Category: Filmography

Dir: Willard Carroll
Star: Gillian Anderson, Ellen Burstyn, Sean Connery, Nastassja Kinski (uncredited)

The film admits the difficulty of what it’s trying to accomplish in the opening monologue, given by Angelina Jolie’s character, the punky extrovert Joan: “Talking about love,” she concludes, “Is like dancing about architecture.” [The latter provided the film’s original title, when it was playing the festival circuit] The film then spends the next two hours doing exactly that: talking about love. It’s certainly a challenging task, but the film approaches it from a plethora of different angles, which is probably a wise move: you may not find all of them interesting or relevant, but the odds are that a number will resonate with your personal experiences in some way. Much credit, I think, to Carroll for the script he also wrote, which does an exceptionally fine job of keeping its numerous balls in the air, and switching between them without losing narrative coherence, before bringing them all together for the final scene.

To get the (low) Kinski contribution out of the way before embarking on a more general coverage of the movie, she plays a lawyer who crosses paths in an upscale bar with Hugh (Dennis Quaid). He spins her a story about being a TV executive, whose wife and children have just left him, and whose life had revolved around a failed effort to revitalize the Thursday night schedule for his network. Which is odd, because the last time we saw him, he was in a different bar, spinning an entirely different tale of woe to another woman, about how he killed his wife and child in a car-accident. Hmmm. Odder still, the same lady who was watching in the bar there, is now also watching him here. Hugh then moves on to a drag bar, and tells a third different saga there. What the heck is going on?

There is actually a solid enough explanation, though to be honest, it perhaps backfires a bit, since it casts more than a little doubt on the emotional honesty of everyone else. That impairs the effectiveness, since the audience needs to buy into these characters, rather than be wary of them. I think Carroll is perhaps being over cautious and hedging his bets, as with the opening monologue, basically apologizing for the rest of the film. He needs to be more confident in his characters and the script and performances abilities to make them interesting. Indeed, the sheer volume of different angles also perhaps suggests something similar, along the lines of, “Don’t like these characters? Wait, wait – there’ll be some other ones along in just a minute!” And that isn’t actually the case, because the majority have something interesting to say.

Which ones work, however, is almost entirely subjective, since as already noted, some will be closer in line with your own thoughts, expectations and romantic history. Interestingly though, despite the drag queen’s presence, it is entirely about male-female relationships. There is one guy who is dying of AIDS, but that one is focused on his relationship with his mother [As an aside, what was it with Kinski and movies in which people get AIDS? I lived in London for the entirety of the nineties, and as far as I am aware, never knew anyone who was even HIV positive. Yet her characters appear to share movies with them frequently. Guess I was just moving in the wrong circles. Or, possibly, this is a case of film makers liking to make a drama out of a topical crisis, especially one affecting many people in its own house.]

Personally, the pairing which I liked best – and which I would have been happy to see as the focus of a standalone feature – was Paul (Connery) and Hannah (Gena Rowlands). They have just received some devastating news of their own, but Paul insists that life goes on, exactly as before. Their relationship is one born of decades of familiarity with each other. It’s not perfect, and has static – there is clear indication of that, based on simmering resentment over an incident a couple of decades ago- but no relationship ever is, and they clearly do love each other very, very much. That’s clear when they exchange vows during their marriage renewal ceremony at the end, having been told to come up with one sentence to sum up their relationship.

Hannah: “You are the tenant of my heart: often behind in the rent, but impossible to evict.”
Paul: “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it any different.”

I’ve been married for 14 years now, and I wouldn’t do it any different either: I hope that remains the case when I become Connery’s age then, in another 14!

That is just one of the range of stories present here. Other run the gamut from the young and photogenic, such as Jolie and Ryan Phillipe’s tale of damaged people finding each other, through a married woman (Madeleine Stowe) having an affair with a man (Anthony Edwards) for purely physical reasons, only for him to want more, on to the previously mentioned thread about a mother (Burstyn) and hers AIDS-stricken son (Jay Mohr). It certainly qualifies as looking to have something for everything, and I think it works, though it’s arguably rather too talky – most people I know would rather gnaw their own limbs off than talk about their feelings, or worse still, listen to someone else do so. But, hey, I’m British, so what do I know? Much credit is due to Carroll for putting together one hell of a cast, even including Jon Stewart, in a rare “acting” role; given this was only the director’s second movie, I’m nor sure how he managed that, though he does seem to have been in the business, mostly as a producer for a lot longer.

Kinski’s brief presence, while welcome, is odd because it’s entirely uncredited, and I’ve not been able to shed any light on the reason why, or how she became involved in the project either. No matter, for after the previous couple of entries, it’s a refreshingly warm look at human nature and behavior, rather than trying to rub our noses in the grubbier side of relationships and the actions they provoke.

Dir: John Landis
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Billy Zane, Lara Flynn Boyle, Rob Schneider
a.k.a. Dying to Get Rich… Susan’s Plan

If you can imagine a comedic version of Your Friends and Neighbors, you will be somewhere in the ballpark as to how much of an abject failure this is. You have virtually the same level of repellent characters, only instead of offering an unpleasant and acerbic commentary on the shallow and banal nature of modern life, they are mugging it up and playing the situation in increasingly desperate attempts for laughs. The aim appears to be “black comedy,” with Susan (Kinski) and her pals plotting the murder of her ex-husband, Paul (Adrian Paul), in order to profit from the insurance. However, the incompetence of the two hit-men (Schneider and Michael Biehn) leave their target only wounded, and potentially able to identify his attackers to the cops who are investigating the shooting. To avoid this, they engage the services of biker Bob (Dan Aykroyd), only for him to demand an increase in his fee when he discovers the incompetence of those who have hired him.

If you want to see this kind of thing done right, watch Fargo – either the movie or the surprisingly impressive TV series. The key difference is that there, significant effort is first made to make the characters performing these reprehensible deeds, sympathetic to the viewer. Jerry Lundegaard is, at heart, a good man, doomed by bad choices. Susan Holland, on the other hand, is first introduced planning Paul’s demise, with no background or motive for this offered, leaving her to come across as a scheming bitch, and given the lack of justification for her kill order, a borderline psychopath. No-one else appears to have any other significant motive apart from money, though sex may be a secondary consideration for some, mostly keyed off Betty Johnson (Boyle) who appears to have bedded the majority of men here, at some point or other. This relentlessly shallow depiction of womanhood could be seen as misogynistic – except, the men are no better.

It’s possible this could have worked, with the right cast, but virtually no-one has any feeling or flair for humor, or the necessary sense of timing to nurse the pitiably weak material to life. [There’s a major set-piece based around farting in a closet. Oh, hold my aching sides, for I fear they may split…] While far from Landis’s first stab at comedy, his other forays such as Trading Places or National Lampoon’s Animal House were blessed with far better comedic talent, in Eddie Murphy and John Belushi respectively. The chasm between those two and Rob Schneider hardly needs to be detailed. About the only person here who has any kind of feel for the genre is Aykroyd, reunited with Landis after their previous work together on The Blues Brothers and Spies Like Us, as well as Places. He brings Bob to life, in a way that makes the character far more memorable than anyone else in the cast, even though his screen time is trivial in comparison.

About the only chunk which works, semi-successfully, is the use of dream sequences to show how Susan and her collaborators fear things will go down. These are seamlessly integrated into the film, in a way not dissimilar to the classic example in Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, and is actually moderately effective the first time it’s used. Unfortunately, like the painful characters and the nonsensical plot, it’s a device that outstays its welcome.  Otherwise, this was the second horrendous misfire of 1998 for Landis – he also directed Blues Brothers 2000 the same year – this ended up being dumped straight to video 18 months after its premiere at the AFI Film Festival. It may also be indicative that Susan’s Plan was also the director’s last foray into narrative features for more a decade, not returning until 2010’s Burke and Hare.

As for Kinski… Well, let’s just say, there’s good reason her career has focused on drama. To her credit, though, she seems to have realized that comedy is not her strong suit, and this failure remains a nearly unique aberration in her filmography. While there are the occasional other attempts at the lighter side of cinema, these were mostly early in her career, such as Passion Flower Hotel, or where she was playing a straight foil to the funny guys, e.g. Billy Crystal and Robin Williams in Fathers’ Day, or Dudley Moore in Unfaithfully Yours rather than having to do the heavy lifting. For comedy is not easy: I know this, courtesy of a son who has dabbled, semi-professionally, in stand-up, and so I have some awareness that, while the best may make it look effortless, that’s along the same lines as figure-skating and lion-taming. Not everyone can be a great, or even good, comic actor; fewer still can manage to be great at both comedy and drama.

And you know what? That’s perfectly okay. Being aware of your weaknesses, as well as your strengths, is an essential part of a successful acting career – though there’s nothing wrong with stretching yourself, and going outside your comfort zone. What’s painful, is an actor or actress who refuses to acknowledge their limits, and continues ramming their head into them like an aggrieved billy-goat: think Keanu Reeves’s frequent attempts to be a Serious Actor, when he is far better suited for action films like John Wick. Kinski’s subsequent career made no repeat of the questionable choices we see here, heading back into the dramatic territory for which her talents are undoubtedly better-suited. Fair enough. She gave it a shot, it didn’t work out, and we’ll all move on. If Nastassja ever thinks of trying her hand in the genre again, 90 minutes spent watching this should dissuade her, and will be time admirably well-spent.

Dir: Neil LaBute
Star: Amy Brenneman, Aaron Eckhart, Catherine Keener, Nastassja Kinski

“What are we looking at here, huh? Lace and language aside, in the end, it’s actually men and women. Right? Just like any other story. Like every story, ultimately, what do these characters want? I know. It’s embarrassing for you to say, but let’s be honest. They wanna… Fuck. Correct? It’s always about fucking.”

The movie’s second scene has college drama professor Jerry (Ben Stiller) breaking down a restoration comedy for his class, but it might as well be LaBute talking directly to the audience, and telling them what the rest of the movie is going to be about. And, Christ, is it a soul-sucking experience. Not that this is a “bad” film: you can see why Stiller, Keener and Eckhart have all become much more famous than they were at the time this was made. LaBute, too, is certainly one of America’s foremost dramatists, though his movie work has been, to be kind, uneven, as anyone who sat through his re-invention of The Wicker Man can attest. This certainly isn’t anywhere near that. However, In ten words or less: this is unpleasant people being unpleasant to each other.

Make no mistake though: this is what LaBute does, has done and, I’ve little doubt will continue to do. LaBute’s cynical dislike for humanity – one critic called him “a misanthrope who assumes that only callous and evil people who use and abuse others can survive in this world.” – shines through virtually every frame of this 100 minutes. But this doesn’t mean I necessarily want to wallow down there with him, venomously scripted and vengefully acted this may be. Now, it’s not as if I require all my films to be Disney-fied, or anything close to it: I could happily come up with an eloquent defense of some utterly brutal movies like Martyrs [though you’ll have to look elsewhere]. But if I’m going to peer into the abyss, I want to be repaid for my time with some kind of insight into…. something. I’m really not too picky. Yet I come out the end of this no better informed, lacking in education and certainly not entertained.

I’m sure it was intended as some kind of scathing critique of self-absorbed assholes, whose interests are largely limited to themselves. But merely depicting self-absorbed assholes, of a kind with which I am quite familiar [I worked for the IT department of a stock trading company in the City of London during the ‘Big Bang’ of the 90’s; I know a thing or two about self-absorbed assholes], does not count as any kind of critique, let alone scathing. As well as Jerry, there is his wife Terri (Keener), and the first thing we hear from her is complaints about Jerry’s vocal tendencies during sex, which she finds distracting. She ends up cheating on him with artist’s assistant Cheri (Kinski), on whom all the male members of the cast also hit, in the same place, to somewhat different effect. These variations on a theme is about the only sequence which seemed to have a demonstrable point.

The counterpoint is another loose triangle of rhyming names: husband and wife Barry (Eckhart) and Mary (Brenneman), plus defiantly single Cary (Jason Patric), a ruthless predator. That married pair is no happier, and Jerry puts a tentacle out to Mary, leading to an assignation in a hotel room, although this doesn’t go well or bring either party the slightest bit of happiness. Jerry is unable to perform sexually, and Mary is dismayed when her husband subsequently brings her to exactly the same spot, hoping to rekindle their romance – apparently at the suggestion of Jerry. Cary, meanwhile, may be the biggest turd of them all; during a discussion with Jerry and Berry, he virtually boasts about raping a (male) schoolmate, calling it the “best fuck” he ever had. While extreme, that’s another pattern here: none of the characters demonstrate the slightest regret about their actions, regardless of their impact on anyone else. There’s no karmic retribution to be found here either; the film ends with the deck of relationship cards somewhat shuffled, but no suggestion anyone has learned anything from their experiences.

It does possess an unblinking ferocity, mostly in Cary’s character, who appears about the thickness of a Phil Collins’ CD from going entirely American Psycho, as in when he berates for of his conquests for getting blood on his high thread-count sheets. He does, at least, have an honesty about him, and does not care what you think. Compared to him, the rest of the cast are milquetoasts.  LaBute appears to be aiming to occupy similar territory as David Mamet, another director whose true passion appears to lie in live theater, but who can unflinchingly turn an extremely chilly eye on relationships and the carnage which results from them. However, he is far less cynical, and is willing to depict the good as well as the bad: in his films, people may do bad things, but their motivations are not so arbitrarily selfish as here.

I note the careful lack of any specific location for this: it could be New York, Los Angeles or anywhere in between, and the title appears to be suggesting that the people portrayed are just like the viewers. Their names are not even revealed during the film, not that they matter. I read some reviews which described this in terms like, “savagely funny,” which seemed so incredibly wide of the mark I had to check there weren’t two films with the same title. Because I actually found this entirely joyless and mostly depressing, a bleak nihilistic experience provoking as much genuine emotional reaction as a porn loop. The late Roger Ebert said of this, “It’s the kind of date movie that makes you want to go home alone.” Alternatively, it’s the kind of date movie that makes you very glad to be in a relationship which is absolutely nothing at all like those pictured.

Dir: Peter Antonijevic
Star: Dennis Quaid, Nataša Ninković, Sergej Trifunović, Nastassja Kinsi

Nastassja’s character dies in this one. That doesn’t count as any significant spoiler, since her death takes place a scant four minutes and thirty-eight seconds after the production company logo appears on the screen, about three and half minutes before her name has even appeared in the credits. There, her name appears immediately after Quaid’s, and as shown below, in virtually the same size font: given this, I spent the rest of the film waiting for her to make a re-appearance, perhaps in some kind of flashback sequence. I needn’t have bothered. She gets exactly two scenes: one in a church, listening to a sermon, immediately followed by the other in a Parisian restaurant. There, her embassy-employed husband Joshua Rose (Quaid) shows up, for a family outing, only to be called back to work. Barely is he inside the door of the embassy, however, when a bomb explosion tears apart the restaurant, killing both wife and son. Exit Nastassja, likely wondering if she can reach the bank to cash her check before it closes.

The incident unhinges Rose, and he subsequently shoots up a mosque, blaming Muslim terrorists for the incident. Whisked out of Paris, he joins the French Foreign Legion under an assumed name, and is sent to the disintegrating state of Yugoslavia, where he can continue killing Muslims to his heart’s content. However, the atrocities committed by fellow soldier Goran (Trifunović) prove too much, even for Rose: when Goran brutally assaults a pregnant woman (Ninković), Rose shoots him. The woman, Vera, gives birth shortly after, but refuses to care for the baby, because it’s the result of her being raped by Muslim soldiers. Rose, thus, finds himself the unwilling foster parent of the newborn child, and has to tend the infant while taking both it and Vera through the war-torn countryside, in search of a secure place where he can leave both mother and child, without feeling too guilty about it. That task is made much trickier, after Vera is rejected by her family.

Yeah, if I seem kinda bitter, it’s the bait and switch performed by the movie. Is this site called dennis.quaid.us? I think not. So, watching him stagger around the disintegrating Balkans, wailing baby in tow, is not something which would generally be high on my list of chosen leisure activities. It’s such a painfully earnest and obvious film, especially once the baby shows up: Rose’s path to redemption will be strewn with dirty diapers. This is a shame, since the start certainly packs a wallop: I can’t say the restaurant blowing up came as an enormous surprise, there’s something about the way the scene is set up, and the almost saintly way in which Nastassja is depicted, that is close to painting a bulls-eye on he back. It’s similar to the way, when a soldier in a war film starts showing around photos of his wife and kids back home, you just know they’re not going to make it to the end of the movie. Still: less than five minutes? Should have merited an “and Nastassja Kinski,” or even a “with Nastassja Kinski” in the credits, not second billing. This is me shaking my fist in disapproval.

While I’m here, I suppose I might as well mention the rest of the film. When your hero walks into a mosque and opens fire on innocent Muslims, it certainly digs a deep hole for the audience’s sympathies towards him, and I was curious to see how the script would get him out of it. The solution was mostly to put him beside someone even worse, in the shape of Goran, who thinks nothing about cutting off the finger of an old, bed-ridden Croatian woman, because he wants the ring she has on. Or repeatedly kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach, because she has been “defiled” by being raped. Yeah, that makes him a much worse person than Rose. But, conversely, it also makes him a much more interesting one. We know why Rose is the way he is. What could possibly have brought Goran. to a point where these kind of actions are something he can perform without a second thought? Well, we’ll never know, as a burst of gunfire from Rose draws all speculation to a premature close, and we’re left to follow the path taken by second-most evil person in the movie instead.

I have a cheerful aversion to babies – I was fortunate enough to marry someone whose kids were already in progress, so I happily got to miss out entirely on the stage where they are basically machines for generating excrement. Initially, Rose seems to share this disdain, but inevitably, his heart eventually melts, and he shows himself prepared to risk his own life to save that of the child. Though personally, I’d have been more impressed, had he taken responsibility for the act of mass slaughter which he committed in Paris, and accepted the consequences: saving one kid doesn’t seem to me to be more than a token gesture at balancing the moral scales of his previous acts. As Shakespeare put it, “I am in blood stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Except, Rose decides to return, and yeah, the journey back does turn to be largely tedious. The only sequence with any power has a Serbian militia stopping a bus, escorting the passengers off and… It’s not pleasant. Let’s leave it at that. The feeling this atrocity is an everyday thing for the perpetrators, is chilling indeed.

It doesn’t seem particularly even-handed, concentrating more on the Serbs, with the Croats mostly the victims. But that’s not among the film’s major flaws, when put beside its simplistic morality and unengaging execution, in which men are little more than Neanderthals, and women saintly baby-producers. Produced by Oliver Stone, a man not exactly noted for subtlety [much though I live the polemic shriek that is Natural Born Killers], I didn’t reach the trite and implausible ending feeling enlightened or emotionally challenged in the slightest. War is hell, m’kay? But anyone with two brain cells to rub together doesn’t need a Dennis Quaid, even one seeking redemption for a dead Nastassja, to tell you that.

Dir: Erich Breuer
Star: Axel Jodorowsky, Nastassja Kinski

This 17-minute short film took three years to produce, with over 20,000 images being manipulated to create the animation, with no computer effects. It’s part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. What’s it about? I told you: it’s about 17 minutes. You want more? For safety, I think I will defer the synopsis listed in the IMDb, as being more likely accurate than anything with which I could come up.

On stormy night in an ugly urban landscape, Ciro Norte (Jodorowsky), a scientist with wild hair and thick glasses, straps himself to a chair he’s has fashioned with wires: lightening strikes, convulsing him. It seems his experiment has not worked. The next day, he drives his jalopy to a bar, sits alone, and weeps. But suddenly, a vortex sucks him into a dream state where he wanders, escapes man-eating fish, confronts his doppelganger, walks through a field of giant flowers, and comes upon Venus herself (Kinski), buried up to her shoulders in sand. She is a giant, and she takes him to her breast. He wakes from the vortex, back in the bar, his mood transformed.

Yeah, it’s kinda like that. Jodorowsky is the son of infamous film-maker Alexander Jodorowsky, maker of impenetrable cult epic El Topo (as well as the somewhat more accessible Santa Sangre, which starred Axel). Jodorowsky Sr was also at one point during the seventies, working on an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which would certainly have been… interesting. There’s a sense of the same surrealist approach here, though Breuer is perhaps equally inspired by the works of German expressionist cinema such as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. This may be simply a result of the black and white, siilent approach Breuer uses in the early going. Things get a lot more colorful, once Norte is sucked through into the other world – as an aside, I didn’t particularly get the impression it was a dream state, it felt more like another dimension [with Norte being chased by giant, predatory fish creatures, I got more of a From Beyond vibe, to be honest]

Quite how or why this becomes Attack of the 50-foot Nastassja, I’m not sure, and I would clarify that the “takes him to her breast” mentioned is intended as much in a spiritual sense, fitting in with her character being Venus, the goddess of love. It’s an odd if memorable piece of work, working much better as a visual tour de force, than anything resembling narrative coherence, and is best approached in that manner, as a 17-minute helping of eye-candy. That running time probably represents the limit of my attention span for this kind of thing, and I’ll confess to having checked a couple of times here to see how much longer there was left to go: a feature-length movie in this style would be hard pounding indeed. Mind you, I never liked El Topo either. The film is, for now, available on Vimeo, and has been embedded below. Your mileage may vary…

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.