Cry-Baby

TCM is running a triple feture of John Waters movies tonight (November 9), and that includes one that I recorded some months back when it showed up in the Saturday afternoon musical matinee: Cry-Baby, at 10:00 PM. Seeing it on the upcoming schedule tonight at 10:00 PM, I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

The movie is set in director Waters' hometown of Baltimore, in 1954, as we see when, over the opening credits, a bunch of members of the Class of 1954 at one of the high schools is receiving their polio shots, since that was a new thing back in 1954. Obviously, the needles hurt a bit, and one of the students, Wade Walker (Johnny Depp), nicknamed "Cry-Baby", sheds a single manly tear.

Getting a shot at the same time as Wade is Allison Vernon-Williams (Amy Locane), and her seeing that one solitary tear makes Allison swoon. There's only one problem, which is that the two come from completely different social strata. Cry-Baby is from a group calling itself the "Drapes", the sort of fake wanna-be tough guys who dress the part of the Marlon Brando biker gang from The Wild One, or John Travolta in Grease, the latter movie being a big influence on Cry-Baby. Allison, on the other hand, is one of the "squares", and the granddaughter of the grande dame of the local community (Polly Bergen). So naturally when Grandma hears that her granddaughter might like one of the Drapes, she's horrified.

While the squares look like the normal upper-middle-class stereotype of 1950s probity, dressing the part and going to charm schol and all that, the Drapes are totally different, and not just in dress. They also listen to the new sounds of rockabilly, the predecesor to rock and roll, and live a more bohemian life in the Turkey Point area where they all congregate. But the feeling between Allison and Cry-Baby is mutual, so he invites her to come out to Turkey Point, where some of the female Drapes give Allison a makeover and she gets to see Cry-Baby perform with his band.

This leads to disaster, however, as Allison's nominal boyfriend Baldwin (Stephen Mailer) finds out and brings his square friend to Turkey Point, where they harass the Drapes to the point that a riot breaks out. Because of the class differences, it's Cry-Baby who gets punished with a sentence to reform school until he turns 21. Cry-Baby hopes to break out, while the girl who thought she was Cry-Baby's girlfriend until Allison showed up, tries to drive a wedge between Cry-Baby and Allison.

It's easy to see why a movie like Cry-Baby became a bit of a cult movie, and why some people rate it so highly. It's a musical and a parody of both musicals and 1950s teen movies, and it has an incredibly infectious enthusiasm. It also has John Waters playing with convention and casting all sorts of people in roles you might not think of them as being suited for the roles they're given, like David Nelson, Troy Donahue, and Patty Hearst.

On the other hand, there's an air of artificiality that goes beyond just plain musical movie artificiality. While watching the movie, I couldn't help but think of things like David Lynch and the colors and camera angles he used at the beginning of Blue Velvet, or Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom. There's almost an air of kabuki theater at times in Cry-Baby, and that doesn't always work in the movie's favor as it's distracting to the atmosphere John Waters was hoping to create.

Still, for the most part, the successes outweigh the failures, so Cry-Baby is definitely a movie you should give a try.

Don Juan de Marco

Another of the movies that showed up on one of the streaming services was one I knew more for the hit song it spawned and because it came at the end of a famous star's career than for the actual movie itself: Don Juan de Marco. Having watched it, I can now do a review of it for all of you.

Johnny Depp plays the titular character, who at the start of the movie is getting dressed up in a Zorro-like mask, although as you might be able to guess from the title, it's really supposed to by Don Juan, the great lover, or at least one of Don Juan's descendants. Since he's referred to as Don Juan de Marco for most of the movie, that's how we'll call him in this post. Anyhow, after getting dressed up, he goes to a fancy restaurant to meet a woman. However, the real purpose is to tell the woman that he's going to commit suicide.

How to stop a young man from committing suicide by throwing himself off a ledge? In Fourteen Hours, they tried to use a policeman to talk the man down, but here, it's considered better to try a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist in question is Dr. Jack Mickler (Marlon Brando), who is nearing the end of his career. Dr. Mickler is successful, and de Marco is taken to the psych ward where they authorities are able to hold him involuntarily for up to 10 days for evaluation.

Dr. Mickler decides he's going to be the one to do the psychiatric evaluation, while his bosses just want to drug the poor patient into submission. So Mickler starts talking to de Marco, who claims he is in fact Don Juan, and starts telling all sorts of stories that seem like they should be too ridiculous for words, and have all sorts of inconsistencies. A century earlier, perhaps the stories might have been more realistic, but consdering de Marco would have been born in the early 1970s, there's no way any of the things he describes could have happened, which is kind of the point.

However, de Marco's presence at the pyschiatric hospital begins to have an effect. All of the nurses seem to be taken by him, and in Dr. Mickler's case, you wonder whether he's beginning to have difficulty distinguishing fact from fantasy. But de Marco is also helping out Mickler's personal life. At home, Micker is stuck in a rut with his wife Marilyn (Faye Dunaway). Talking to de Marco gives Mickler the gumption to try to put some spice back into his love life.

Still, there's the looming deadline of the 10 days' detention, and the finding of de Marco's grandmother. Grandma informs Dr. Mickler that not only is de Marco's story not true, the real story is somewhat more disturbing. He fell for a magazine centerfold and basically tried to stalk the poor woman until he was told in no uncertain terms to knock it off. At least he only tried to kill himself, not the woman. What will happen when de Marco has his meeting with the staff and a judge at the end of the ten days?

Don Juan de Marco is a movie that has an interesting premise, if one that's fairly unrealistic. It's also well photographed, and has a pretty good performance from Johnny Depp who certainly knows crazy after having been a disastrous relationshp with Amber Heard. Marlon Brando, on the other hand, make you feel like he's sleepwalking through the movie. Then again, I'm not as big a fan of Brando as some people are, so it may be in part my own prejudices. It's also a movie that TCM could show in 31 Days of Oscar since Bryan Adams' song "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman" was nominated in the Original Song category.

If you want an interesting romantic fantasy, and something with more modern sensibilities than the classic movies I usually discuss, you could do a lot worse than Don Juan de Marco. But it could have been a better movie.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape

I like to say that I wind up recording more recent movies when I get the free preview weekends from DirecTV, but then, some of the movies are really not all that recent. Closing in on 30 years go, for example, is What's Eating Gilbert Grape. I see that it's on again, tomorrow (April 24) at 1:00 PM on The Movie Channel Xtra if you've got the premium channels. It'll be on again several amore times over the following week.

Johnny Depp plays Gilbert Grape. He's a twentysomething living in the small town of Endora, IA, in a sort of dead-end life. He works at the local grocery store, Lamson's, which has been serving the community since 1932, although it's in financial difficulty now since a new Foodland supermarket has opened up in the next bigger town over. As part of his job, Gilbert gets to make deliveries, this being the era between the pre-supermarket days when grocery stores would still have delivery boys, and the current day with apps promising delivery of almost anything, at least in bigger cities. One of Gilbert's frequent clients is Betty Carver (Mary Steenburgen), trapped in a loveless marriage to an insurance agent. Both Gilbert and Betty use these deliveries as an opportunity to escape the difficulties in their lives.

Frankly, Gilbert has a lot more difficulties in his life than Betty does. Gilbert's father walked out on the family many years ago and committed suicide, leaving the family in dire financial straits and stuck in a house that could probably collapse any day now. Gilbert's older brother fled town on graduating high school, while Momma (Darlene Cates) decided she wouldn't leave the house and ate herself into the sort of obesity that seriously shortens people's lives; no wonder the older brother couldn't face all this. But wait, there's more; Gilbert has a kid brother Arnie (Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie that made him a star) who is autistic or has some other sort of brain injury that's left him trapped at a fairly young age developmentally, much younger than the 18 he's about to turn. Of course, the doctors didn't even think young Arnie would reach 10. The only good news for Gilbert is that he's got two sisters who can help out around the house.

One of Arnie's joys, and one that's a relative positive for the people around him, is the annual parade of Airstream trailers that go through Endora every year on their way to an annual meet-up of fans of those old trailers. You've probably seen them before, the aluminum trailers with rounded corners towed by a pick-up truck or something with similar power. This year, one of the trucks breaks down on the road where Gilbert and Arnie are watching the procession, leaving two women stranded, young Becky (Juliette Lewis) and her grandmother.

Gilbert offers to do what he can to help in terms of driving Becky around to do errands like getting fresh groceries or picking up the neeed parts for the car, since she and Grandma can't do the driving. This gives Gilbert a chance to fall in love with Becky, but it also means he won't be watching Arnie quite so closely. Another of Arnie's joys is running off and hiding, and this is a joy that is a constant source of consternation for the rest of the Grapes, since Arnie likes to hide from everybody else by climbing the town's water tower, which isn't really hiding at all since it brings out a crowd and really embarrasses both Gilbert and Momma, albeit in different ways.

Major life events happen to more or less everybody, although for Becky they're not quite so major, involving finally getting to meet Gilbert's mother -- something Gilbert had always been reluctant to do -- and getting the part to repair the truck which of course means she'll be leaving town and leaving Gilbert behind.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape is one of those little movies, despite the presence of Johnny Depp, who was already a pretty big name after his starring role in Edward Scissorhands. That, combined with the subject matter of the movie, makes it fairly easy to understand why the movie was a box-office failure on its original release. That's a shame, since the movie is filled with fine performances, even when they're playing the sort of characters who can be difficult to sympathize with. (Despite Arnie's having a medical condition that's clearly not his fault, it's also obvious why people around him would have periods of intense frustration, reminiscent of Benny and Joon, also starring Depp and released a few months before What's Eating Gilbert Grape.)

If the movie has flaws, it's probably that the sort of small-town life seen here is stereotyped, with all of the supporting characters being practically archetypes of what you'd really meet in a small town. That, and the story wrapping up just a bit too neatly. But those are relatively minor flaws in what is otherwise a very good movie.

Joe Pistone

During one of the free previews of the premium movie channels, I had the opportunity to record Donnie Brasco, not having done a post on it here before. It's available on DVD and is going to be on the Epix channels in the comind days if you have the premium channels and wish to watch it.

Johnny Depp plays Donnie Brasco, a jeweler in Brooklyn in late 1978. Or at least that his story that everybody believes. In reality, his name is Joe Pistone, and he's an undercover FBI agent who's been given a job of infiltrating the New York Mafia. He meets Lefty (Al Pacino), a mid-level mobster working under Sonny Red. It's a difficult case that requires Joe to be away from his wife Maggie (Anne Heche) and kids for long stretches, without his being able to tell her why he's away. (You'd think she knows he works for the FBI, since the real life Pistone had been in the FBI for several years before the Donnie Brasco operation.)

Lefty befriends Donnie, and brings him into the organization, which doesn't seem to be particularly successful since it's engaging in small-time fencing of stolen goods. Donnie is fitting in with them, to the point where one of his FBI handlers wants Sonny Black (Michael Madsen) to expand to Florida so that the FBI can get more sources. Donnie is able to do this, and in the process, become a direct underling of Sonny Black rather than Lefty.

However, there are problems brewing. One is domestic, where Maggie is getting increasingly irritated with only seeing Joe irregularly and at unannounced times. It gets to the point that she's ready to ask for a divorce.

More worrisome is the business side. Lefty is reading a story in Newsweek on the Abscam affair, and sees the same yacht that they had been on together down in Miami, so he knows something is up. This, combined with a raid on the bar Donnie has opened down in Florida leads Sonny Black to realize there's a stoolie in their midst. This leads to some rubouts, and Donnie becoming more like the men he's supposed to be surveilling, making him increasingly frightened of what he's becoming.

Donnie Brasco is a pretty darn good movie, with an excellent performance from Depp in what is more of a stretch for him than the other actors faced, I think. That it's all based on a true story makes it even more fascinating. The only problem I had is that I found myself looking for anachronisms. There's a fair amount of period music used, although several of the songs were released months to a year or so after the events depicted. (I listened to a lot of Top 40 radio growing up.) More humorous for me was a newspaper mentioning the death of John Wayne while Donnie and friends were in Miami. I thought Wayne died in 1978, but in fact he died in June 1979, so this wouldn't be an anachronism. But: during that same scene, Donnie/Joe is calling his wife back in New Jersey, who is complaining about it being 12 degrees with a bunch of snow on the ground. In June!

Of course, those anachronisms are a very minor nitpick and things most people wouldn't stop to think about. Even if you do, Donnie Brasco is still excellent.