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Reviews
The Believers (1987)
Interesting horror flick
John Schlesinger's weird occult horror is an interesting curio for fright buffs. Martin Sheen plays a recently widowed police psychologist who moves to New York with his 7-year-old son and finds himself endangered by an ancient underground religious cult that practices the ritual sacrifice of children.
I found The Believers to be a genuinely scary and disturbing supernatural horror. Okay, the plot contains some silly mumbo-jumbo and mystical red herrings, and critics complained about the xenophobic attitude towards the religion Santeria. But it has gore, suspense, good production values, stylish Robby Muller cinematography, plenty of jolting shocks, nightmarish visuals and, above all else, a really strong atmosphere of evil. There is a powerful, convincing sense of malice from beginning to end, which is what always gets me in a horror film. It reminded me variously of Rosemary's Baby (diabolical goings-on in upscale NYC), The Serpent and the Rainbow and even Schlesinger's earlier NY thriller Marathon Man.
Scariest parts: the opening electrocution scene, the spiders coming out of the woman's cheek, anything involving that white-eyed Haitian voodoo priest. No classic, but worth a look.
Hustle & Flow (2005)
Highly entertaining film
I really enjoyed it this movie. I know you could easily argue that it was clichéd, manipulative, misogynistic, one-dimensional and so on, but I just found it immensely likable and well crafted in all departments. It genuinely felt like a Rocky or Saturday Night Fever for the 00s while I was watching it.
Terrence Howard was outstanding as Djay. It's a fresh, vibrant and charismatic star turn fully worthy of his Oscar nomination. Seeing this after his wildly different role in the same year's Crash just confirms his striking versatility. There was a lot of justifiable praise for Taraji P. Henson as Shug, the pregnant hooker who sings the chorus on "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp", but I think Taryn Manning almost stole the show as Nola, the young hooker with the blonde braids that Djay confides in; I'm surprised there was so little mention of her performance in most reviews.
The songs were all naggingly catchy I can't get "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" out of my head now. All in all, this was pretty irresistible entertainment.
Rumble Fish (1983)
A weird and wonderful journey
I don't know many people who like it, but I've always loved the odd, dreamy story of Rusty James and his big brother, the Motorcycle Boy.
Rumble Fish was Francis Ford Coppola's second S.E. Hinton adaptation of 1983 after The Outsiders, and it was generally derided as a silly, pretentious, self-conscious "art film for teenagers". It was loudly booed when it premiered at the New York Film Festival, was savaged by most critics, and lost a lot of money at the box office. Vincent Canby of The New York Times said, "Rumble Fish is not a success, but there is something deserving of attention in its failure. Mr. Coppola thinks BIG, which is better than not thinking at all." Roger Ebert, however, raved about it in his 3.5/4-star review: "This is a movie you are likely to hate, unless you can love it for its crazy, feverish charm. It's all style and flash, all emotion and impact, and it doesn't slow down for the usual items of business. It lays a weird-looking, experimental film style on top of a fairly basic story about hoods and street gangs, and if you care how the story turns out, you're in the wrong movie." Mickey Rourke stares intensely and delivers all his dialogue in a barely audible whisper. It's an odd performance I can never reach a clear decision about. I thought Matt Dillon was wonderful here. Granted, he's not the most versatile actor, but the role of Rusty James seems tailored to his specific strengths. His character is needy, braindead and parasitic, but his puppy-dog eagerness to please his big brother made me want to give him a big hug and put some sugar in his bowl.
Fleshing out the cast are newcomers Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Vincent Spano and the late Chris Penn, as well as old-timers Dennis Hopper and Tom Waits. On the female front there's an 18-year-old Diane Lane as Rusty James' petulant and sulky upper-crust girlfriend Patty, and Diana Scarwid (whatever happened to her?) is a junkie schoolteacher besotted with the Motorcycle Boy. It's also fun to see an 11-year-old Sofia Coppola (credited only as Domino) in a cameo as Lane's cheeky younger sister Donna.
I love the beautiful, expressionistic black-and-white cinematography of Stephen Burum, and the dreamlike, percussion-driven score by The Police drummer Stewart Copeland, which was quite ahead of its time and rightly nominated for a Golden Globe. But above all, I have a long-held interest in the messy dynamics of sibling relationships and am a sucker for good films about brothers (East of Eden, Dead Ringers), sisters (Georgia, Cries and Whispers, Hilary & Jackie) or brothers and sisters (You Can Count on Me). This may be why Rumble Fish seems to resonate with me more than most people.
The Hotel New Hampshire (1984)
Utterly bizarre, but compellingly so
Okay, this was officially an insane film. The dysfunctional families in The Royal Tenenbaums or Little Miss Sunshine have got nothing on this lot.
Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster are a teenage brother and sister who harbor blatant incestuous desires for each other. Jodie gets gang-raped (a test run for The Accused, perhaps) and then falls for the guy who spearheaded her rape. Matthew Modine has a double role as the head rapist and the perverted leader of a radical terrorist gang who want to blow up a Viennese opera house. Nastassja Kinski pops up halfway through as an insecure lesbian in a bear suit, and gets it on with both Rob and Jodie. Amanda Plummer plays a virginal Austrian chambermaid/terrorist known only as Miss Miscarriage. Beau Bridges is the patriarch, a teacher who dreams of setting up a hotel and gets blinded by an exploding bomb. There's also a child authoress (Jennie Dundas), a weightlifting grandfather (Wilford Brimley), a real bear and a dog with "terminal flatulence".
Tony Richardson is obviously going for a type of bizarre, surreal, epic black comedy, and he has faithfully adapted John Irving's sprawling, near-unfilmable 1981 novel. Both the tone and the narrative are faithful, but it's certainly not as successful an adaptation as The World According to Garp two years earlier. The cast is game and there are some rich, funny moments along the way, but there is clearly too much going on, too many characters and wild globe-hopping vignettes, and the overdose of quirk becomes wearisome well before the end. It's an utterly chaotic mess, then, but it remains one of those morbidly fascinating films you can't tear your eyes away from, if only to see what the hell happens next.