[This blog entry was originally part of a piece from January 2011.]
I thought Winter’s Bone was the best movie I saw all year. It won the 2010 Sundance Grand Jury Prize. I’m kind of partial to Southern, hillbilly noir, or “country noir.” Read the book, Winter’s Bone recently, too. Thought it was great stuff. Raw, lean prose, as they say. A new voice in literature you’ve never heard of, Daniel Woodrell, from the Missouri Ozarks. I look forward to the re-release of his hard to find novels in April. I hope the movie does well at the Academy Awards this year. I loved the uncle character, Teardrop. People tended to give him wide berth. He’s like the crazy-assed country boy who grew up around guns and is not afraid to bust some caps. I’ve known a few. Like a quiet, subdued, country folk equivalent of some psychotic, Joe Pesci character in a Martin Scorsese mob movie.
I watched Howl and thought it was great. It brought back a lot of memories of my youth when I wanted so badly to be a poet like Arthur Rimbaud, Allen Ginsberg… or a Richard Brautigan or Patti Smith… or Bob Dylan, the demigod.
I liked The Killer Inside Me, though I thought it was really creepy, as intended, I guess. It worked. It was difficult to watch at times because of the graphic violence toward women. Read up on Jim Thompson, too. Didn’t know he was a local Ft. Worth boy, though an Okie. Read his bio, Savage Art, by Robert Polito. More hillbilly noir, I suppose, created back in the 1940’s and 1950’s at the dawn of the whole film noir movement. There were some crazy tidbits of information about Texas and Oklahoma characters from the Great Depression era and ensuing years.
Didn’t get to see as many movies as I would have liked in 2010. Scant time available for such luxuries. Hope to see more in 2011. Looking under rocks for some seed money. Jonesing to make another movie. I have to have one more movie in me before I die. Jacksboro Highway? Dead or in Huntsville? A Girl and a Gun? Warboots? Knock on wood….
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Heaven or Hell - Woody Harrelson in Rampart
Woody Harrelson smokes a lot of cigarettes in Rampart. From opening scene to closing scene he has a fag in his mouth. Enough so that it made me want a cigarette as I recently watched the Blu-ray disc, and I haven’t smoked in six years. Rampart is Woody Harrelson at his finest as he portrays Vietnam veteran, Dave “Date Rape” Brown, a tough LA cop in the Rampart division during its historically checkered past, with a bad reputation for smoking the bad guys. Did he or did he not kill the date rapist, thereby earning himself the moniker, Date Rape Dave? Internal Affairs would like to know. So would his two young daughters, who are aware of their dad’s soiled reputation and the ubiquitous media coverage of video footage showing him giving a severe beating to a black, hit-and-run driver trying to flee the scene, after having the misfortune of accidentally smashing into Date Rape Dave’s car.
His youngest daughter also has to ask Dad about her confusing genealogy. He explains to her that her older sister is both her half-sister and first cousin. Seems Woody Harrelson’s character married two sisters in sequential order. Anne Heche plays his ex, while Cynthia Nixon portrays his next. Date Rape sired a daughter by each, and they all share the same house: Date Rape, the two sisters and two daughters, all sharing the same home as one big dysfunctional family, though he is supposed to have moved out already. His older teenage daughter is mad at him. The Anne Heche character hates him and tries to give him the boot but he keeps showing up unannounced. He slips into bed with the other sister later, and she too tells him he needs to pack his bags.
Dave gets a lot of trim in this movie. From the hot black chick who digs cops that he picks up in a bar and later gives a visually stunning toe job to in a motel room, to the mysterious defense attorney played well by Robin Wright whom he also hooks up with in a bar, and who later explains herself thusly with the immortal lines, “And I like to suck cock, so sue me.” Did I mention that master scribe James Ellroy wrote the screenplay?
While watching Rampart it felt as if Abel Ferrara’s coked-up Bad Lieutenant from New York City, played so well by Harvey Keitel twenty years ago, had stumbled into a Hawaiian-shirted, James Ellroy version of a Los Angeles cop movie. I realized I was watching a noir version of Bad Lieutenant, and not a bad version at that. Though director Oren Moverman evidently made a lot of changes to the Ellroy script and ended up sharing screenwriting credit with Ellroy, who is arguably one of the greatest American writers ever with his hugely popular and uniquely stylistic series of crime novels: the USA Underworld Trilogy and his LA Quartet, the most famous of which is LA Confidential. The fact alone that Ellroy wrote the script was enough to get me out of the house and into the theater when Rampart first premiered in 2011. One also learns from the director’s and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski’s co-commentary that there were no rehearsals and the actors were encouraged to improvise.
And it has a great supporting cast. Ned Beatty as the old school, retired, father-figure cop who gives Date Rape a tip on an illegal card game that’s going to get robbed, so Date Rape can show up and save the day by busting some caps in pursuit of the card game thieves. Sigourney Weaver portrays the IA bigwig who wants Date Rape to retire and make the “shitstorm” of his recent media coverage and sordid career go away. Ben Foster, who was also given producer credit, Steve Buscemi and Ice Cube also have small roles. But it is Woody Harrelson as Ellroy’s misogynistic, racist, homophobic, chauvinistic, priapic cop who steals the show as only Woody Harrelson can. He threatens the maître D at a posh hotel with busting him for the hookers in his lobby if he doesn’t hook him up with a free room and a bottle of Scotch. Later he extorts lorazepam and phenobarbital from a pharmacist whose boyfriend just got busted by saying he can make the charges go away. Later he extorts the same pharmacist again, telling him to give him something to “Take me up this time and something to keep it hard.” He goes to some sort of kinky sex club and after wandering around awhile in a drunken and/or drugged stupor, he gorges himself at a buffet table like a pig, eating with his hands as he gormandizes, shoving more and more food down his throat, until graphically vomiting in the bathroom. When leaving the club in the middle of the night, he stumbles and falls down on the sidewalk as onlookers look on impassively; but being the super-stud cop that he is, he manages to get back up and leave.
As the movie progresses, Date Rape becomes more obscured and in the background, and in shadows, and in reflections; like a specter, according to the cinematographer’s comments. I thought it was extremely well done in that respect. I thought the dark, shadowy scenes and intermittent use of natural lighting was all brilliantly done by Bobby Bukowski. Kudos is also due to David Wasco for his skills as production designer. Oren Moverman uses a lot of close ups in his direction, which I also thought was well done, highlighting Woody’s character’s rough exterior and facial features, and also bringing out the character’s inner pain, or lack thereof. You just can’t go wrong with Woody Harrelson playing the lead role in a James Ellroy cop script. That’s a match made in heaven – or hell. If you are a fan of Woody Harrelson, James Ellroy, or film noir, Rampart is a movie not to be missed.
His youngest daughter also has to ask Dad about her confusing genealogy. He explains to her that her older sister is both her half-sister and first cousin. Seems Woody Harrelson’s character married two sisters in sequential order. Anne Heche plays his ex, while Cynthia Nixon portrays his next. Date Rape sired a daughter by each, and they all share the same house: Date Rape, the two sisters and two daughters, all sharing the same home as one big dysfunctional family, though he is supposed to have moved out already. His older teenage daughter is mad at him. The Anne Heche character hates him and tries to give him the boot but he keeps showing up unannounced. He slips into bed with the other sister later, and she too tells him he needs to pack his bags.
Dave gets a lot of trim in this movie. From the hot black chick who digs cops that he picks up in a bar and later gives a visually stunning toe job to in a motel room, to the mysterious defense attorney played well by Robin Wright whom he also hooks up with in a bar, and who later explains herself thusly with the immortal lines, “And I like to suck cock, so sue me.” Did I mention that master scribe James Ellroy wrote the screenplay?
While watching Rampart it felt as if Abel Ferrara’s coked-up Bad Lieutenant from New York City, played so well by Harvey Keitel twenty years ago, had stumbled into a Hawaiian-shirted, James Ellroy version of a Los Angeles cop movie. I realized I was watching a noir version of Bad Lieutenant, and not a bad version at that. Though director Oren Moverman evidently made a lot of changes to the Ellroy script and ended up sharing screenwriting credit with Ellroy, who is arguably one of the greatest American writers ever with his hugely popular and uniquely stylistic series of crime novels: the USA Underworld Trilogy and his LA Quartet, the most famous of which is LA Confidential. The fact alone that Ellroy wrote the script was enough to get me out of the house and into the theater when Rampart first premiered in 2011. One also learns from the director’s and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski’s co-commentary that there were no rehearsals and the actors were encouraged to improvise.
And it has a great supporting cast. Ned Beatty as the old school, retired, father-figure cop who gives Date Rape a tip on an illegal card game that’s going to get robbed, so Date Rape can show up and save the day by busting some caps in pursuit of the card game thieves. Sigourney Weaver portrays the IA bigwig who wants Date Rape to retire and make the “shitstorm” of his recent media coverage and sordid career go away. Ben Foster, who was also given producer credit, Steve Buscemi and Ice Cube also have small roles. But it is Woody Harrelson as Ellroy’s misogynistic, racist, homophobic, chauvinistic, priapic cop who steals the show as only Woody Harrelson can. He threatens the maître D at a posh hotel with busting him for the hookers in his lobby if he doesn’t hook him up with a free room and a bottle of Scotch. Later he extorts lorazepam and phenobarbital from a pharmacist whose boyfriend just got busted by saying he can make the charges go away. Later he extorts the same pharmacist again, telling him to give him something to “Take me up this time and something to keep it hard.” He goes to some sort of kinky sex club and after wandering around awhile in a drunken and/or drugged stupor, he gorges himself at a buffet table like a pig, eating with his hands as he gormandizes, shoving more and more food down his throat, until graphically vomiting in the bathroom. When leaving the club in the middle of the night, he stumbles and falls down on the sidewalk as onlookers look on impassively; but being the super-stud cop that he is, he manages to get back up and leave.
As the movie progresses, Date Rape becomes more obscured and in the background, and in shadows, and in reflections; like a specter, according to the cinematographer’s comments. I thought it was extremely well done in that respect. I thought the dark, shadowy scenes and intermittent use of natural lighting was all brilliantly done by Bobby Bukowski. Kudos is also due to David Wasco for his skills as production designer. Oren Moverman uses a lot of close ups in his direction, which I also thought was well done, highlighting Woody’s character’s rough exterior and facial features, and also bringing out the character’s inner pain, or lack thereof. You just can’t go wrong with Woody Harrelson playing the lead role in a James Ellroy cop script. That’s a match made in heaven – or hell. If you are a fan of Woody Harrelson, James Ellroy, or film noir, Rampart is a movie not to be missed.
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