Worth Mentioning - A Derangement of the Synapses

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Thrills, cigarettes, cyborgs, and exploding heads.

FLESH AND BONE (1993)

These days, Steve Kloves is best known for being a screenwriter on all but one of the Harry Potter movies, but for most of the decade before he started writing Potter I knew his name from my repeated viewings of his 1993 Texas noir thriller Flesh and Bone. Capturing a tone that I would say puts it somewhere in the range between the Coen brothers' Blood Simple and the Eric Red-scripted films The Hitcher and Near Dark, this one has some really dark, unsettling elements and fascinating rural characters.

Dennis Quaid stars as Arlis Sweeney, a man who travels around the Texas countryside, making sure vending machines are stocked, there's always a freshly painted chicken in the "Brainy Betty" machines, and the bar pool tables are in good condition. Soon after we're introduced to him, he gets caught up with party entertainer Kay Davies (Quaid's then-wife Meg Ryan), who has an explosive confrontation with her abusive, screw-up husband when Arlis drives her home after a party hosted at a roadhouse.

Arlis isn't too pleased with the "activity" he has to deal with because of Kay, which includes witnessing her firing a gun in her husband's general direction. (After the husband has punched her in the face.) Arlis likes a simple, quiet life. But the Kay excitement seems minor when another woman, Gwyneth Paltrow as Ginnie, comes into his life. We've seen Ginnie wandering around, putting Vaseline on her lips so she can use it to sneakily slip jewelry off the fingers of corpses at wakes. Worse than that, she has a travel companion: Roy Sweeney (James Caan). Arlis's father.

More than an hour of the film's 126 minute running time has gone by before Quaid and Caan come face-to-face, but we first see Roy in the opening sequence, in which Roy uses a young Arlis (Jerry Swindall) to infiltrate the country home of a nuclear family in the middle of the night. It seems this is something Roy did frequently, making Arlis act like he's lost so a family will take him in for the night, then have the boy let him when the occupants are sleeping so he can rob the place. Problem is, the parents weren't sleeping this time, so Roy killed the parents and their young son, leaving only their infant daughter alive. And by crazy coincidence, Kay happens to be that girl.

For a time in the 1990s, I became obsessed with the state of Texas and would watch movies that were set and filmed there over and over. I loved seeing the wide open spaces of the state in films, and Flesh and Bone was in the mix because it has some terrific shots of the countryside. Another reason I watched this movie a lot is because I had read in the pages of Fangoria magazine that the upcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation had been primarily filmed in a tin-roofed house in Pflugerville, Texas that had also been a location in Flesh and Bone. Indeed, the house that was used for Leatherface's home in The Next Generation is a very important location in this film. It's the house that the opening murders are committed in, and the characters return to that now-abandoned house at the end of the film. So, being a fan of the Chainsaw movies, I looked to Flesh and Bone for a preview of the house I'd see in Chainsaw 4. I also used this film as my guide when I ventured to Pflugerville with my father the year before Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation was finally released on VHS, searching for that house. Just so I could see it in person and take a picture. But Kloves tricked me with the movie magic, using different locations for the interior and exterior of this house, so I was looking for the wrong place. And didn't see it anyway. But if you watch Flesh and Bone, you do get to see Dennis Quaid, James Caan, Gwyneth Paltrow, and James Caan move around in the same house Matthew McConaughey, Renee Zellweger, and Leatherface would be moving around in soon after.

Flesh and Bone strikes me as a movie that probably wouldn't get made today, at least not on this budget level. Its focus is on the character interactions and the atmosphere, not on events. Nothing much really happens in the movie. So if it were made today, I think there would be much less money to work with, and Kloves probably would have been told to cut it down. It's kind of surprising they allowed him to let the movie run for so long even in 1993. But while there isn't much going on in its excessive running time, I still like watching this movie because I like the tone, the locations, and the performances. The actors all did great work bringing their characters to life. In Caan's case, that means playing a character we hope won't live too long.

SCANNERS (1981)

Writer/director David Cronenberg's 1981 sci-fi horror film Scanners is a movie that's really just famous for one scene. A crowd-pleasing moment so unique that people have been talking about it for 40 years. People who haven't even seen Scanners in its entirety know about this scene. But you don't hear much about Scanners aside from that scene, and that's because the rest of its 103 minutes aren't nearly as interesting. The film peaks 13 minutes in. The film has its fans, definitely, but most viewers are just there for what happens at the 13 minute point.

What happens is that a man's head explodes right on screen, a spectactular special effect achieved by legendary makeup artist Dick Smith. The head explosion occurs at a demonstration a company called ConSec, a private military company that's in the business of international security, weaponry, and private armies, is giving for North American financial and political VIPs. ConSec has come to find out that there are at least 236 people out there who qualify as "scanners", they have psychic and telepathic abilities - abilities which ConSec is hoping to weaponize. They have a man credited as First Scanner (Louis Del Grande) working for them, and this scanner is supposed to pick someone out of the audience and show off the fact that he can read their mind. Unfortunately, the man he picks out of the audience is actually a very powerful scanner named Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside). So as the First Scanner tries to pull off his mind-reading trick, Revok uses his scanning ability to make the man's head explode. It's not the demonstration ConSec intended.

The scanner program is headed up by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), and it's pretty amusing to hear someone other than sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer be referred to as Dr. Ruth. That Dr. Ruth was only starting to gain popularity when Scanners went into production, so Cronenberg probably didn't know he had given his character a funny name. ConSec gets a new director of internal security after the demonstration disaster, Lawrence Dane as Braedon Keller, and Keller thinks the scanner program should be scrapped, especially since Ruth hasn't had much luck getting scanners to join up - and they keep disappearing, because Revok is recruiting them into his own group. When he's not making their heads explode. But Ruth still has one scanner at his disposal, a homeless man named Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack). ConSec wants to strike back against Revok, and Vale is their chance to do that. So Keller doesn't get to shut down the scanners program right away. Ruth and Vale have work to do, and Vale embarks on this mission once Ruth has helped him understand these abilities he has. 

Much of Scanners is slow and uneventful, and that's why it took me several tries over many years before I could see this movie - other than the head explosion - as anything more than dull. I could just never get into it. Even when there were things happening, the film just has a feeling to it that always pushed me away. Finally, during my umpteenth attempt to get through this movie, it recently clicked for me and I actually found myself, for the first time, getting interested in what Cronenberg was showing me. Scanners does feel like a movie that doesn't reach its full potential, the concept could have been used for something much more engaging and exciting, but it has more going on than I had ever given it credit for before. There's more action than I had realized! The movie does slow down a lot, but I didn't remember so many shotguns being used. I didn't even remember the scanner ally Vale gains along the way, Jennifer O'Neill (who gets top billing) as Kim Obrist. That indicates how often I would give up on Scanners early during my previous attempts to get through it.

I still believe the head explosion is the best thing Scanners has going for it, that's what to watch it for, but the rest of the movie isn't so bad after all.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (2005)

Jason Reitman's feature directorial debut Thank You for Smoking will always have a special place in my memories due to the circumstances I first saw it under. In April of 2006, there were three films in limited release that I really wanted to see - Rian Johnson's Brick, Mary Harron's The Notorious Bettie Page, and David Slade's Hard Candy. The latter two were released on the same day as Thank You for Smoking, which had a much larger release than the other three. But it happened to be playing at the same arthouse theatre that was showing the other three movies, which was 90 minutes away from my home. So one day, my mom and I made the trip to this theatre and watched Brick and The Notorious Bettie Page back-to-back. We returned home, then the following day we made that 90 minute drive again to watch Thank You for Smoking and Hard Candy back-to-back. This is the sort of thing my mom would do to indulge my obsession with cinema. Thankfully, all four movies we saw on those two days were really good.

Based on a novel by Christopher Buckley, Thank You for Smoking is a satire of the tobacco industry that stars Aaron Eckhart as Nick Naylor, a spokesman for the Academy for Tobacco Studies, the main tobacco lobby in Washington D.C. It's his job to make public appearances where he argues that cigarettes are not addictive and there's no proof they cause lung cancer. J.K. Simmons is his boss BR, and above BR is the Captain (Robert Duvall), the founder of the Academy and the man who came up with filters for cigarettes when it first started going around that they were unhealthy. Now that cigarettes are getting so much bad press, especially with Senator Ortolan Finistirre (William H. Macy) pushing the idea that every pack should feature a skull and crossbones symbol, Nick decides to strike back by landing a major product placement deal in Hollywood.

Nick Naylor is an unscrupulous scumbag, but Reitman and Eckhart make him fascinating to watch. Eckhart delivers one of the best performances of his career here, and Reitman wrote some fantastic dialogue for him to deliver. This isn't a comedy on the level of some of the things Reitman's father Ivan directed (Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters), but it is frequently amusing. In addition to the actors mentioned, there are memorable appearances by Cameron Bright as Nick's son Joey, who probably shouldn't pay much attention to his dad; Kim Dickens as Nick's ex; Maria Bello and David Koechner as friends and fellow spokespeople Nick meets up with regularly; Rob Lowe and Adam Brody as Hollywood types; Sam Elliott as a character who is "the original Marlboro Man"; Todd Luiso as an associate of Finistirre's; and Katie Holmes as a journalist that Nick makes the mistake of getting intimate with.

This was a great debut for Jason Reitman and let the world know right away that he was a talented filmmaker to keep an eye on. It's clearly a movie from a director who's going to be in the conversation for Academy Awards at some point - it's somewhat surprising that this movie didn't earn some nominations itself. Eckhart at least should have been up for an Oscar. But the Academy didn't give this one any nominations, they saved those for Reitman's second film, Juno.

NEMESIS 3: TIME LAPSE (1996)

Nemesis movies love to list dates for the viewer, which is a risky thing to do because movies in general tend to be terrible at keeping track of continuity like that. Nemesis 3: Time Lapse (which is also known by the cooler title Nemesis 3: Prey Harder) is one of the movies that drops the ball when it comes to dates. While Nemesis 2 told us that the Predator-esque cyborg Nebula was sent from 2097 to "Present Day", 1995 at the time, to hunt down Alex (Sue Price), who poses a risk to our future cyborg rulers, Nemesis 3 shows Nebula's replacement being sent back from 2077. And even though the movie claims that we're in "Present Day" when we catch up with Alex in the African desert, computer readouts at the beginning of the film said the bounty hunter who will be tracking her this time was being sent back to 1998. So it's not 1996, when the movie was released, or even 1995, the year we thought Alex defeated Nebula in. It's a couple years ahead of the then-present day.

Nemesis 3 picks up very soon after the end of the second film, but something bad happened to Alex between the moment when the second film's end credits started rolling and this one's opening title sequence began. We find her lying on the ground, covered in blood and nursing a head wound that has given her amnesia. Although she's having a lot of flashbacks to the events of Nemesis 2, she doesn't know who she is. This allows for the story to play out in a convoluted, fragmented way. 31 minutes of nothing have passed by before Alex starts to figure out what happened, at which point we jump back in time 22 hours to see the action that led up to Alex's injury.

After Nebula failed, a whole team of cyborgs were sent back in time to capture Alex, including Sharon Bruneau and Debbie Muggli as the duo of Lock and Ditko, with Tim Thomerson leading the group as Farnsworth 2 - an updated version of his character from the first Nemesis. For some reason, there are shots where we see Farnsworth 2 as a CGI machine, but other characters in the scene with him can't see that, they just see him as Tim Thomerson. They're missing out, because that low budget CGI from 1996 is quite a sight to behold.

Also visiting from the future is Alex's half-sister Raine (Ursula Sarcev), who intends to take her back to the future in just a couple hours, so Alex needs to get herself together and get to their time capsule before the launch window closes. Alex is the result of a scientist creating a "super DNA gene that would produce a human with extraordinary power", but she wasn't just made to kick cyborg ass. Procreating is also a major part of her destiny. She and her sisters are supposed to birth a generation of extraordinary cyborg fighters.

Alex and Raine are split up for most of the film, but while Alex is running from and fighting with the cyborgs she does get some assistance from Norbert Weisser as a soft-spoken mercenary named Edson and Xavier Declie as Johnny, a heroic soldier who has the mental capacity of a child since suffering a head injury of his own. 

Writer/director Albert Pyun made Nemesis 2 and 3 back-to-back, and when that happens it's often a problem that there really wasn't enough story to sustain two movies. That's certainly the case here, even with most of 2 having been an extended chase / action sequence. Nemesis 3 is a mess that doesn't have much interesting going on in it. Even the action is weak compared to what was in its predecessor. When a movie can have Tim Thomerson in a prominent role and still be difficult to sit through, it has serious storytelling problems. After enjoying Nemesis 2 when I was 11 years old in 1995, I was excited to check out the sequel the following year... and then I was disappointed when I watched it. Making movies back-to-back definitely doesn't mean they'll turn out to be the same quality.

Nemesis 3 ends with the promise that Nemesis 4 would be coming soon, and while that is listed as a 1996 release on IMDb, a lot of fans had to wait three years before they got to see the next sequel.