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.

Natural Born Killers Still A Favorite

I can never seem to get enough of Oliver Stone’s 1994 movie, Natural Born Killers. I re-watched the Director’s Cut several nights ago, along with the special features which include director’s commentary, deleted scenes and Chaos Rising; the behind-the-scenes, making-of piece, which has interviews with the actors, producers and crew, and which chronicles the filming and the controversy centered around the violent nature of the movie.

The original screenplay was penned by Quentin Tarantino, before he became “the” Quentin Tarantino. There was a big brouhaha in the press around the time of release about then neophyte producers Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy, JD Productions, optioning the screenplay from Tarantino, who in the meantime became quite famous from the success of Reservoir Dogs. Purportedly Tarantino hoped to get the script back after the year-option expired, so he could make the movie himself, and a big feud erupted between Tarantino and JD Productions, culminating in Don Murphy supposedly saying he would openly celebrate Tarantino’s death, and Tarantino slapping Murphy in the face at a famous LA restaurant.

After the movie was released, Jane Hamsher’s book, Killer Instincts: How Two Young Producers Took on Hollywood and Made the Most Controversial Film of the Decade was published. Killer Instincts is a great, gossipy read about the underbelly of making movies in Hollywood, and the excitement and unique craziness of making a movie with the legendary Oliver Stone.

As the story goes, just when JD Productions was about to lose the option, purportedly due to underhanded, behind the scene maneuvers of Tarantino, Oliver Stone stepped in as director to help Hamsher and Murphy make the movie. He also re-wrote the script, much to the chagrin of Tarantino, with the help of David Veloz and Richard Rutowski.

The whole sordid affair was fodder for the tabloids and gossip mills, and I ate up everything I could find on the movie, since I am one of the biggest Oliver Stone fans on the planet. And I must confess a big fan of Tarantino’s earlier work, as Tarantino was also a big influence on my own wannabe, screenwriting attempts. I snatched up and eagerly devoured every book, magazine and shred of press material I could find on both filmmakers at the time. I’m still a big fan of both auteurs, but Stone is by far the better and more serious filmmaker, and in that famous feud, I would still fall into Stone’s camp.

When I first saw Natural Born Killers on the big screen, I really didn’t like it. I much preferred the serious Stone films, and upon first viewing, I was disappointed. I thought Natural Born Killers was kind of silly and awkward, and even incongruously silly and horrific. It was shocking in places. It was creepy in places. I usually don’t like movies that mix violence and comedy, and I’m not much into satire. As a matter of fact, I didn’t like Natural Born Killers so much, that I ended up watching it ten times on the big screen! And yes, I still have all my chromosomes. By the second and third viewings, I liked it a lot and recognized it as a work of genius: a psychedelic, satirical, no-holds-barred, violent love story. And I must confess, I do love violent love stories. (The Tarantino penned, True Romance, for instance, is a great, violent love story.) By the fourth through the tenth big screen viewings, I took along as many friends as I could and watched it to study camera angles, sets, props, acting skills, etc. I studied that movie intensely, as a devoted, armchair student of film and all things Oliver Stone.

Of course, more controversy eventually erupted over the movie as copycat killings and violent crimes began to occur and be attributed to the movie. Mystery writer and attorney John Grisham even went so far as to help bring a lawsuit against Oliver Stone and Time Warner on behalf of one of the victims. (I have since boycotted all things John Grisham.) According to newspaper accounts at the time, one of the copycat killings even happened on the roof of a convenient store on the NW corner of Midway and Rosemeade, about a stone’s throw from the apartment where I lived in Dallas for many years and made my own movie. The Grisham lawsuit was unsuccessful, thankfully, and no precedent was set which would make filmmaker’s and artists responsible for the actions of a few lunatics and lost souls who might act upon movies, plays, books, poems or other art forms or media created by artists whose soul intent is to move, enlighten or entertain an audience. Tragic indeed when life imitates art in such a way as to cause a murder, and my heart does go out to the victims and their families. But one cannot prosecute Martin Scorcese or Paul Schrader because John Hinckley shot President Reagan purportedly due to an infatuation with the Jodie Foster teen prostitute character, Iris, in the movie Taxi Driver.

It was Aristotle who said, “Art imitates life,” and Oscar Wilde who countered centuries later, “Life imitates art.” I remember reading John Lennon’s Playboy magazine interview in 1980 in which he mentioned he was subsisting on Hershey’s with Almonds candy bars and Gauloise cigarettes. I rushed out and purchased and consumed both of those items simply to experience what John Lennon experienced. Life imitating art, one might say. I couldn’t very well sue John Lennon or Playboy magazine if I developed lung cancer or a tooth cavity, though eating Hershey’s with Almonds and smoking French cigarettes was my way of imitating the artist, John Lennon; silly though it may have been.

Nowadays in film, product placement has become the evil twin of life imitating art. Movie production companies now include brand name, consumer products in their movies in order to raise production funds from corporations that market the products. It’s an art-compromising way to subliminally include commercials into movies to make a buck. When famed filmmaker, David Lynch was asked what he thought about product placement in movies, he replied emphatically, “Bullshit, total fucking bullshit.”

One of the things that struck me as I watched the opening scene of Natural Born Killers is the inclusion by Oliver Stone of various “natural born killers” and inhabitants of the desert: such as the coyote, the rattlesnake, the hawk, the scorpion and the rednecks with the dead deer on the roof of the truck; all killers in their own right, yet all a part of the natural order of the planet. As Mickey Knox says in the nationally televised, prison interview on Super Bowl Sunday that comes later in the movie, “It’s just murder… all God’s creatures do it… the wolf doesn’t know why he’s a wolf - the deer doesn’t know why he’s a deer. God just made it that way.” He goes on to say: “The media is like the weather, except it’s manmade.” Those may be wise observations from a demented mind about the cruelty of nature, but still rather chilling statements to a viewer in a civilized society.

The movie is chocked full of oblique angles, jump cuts, black and white footage and every conceivable angle and film format known to mankind. It is a visual onslaught that never lets up throughout the whole movie: a psychedelic, kaleidoscopic, drug-induced romp through every conceivable manipulation ever dedicated to film. According to Hamsher’s book and interviews included in the Director’s Cut, she and Oliver Stone and others ate hallucinogenic mushrooms while scouting film locations in the desert. The movie itself tries to imitate a psychedelic trip, and successfully does so in my humble opinion.

One of the film’s most disturbing scenes to me is the backstory of Juliette Lewis’s character, Mallory, and her life at home with her abusive father, Jack, eerily played by Rodney Dangerfield. As the scene unfolds and it is made apparent that Jack has physically and sexually abused his daughter, the scene is nonetheless shot as a sitcom, complete with a laugh track included at the most sinister moments. The incongruity of that juxtaposition of a very creepy scene with a laugh track layered in was quite troubling to me, and difficult to watch. It is also at that juncture where Tarantino, during his first viewing of Natural Born Killers, supposedly walked out of the movie theater and said he would, “Watch it on cable someday.” Evidently he did not approve of the rewrites or Stone’s interpretation of his original script. Tarantino had even insisted that he be given screen credit for the “story’’ only, when he was made aware of the numerous changes to his original script.

The cast of Natural Born Killers did a great job. Stone said one reason he cast Woody Harrelson was because Woody’s father, hit man Charles Harrelson, infamously assassinated a federal judge in Texas in 1979, and Stone thought there was something in Woody’s genetic makeup that would bring out something extra in the Mickey Knox character. Juliette Lewis was dedicated to the role of Mallory Knox, and it shows in her flawless performance. Robert Downey, Jr. almost steals the show as the TV journalist, Wayne Gale. Tommy Lee Jones gives a rare performance as the cruel, nose-picking prison warden with his crude, instruments of torture. Tom Sizemore rounded out the cast very well playing the famous, memoir-writing lawman that is hired to track down the psychotic, murderous lovers. As we find out, he too is a killer who strangles a prostitute in a motel as he searches for Mickey and Mallory.

There are no heroes it seems in Natural Born Killers. According to Oliver Stone, “Once [Mickey and Mallory] kill, they’ve entered into this world of breaking all the rules. It’s fitting that the filmmaker is also breaking the rules, with them.”

Maybe to some, Natural Born Killers is a sick, controversial movie, unrealistically portraying a sick world. But, as Tommy Lee Jones says in the interview in Chaos Rising, “You don’t have to be a very sophisticated person to know that this is not an exploitation film. This is an art film.”