A Complete Unknown Pre-Game Triple Feature: HEARTS OF FIRE (1987) / OLIVER & COMPANY (1988) / HOT SUMMER NIGHTS (2017)

I want to review Best Picture nominee A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, but to set the scene I thought I’d first take a look at earlier works from some of the people involved. So here’s a movie starring the subject, one written by the director, and one with the same star.

First up chronologically is the rock ’n roll drama HEARTS OF FIRE (1987), which starts out like LIGHT OF DAY but goes a little A STAR IS BORN. It follows 18 year-old singer/guitarist Molly McGuire, played by Fiona, a real singer who at the time had two albums on Atlantic Records and had guest starred on an episode of Miami Vice. Molly fronts a bar band in a small town and one day she’s surprised to see reclusive former rock legend Billy Parker (Bob Dylan, PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID) sitting at the bar. She scares him off with her gushing, but on another night he impishly appears in the crowd shouting a request for “The Unusual,” his song she told him was her favorite. Actually I guess it’s a John Hiatt cover, but he comes up and performs it with the band – a highlight of their small time rocker lives.

The rest of the band are older than Molly and have wives and kids and mortgages and shit, so they take a gig at a hotel that Molly isn’t interested in. Also her job working a booth at the border is not going well. But she does strike up a weird friendship with Billy Parker, who claims to be happy in his humble life farming chickens until he suddenly invites her to come with him to play some shows in London.

Molly has many surreal experiences between her unclear relationship with an enigmatic trickster celebrity and the stardom it brings her. But she cares about her music more than anything, so she gets mad at him when she thinks he’s just doing the shows for a paycheck and not taking the band auditions seriously. She performs with Billy, another legend named Pepper Ward (Richie Havens, STREET HUNTER), a musclebound drummer named Nico (Timmy Cappello, the saxophone player from THE LOST BOYS and the BEYOND THUNDERDOME video!) and a bleach blond new wave lookin guitarist named Fizz (holy shit, that’s twentysomething Mark Rylance!), plus she meets James Colt (Rupert Everett with a mullet!), a huge pop star who looks up to Billy.

Although much-older Billy doesn’t really reciprocate, there’s clearly a love triangle going on here, with Fiona’s heart going to Billy but being rejected and taking refuge with the younger superstar, whose lifestyle includes a palace, a butler named Alfred (Julian Glover, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK), and piloting helicopters, including a time when he lands it on top of her place (?) and climbs in the window and has sex with her. Also things get weird when a blind superfan whose opinion he respects (Susannah Hoffmann, THE BRAIN) gets possessive of him.

This is not my type of music, and I suspect that this dangly earring, fringe jacket, blues rock era of Bob Dylan is not anybody’s favorite. He does two original songs and the aforementioned cover, if you’re wondering. But Fiona is obviously a good singer and the performances are enjoyable enough. Also it’s fun to see Everett on stage singing – in this reality his version of “Tainted Love” is the one they play on the radio. But the highlight is obviously the novelty of seeing Dylan act, even if he’s mostly just doing a scripted version of his persona as the funny, charming, confusing, frustrating riddler guy who knows how to rock. Also he trashes a hotel room in one part. That used to be a big part of being a musician, I guess.

The original screenplay was by only-timer Scott Richardson, but it was rewritten by Joe Eszterhas (FLASHDANCE), who I’m guessing added some sex scenes. This was the last film from Richard Marquand, director of RETURN OF THE JEDI. He had a stroke and died about a month before its limited release in the UK. It went straight to VHS in the US and never came out on DVD. I guess you can get it digitally, but only in standard def.

OLIVER & COMPANY (1988) is the first Disney animated feature greenlit under the Michael Eisner/Jeffrey Katzenberg regime, the one before they hit it big with THE LITTLE MERMAID and kicked off what became known as the Disney renaissance. Despite my interest in the history of the studio I avoided it for a long time, and can’t even remember if I’ve actually seen it before, due to my longstanding bias against Billy Joel, who not only sings in it but stars as a dog who refers to himself in the third person. Having softened my stance on Joel in recent years I thought it would be a good time to finally watch it, but unfortunately it has set the cause back immeasurably. This is easily one of the worst Disney features, seeming more like one of the clueless later Don Bluth flops.

The script is credited to James Mangold (COP LAND, 3:10 TO YUMA, LOGAN), along with Jim Cox (FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST) and Tim Disney (A QUESTION OF FAITH). It would be generous to say they came up with a half-assed story and characters. This feels like one of those rough drafts you hear about getting completely thrown out after they finally crack the story.

The (in my opinion weak-sauce) premise is to do a dog version of Oliver Twist, so Joel’s character is named Dodger. Although they were being created around the same time, I think Dodger was meant to be sort of a David Addison type – white guy who claims to have soul wears sunglasses, exaggerates his working class accent, doesn’t take anything seriously and you’re supposed to think he’s awesome. That’s a common archetype in ‘80s film and television, but being animated makes it way worse. There are few things as intolerable as a cartoon animal in sunglasses who we’re told is really fucking cool. If this had been made like six months later he would’ve been riding a skateboard and wearing a backwards hat. This asshole dog literally struts into the movie, and the first thing we see him do is make kissy sounds at a girl dog and enjoy her outrage.

Then he sings a song that keeps repeating the line “I’ve got street savoir faire,” one of those things where I’m pretty sure the treatment said “he has street savoir faire” and Eisner loved that and kept repeating it but they realized they had no clue what the fuck it was supposed to mean so they just had him keep saying that he had it. And then Eisner probly asked for him to have more street savoir-faire so they added the reprise of the song at the end. And he still wanted more. I don’t know man, is a handkerchief street savoir-faire? I’m just guessing. I don’t know about giving him a leather jacket or fingerless gloves.

Dodger meets stray kitten Oliver (Joey Lawrence, SUMMER RENTAL) on the street and uses him as a distraction to steal a rope of sausage links from a hot dog vendor. Why does a hot dog vendor have sausage links instead of hot dogs? So Dodger can wear it around his neck like he thinks he’s Rover fucking Dangerfield. And he seriously does put on sunglasses.

Oliver follows Dodger to his home, a shack-like barge shared with several other stray dogs voiced by Cheech Marin (AFTER HOURS), Sheryl Lee Ralph (THE MIGHTY QUINN), Roscoe Lee Brown (THE CONNECTION) and Richard Mulligan (THE HEAVENLY KID). They are soon joined by their human/homeless caricature friend Fagin (Dom DeLuise, The Jacksons), who owes money to a loan shark named Mr. Sykes (Robert Loggia, CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER) who has two mean dobermans voiced by Taurean Blacque (THE HUNTER) and Carl Weintraub (AIR FORCE ONE). Fagin can’t hear the animals speak, but talks to them as if he knows they understand him, and sweetly reads them bedtime stories. I guess kind of like Jon Arbuckle.

The next day while they’re singing a song to teach Oliver how to steal, they try to scam a butler (William Glover, ARCHIE: TO RIVERDALE AND BACK), but the little girl he’s driving, Jenny (Natalie Gregory, DAD’S A DOG), sees Oliver and brings him home to her mansion and sings him a song.

Jenny’s snobby poodle Georgette (Bette Midler, CATS & DOGS: THE REVENGE OF KITTY GALORE) is jealous of the kitten, so when the other dogs (Oliver’s company) sneak in she lets them take him. He wants to go back so Fagin tries to ransom him to the family, then feels bad about it, but Sykes kidnaps Jenny, there’s a car vs. scooter chase that goes through a subway tunnel and onto the Brooklyn Bridge, the villains all die, everybody hugs and the violins play, the end, thanks for spending these 69 minutes with us.

Let me say some nice things. I like the sound design at the beginning – the voices and sounds of traffic and sirens off camera as Oliver is walking around at people’s feet. I like that some of the songs (including the first rap song in a Disney movie?) are distorted because they’re playing on portable radios. Some of the animation is well done, especially Jenny. I like the paintings of New York City, I like the cars (both the motionless painted ones and the moving ones that are a fairly early hybrid of drawing and computer animation), and some (not all) of the random extras, who don’t look Disney style at all.

There’s a really good simulated camera rotation during Jenny’s song that’s a precursor to the famous ballroom scene in BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, but other parts of the animation are pretty shoddy for Disney. The expressions are overly saccharine, the movements aren’t natural enough. I really don’t think it’s their best animal work. I hate Oliver’s big fat paws, I hate the way he and the dogs dance, I hate the dancing of the character who could only be called “Black Guy Carrying Boombox Playing a simulated Rap Song Called ‘In The Fast Lane.”

And I hate that the character of Fagin never seems to match the celebrity voice they cast for him, who had already done two Don Bluth movies. He’s the closest thing to a complete character in the movie and he doesn’t work at all for me.

I believe 101 DALMATIANS was the first Disney animated movie set in the present day, and this follows that same tradition. In this case that means there are billboards for USA Today and Tab, and lots of people wear bulbous Chuck Taylor knock-offs. It’s edgy for a G-rated movie because the poodle sexily invites the chihuaha upstairs to take a bath. But the villain is even less substantial than the heroes, and the style and music seem dated in a bad way. Maybe I should apologize to Don Bluth for dissing him repeatedly in this review, his THE LAND BEFORE TIME came out the same day and has aged much better. It opened bigger but ultimately made less money (not counting DTV sequels, I assume).

OLIVER & COMPANY is bottom of the barrel Disney, but I don’t blame Mangold. He was working with two other screenwriters plus numerous artists reworking everything (more than a dozen of whom got story credits). It’s his first movie credit, so maybe it helped him pay the bills until he directed HEAVY seven years later.

HOT SUMMER NIGHTS (2017) is a kind of stylish, quite self conscious but pretty watchable crime drama that premiered at South by Southwest, got picked up by A24, and was the second starring role for Timothée Chalamet – CALL ME BY YOUR NAME hadn’t come out yet when he filmed this. Writer/director Elijah Bynum had written it a while earlier, when he was in his early twenties, and it has that confident young person enthusiasm in the detailed first person narration about the fateful summer of 1991 when Daniel (Chalamet) was depressed about the death of his father and went to stay with his aunt in Cape Cod (filmed in Atlanta). For a second I though “oh shit, this is so early Chalamet’s voice hadn’t changed yet,” but the narrator is somebody else (Shane Epstein Petrullo) representing some random kid.

The random kid explains how the town works. Everybody seems like snooty country club types, but they listen to Just Ice at their house party? Kind of weird. He claims that practically everybody in town smokes weed that they buy from this handsome cool rebel bad boy named Hunter Strawberry (Alex Roe, SNIPER: LEGACY). He seems intimidating until one day Daniel is working at a convenience store and Hunter comes in and has him hide a stash from a cop, so they become unlikely friends and then Daniel starts working for him.

The teens of Cape Cod go to the drive-in often. We see on the sign that NAKED GUN 2 1/2 and THE ROCKETEER are playing. I admit I enjoyed the narrator mentioning that something happened the same day T2 came out, and later they go see to it repeatedly. One day when Daniel is at the drive-in by himself he sees the town’s hottest girl McKayla (Maika Monroe, THE GUEST, IT FOLLOWS, INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE) get mad at her date and then get into his car. He drives her home, sort of makes her laugh, and becomes obsessed with her, which is a town pastime according to the narrator, who describes boys stealing her panties and chewing her discarded gum. For Daniel the courtship goes well other than he finds out she’s Hunter’s sister and Hunter forbids him from dating her (I’ve told you how brothers are in movies) and she refuses to talk to Hunter because she thinks his drug dealing killed their mom.

There’s the forbidden romance story and there’s the rise and fall of a criminal story and also there’s a hurricane and a car wreck coming, as teased in a flash forward opening. They’re forced to work for a more dangerous criminal named Dex (Emory Cohen, REBEL RIDGE), and are intimidated by a menacing cop (Thomas Jane, BEFORE I WAKE), especially after Hunter starts dating his good girl daughter (Maia Mitchell, TEEN BEACH MOVIE). Jack Kesy (Hellboy in HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN) has one scene as a rival drug dealer named Ponytail, who does not have a ponytail. William Fichtner is in a BOOGIE NIGHTS inspired scene where Daniel nervously sits in his living room for a cocaine deal. There’s a topless lady playing piano and a weird shirtless guy sitting on the couch next to him and Fichtner’s wearing shorts and a t-shirt and has bedhead and Daniel’s wearing a Jesse Jackson ’88 hat.

The narration isn’t too heavy in the middle, but when it’s there I think it’s a little much. I can mostly get past the cuteness of the story being told by a character who only has one tiny connection to the story revealed at the end; I have a harder time getting past it being a kid. He’s a good actor, and that makes it worse, because he sounds so sincere trying to sound all-knowing when he’s trying to do GOODFELLAS, and when he slows down to denote heaviness when he switches to STAND BY ME. That movie was an adult looking back on an event from his childhood after learning that one of his old friends was killed. This is, like, a 13 year old kid making declarations like ”he was never seen again” and “some say” such and such but “others will tell you” this other thing but this is what I have come to believe… Kid, your voice hasn’t changed yet, this had to have been like six months ago, why are you acting like you wrote the definitive volume on what happened with two pot dealers in Cape Cod and how it changed you forever? It’s too much for me. Disbelief not suspended.

I think Bynum does well with the directing, even though he’d never even done a short before, he leveraged the job by having written the script and getting it on the 2013 Black List (also that year: A MONSTER CALLS, FAULTS, AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE, SPOTLIGHT, AMERICAN SNIPER, THE END OF THE TOUR, PAN, and another one by Bynum called MISSISSIPPI MUD, so far unproduced). He’s only done one more so far, but it was MAGAZINE DREAMS, the bodybuilder movie that was well reviewed when it played Sundance in January of 2023, then got dropped by the distributor after its star Jonathan Majors was accused of assaulting his girlfriend. (It’s supposedly coming out this March.)

I’ve always felt Chalamet was a good actor, and this is no exception. He only uses a little of his humor, but he’s a lanky quiet nerd empowered by proximity to Hunter and the success of his criminal activity, getting greedy and overplaying his hand. I never would’ve guessed the kid would be playing Bob Dylan less than a decade later, but there are parallels here. Hunter could be Pete Seger I guess, the popular successful guy who meets a talented new kid and takes him under his wing to follow his dream but then the kid gets bigger than him and starts going in directions he doesn’t feel comfortable with. When Daniel wants to start dealing coke that’s his version of going electric. And his stupid choice to lie to Hunter about dating McKayla and to McKayla about dealing drugs is an example of his secretiveness and the lack of honesty that dooms his relationships. It’s pretty much the same movie I guess. Also Johnny Cash is mentioned. It was all foretold here, we just weren’t ready to read the signs.