Posts Tagged ‘Harvey Keitel’

Bad Lieutenant

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

A guy I know told me a funny anecdote about renting this in the early ’90s when he was a teenager. He said he got it at a tiny little mom and pop store in a suburb of Seattle. You don’t really see stores like that now but they used to be around, especially in the ’80s, before Blockbuster and Hollywood were everywhere. This one had a nice old man who ran it (the pop) and when this kid and his little sister brought up BAD LIEUTENANT the old man got excited. “My niece is in this movie!” he says.

“Really?”

“Yeah! Watch for the scene where he pulls over the two teenage girls. She’s one of the girls!”

So, of course, if you’ve seen the movie you will remember the scene where Harvey forces one girl to show him her ass and the other one to pretend she’s sucking a dick as he stands there jerking off and repeating “you ever had a guy’s cock in your mouth? You ever have a guy’s cock in your mouth?” over and over again. Well, don’t worry, one of those actresses has a proud uncle.

That’s right man, that Harvey Keitel is one bad lieutenant. I’m not talking about a baaaaadass lieutenant. I’m talking about a coke snorting, crack smoking, heroin shooting, hard drinking, walking around naked, money stealing, lying, gambling addicted, n-word using, jerking off in front of some teenage girls he pulled over, spying on a naked rape victim, law enforcement sonofabitch. That would be a more accurate title but it’s too long to fit on a marquee and gives away pretty much 95% of what happens in the movie. (more…)

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Be Cool

Tuesday, March 8th, 2005

This is the sequel to GET SHORTY. Based on another book by Elmore Leonard, but this book was made after the GET SHORTY movie and with the idea that it would become a movie too. So this is a movie about sequels based on a book that was a sequel to a movie based on a book. Which means there’s all kinds of metapostmodernistical type business running around calling attention to itself. Hey, look at me, I’m a character in a sequel talking about how sequels are bad. Now I’m a character in a PG-13 movie talking about how if you say fuck twice you get an R.

(John Travolta, as badass loanshark turned movie producer Chili Palmer points this out and says, “You know what I have to say about that? Fuck that.” And if only he had repeated “fuck that” again for emphasis I guess he would’ve gotten the R and I could’ve seen this movie in a quiet theater full of adults and not a fuckin high school cafeteria. But that’s a subject for a separate rant.)

Anyway that’s kind of how GET SHORTY was though and most of it works here, it’s fun if not exactly a fresh new idea. There are a couple of fuck ups though where they got celebrities playing fictional characters who make references to trademarks of the actual celebrities, and that shit just doesn’t fly. The Rock for example keeps doing his famous eyebrow movement (oh jesus, I can’t believe there is even such a phrase as “famous eyebrow movement”), and that’s just not funny. That belongs in the scrap pile with the part in SCREAM 3 where some asshole tells Carrie Fisher she looks like Princess Leah. That’s not a joke, that’s a reference. Stop it kids.

Also, they got a scene where John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance together, and you’re supposed to be excited because remember, they danced together in PULP FICTION. But in PULP FICTION you were supposed to be excited because remember, he danced in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. I mean how many fuckin times we gonna get excited because the man dances? At some point it’s gonna occur to America that John Travolta’s a dancer. So by definition he ends up dancing at some point. It’s not really that big a fuckin deal, in my opinion. (more…)

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Blue Collar

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Paul Schrader. He is sort of a lesser known legend of independent film. Legendary because of the many screenplays he wrote for Martin Scorsese, including Taxi Driver, lesser because he went on to direct crap like the rock band movie Light of Day with Michael J. whatsisdick. And that sort of thing tends to lower people’s opinion of you. I mean, you don’t see the dude who did Satisfaction with Justine Bateman going on to inspire a new generation of filmmakers. That’s just the way it works.

But Paul Schrader did make sort of a comeback. After a really terrible Elmore Leonard/Tom Arnold picture called Touch he did Affliction with James Coburn and got some Oscars and what not. Now I am in favor of any picture that gets an Oscar for James Coburn just on basic principle, but I haven’t seen it yet so instead I will review Mr. Schrader’s first work as a director, and still maybe his best, Blue Collar.

You see this picture is important to me because it is one of Richard Pryor’s few great film roles outside of his stand up films. Richard was in many shoddy films made by people with no understanding of his talents or desire to display them properly. So you get the man dressed up as a chicken or running around getting his ass bit by piranhas or what not. The kind of garbage that Robin Williams could even do. And as Richard once confessed to me, by writing his autobiography, he was too far gone in his addiction to really care any more. He just wanted “the moneys” and so would sign on to pictures like Super Man Part 3 that he thought were crap.

So Blue Collar is one of the few pictures where he actually got to play a multi-faceted, dramatic type role where he gets to be funny but also gets to display other emotions convincingly and organically within the story. He gets to change throughout the movie, but not in the, “It turns out I have a big heart after all and love kids” type of way. I mean it’s the other way around, he turns into kind of a villain, he sells the fuck out. (more…)

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City of Industry

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Here’s a small time crime picture for you, never got much attention as a child but grew up to be a pretty good movie. It starts out with Timothy Hutton stealing a car (very believable hotwire scene here with actual hammering of the dashboard, not just pulling some wires out) then going to pick up his partner for a job. They eventually get together their crew for a jewel heist, it consists of Timothy Hutton, his older brother Roy Egan (Harvey Keitel), Jorge (some guy I thought I recognized, but turns out he was only in a handful of movies before he died) and an obnoxious hotshot jackass named Skip, sort of a Stephen Dorff type (Stephen Dorff).

There is a pretty strong Richard Stark feel to this for a while as they prepare their heist. No funny stuff, no fancy talk, just straight business and some primal percussion type soundtrack shit to get your heart beating. Everything goes smooth actually until after the heist when this fucker Skip decides to shoot everybody, burn down the motor home and take off with the boodle. Fucking asshole! So the rest of the movie is about Roy trying to find and kill Skip, Skip trying to have Roy killed before he finds him. Very simple. That’s what I like.

One thing weird about this movie, the two main characters are named Roy and Skip. You don’t get that too often. Usually one would be John, then maybe the other one would have a fancy name like Esteban or Molochai or whatever, but not Roy and Skip. That’s pretty unusual.

I said earlier Skip was kind of a Stephen Dorff type. That’s because he’s kind of the same character, Deacon Frost, that this guy played in the classic Wesley Snipes picture BLADE. Deacon Frost was the young spikey haired showboat who thought he was better than all the other vampires, listened to lots of techno music and scared all the old timers with his young edgy mixed blood vampire methods. This is the same thing here, he thinks he’s hot shit, he plays loud, bad music while he’s driving and he stirs up trouble with all the pros like Roy and his crew. Also he has bleached blonde hair. This was 1997 though, one year before Blade, so Stephen Dorff didn’t know yet about how motherfuckers always trying to ice skate uphill. (more…)

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