Tag: remembering

“blue thunder” and “backtrack” (aka Catchfire”)

I watched two movies back-to-back (unintentionally) that had helicopter chases.

The first was Blue Thunder, staring the greatest leading man of all time…Roy Scheider. It is also the greatest movie that Paul Verhoeven never made.

No disrespect to the highly competent John Badham, but Verhoeven would have crushed the shit out of this material. The film takes place in 1980s LA and is about a police pilot and Vietnam vet, played by Scheider, who gets introduced to a military-style helicopter that the city wants to use for patrol. The villain is Malcolm McDowell, a British man that somehow became a Lt. Colonel in the US Army, who for some contrived reason wants to kill Scheider. The fascistic overtones are right up Verhoeven’s alley, and even some of the story beats would be echoed in Robocop four years later.

But the movie looks incredible. John A. Alonzo is really an unsung hero in the field of cinematography. The handheld work is really ahead of its time, and masterfully done. After watching the first scene of Scheider walking out to his helicopter, I was shocked that this came out in 1983. It’s a natural look that even films today have trouble emulating.

And that final helicopter chase was incredible. All of the concerns that Scheider’s character had regarding public safety goes out the window once when he gets hunted by fighter jets and Malcolm McDowell. Chicken factories and buildings get blown up while debris falls on the people below. Meanwhile, Candy Clark drives like a bat out of hell down the streets of LA. As far as 80s action movies go, I’m not saying that it’s up there with the Schwarzenegger, Verhoeven, and John McTiernan classics, but it is very good. In fact, I would say it was a prototype for subsequent 80s flicks.

The other film was less of a banger but no less interesting (for various reasons). It was Dennis Hopper’s Backtrack (or Catchfire, idk). There are apparently two versions: theatrical cut and a directors cut. I guess I watched the director’s cut.

Hopper himself was apparently dissatisfied with the original version and had his “directed by” credit given to Alan Smithee. Honestly, he should have taken his name off the director’s cut as well.

What’s it about? Not sure.

I think Jodie Foster accidentally sees a mob hit by Joe Pesci and Pesci tries to track her down by hiring Hopper and Hopper falls in love with her (and she with him).

Now I’ll say this because I’ve said enough about dude’s bodies in this blog and it’s time women get their due: Jodie Foster is fiiiiiiiiiiiine as hell in this movie. You could say that I was “sexually attracted” to her. It made me uncomfortable (in my pants specifically). I could understand why Hopper didn’t want to kill her.

But the problem with this movie (one of many) is that Dennis Hopper is, I’m sorry to say, not fit for the role. Hopper is at least 25 years older than Foster. There’s nothing romantic about their scenes together. They’re downright creepy. It’s a role that someone like Nicholas Cage, Mickey Rourke, or Sean Penn could have aced at that time.

That being said, Hopper REALLY makes some decisions in this movie, both in front of and behind the camera. To be honest, I don’t even know what he’s trying to do. Is that accent New York or Cajun? Does he know his lines or is he just making shit up? Now no one on God’s green earth could have saved this screenplay, but Hopper’s visual flair and strange acting decisions steal the show…almost to the point where you forget that heavy hitters like Joe Pesci and Vincent Price are also in the movie.

RIP Dennis Hopper and Roy Scheider 😔

what dreams may come

I’m a hard sleeper.

Nothing can, nothing will, wake me up. Construction, gun shots, home invasions, house fires, nuclear holocausts…nothing.

So I get to have incredible dreams. Last night, for example, I dreamt that I was a football player buried deep down the depth chart. The team boarded a plane en route to a game with the pilot both coked up and drunk. The pilot thought it would be cool to do a barrel roll in a passenger plane which caused some concern. I brushed it off and took a nap. When I awoke, the plane had to make an emergency landing onto a road but ended up crashing into an apartment building. No one was killed,miraculously, and the people in the building didn’t think anything unusual about it because it was in Mississippi and apparently things like that happen all the time. Nevertheless, one player thought this was the perfect opportunity to exact revenge…for whatever reasons…on the head coach and a few other players. So it was up to me, some nobody, to save the team.

Once when that was done, I had to book a flight home but chose to fly to London, England instead. The price came to $20,000 and I didn’t have the money. Then the dream ended.

There were dreams on the periphery, one which includes me fighting a rabbit in Monument Valley and sending it to a highly mechanized version of hell.

I guess dreams are just a hodgepodge of shit stored in our heads and when we sleep, our brains randomly throw things together which we later attempt to make sense of (or in my case, project a story onto). Does it ever mean anything? Probably not.

At least not most of the time.

But I do have recurring dreams. Not dreams where the exact same things happen, but they share similar themes, people, places, etc. I suppose that there are shreds of truth in these kinds of dreams: a revelation of regret, dread, loss, and so on.

I find the subject of dreams fascinating. It reveals the chaos that exists in our own minds. Even the purest of people will experience a gruesome nightmare. Despite their outward practices in real life, even in their minds they will produce true horror. That emanates completely from them. We try to project some sense onto our dreams, but the fact is that there isn’t any whatsoever.

We do the same thing to our reality.

carnal Knowledge (1971)

I normally watch 42,000 movies a week. Few of them stick with me.

Carnal Knowledge, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel’s pubic hair, has.

It’s a movie I could’ve written back in my college days. Particularly the first act, about two college guys that know next to nothing about women who try to score with Candice Bergen. Of course, Mike Nichols aces the direction by presenting the two characters in all their pathetic glory. Bergen is also handled nicely as she plays a confused girl torn between these two dorks. Imagine watching a dramatized version of Beavis and Butthead in college, that’s the first act of the film.

Naturally, this romantic interaction has long term consequences, especially for Nicholson’s character. The second half explores his inability to connect with and emotionally abuse Ann-Margret.

Carnal Knowledge really makes you wonder why women love men at all.

Before Jack Nicholson became the Jack Nicholson we know and love today, he specialized in these character studies. Other notable examples are his collaborations with Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens) and The Passenger. He was (is) truly an unusual leading man.

Is Carnal Knowledge a great film? Not particularly. In it’s simplicity, it would probably work better on the stage than on the screen. But it is the highlight of Nicholson’s career from 1969 to 1974, a brief window from when he was still an actor, before he became better known as Jack Nicholson the film star.

conversations with dennis

Nothing to talk about today.

So I was thinking about a conversation I had with my narcissist coworker. For the sake of this post, I’ll call him Dennis. It’s probably in my top 10 favorite conversations I’ve ever had.

The topic: some woman, Jane, who was allegedly a hoe-bag that once worked with Dennis (and always claimed he never messed around with).

The place: the toilet factory where we work. We use a lot of PPE, especially rubber gloves.

Of course, most of the conversation is paraphrased. But the parts said verbatim are in bold.

****

Dennis: I never fucked Jane.

Me: Did she suck your pp?

Dennis: No, but she sucked Tex’s pp, and Bob Dutch’s pp.

Me: But I thought you two worked on the same shift.

Dennis: yeah and one night I came in and she was sleeping naked on a cot we had back there. I turned the lights on and quickly turned them off. She said (mimicking a female voice) “oh sweetie don’t be embarrassed.” Then she asked me if I wanted to lay down with her and but I told her hell no.

Me: So you didn’t even fool around?

Dennis: she kept asking me if I wanted a blowjob, but because she sucked every guy off, I kept telling her no. Then she started badgering me, telling me that I wouldn’t know how to please her anyway. So finally I told her “alright, let me put some gloves on” and I went back to her cot.

Me: (laughing uncontrollably)

***

So Dennis started the convo initially denying he had sex with Jane, then a few moments later admitted to finger blasting her.

Moral of the story: Dennis’ story is probably completely fabricated, Jane probably wasn’t a hoe. Because I was such a good audience for Dennis, he probably thought he could take the story in any direction he wanted, despite the blatant contradictions, and he thought I would believe all of it.

That’s what a conversation with a narcissist looks like.

That’s it. That’s the story. Bye ✋