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.
A classic Spaghetti Western, more Scorsese and De Niro, Monica Keena's proudest moment, and Pam Grier's revenge.
DJANGO (1966)
This "Spaghetti Western" from director Sergio Corbucci is working to make its title character an icon as soon as the film begins, with shots of Django (Franco Nero), still wearing a Union uniform even though the Civil War has come to an end, dragging a coffin through the desert while an awesome theme song performed by Rocky Roberts blasts on the soundtrack. As soon as the title sequence ends, Django witnesses a tied-up woman being whipped by Mexican revolutionaries - who are quickly gunned down by former Confederate soldiers. These guys aren't there to save the woman, they're going to tie her to a cross and set her on fire. So Django intervenes, saying "A woman shouldn't be treated in that way" before shooting down all five of her attackers. Yep, Django is pretty cool, and Corbucci, Nero, and their collaborators were so successful at making the character popular with the audience that this movie was followed by dozens, or hundreds, of unofficial "sequels" that just stuck the name Django in the title to lure in movie-goers. "Django" movies became their own Western sub-genre; so much so that Quentin Tarantino decided to add to it with his own Django Unchained.
The woman is a prostitute named Maria (Loredana Nusciak), and Django takes her back where she came from, a brothel in a place that's a ghost town other than the brothel's prostitutes and bartender. Django is informed that this is the neutral area in the battle being fought between the former Confederate soldiers still taking orders from the sadistic Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo) and working with the Mexican government to fight the revolutionaries led by General Hugo Rodriguez (Jose Bodalo). The "man caught between two sides" element is obviously a nod to A Fistful of Dollars, which this movie was made to cash in on, but Django sides with one group much more than the other; it's beneficial that Jackson and his associates have so many enemies, because Django has come to murder Jackson for killing the woman he loved, and to steal Jackson's stash of gold. While he does run into some serious issues with Rodriguez, Jackson is the true villain of the film.
Django proves to be even cooler than we already thought he was when he lifts the lid of his coffin and reveals that it doesn't contain somebody's corpse, nor is it empty and waiting for him to stick Jackson in it. This coffin is Django's way of transporting a belt-fed machine gun!
Django is one of the best Spaghetti Westerns ever made, ranking up there with A Fistful of Dollars and its follow-ups For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I wouldn't quite put it on their level, but it's a really entertaining, fast paced movie with an interesting story and a badass hero. It's shocking that this didn't become a proper series - an official sequel with Nero reprising the role of Django didn't happen until 21 years later.
THE KING OF COMEDY (1982)
Director Martin Scorsese's films Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are often mentioned together as if they were companion pieces, and it makes sense, since both of them star Robert De Niro as mentally unbalanced men who spend a lot of their time alone in a room, obsessing over things, and end up doing something very bad - and yet, celebrated in a way - by the end.
De Niro's character in this one is Rupert Pupkin, who dreams of having a career as a stand-up comedian. When he lucks into being able to share a car ride with popular comedian and talk show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), Rupert sees this as he way to break into the big time. He gets a tape of his material to Jerry and waits to receive a call back with an offer to appear on Jerry's show. While he waits, he imagines having a future of regular appearances on Jerry's show, that some day he'll even be asked to fill in for Jerry as host for long stretches of time. He acts out his appearances in his room while his mom yells at him from elsewhere in the home, telling him to keep it down. He laughs maniacally at the interactions that exist only in his mind.
As time goes by and he doesn't hear from Jerry, Rupert begins to act in a desperate and inappropriate manner. This is one of those movies where it's difficult to sit through simply because you feel so embarrassed and uncomfortable for the lead character, they're handling situations so poorly, they're doing and saying all the wrong things. At one point, Rupert even decides it would be okay to take a date (played by Diahnne Abbott, who also appeared in Taxi Driver and was De Niro's real life wife at the time) to Jerry's home in the country. When that doesn't go over well, Rupert teams up with Jerry's love-sick stalker Masha (Sandra Bernhard) to take things even further.
The King of Comedy is a really good movie, carried by another incredible performance from De Niro. Lewis is great as Langford, although he would brush off compliments on this one because he said he was just playing himself. I'm not generally a fan of seeing Bernhard in things, but casting her to play Masha was a good match of actor and character.
This and Taxi Driver go together quite well, but I would understand if someone were to like one but not the other, as they do have different tones and styles. Taxi Driver is really dark, while The King of Comedy is more just awkward. You know things are going to go wrong, but it doesn't feel like it will be too dangerous. While I prefer Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy is one of my other favorites on Scorsese's filmography.
RIPE (1996)
Writer/director Mo Ogrodnik's Ripe is a movie I first saw in the early 2000s, having sought it out after reading that it was the movie Monica Keena was "most proud of" out of everything she had been in up to that point. I was starting to see her in quite a few projects around that time, most importantly (to me) Freddy vs. Jason, so I was interested to see her proudest moment. I'm assuming this would still be her proudest moment, because things have been kind of bumpy since Freddy vs. Jason.
Keena stars in Ripe alongside Daisy Eagan, the pair playing 14-year-old fraternal twins Violet and Rosie. When their trashy parents die in a fiery car wreck caused by a collision with a deer, Violet and Rosie flee from the crash site and off through the wilderness, planning to avoid the authorities and run off to Kentucky, where they'll start a new life. Along the way, they end up encountering a drifter named Pete, played by Gordon Currie of Puppet Master 4 and 5. They end up staying with Pete under circumstances I hadn't heard of before this film, and I don't know if things like this happen in real life: when Pete's motorcycle breaks down on the road, he rolls it into a nearby military base, where he offers to work odd jobs for the officers and soldiers in exchange for housing while he saves up cash to fix his bike and ride out of there. It works, they give him a little house. And then Pete decides to let Violet and Rosie stay there with him, while they help him with his chores. He convinces the higher-ups that Violet and Rosie are his nieces. So now there's this kind of weird, kind of creepy drifter and a couple teenage girls just roaming around on this military base.
Of course, this is a recipe for disaster. Currie would have been in his late-twenties at the time this was filmed, so let's say Pete is twice the age of these girls, and he does not act appropriately toward them. One minute he's consoling Violet after she has her period for the first time, the next he's displaying willingness to give her a first time of a different sort. While Violet is focusing on Pete, Rosie is drawing attention from soldiers on the base, including one who teaches her how to shoot a gun. A bad idea, because Rosie is really into the idea of her and her sister being outlaws on the run, so you know she's going to use that gun for criminal purposes. Rosie's mental state is pushed even further off balance by seeing how Violet and Pete act around each other, because she's one of those obsessive siblings I see in movies from time to time but haven't seen in reality; she wants life to just be "Violet and Rosie forever", and got her sister to swear she wouldn't go off with any boys. A promise Violet is breaking now.
I don't know how realistic Ripe is with the military base situation, but the element of the girls drawing inappropriate attention from older males is all too realistic, that's something Rosie should have expected as soon as they met Pete, because there's something off about the guy from the start. Ogrodnik makes this film about people making very bad decisions fascinating to watch, because Pete's behavior and Rosie's mental issues obviously make this a "ticking time bomb" situation. Something terrible is going to happen... well, Pete starting a relationship with Violet is already terrible, but that's going to lead to more terrible things in some way... but what's going to happen, and just how bad will it get?
It's easy to see why Keena is proud of Ripe. Although it deals with questionable subject matter, it's a good, dark drama, and it's the kind of unique, artistic movie that actors often appreciate getting the chance to work on.
FOXY BROWN (1974)
Writer/director Jack Hill and star Pam Grier delivered a hit for American International Pictures with their 1973 revenge film Coffy, so Hill thought it would make a lot of sense to bring Grier back as Flower Child Coffin for a sequel the following year. He even had a title picked out: Burn, Coffy, Burn! But then, for some baffling reason, AIP decided they didn't want to make a sequel to Coffy. So Hill reworked his idea into an original film that put Grier in the role of Foxy Brown.
Foxy Brown is very much along the same lines as Coffy: when drug runners cause harm to one of her loved ones, Grier's character embarks on a mission of revenge that involves her infiltrating a criminal organization by going undercover as a call girl. In this case, the trouble starts when Foxy's ne'er-do-well brother Link (Antonio Fargas) asks to hide out at her place because he owes a lot of money to a loan shark; he needed to borrow money to start a pseudo-legit business since Foxy gave him grief for being a coke dealer. Link is a liar, he's still dealing drugs, and the reason he's in trouble is because narcotics police found his stash and took his drugs, putting him in trouble with "fixer" Miss Katherine (Kathryn Loder), a drug runner who also has a stable of call girls, and the only clients they take are high profile men like congressmen and judges, who they can manipulate through sexual favors. Foxy's boyfriend Dalton Ford worked for the Bureau of Narcotics and was undercover for two years, trying to bust this criminal organization. But the fix was in, he couldn't get an indictment, so he has gotten a new identity and plastic surgery. Dalton's plan to move on to a new life with Foxy is blown really quick when Link sells him out and gets him murdered. Then Foxy sets out to avenge her boyfriend.
Yeah, the set-up in this one is quite stretched out and convoluted, which is one major reason why I prefer Coffy over Foxy Brown. In Coffy, Grier was already out for revenge as soon as we met her because her eleven-year-old sister was hooked on drugs. It got to the point very quickly. Foxy Brown is much less exciting and eventful. That said, it is a good movie in its own right... it's just difficult not to directly compare it to Coffy, and when it's compared it comes up short.
It is interesting to see how Hill makes the film a blend of scenes where Grier is a badass, capable ass-kicker, and scenes where the camera ogles her as she provides some gratuitous nudity - in fact, the very first scene we see Foxy in (after the title sequence, where she dances and kicks while the theme song plays), we see her bare breasts. Some may disapprove of this approach, but Grier is so cool and exudes so much strength and confidence, it doesn't feel like degrading objectification. She's sexy, she's tough, she's powerful. As Link says, "She's a whole lot of woman."
Miss Katherine's people do pose enough of a threat to Foxy that she does need to seek some assistance by the end, not just from a vigilante group, but also from a dopey pilot played by Sid Haig - making this the fifth time Grier and Haig worked together, following The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage, Black Mama, White Mama, and Coffy.
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