The Full Monty

I saw this film in a theater in 1997ish, and I think I was on a date at the time. The Full Monty as a date movie? Yep. I remember laughing quite a lot. Simon Beaufoy's script is solid work.

Later, I found that The Full Monty seemed to lose impact on the small screen. (Write your own joke.) In this way, the film is a lot like There's Something About Mary, which had people rolling in theaters, but isn't nearly as bust-a-gut funny at home. In part, that's why I did not own a copy on DVD until recently.

I was in a Kmart a few weeks before Christmas this year (looking for Crispy M&Ms, which we'd heard were still available there), when I passed a display of DVDs and saw a copy of The Full Monty for $5. Yoink!

(We never found Crispy M&Ms, and since then we have determined they are long gone, a revelation that leaves my wife wanting. But I got this film on DVD — perhaps the last DVD that I'll ever purchase, so there's that.)

I remember not being able to understand half the dialogue in the theater (untrained ears 12 years ahead of marrying into a Brit family). Some lines still elude me without subtitles. I don't remember noticing the odd use of the word "soccer" in the intro, which doesn't fit at all (but probably got inserted to spare U.S. audiences).

One thing I don't recall is ever judging this film or feeling "icky" about the prospect of these middle-aged men turning to a life of stripping to make ends meet. Sure, say what you will about Robert Carlyle's character having his son along for things he probably shouldn't see, but aside from that, there's not much here to get worked up about, is there?

Consider it this way: Sheffield was once a booming steel town, and now it isn't. Reminds me a lot of my hometown of Muncie, Indiana, or really, the whole rust belt of America. People do what they can to survive even after the jobs have gone. They don't have a choice, do they?

There are worse things to turn to in times of desperation. Consider the meth problem, or the crime rate in general, of so many rust belt towns. Stripping for money seems rather tame in comparison to selling drugs to little kids or killing people.

If, in the Sheffield of The Full Monty, this is how depressed things have become, and if this is how desperate the people of Sheffield have become, then who are we to judge if these people find a little escape in going out to a strip club? Who are we to judge if people dance in one to make money to survive? What are people supposed to do?

I was unemployed for a time. (No, I never turned to stripping.) I remember the frustration of wanting to work and no one giving me a chance. I didn't want to work so I could eat, pay bills, etc. That was secondary to simply having a purpose and making something of myself. We forge our identities, in part, from our careers. I couldn't. That was incredibly painful.

During the '80s, my dad went through something similar. He was laid off from his factory job for 2 1/2 years. (No, he never turned to stripping, either.) He took a job cleaning RVs, and another job as a janitor. He drove farm trucks and tractors. He worked on cars. He opened his own farm equipment shop with my uncle. He took odd jobs. He did what he had to do, and life was very, very hard. At one point, my mom was in a panic because they only had $45 in the bank. My mom worked in a gas station and became the only source of income. My dad's identity as the breadwinner of the family was lost for a time. He seemed untethered, unhinged. He was miserable.

Now I understand, and I'm able to identify with the characters in The Full Monty quite a lot. These characters are out of options. They can't be choosy. They don't have the luxury of waiting for happiness and self-actualization. Sometimes happiness is just a warm plate of food.

By the end of the film, these men have overcome their own faults, for the most part, and their own insecurities. Their loved ones are proud of them for doing something in a town where nothing ever happens and where there are no opportunities. These men carved out their own opportunity and boldly went ahead.

We all do that, in a way. My parents did. I eventually did. You probably did. That's life.

The Fugitive

If I'm flipping channels, and I find The Fugitive with Harrison Ford playing, regardless of the point in the story, I can't change the channel until the film is over.

I probably have seen this film two dozen times over the years — mostly on television, replete with commercial interruptions that I dutifully sit through so I can watch the rest of the movie. Again.

There are a few other films like that. Die Hard and The Silence of the Lambs come to mind, among others, but not one of them works like The Fugitive.

As a still-aspiring screenwriter, I've read a lot about Jeb Stuart and David Twohy's script, which has one of the best stories of any action/suspense pictures in the last 30 years. The Fugitive is easily the best work of either Stuart or Twohy's career.

The film isn't perfect, but The Fugitive is great entertainment. Sure, there are a couple of plot holes and implausible sequences. (The dam jump, anyone?) But that stuff is easy to pass off as one-in-a-million chances that work out for Kimble.

Maybe the most frustrating aspect of the film is the opening credits, which run off and on for the first 15 minutes of the movie. They seem endless. A film this suspenseful loses impact if you distract viewers with opening credits that drag so long into Act One. Mercifully, the credits end at 14:49, just before the iconic bus/train sequence.

The film doesn't have another sequence quite like the train accident. The rooftop chase is fine, but nothing like the rooftop sequence in, say, Die Hard. The climactic chase through the laundry is weakly symbolic (Kimble delving into someone else's dirty laundry to exonerate himself). But...I don't care.

In a way, re-watching The Fugitive is like doing a job I really love. I get to do this fun and exciting thing and get the same or similar result every time. I get to think about the time I spent in Chicago, the memories of which are bittersweet at best.

Much of this film is shot within the Chicago city limits, with easily recognizable locations — especially along Randolph St., near the Thompson Center. When I lived in Chicago, I worked about two blocks from there. When Chicago weather allowed, I used to walk to the Thompson Center to eat lunch and get my hair cut (on good days, I could afford both).

Chicago was a rough period for me, which I've mentioned here before and don't want to belabor. I had ambitions of doing improv and finding work as an advertising copywriter. I did the improv, but most of the ad agencies I contacted responded with indifference. Of course they did — I had no experience, and the economy tanked right around November 2000, when I moved to town. One creative director seemed interested, but she had no job openings. She said, "You never know, though — things change."

Not much changed except the weather. Eventually, I realized I could neither eat nor pay my bills regardless of whether I kept my job. So I quit. A few weeks later, I left town and went back to grad school.

I've done improv only a handful of times in the 10 years since. Imagine my surprise when I learned that much of the dialogue in The Fugitive was improvised or otherwise invented by the actors, including Tommy Lee Jones' famous "I don't care."

I learned at The Second City that most of the sketch revues are written through improvisation and refinement rather than clacking away at a keyboard. Improv is just another form of writing. That said, an ordinary script can become extraordinary in the hands of the right actors. That's exactly what happened to The Fugitive.

Neither Jeb Stuart nor David Twohy ever have written what you'd call critically bulletproof material, but put the writing in front of Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, give them some freedom, and see what happens.

That's more than enough to keep me watching. Again.

From Russia With Love

From Russia With Love is the second 007 film, and I can't for the life of me remember the plot. Something about SPECTRE going after Bond with some blond-haired tough guy and sending some blonde-haired woman...not that plot matters, but here's the IMDB logline:

"James Bond willingly falls into an assassination ploy involving a naive Russian beauty in order to retrieve a Soviet encryption device that was stolen by SPECTRE."

As in Dr. No, the 007 theme music appears frequently, though not enough to be as much of a distraction as in the previous film. Still, sometimes I notice James Bond's most trivial movements accompanied by the theme. Walking into a hotel — play the Bond theme. Drive a car — play the Bond theme. Raise an eyebrow — play the Bond theme.

I'm rather glad the Daniel Craig iterations don't feature the Bond theme so prominently.

Watching early Bond films can be difficult, thanks to the efforts of Mike Myers and the Austin Powers franchise. Frau Farbissina, Dr. Evil, and Number Two all have equivalents in this picture. I can't help some inadvertent laughing.

I can forgive the quaintness, but I can't get past my inner monologue, saying the name "Frau Farbissina" while impersonating Dr. Evil. It got weird.

The "chick fight" at around the 43:00 mark? The two women who fight for a husband? Yeah, that fight looks pretty bad now. I get the impression that fight was choreographed by a man. There's just not enough screeching and hair-pulling. They look like two members of G.L.O.W.

Speaking of appearances, how about Robert Shaw as Donald Grant, the Bond heavy here? He looks like a congressman from my home state of Indiana:

My biggest complaint with From Russia With Love is the rather abrupt ending. Stuff blows up, then Bondandthegirlrideawayinaboattheend.

Again, though, that complaint sort of gets at the writing, and criticizing the writing of a Bond film is rather like kicking a baby. All of the Bond films have varying degrees of bad writing, from cheesy dialogue to general implausibility. Who gives a crap?

Caring isn't worth the trouble. I like Bond films for the escape they deliver, and as I'm going through the grieving process and settling my mother's estate, this stupid stuff is the perfect antidote.

From Dusk Till Dawn

Remember when vampires were a surprise?

In From Dusk Till Dawn, we get no hint of vampires for the first hour of the film.  Nobody mentions anything about vampires. Nothing.

This isn't like everybody talking about Harry Lime in The Third Man for the first hour or so, and then Orson Welles finally shows up in the shadows. In that film, they established the character's presence in the world of the film because other characters talked about him, and then he finally showed up.

This isn't really like Psycho, either, in which Janet Leigh's character goes on the lam, only to die in the shower in the middle of the film. Psycho goes on from there with different, new main characters, sort of rebooting the narrative.

Strangely, From Dusk Till Dawn is a bit like both. We get no clue about vampires, and when all hell finally breaks loose near the one-hour mark, we spend the remaining 40 minutes watching the characters (some new, some newly dead) deal with the consequences of the choices they made before the vampires appeared.

The Gecko brothers choose to flee the law to Mexico. They choose to kidnap a family with an RV.  The family chooses to go along rather than try to get away, fight, or attract the attention of the border patrol to get help. The family, in fact, chooses to travel by RV, yet stay in the hotel where they run into the Gecko brothers. From Dusk Till Dawn is a film about extreme consequences to even the most minor choices.

From Dusk Till Dawn is a screed about the merits of personal responsibility, and I don't think that's my sleep-deprived state talking. In the end, all the characters drive off by themselves, presumably to take care of themselves.  The two surviving characters have no one left to care for them, and no one left to care for, either. They're only responsible for themselves. Why not? Everyone else they've known in the last 12 hours turned into a monster.

That's part of what brings me back to this film. You get the standard Tarantino/Rodriguez touches — the hyperviolence, the clever language informed by '70s television, etc. But this film takes real risks, not the least of which is randomly throwing vampires into the mess after an hour of weird choices. This is what can happen if you are dumb, mean, or psychotic, the film seems to say. But this film also seems to tout the merits of self-reliance rather than some dipshit sparkly vampire bliggety blah.

Yes, blah blah blah, vampires possess some kind of romantic or sexual allure. Someone is always falling in love with a vampire, either in some trance or by choice. Here, that doesn't happen. This film is more about the mayhem and gore rather than the paranormal necrophilia of something like "True Blood" or the Twilight series. I prefer the mayhem. If vampires exist, this is probably what you'd get if you found a vampire bar out in the middle of nowhere. They don't have to be sneaky.

Ah, but tween girls don't line up to watch a movie with Cheech Marin as the vampire. You don't have HBO making an entire softcore porn series out of Mexican vampires in a truck stop/topless bar. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino weren't writing and selling gazillions of formulaic "paranormal romance" novels. Doesn't happen.

In defense of "True Blood," though, you do see them touching on social issues much more than in a film like From Dusk Till Dawn. Indeed, Rodriguez's film eschews political correctness, such as when George Clooney's character refers to the Asian character as a "Jap" when in fact the character is Chinese. (When corrected, Clooney's character says something along the lines of "Excuse the hell out of me.") This sort of apolitical correctness is present in most of Tarantino's films as well. Characters are often racist, sexist, etc. They want money, sex, alcohol, and other id-driven desires. These characters are not seeking some kind of sociopolitical redemption. They don't want to evolve.

From Dusk Till Dawn is not a great film (when I re-watch this one, I'm usually floored by how many bad, silly moments are here), but this is an interesting example of '90s cinema. My first look came in the mid-'90s, when everything Tarantino and Rodriguez did was "awesome" but no fanboy could explain why. Now, with some distance, context, and education, I can sort of articulate what's happening here — or at least, what I can make of this now. I like that.

The Frighteners

Lord of the Rings would not have happened without The Frighteners.

In Peter Jackson's introduction to this DVD release, he notes how many computers and hard drives WETA ended up with after post-production on The Frighteners — going from just one machine to something like 35.  What to do with all that technology?

That set WETA up to be one of the few digital effects houses in the world that could handle something like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  When they finished The Frighteners, that's what they were thinking, too.

This film marks Michael J. Fox's last starring role in a live-action motion picture.  Although he went on to lead voice-acting roles in the Stuart Little pictures and supporting roles in a couple films and various television shows, this is pretty much the end of Michael J. Fox's career as a bankable lead actor.  There's a certain peace to be found in watching this film.  Like the Back to the Future trilogy, he's forever young(er) here.

Peter Jackson's career was a blind spot for me prior to film school.  My old roommate Justin sat me down in the summer of 2000 and made me watch Dead-Alive and The Frighteners.  I remember noting distinct stylistic similarities between the two films.  We might have watched them on separate days — I can't recall.  Justin was always making me watch a movie, and even though we eventually lost touch, I owe a lot to that guy for pushing me into unfamiliar movies.

I pushed myself into watching this one again today.

Here's a film that depicts a spectral serial killer who kills the living by inflicting heart attacks — squeezing the life out of his victims.  When characters die, we see a light tunnel open above them, and their spectral selves emerge from their bodies, and they ascend.

Yeah, that's a little hard to watch right now.  Pretty much anything about death is hard to watch since losing Mom, but I'm going ahead anyway.  What's harder is not getting back to normal things, like spending a Sunday afternoon watching a silly movie and writing.