Film Pairings — A Different Kind Of On The Road: Duel And Joy Ride

Make sure the edge of your seat is comfortable because that’s where you’ll spend most of your time during this double feature. 

I saw both these films years ago.  Both by accident.  With Duel, I was home alone bored, probably flipping pages in a magazine.   The TV set was on.  I glanced at the screen from time to time. Whatever was on didn’t appear to be that exciting, yet there was something about it that kept drawing me back.  The movie was about this ordinary guy, a traveling salesman driving his ordinary Plymouth to an appointment. And we’re along for what appears to be a boring, ordinary ride. This ordinary guy, Dennis Weaver, inadvertently pisses off a truck, driver. In that moment, though it takes our ordinary salesman a moment or two to realize it, there is no ordinary anymore.  And WE are along for a ride through hell.  Initially made for TV in 1971, with a less than half-million-dollar budget, this was Steven Spielberg’s first full-length movie and the one that gave him keys to the cinema kingdom. Weaver is great as a kind of everyman caught in an inescapable contest that he is in no way qualified to compete.  Equal credit goes to his co-star, a 1955 Peterbilt Tanker, an evil, smoke-spewing monster of a truck that should have an Emmy on its dash.

One evening a few years later, facing the fact that the movie I intended to see was sold out, I opted to buy tickets to Joy Ride.  The movie poster suggested I was about to sit through a cheesy thriller.  Why not? Sometimes cheesy movies are satisfying.  Joy Ride was, however, more than a little familiar — there is this mad trucker on a rampage. Director John Dahl (Red Rock West and The Last Seduction) readily admits his 2001 film owes a lot to Duel.  Despite the similarities — the devil truck here is also a Peterbilt, for example — Joy Ride is not a remake.  It stands on its own.

Instead of the relatively blameless every-day Joe getting caught up in a maniac’s derangement, two young smart asses tease a ‘redneck’ truck driver. Either the trucker doesn’t have a sense of humor or it is very, very dry.  Paul Walker, Steve Zahn and Leelee Sobieski are college-age humans who know not what evil awaits them when a hardened, repressed and rage-filled truck driver wants revenge for a frat-boy level prank.

What both films do is take what should be a preposterous situation, make it believable and scarier than hell. The difference is that in Duel Weaver didn’t really cause the sky to fall on his head. What happened to him could happen to any of us.  In Joy Ride, the message is don’t poke the beehive and for God’s sake, don’t poke it twice.

I hate to suggest beer again as an accompaniment to film night, but we’re talking truck drivers, diners and motels.  So, maybe a trip down Memory Lane and a couple of CC & Sevens.

Confessions — Let’s Set The Record Straight

Mr.  Wolfe

Mr. Tierney

After all these years, I thought it was time to shine little light on author Tom Wolfe’s attempt to minimize my influence on his work not to mention his celebrity.  First, let’s examine his trademark white suit.  Was he the first dandy of American literature?  I was establishing this iconic image at five when I first wrote Lime Kool Aid, A Failure, which Wolfe later transformed into Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.  But this wasn’t the end of his intellectual thievery.   There can be no doubt that his much heralded The Right Stuff was lifted from my own The Right Stuffing, My Favorite Thanksgiving and that his famous Bonfire of The Vanities was little more than a rework of my masterpiece, What Happened To My Marshmallows?  Mr. Wolfe, you owe me some royalties.

Film Pairings — Gambling As A Means To A Bad End, Or Not

When I propose these double features, I’m not necessarily recommending them — at least not for every one. I mention this now because I have vey mixed feelings about both Killer Joe and Rounders. Both have fine casts; reason enough to see them, perhaps. The directors are experienced, and the story premises are promising.

However, Killer Joe, with its perfect noir plot, is nonetheless filled with gratuitous violence and prolonged humiliation. I felt this way before I read about director William Friedkin’s battle to keep it from getting the dreaded NC17 rating.  He lost that battle and a similar one in the U.K.  In the end, Friedkin did not make the cuts that would have made the film an “R’ and more profitable in general release.  Good for him.  But while I wholeheartedly support the director’s refusal to give in to censorship, I found myself censoring it on my own by fast-forwarding through scenes when the camera lingered far too long on scenes of little more than torture. Without spoiling the artful twists in plot, here’s the story: A sleazy, mentally disturbed Houston cop, Matthew McConaughey, is hired to kill a woman by the woman’s son, daughter and ex-husband. The son, Emile Hirsch, has a crushing gambling debt and is mere days from extinction.  He has exhausted all alternatives, except the one that brings Joe into their dysfunctional family.  With a common purpose — killing mom — gives family members reason to unite.  Juno Temple, Gina Gershon and Thomas Hayden Church, who brings depth to the depthless, make the characters and story all too real.

John Malkovich and Matt Damon

If Killer Joe suffers from some horribly misplaced exuberance, Rounders may be flawed by too much restraint.  John Dahl, director of one of my favorite, darkly comedic films — The Last Seduction — focuses on a promising young gambler played by Matt Damon in Rounders.  The problem for our protagonist in this film, like Killer Joe, is that when you gamble, sometimes you lose and sometimes you lose to the wrong people.  We spend most of the film as bystanders to poker games as Damon tries to climb out of deep debt the way he got into it — by gambling some more. Even for a poor poker player like me, this was more interesting than I would have imagined.  Each game brings with it its own drama.  However the central drama is the choice Damon’s character must make.  Should he, a smart law student, go straight or, as the devil on his shoulder, Edward Norton, counsels, “go pro” in the exciting world of high-stakes poker.  I stayed with the film for its promise.  Here was John Turturro, John Malkovich and Martin Landau. With all these great characters and the danger hovering over Damon’s genuinely decent character, what great surprise, what profound irony are we going to experience?  I have no idea.  He makes a choice.  If that’s it, it’s not enough.

This is definitely a beer night — the cheaper the better.

Book Notes — Banned in Guantanamo Bay, Texas Jails And In A Library Near You

Each year the American Library Association hosts “Banned Book Week,” when they call upon the public to remember the U.S. has a history of trying to determine what we should be allowed to read. I remember as a kid turning the wire bookrack in Simpson’s Pharmacy, seeing those excitingly vulgar paperbacks with hot type banners: Banned in Boston.  If the books were arty, the word, “unabridged” might convey a certain sauciness therein.  Very desirable that was.  I remember the owner of Aristotle’s Bookstore in Indianapolis being arrested for selling Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer under the counter. Aristotle’s was an academic bookstore not particularly known for its appeal to the prurient. Yet the state of Indiana deemed the book obscene and banned it. This was in the early ‘60s.  I was in my teens and the only encouragement I’d need to read the book was to be told I couldn’t.

As a side note, Indiana is a funny state.  There was a big kerfuffle about the musical Hair coming to town. It was nearly banned.  Hair contains nudity. On the other hand it was the hottest ticket in the country.  There was a fight among the citizenry between those who wanted the city to be culturally savvy — cool  — and those who wanted to hold the line against savage appetites stealing the souls of our young.  A number of concerned citizens just wanted the play and its message of love to go away.  Producers were caught.  If they went ahead, the play might be raided.  Threats were made. The troupe couldn’t find a venue because of it.  Eventually they worked it out.  A strange compromise.  The logic was this:  Nude statues were legal.  In fact there were concrete and marble penises here and there in fountains, for example — all around the city.  And breasts.  Same thing.  Right? So, cast members would spend a moment in compete darkness, during which they would remove their clothing. They would remain PERFECTLY still when the lights were on, still like statues, the show could go on. It did.

Back to books attacked for political reasons.  Indiana doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone.  It seems determined to uphold the rights of the uptights at the expense of the rest of the population.  The state and another Republican governor made news again in its desire for mind control. Recently — that is 2013 — Indiana Governor and potential presidential candidate Mitch Daniels, who had no academic credentials, tried to get books by historian Howard Zinn thrown out of state university curriculums. Zinn’s sin was that he didn’t always portray the U.S. in a positive light. It’s true. It’s doubtful he could have portrayed Daniels in a positive light either.  After terming out of office and needing a legit job, Daniels was appointed head of Purdue University by the school’s board of trustees — the same trustees he appointed while governor.  Mr. Zinn, had he not died a couple of years earlier, would have found that bit of business historically interesting.

In another bit of irony, this time on the world stage, the people who run Guantanamo Bay have banned Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.  In apparent homage to Mother Russia who originally banned his books, an uncharged Gitmo detainee was not allowed to accept a copy.  They are allowed books — just not this one.  Perhaps authorities didn’t want the detainee to make that Gulag connection. Next time, try Kafka.

In Texas, contrary to federal law, the state’s department in charge of criminal justice maintains a database of 12,000 banned books, many of them by the usual suspects “Slick Willie” Shakespeare, Big George Orwell and Norman (Tough Guys Don’t Dance) Mailer.  Usually the only books banned in prisons are ones that explain how to make a bomb out of oatmeal or how to carve an AK15 out of a case of DOVE soap. But this is Texas.

This year, we will “celebrate” Banned Books Week from September 22 to September 28.  Libraries and bookstores around the country will have special sections devoted to books that have been banned throughout the years.  Among the many authors with that distinction are Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Kurt Vonnegut, William Golding, Richard Wright, Aldous Huxley, J.D. Salinger and Ken Kesey.

And here are a few of the 50 or so books, The American Library Association said were banned or challenged just last year:

Alexie Sherman, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Georges Remi Hergé, Tintin in the Congo

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Stephen King, Different Seasons

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Chuck Palaniuk, Fight Club

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Check out and support your local library and go here for a list of independent bookstores throughout the U.S.

Putin On The Ritz

Vladmir Putin wasted no time closing down an art gallery that exhibited work that made fun of him.  To be expected. After all this is the guy who had a provocative rock group put in jail. Apparently the world's most powerful homophobe, who loves to prance about in public, shirtless, has no sense of humor. Pictured here are Mr. Putin and his bff Dimitri Medvedev. Then again, have we heard from Dimitri lately?

Black Mask Magazine Returns

Film Pairings — True Crime Brought To The Screen

Sissy Spacek, Martin Sheen in Badlands

For those who watch crime films about serial or mass murderers for the “kill” moments, Badlands and Zodiac will disappoint.  And I’m betting I’m not the only viewer to feel that both films are tremendously well done and worthwhile, yet unsatisfying because they convey only the senselessness of the acts. There is no answer to the question, why? Because of this, I suspect they more honestly convey the sad truth of it all.

Director Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) takes us back to the 1950s to tell the story of real-life spree killer Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend — outcast and naive romantic.  The beauty of this film certainly isn’t the story, nor any powerful lesson one can learn from it.  It is the way the story is told. There is a great deal of quiet, minimal dialogue and powerful cinematography. We are there with them, sharing their isolation, their connection with each other and their disconnection from the world.  The Starkweather role is played intentionally and effectively with shades of James Dean by a very young Martin Sheen. I’m not sure anyone but Sissy Spacek could have convinced us that a smart sensitive young woman could overlook cruelty for so long, despite the charming package that contained it.   In any event, the audience might find itself lost in time and suspended in a place where only the two characters exist.

 

While Badlands is kind of a gritty fantasy, Zodiac, (2007), despite attempts to market it as a “thriller,” is neither fantasy nor thriller. It is as close to a documentary as a scripted, acted film can be. Directed by David Fincher, Zodiac takes us back to 1969 when a killer began to focus his senseless killings in and around San Francisco.  We are witness to the inevitably gruesome aspects to remind us of the level of the horror, but we are given much more information on how the killings affected those – the police, the media and their families and the entire city — who are drawn into and for some, destroyed by the madness.  Here, detail is important and the filmmakers get it right.  We are inside the city’s Hall of Justice where investigators feel the immense pressure of a city scared out its collective wits.  We are inside the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle to witness its internal struggles and moral dilemmas. And we, the audience, never know more than was known as the story unfolds.  Expert casting: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey, Jr. and Anthony Edwards. Brian Cox also appears as San Francisco’s legendary lawyer, Melvin Belli.  The film was based on the book by Robert Graysmith.

As an accompaniment, beer strikes the right mood for Badlands.  So, to bring San Francisco into the picture, go for Anchor Steam.

Musical Interlude — Parov Stelar, "Rude Boy"

Elmore Leonard: 1925 — 2013