mode [I will say that some of his straight work is much better, e.g. Insomnia] As far as Kinski goes, I can only say, I hope the payment received was adequate.

This was something of a find, and isn’t even listed by the Internet Movie Database in Nastassja’s filmography. I stumbled across the first hint of it while browsing a picture archive, my attention being drawn by the picture above. It and the other, related pictures, showed Kinski with Rudi Carrell, a Dutch-born entertainer who found great success hosting variety programs and game shows in Germany, from the sixties through the nineties. The Rudi Carrell Show was the most well-known, but the picture caption referenced another show of his, Am laudenden Band, which ran for 51 two-hour episodes from 1974 through to 1979.

This combined aspects of both variety and game show. The latter angle pitted four couples, each family members from different generations, against each others, over several rounds of competition, in things like observation, as well as trying to emulate the skills of professionals, e.g. a painter. The eventual winner sat in a chair while a variety of objects passed in front of them on a conveyor belt – hence the title of the show. They then had 30 seconds to remember as many items as they could, and whatever they recalled, they got to keep. [If this sounds more than slightly familiar to British readers, popular seventies series The Generation Game was also based on the same Dutch show that inspired this, Eén van de Eight]

Nastasssja wasn’t actually the first member of the Kinski clan to appear on the show, as father Klaus had appeared on the 11th edition, in March 1975. On New Year’s Eve 1977, in program #35, Nastassja followed suit, playing a mermaid in one of the skits that alternated with the game-show components. Miraculously, someone had uploaded the entire episode to Youtube, which I’ve embedded below for your viewing pleasure. The sketch starts at around one hour, 32 minutes in, with Kinski showing up a couple of minutes later, after castaway Carrell wishes for a woman as he falls asleep. She sings/lip-syncs a song about her life, which begins, somewhat unnecessarily, “I’m half woman, and I’m half fish.” But it has to be said, if I wished for a woman and Kinski showed up, I’d be happy to take the rough – or perhaps, more appropriately, the scaly – with the smooth…

Dir: Armand Mastroianni
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Rupert Penry-Jones, Tim DeKay, John Tenney

Which living author has sold the most books? Stephen King? J.K. Rowling? Not even close. The champion is Danielle Steele, with estimates ranging from 500 to 800 million copies sold – for comparison, the number for Rowling, the next-highest, is 350-450 million. Of course, it helps considerably that Steele has written an awful lot more books: 120 since her debut over four decades ago, so her average sale is a good deal less. But she certainly has her market, even if some decry her work as formulaic rubbish, rather than great literature. More than 20 of Steele’s novels have been turned into movies or TV miniseries, including this, a  two-part example of the latter screened on NBC.

It covers the von Gotthard family over a period of almost forty years, beginning with the matriarch’s tryst being rudely interrupted by the Nazis in pre-war Germany, due to her lover being a Jew. He’s shot dead in front of her, and she ends up committing suicide in the bathtub, being discovered by her young daughter, Ariana. A decade later, the war is in full, and Ariana (Kinski), her younger brother Gerhard (Penry-Jones) and their father Walmar (Michael York) are making plans to exit the country before Gerhard is sent to the Russian front. The attention of the authorities is attracted when they help a family friend Max Thomas (DeKay) escape by train, and it’s decided that the father and son will go to Switzerland first, leaving Ariana behind to allay suspicions. However, Walmar is shot trying to cross the border, splitting the family up. It takes a quarter-century of time, and a great deal of drama, before Ariana and Gerhard are re-united.

The thing which strikes me most is how little effort the production puts into showing the passage of time on the heroine. When we first meet Nastassja as Ariana, she must be twenty, based on her being ten (per the IMDb credits) when she discovers her dead mother in the bathtub. In her mid-thirties at the time of filming, Nastassja is probably a little mature, but still fresh-faced enough to pull it off without any real issues. However, the film finishes 27 years later, which would put Ariana near fifty years of age – yet she still looks almost exactly as she did at the start of the movie. The complete lack of effort put into the passage of time is oddly disconcerting, and I was left wondering if, along with the family’s treasured Renoir, there was a painting of Ariana in an attic somewhere, which was aging mysteriously.

The rest of the film is the kind of melodrama with which you can safely curl up with on the sofa for a rainy winter Sunday afternoon’s entertainment, accompanied by a box of chocolates and a purring cat. The script does a good job of weaving the separate stories of the siblings, along with Max’s to a lesser extent, as they independently make their way out of the chaos that was post-war Germany, and try to make new lives for themselves, with varying success. It’s interesting to compare and contrast the similar kind of issues they face, e.g. pregnancies, be they unwanted or phantom; parental disapproval or demands. The titular ring doesn’t play much of a part in proceedings: it’s simply a family heirloom, passed down from Ariana’s mother to her, and then on to her daughter in law, though it does trigger the eventual reunion with Gerhard [Look, it’s a Danielle Steele book: saying there’s a happy ending is hardly a spoiler]

The acting is generally solid and after a couple of supporting roles, it’s good to see Kinski back at the centre of the film, around which the storyline turns. She delivers a winning performance, very quiet and soft-spoken, but also capable of incandescence, such as the smile when she discovers Gerhard may still be alive. She also possesses her share of steely resolve, most apparent when she’s arrested by the authorities, who want to find out where her father and brother have gone, and she withstands not just incarceration but also more direct brutality, before fortunately being rescued by sympathetic Nazi Manfred Von Tripp  (Carsten Norgaard) – their relationship ends with his death during the defense of Berlin, which is rather unfortunate, since Ariana is pregnant. This is pretty much par for the course here, since her troubles are largely because Ariana is a victim of unfortunate circumstance, rather than poor life choices.

For example, the only way she gets to America is on a Jewish refugee ship, but the pretense of being Jewish required, ends up causing more problems than it solves, further down the road, as she has a relation ship with Jewish refugee worker Paul Liebman (Tenney), whose family brings her into their home, unaware she’s faking her religion. There’s probably a lesson for us all there. Just don’t ask me what it is…  I haven’t read the book, so can’t say in detail how it compares to the film. But it does appear to pay more attention to the mother, which would probably be helpful, as the first time we see her – indeed, it’s the first scene of the entire film – she’s in bed with her lover, which makes her come across as a bit… Well, the word “whorish” does come to mind, and it certainly doesn’t do much to create sympathy for the character. The final reel also requires more than its fair share of disbelief suspension, as Ariana’s son ends up going out with her second husband’s daughter. What are the odds?

I enjoyed this rather more than the first occasion I watched it, back in 1998, when I watched it as the second part of an all-night Nastajssafest, and it seemed more like a test of endurance. This time round, it seemed a lot less of a chore, though I’d hardly call it more than reasonably well-made fluff. As such, it seems perfectly appropriate as an adaptation of Steele’s literary output. Random trivia: also seen here is Leigh Lawson, who played Alec d’Urbeville opposite Nastassja in Tess, almost two decades previously.

[Screenshots from Cosas de Mar]