The Bad Boys Of The ‘70s season continued into its third and final weekend at Auckland’s Academy Cinemas, and provided a film I’ve never seen despite its soundtrack being a cornerstone of my record collection for more than half my life.
I’ve never rushed to see this film because I’d never heard anything particularly encouraging about it. A film should be given a chance, I always think, and it’s been my intention to get around to it sooner or later. In this case though, the rumours are true. It’s pretty weak. It’s not in the same low league as ROLLERBALL, another terrible Bad Boys Of The ‘70s first watch, but it was still a disappointment.
Richard Roundtree plays John Shaft, a private detective who seemingly knows every motherfucker in Harlem. I’ve seen Roundtree in subsequent roles and he always gives a strong, if sometimes flat, performance. Here, he’s terrible. It doesn’t help that the overly-ripe dialogue is some of the worst screenwriting I’ve experienced in quite some time.
If the writing is poor, the direction is just as bad. Certain things happen in the film that either don’t make sense, or just don’t pay off for the amount of screen time they take to set up. There’s an admittedly great great sequence where Shaft moonlights as a bartender just so he can speak to two men he suspects are staking out his apartment across the street. He gives them free drinks, and gets talking to them. But it leads nowhere. You think he might be plying them with free booze so their senses are dulled for the inevitable fist fight, but he just calls his detective friend and two patrolman are dispatched to arrest them. A great sequence, but one that just doesn’t make too much sense. As they obviously were unaware of what Shaft looked like, he could have just sat next to them at the bar and reached the same conclusion.
Another oddity is in the final sequence where Shaft abseils through an hotel room window. We see quite a bit of set-up where he makes a home-made flare and sets fire to it, but despite throwing this through the window first, it has very little effect on the sequence. Just another dead end.
We’re not here for the dialogue though. We’re here to hear Isaac Hayes’ soundtrack score pumping out of a cinema sound system. And I can confirm it sounds bloody fabulous. Great too to finally hear a soundtrack I know so well but in its original context.
The shady side of New York looks fantastic too. Harlem, Times Square, and a heap of cinema marquees. Just beautiful.
A couple of weekends ago I had the pleasure of seeing all three Bill & Ted films, back to back, on the big screen. Auckland’s Academy Cinemas are pretty good at rolling out the occasional double- or triple-bill. Last year, they played the BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy on a Sunday afternoon; this year it was the turn of Bill & Ted. And these opportunities come around so rarely, you have to jump at the chance of seeing them. In fact, due to the film coming out on streaming at the height of the COVID pandemic, I think this might have been the first public screening of the third film, BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC, in New Zealand.
The first film, BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, is pure class and holds a special place in my heart. It works so well because it’s such a simple premise – school kids travel back in time to find historical figures to help with their history report – and avoids the messy over-plotting of its sequels. This soundtrack score, by David Newman, is a nice addition to the loud and raucous needle-drops that take centre-stage throughout the film.
I didn’t like the second film, BILL & TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY, back in 1991, and I still don’t like it. I was initially unimpressed with the third film when it came out during lockdown in 2020, but upon seeing them back to back it’s clear that the second film is the weakest of the bunch. Sure, there are great moments, but it’s just trying to do too much, something that really jars after the simple, straightforward premise of the first film. It also doesn’t help that BOGUS JOURNEY simply isn’t as funny as the first film. The stuff with Death is great, but they really don’t get going with him until halfway through the film. Structurally, the writing is weak, and usually with comedies, the jokes can paper over some of those cracks, but not here.
I was unimpressed with FACE THE MUSIC when it came out in 2020, one of the first big films forced to come out on streaming when you really got a sense that it belonged in the cinema.
Four years later, getting to see it on the big screen was a real treat, and it was nice to measure up to those films without a thirty year gap.
It’s clear now that this third film is the strongest film after the sequel. It almost gets lost in its overplotting, but nowhere near as overcooked as the second film, and the comedy in this is much better than that film too – particularly in the storyline following Bill and Ted. The scene with them when they go to see Death and ask him to join the band – full of jokes around non-amicable band splits – is absolute gold.
Even though it was a lift of the events of the first film, I really enjoyed the sub-plot with the two daughters although maybe that storyline could have been its own film. They’re very good at aping their on-screen dads, particularly Brigette Lundy-Painel playing Ted’s daughter – who does a perfect 1989 Keanu Reeves impression.
It was also great to see Erinn Hayes as Ted’s wife; I’m a huge fan of her work on things like MEDICAL POLICE (and it doesn’t hurt that she’s a knockout). There’s a joke in that series about silent discos that I think about daily and chuckle to myself.
It’s nice when the universe lines up just right. I’ve not too long ago just finished reading Sam Wasson’s THE BIG GOODBYE: CHINATOWN AND THE LAST YEARS OF HOLLYWOOD, his exploration of three men in the motion picture business – Roman Polanski, Robert Towne and Jack Nicholson – and how their paths diverged in the early 1970s to make this beautiful film.
And just a few months after I finished reading it, and before I had got around to rewatching it at home, Auckland’s Academy Cinemas included the film in part of their ‘Nights Of Neo-Noir’ programming last Thursday on the eve of the Easter weekend. It was a perfect screening even though I was sat two seat away from a very fidgety man, who deeply exhaled from his nostrils every 30 seconds, spent a good 20 minutes loudly picking his teeth, and thought that Faye Dunaway’s reveal in the final hour was absolutely hilarious…
This was the first time I’ve seen the film – I think – since another watch on the big screen back in the UK in the early 2000s, so it was a well-overdue rewatch.
What a glorious picture. Everything about it just exudes class. And while I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that the plot is a little on the overcooked side, I was amazed at how straightforward it is. I was just saying to a friend the other day that one of the things I tend to struggle with in the noir and mystery genres is that the plot lines can sometimes be a little (needlessly) convoluted. As though the audiences would be disappointed if the plot didn’t have multiple layers and red herrings agogo.
In CHINATOWN, with an Academy Award-winning screenplay arrived at with a great deal of pain by Towne – and then tyre-kicked by Polanski into something more akin to his doom-laden European sensibility (the downer ending is all his) – it’s all fairly simple. The chief of the local water board is found dead after discovering that someone is engineering a drought to push farmers off their arid land in order to buy it up cheap. And aside from the icky familial matters of the man behind everything, that’s mostly it…
There’s an element of the James Bond Twitter community who won’t give QUANTUM OF SOLACE the time of day – for a whole host of reasons – but one of them being that the plot revolves around its antagonist Dominic Green buying up Bolivian Land so that he can profit as the country’s sole water provider. The general consensus is that the motives of the villain aren’t Bondian enough. He doesn’t want to kill anybody with a giant space laser, or wipe out the population of the Earth with a deadly toxin, he just wants to get rich.
Now, ignoring that this is exactly the same motive behind one of the series’ greatest villains, Auric Goldfinger, the feeling among QUANTUM OF SOLACE’s detractors is that a movie plot revolving around the control of water just isn’t cinematic enough.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you CHINATOWN – one of the American Film Institute’s top ten mystery films of all time, selected by the Library Of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as being ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically significant’, and regularly lauded as one of the greatest films ever made – a film about water.
Wasson’s book charts the early lives of Polanski, Towne and Nicholson, and how their respective upbringings brought them together to make CHINATOWN. Towne and Nicholson’s personal history is relatively benign – they shared an apartment while they were in acting classes with Roger Corman, Irvin Kershner and Sally Kellerman, before Towne moved into writing for Corman, and Nicholson focused on acting, moving through the ranks from the ground up.
However, in a turn of events that feel like they may have been ripped from the pages of Towne’s screenplay, Nicholson grew up thinking his mother was his sister. She had a child at 17, to an unidentified father, and as she was unmarried, the child was brought up by her parents – Jack’s biological grandparents – with her acting as his sibling.
But Polanski’s history is something else – and it’s not surprising that it was he who pushed for CHINATOWN to have a downbeat ending. Despite being born in Paris in 1933, his Polish-Jewish parents moved to Kraków in 1937 where the family were rounded up two years later and trapped in the Kraków Ghetto. His parents were both taken in raids by the invading Nazis, and Polanski grew up in foster homes, surviving by concealing his Jewish heritage.
In 1962, his first film KNIFE IN THE WATER – shot in Poland – was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, and he moved to Paris, then London, before reaching the USA in 1968 and directing his crossover hit ROSEMARY’S BABY.
Despite surviving such a horrific childhood, it’s almost hard to believe what happened next. In 1969, his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, and four of their friends were murdered by members of the Manson Family while Polanski was in London (in pre-production for his next film THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN, which would ultimately be directed by Mike Nichols).
Before I read Wasson’s book, I didn’t know too much about the Tate murders, aside from a few gory details, and the more truthful aspects of Tarantino’s revisionist ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. For example, I had presumed that the Manson family were either found at the scene of the crime, or somehow arrested shortly after the fact. I had seen the grisly crime-scene photos, and footage of the Manson family members turning up for their court hearing, but wasn’t sure what the time difference was between these two events (the murders took place in August 1969 and went unsolved until December 1969).
There are events during this period, recounted in Wasson’s book, which sound like the makings of a Hollywood comedy. After an initial period of absolute grief, Polanski became indignant at the LAPD’s inability to find those responsible and became an amateur detective himself. One of the clues left at the house where the murders took place was a pair of eyeglasses, which didn’t belong to Tate or any of her guests. Polanski then began to suspect members of his circle who wore eyeglasses and may have held a grudge against either himself or Tate.
Polanski found out the prescription of the left-behind glasses, and bought a tool which enabled him to check people’s glasses to see if the prescriptions matched up. At one point, his chief suspect, of all people, was Bruce Lee – the Bruce Lee! – who mentioned that he had misplaced his glasses. Polanski accompanied Lee to his opticians with the grand plan of uncovering him as the murderer.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t Bruce Lee.
Despite what you think of Roman Polanski’s actions following the release of CHINATOWN – namely his 1977 arrest for the drugging and raping of a 13-year-old girl, and his subsequent flight from American authorities – and whether you can somehow attribute these actions to a horrific war-torn childhood and a terrible tragedy in his adult life, you cannot disregard the majesty of CHINATOWN. I’ll always struggle to understand people who can’t separate the art from the artist (for one thing, if you thought like that, you wouldn’t be left with much art to enjoy).
It’s not Towne’s fault what Polanski did. Or Nicholson’s fault. Or producer Robert Evans. Or the composer of the beautifully haunting soundtrack score, Jerry Goldsmith. Or production designer Dick Sylbert. Or cinematographer John A. Alonzo. And so on…
It was awesome to see a big-screen zombie double-bill last Friday at Auckland’s Academy Cinemas: George A. Romero’s seminal horror NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) followed by his decade-later sequel DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978).
This was the first time I had seen either film on the big screen, and it’s probably the first time I had watched them since my teens when they, especially DAWN, were in heavy rotation.
I’ve never been too enamoured with the first film. Take away its genre-creating credentials (although zombie films did exist before), and NIGHT is quite a dull watch. It’s a bit of a slog to get through; 90 minutes that feel like 150. I’m sure it was scary as hell when it came out to unsuspecting audiences in 1968, but it’s been overtaken in both style and impact by decades of films it has influenced since.
DAWN on the other hand is far more enjoyable. The choppy editing in the opening sequence is fairly annoying, and feels like Romero is using a sledgehammer to tell us that society has broken down. Once that helicopter takes off with our four leads, it turns into another film completely.
Seeing the film after so many years, it’s wonderful to return to this quartet. The casting of this film is easily one of its strengths. We first meet Fran Parker (Gaylen Ross), a news producer at the TV station that is falling apart at the top of the film. Her partner, Stephen ‘Flyboy’ Andrews, the helicopter-flying traffic reporter, arrives to take her away from the chaos.
In a brief, mostly unnecessary side plot, we then meet Flyboy’s friend Roger ‘Trooper’ DeMarco (Scott Reiniger), a disillusioned SWAT team member tasked with clearing out apartment blocks full of tenants refusing to hand over their dead to the National Guard. Trooper meets who the no-nonsense – and similarly disillusioned – Peter Washington (Ken Foree), and they decide to desert together and join Flyboy to escape in the TV station’s helicopter.
From there, we mostly escape any threat of death – aside from a few close calls when they stop to refuel – and they spot an abandoned (by the living) shopping mall, the now-iconic Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania, which is overrun by zombies. Herein starts perhaps the cosiest hour of horror ever committed to celluloid, as the four leads find a place to live inside the complex, clear the place out of zombies, barricade the entrances, and…go shopping.
Much has been said that the film satirises consumer culture – and all the great horror films are usually about ‘something else’ anyway – but it’s just so great to see a living, breathing shopping mall frozen in time in November 1977, when filming began.
All of the shop names, the oft-revisited JC Penney’s, the fashions of the mannequins, and the in-store signage, all combine to give us this glimpse of a different age – an age that seemed to explode in the 1980s, both in real-life and in movies. This must be one of the first movies set inside a mall of this size, and the living dead are returning to it out of habit or, as we are told, it’s a place of importance for them. A great film to compliment this in a double-bill would be the 2020 documentary JASPER MALL by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb’s, which deals with the closing of that age of consumer culture. Romero’s death in a mall, compared with Thomason and Whitcomb’s death of a mall.
I never owned the sublime soundtrack score to DAWN OF THE DEAD when I used to watch the film repeatedly as a teenager. I’ve since bought this beautiful repress by Waxwork – not to mention Trunk Records’ release of the library cues, including The Gonk – and so the music is far more familiar to me now than it used to be. I’m disappointed that the music isn’t higher up in the sound mix in the US cut, but maybe that’s just because it’s by Goblin, and I’d expect that due to Dario Argento’s involvement with the film (he co-financed the film in exchange for its international distribution rights).
Vinyl Stylus 