Wild At Heart

Actress Diane Ladd died earlier this week at the age of 89. I just happened to have Wild At Heart on my DVR from when TCM showed it as part of their programming tribute to director David Lynch, so I decided I'd watch it as soon as possible to put up a review here. (Now watch it get added to the December night of movies for people who died in 2025.)

Nicolas Cage stars as Sailor, who at the start of the movie is at a hotel ballroom in Cape Fear, NC, together with girlfriend Lula (Laura Dern). As he's walking down the stairs, he's stopped by another man who says he saw Sailor and Lula doing the nasty in the bathroom, which is a big no-no because Lula's mom Marietta (Diane Ladd) doesn't like Sailor. This other man then concludes by pulling out a knife with which he clearly intends to stab poor Sailor to death. Sailor is able to get the knife out of the other man's hand and then proceeds to beat this other man quite violently, eventually bashing the guy's head in well past the point of death.

So, obviously, this is at the very least manslaughter: while Sailor had reason to fear for his life, beating the other guy all the way to death wasn't quite called for. Sailor spends just shy of two years in prison, and when he tries to call Lula, it's her mom who answers, and who is absolutely pissed about Sailor's trying to contact Lula. Lula, for her part, loves Sailor, so she shows up at the prison on the day Sailor gets released on parole. There's a catch of course, which is that Sailor is supposed to stay in the area or else it's a parole violation. But that would mean staying near Marietta. Sailor decides, screw it, he's going to violate parole by going all the way off to California, and would Lula be willing to join him? She does, and they set out on the road.

Marietta is again unhappy about this, and gets in touch with her boyfriend Johnnie (Harry Dean Stanton). Johnnie's job is to find Lula and Sailor, and get them back to North Carolina. But at the same time, Marietta has another boyfriend, Santos (J.E. Freeman). Marietta gets in touch with him, too, and gives him a contract to kill Sailor. Santos being much more violent, also gets in touch with contract killers to have Johnnie killed to, presumably so that only Santos can get the money for dealing with Sailor. Sailor is bright enough to know that he's probably not quite safe on the run, and not just safe from the legitimate authorities.

As Sailor and Lula make their way down first to New Orleans, and then to middele-of-nowhere Texas, we learn more about Lula's past. She was raped at 13 by her father's business partner, while Dad responded by setting himself on fire and killing himself. Except that we learn later that perhaps this wasn't a suicide but Mom and Santos killing Dad, with Sailor having witnessed what happened, which would certainly explain why Lula's mom has it in for Sailor.

Stuck in Texas, the couple stays at a hotel full of weirdos, including Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe). Sailor needs money in order to be able to support Lula as a wife, especially because she's pretty darn certain she's pregnant with Sailor's child. Bobby gets Sailor involved in a scheme to rob an agricultural feed store, but that robbery goes wrong, leading to the movie's denouement....

Wild At Heart got mixed reviews on release, and it's easy to see why. It's decidedly violent, although I don't necessarily have a problem with the violence. However, as with the other of Lynch's films that I've seen, it's also highly stylized, and that Lynch style isn't something that's a favorite of mine. I didn't care for it at all with Eraserhead; with Blue Velvet I didn't dislike the movie although the mannered execution of it is disconcerting at time. In Wild at Heart, everybody's weird for no good reason, to the point of being highly artificial. Some people are going to love this, but for me it's also easy to see how some people are absolutely going to hate it.

Of course, if you're already a fan of David Lynch, you've probably seen Wild At Heart, so none of this is going to be new to you. Sit back, watch it (again), and enjoy.

Movie adaptations

I mentioned not too long ago that I had several more recent movies that aired on TCM during 31 Days of Oscar that I was going to have to get to before they expire from my DVR. One of them from the early 2000s is Adaptation.

Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) is a real-life screenwriter, and writer of the screenplay for Adaptation. Before that, he worked with director Spike Jonze (director of Adaptation) on Being John Malkovich on the movie Being John Malkovich. As Adaptation opens, Charlie is trying to come up with an adaptation of a book called The Orchid Thief, by an author named Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep).

Now here we need to stop and go back a bit. Susan Orlean is also a real person, like Kaufman, a Manhattan writer who came across an interesting story about a man who went into the Florida swamps to try to poach a species of orchid that's considered very rare. So she decided to write a long-form article about the case for The New Yorker, and eventually turned that into the book The Orchid Thief. I haven't read the book, but by all accounts the story is about subject material that might make for an interesting movie. Except that the way Orlean wrote The Orchid Thief apparently made it hard to adapt the book directly into a movie.

So part of Adaptation is about the fact that Kaufman is developing a case of writer's block trying to turn The Orchid Thief into a workable screenplay. Except that the movie isn't a documentary by any means. For one thing, the real-life Kaufman invents a twin brother, Donald Kaufman (obivously played by Nicolas Cage as well), who is an aspiring but unsuccessful screenwriter. Donald goes to seminars run by famed screenwriting professor Robert McKee (Brian Cox). Donald comes up with ideas that are ridiculous largely because they're the stereotype of a bunch of tropes put together to come up with something that might be a story.

Getting back to Charlie and Susan, The Orchid Thief is also based on a real person, John Laroche (played by Chris Cooper, who won a Supporting Actor Oscar). Today we'd call the guy Florida Man, although I don't know that the term existed 25 years ago. He's a "hold my beer" type who has developed a series of all-consuming passions, only to drop one to pick up the next, with orchids being the current passion. Susan, however, begins to figure out that she really doesn't have any passions in her life, so she gets fascinated by John, in part because of the New York class bigotry and in part because he can have passions where she doesn't seem to be able to.

Charlie continues to try to write that screenplay, while Hollywood producer types are increasingly getting on him to finish the damn thing so that they can start filming it. Eventually, his plot part about trying to write that screenplay comes together with the plot of Susan writing the book while getting to know Laroche. The movie goes in ways that real life didn't, although I won't reveal those.

Adaptation is an interesting movie that veers off in all sorts of unexpected directions. Some people might have a bit of a problem with that considering that at the heart of all this is a book that's actually based on real people. I didn't know anything about the book or the movie before going in to it, so I didn't have any of those problems. Instead, I was able to sit back and enjoy what is a bit of a wild ride, and a lot of fun. If you want something different, Adaptation certainly fits the bill.

TCM's Norman Jewison tribute

Director Norman Jewison died in January, and with 31 Days of Oscar beginning not long after Jewison's death, TCM didn't have a whole lot of time to plan a programming salute to him before the Oscar programming. So they had to delay things until later in March. That programming salute is tonight, March 21, and includes five of Jewison's films:

8:00 PM The Thomas Crown Affair
10:00 PM In the Heat of the Night
Midnight Moonstruck
2:00 AM Fiddler on the Roof
5:15 AM The Cincinnati Kid

Unlike yesterday with Ryan O'Neal, I had one of the movies in the programming salute on my DVR and not having done a review on it before. Moonstruck aired during 31 Days of Oscar, so I recorded it then, and with the Jewison salute coming up, I decided I'd watch it now so that I could do the review in conjunction with the upcoming airing.

Granted, Moonstruck is a famous enough movie that most people probably know the basic plot. Cher stars as Loretta Castorini, a bookkeeper who still lives with her family, parents Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia) and Rose (Olympia Dukakis), and Cosmo's very elderly widowed father (Feodor Chaliapin). Although, to be fair, Loretta lives with them in part because she's a widow, having married a bit later than the women in her part of the world -- Brooklyn's Italian-American community -- do and then having tragically lost her husband in an accident.

Loretta goes out to dinner with her kinda-sorta boyfriend, Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello). He's a decent human being and the two like each other, although Loretta isn't quite certain how much love there is. Not that she's overly worried. She married the first time for love, and look where that got her. So she'd consider marrying a second time for security, and indeed, gets Johnny to propose to her.

But there's a bit of a catch. Johnny's beloved mother lives in the old country, and word has reached Johnny that she's on her death bed. So he needs to go back to Sicily as soon as possible to see Ma before she dies. That should only be a couple of weeks maximum, and when Johnny returns, they can have the church wedding straight away.

Johnny has other difficulties. He's got a brother, Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to whom he hasn't spoken in years. This would be a good time to make amends, bury the hatchet, what have you. So while Johnny is off in Italy, would Loretta be so good as to call on Ronny and get him to come to the wedding? Ronny works at a bakery, so Loretta goes there to try to find Ronny and speak to him.

She quickly learns why Ronny hasn't spoken to his brother in five years. Ronny was engaged, but one day when Johnny came to the bakery Ronny paid more attention to him than to his work. A work accident caused him to lose his hand, and then his fiancée, so Ronny blames Johnny for both. He's bitter, and hasn't been with a woman since. This gives him a bizarre idea: would Loretta spend just one night with him at the opera, Cinderella-style?

Of course, Ronny and Loretta wind up falling in love. And it's not the only case of infidelity in the story, as there are several other subplots involving love. But what will Johnny do when he gets back from Italy?

Moonstruck is a wonderful little romantic comedy, in part because it feels to me like it has a near universal appeal. Yeah, it's set in a fairly specific community, but after all it has to be set somewhere. In fact, it feels like it could have been set anywhere, and that the situations could happen to almost anybody. Indeed, one of the subplots involves a decidedly non-Italian character, the college professor Perry (John Mahoney who was so much more than just Kelsey Grammer's TV father on Frasier) who takes his female students to the same Italian restaurant the main characters go to, only to get a glass of water thrown on him.

Not only is the script excellent, the cast all give tremendous performances. Cher and Olympia Dukakis both won Oscars, but everybody else is just as good too. Moonstruck is one of those movies that is not to be missed.

Not Dwayne Johnson

During one of the previous free preview weekends, I had the chance to record the movie The Rock. Recently, I finally watched it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

Ed Harris plays Brigadier General Francis Hummel, who at the beginning of the movie is seen at his wife's grave vowing to do something in her memory, and it's not long before we see what that something is. Hummel is the leader of a section of the Marines that does super-duper secret missions, so secret that when the marines die, their families aren't even compensated, because that might break the secrecy of these operations. So he and his mean break in to a naval weapons facility and steal a bunch of chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, back in Washington DC, Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) is one of the few honest people in the FBI, at a time when the FBI hadn't redeemed itself in the eyes of Hollywood by going on a politicized extralegal campaign against former president Trump and his supporters. Godspeed is the head of a department within the Bureau that investigates chemical weapons, so it's obvious that he's going to get called in by the people closest to the President when Gen. Hummel puts the rest of his plan into action, and it's not going to be long before that happens.

That plan involves making their way to Alcatraz, taking one of the tour groups hostage, and threatening to blow up rockets that have the nerve agent as warheads over various places in the San Francisco Bay Area, killing tens of thousands of people. Goodspeed's job is going to be to disable the weapons, since he knows what to look for.

Of course, there's a pretty big problem: how to get on the island of Alcatraz in the first place. Gen. Hummel is no dummy, and has communications and radar and whatnot set up, so he and his men will pretty much seen anbody trying to get to the island by air or the surface water. But how to get there from below the surface? Well, it shouldn't be that difficult to send in some frogmen, but in theory they'd be noticed when they surface having reached the island. Perhaps there might be some subsurface way into the facility?

There's only one person who knows that, since the blueprints aren't that detailed. That person is Capt. Mason (Sean Connery), a member of British Special Forces who was imprisoned at Alcatraz for reasons that will be explained toward the end of the film, although those reasons turn out not to be germane to the plot. Mason escaped from Alcatraz, only to be recaptured and held in some secret location for the past 30 years. But now the FBI needs his knowledge to get back in to Alcatraz in order to deal with Gen. Hummel and his men.

The operation goes wrong, with all of the regular-duty FBI agents getting killed, leaving only Goodspeed and Mason left to carry out the operation, which as you can guess they are somehow able to do because otherwise we'd have the sort of profoundly sad ending that you wouldn't expect Hollywood to give us in a movie like this. A few dramas (Fail-Safe and The Bedford Incident) and parodies (Dr. Strangelove and The Day the Fish Came Out are movies that come to mind) have done it, but not an action movie with an obvious hero.

Michael Bay directed, so if you want special effects, non-stop action, and explosions, you'll get those in spades. And chances are you'll be highly entertained. But I found Bay's direction to be one of the problems with the movie, as a lot of the camera angles and editing didn't work for me, making the movie longer than it needed to be (131 minutes before the end credits begin to roll). You'll also have to suspend a lot of disbelief to watch this one. But if you can do that, you'll like The Rock.

A dozen years after Under the Volcano

This year's 31 Days of Oscar saw the TCM premiere of the movie Leaving Las Vegas. Not having blogged about it before, I decided to record it. I noticed that it's got an airing on Flix this week, at 10:00 PM on Sept. 29, so I once again made a point of watching it in order to do a blog post on it now.

Nicolas Cage plays Ben Sanderson, who at the start of the movie is buying a bunch of alcohol in order to go on the bender of all benders. He meets one of his friends in Los Angeles, who has obviously seen enough of Ben's antics and is not pleased with Ben accosting him in a business meeting at a restaurant. In a brief flashback, we learn that Ben has just lost his job as an associate producer with one of the Hollywood studios, and is thinking of taking his severance package and getting away to Las Vegas for a while.

Of course, he's really thinking of doing much more than that. He burns many of his possessions and leaves others at the curb in garbage bags before heading out to Vegas. When he gets to Vegas, he's clearly drunk already, that is, if he's even ever sobered up, based on how little he's paying attention to the throng of pedestrians in the Strip area of the city. Among those people is Sera (Elisabeth Shue), a prostitute whom Ben eventually runs into again. By sheer coincidence, Ben is alreadly peripherally involved in her story, as she's got a pimp Yuri (Julian Sands) who is being pursued by some gangsters Ben met in the Mojave desert on the way to Vegas.

At any rate, Ben runs into Sera again, and this time offers her $500 to come back to his crappy motel and spend some time with him. They don't have sex, but instead talk and form an odd and uneasy friendship. Ben tells Sera that his plan is to drink himself to death in Las Vegas, and that the one thing she absolutely has to do is not try to get him to stop drinking. She agrees but tells him not to judge her too harshly for being a prostitute.

Sera develops enough of an emotional bond with Ben that she even checks him out of the motel and brings him to her apartment, and both of them go through a lot of hell before their eventual storylines end.

To be honest, there's not much of a plot to Leaving Las Vegas, as it's as much a character study as a fully fleshed-out story. As I was watching, I couldn't help but think of Albert Finney in Under the Volcano. That's an extremely powerful acting performance, but also one that's incredibly difficult to watch. Leaving Las Vegas wasn't quite as difficult to watch, although it's definitely not a movie for everybody. Certainly, it's not your normal Hollywood sanitization and leaving everybody with a happy ending and the possibility of a sequel. And to be honest, I found it a bit difficult to understand why Sera would minister to Ben the way she did.

But if you want to see some good acting, this is definitely the movie to watch, as neither Cage nor Shue seemed to be going over the top. And if you can handle movies that aren't easy, than Leaving Las Vegas is absolutely worth the watch.