I saw BANGKOK DANGEROUS in a hotel in Havana recently. It really wasn’t that bad, certainly no worse that LORD OF WAR and probably better than NATIONAL TREASURE. Maybe I’m being generous because it was the only thing on tv at the time. But at least Cage got the Pang Brothers for the remake.

i just looked up cliff curtis on IMDb and apparently he was in THE PIANO, but i don’t remember him in it (i didn’t know who he was when i saw it, and i saw it so long ago that i don’t remember the details of it clearly, but i liked it).

And I think ONCE WERE WARRIORS is really good. One of the most uncompromising depictions of alcoholism that I’ve seen. It’s my understanding that the film out-grossed JURASSIC PARK in New Zealand. Cliff Curtis wasn’t a big part of the film.

anyway, i remember watching them shoot the scene where nic cage smashes the windshield with a baseball bat and being amused at seeing nic cage. if it was now, i would have been super excited to see him, but at that time i had already given up on him (this was of course post CITY OF ANGELS). so as it were, i was way more excited to catch a glimpse of scorsese. unfortunately, he stayed inside a van the whole time in front of the monitors and directed by walkie-talkie. when i asked a crew member they said that’s how he always did it. i remember being a bit disappointed, as i always felt that was a much more cold and impersonal way to direct, as opposed to being physically on the set and interacting with the actors directly.

when i finally saw the movie when it came out, i was amused to see that they had used my block to try and show the rundown hellish nightmare-scape that apparently was hell’s kitchen in the 80’s. it was also to see that the scene where cage chases marc antony into some dingy little alley because in actuality that dingy little alley was also on my block but it was in fact the entrance to this newly opened and swanky yuppie-butt bar. movie magic!

anyway, i had really been looking forward to the movie, being a huge fan of scorsese’s, and it being – at least in my mind – something of a spiritual sequel to TAXI DRIVER (scorsese and schrader teaming up on a movie about hellish new york). but ultimately i, too, had a lukewarm reaction to it. stylistically, i thought it was great, and i loved all the little flourishes. i loved the soundtrack and the look of the movie and the way it was shot and edited (i always think about that shot where the camera follows the van down the street, panning vertically 180 degrees until the shot is completely upside-down). i dug the overall atmosphere. i thought goodman and sizemore were great. i just felt that there were too many elements that didn’t quite click for me, story-wise. i always just kind of attributed it – possibly unfairly – to the source material, since i implicitly trust scorsese and schrader, but it was based on a book by an actual EMT worker, so how good of a writer could he be (again, probably not fair, but i couldn’t help thinking that – ot that he couldn’t be a good writer just cause he was a former EMT worker, but just cause he had never written anything before). also, i fond arquette’s performance to be not very good (as i often find with her), and i thought Ethnic Everyman (TM) cliff curtis’ performance was distracting. what the hell kind of accent was he trying to do?? some kind of weird black-american/jamaican deal (it’s been a while since i’ve seen it)???

as an aside, i often find cliff curtis distracting in movies. it’s funny how he’s this maori guy from new zealand, but hollywood has basically cast him as just about every non-white ethnicity that there is on the planet other than maori (in fairness, there probably aren’t too many maori characters in hollywood movies). i have seen him play arab (several times), iraqi, black (!), mexican, and several varieties of south american, to name a few. i usually admire his effort, but rarely actually like his performance, THREE KINGS being probably the only time i really liked him in a movie (i haven’t seen WHALE RIDER or ONCE WERE WARRIORS, but i suspect he is more tolerable playing kiwi parts). he is sometimes convincing in his ethnic role (THREE KINGS) and sometimes horribly distracting (BOtD, TRAINING DAY).

okay, end cliff curtis rant.

in summation, not having seen BOtD since it came out, thanks to this review i have now had the desire to re-watch it finally rekindled. ooh, i just remembered i can but it on VHS for 50 cents at my local video shop! i shall be watching it soon…

I remember wanting to like it, hoping the lukewarm reviews were wrong, kinda liking it, but ultimately feeling that it didn’t quite click somehow. And then it mostly passed from my memory, which is a bad sign. But now I can’t remember what I didn’t like, aside from it being a bit too familiar coming from Scorsese at that point in his career.

I do recall that Cage’s accent bugged me throughout the film. “It was the neighborhood I grew up in,” he says in a lazy SoCal drawl. Maybe I’m being picky, but that sort of thing is a great distraction, especially in a film so anchored in a specific time and place. Even odder is the fact that he did a passable Queens accent in KISS OF DEATH just a few years earlier. Maybe a little broad and hammy, but at least he tried in that one.