Tag: frank stallone

Stephen Kay’s Get Carter

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

As far as the remaking of cult classics, Stephen Kay’s Get Carter is a piss poor effort, so much so that not even a positively stacked cast could do much of anything about it. The original saw fearsome bulldog Michael Caine getting shotgun fuelled revenge and has since become iconic, while this one switches up rainy Britain for rainy Seattle and a sedated Sylvester Stallone in a shiny suit takes over as Carter, a mob enforcer who hails from Vegas but has travelled north both to escape scandal and look into a shady family matter. There he finds all sorts of characters played by a troupe of big names, character actors and even Caine himself in an extended cameo as a bar owner, but it all feels lazy, listless and flung about like a ball of yarn full of loose plot threads and scenes that fizzle. It’s obvious that there were major editing problems here as the pacing is in conniptions and an entire subplot involving a love interest back in Vegas (Gretchen Mol) has been slashed to ribbons. So sloppy was the final product that my college acting teacher, who landed the role of Carter’s gangster boss back in Vegas, although mentioned brazenly in the opening credits, can only be seen briefly from the neck down and heard on the phone, except for whatever reason they decided to dub his voice over with an uncredited Tom Sizemore, which is just so bizarre. Anywho, Stallone sleepwalks his way through a local conspiracy involving his dead brother, the widow (Rachel Leigh Cook), a mysterious femme fatale (Rhona Mitra), a weaselly computer tycoon (Alan Cumming) a sleazy pimp/porn baron (Mickey Rourke) and more. It’s just all so terminally boring though, and none of the clues or twists spring to life or feel organic at all. Rourke provides some of the only life the film has to offer as the villain, a guttural scumbag who has two painful looking nightclub boxing beatdowns with Stallone which are fun. John C. McGinley raises the pulse somewhat as a lively Vegas thug dispatched by Sizemore’s voice to bring Stallone back to face the music. Others show up including Miranda Richardson, Mark Boone Jr., John Cassini, Johnny Strong, Frank Stallone, Tyler Labine and more. None of it amounts to much though and by the time the anticlimactic plot resolutions arrive and Carter jumps a red eye back to Vegas before the credits roll, you wonder what the point of it all was and want your hour and forty minutes back. A thorough bummer.

-Nate Hill

Charles Bukowski’s Barfly

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Charles Bukowski’s Barfly requires a specific thing of it’s audience: emphatically try to observe a very particular brand of life, that of the binge drinking drifter in 1970’s LA basin area. If you can do this, it’s a brilliant piece of work to enjoy, and if you can’t, it’ll be an abrasively off-putting slog to sit through. I fell smartly into the former category as the subject matter came.. vaguely close to hitting home, and because it’s just a fantastic movie in itself. Mickey Rourke was at the top of game during the 80’s, and this is one glowing gem of a role for him, one that shows a vulnerable, less macho dipped side of the man no less. Playing a restless, shambling gutter-snipe named Henry Chinaski, he careens through the film consuming any booze he can get his hands on, barely maintaining already dysfunctional relationships and haunting his derelict apartment, as well as that of a fellow rummy he meets in the form of excellent Faye Dunaway, looking equal parts haggard and angelic until we’re not sure what we’re looking at. Chinaski is of course supposed to be Bukowski himself, as the film and it’s fiery script are autobiographical in nature, based on the willfully misanthropic writer’s hazy adventures in backwoods Hollywood during that era. Approached by a publisher (beautiful, articulate Alice Krige, who replaced Helen Hunt) with stars in her eyes for the man and his work, Chinaski gets a taste of life on the other side of the tracks, albeit briefly, an interlude he describes as ‘a cage with golden bars.’ The dives along those strips are his home right to the core, and he’s proud of it. The film is episodic, elliptical and open ended, a glimpse through the window of what it must be like for these people for a time, as the camera lovingly follows them about their ways for a while like a fly on the wall, then loses interest, buzzes off and leaves them in peace without rhyme, reason or resolution, unless of course your sensibilities jive with the meandering, barely sculpted story structure, which I loved. The film has little interest in aesthetics or pleasantries either, showing ugly, mottled alcoholics and layabouts who fill the frames around Rourke and Dunaway like brittle garden gnomes adorning the bar, a far cry from the fresh, powdered faces we’re used to in Hollywood. “Don’t you hate people?” Dunaway laments to him in one scene. “No, but I seem to feel better when they’re not around..” he croons back. It’s that kind of stinging poetry that gives this film, and Bukowski’s career, such lasting weight. Not to be missed.

-Nate Hill

Forgotten gems:  Remembering 1988’s hypnotic, bizarre Heart Of Midnight 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


Somewhere between the dustbowl basilicas of 1980’s VHS town and the restless urban decay of metropolitan Americana lies the Heart Of Midnight, a dilapidated abandoned sex fetish nightclub full of nightmarish corridors, dead end rooms with ominous stains on the wall and a perpetual sense of acrid dread. Jennifer Jason Leigh is the reluctant heir to this heap, passed on to her by a weird old uncle she barely remembers, now deceased. It’s in a ruined, crime ridden part of town that still seems safer compared to the various themed rooms of this erotica dungeon, but she’s a trooper anyways, giving her best efforts to fix the place up and make something decent of it. Leigh seems to have deliberately go out of her way to pick kinky, controversial roles since her career began, always with sexual undertones and never short on psychological turmoil. She’s put through a wringer here, as the sordid, perverse and highly disturbing history of both the club and her uncle comes back to haunt her in full sleazy swing, a turn of events not for the squeamish or puritan side of the crowd. Walls seem to move, eyes peer through cracks and haunted cries echo through the fissures in the structure, as well as howling bad dreams that distort her reality. When a detective (Peter Coyote, brilliant work) shows up to help, he’s just as unsettling and shady as the building itself, clearly in the know or up to something. The only borderline sane character is another cop played by Frank Stallone, getting some of the best much needed comic relief of the piece. It’s priceless to see Leigh wander into the police station looking for answers only to find him in the middle of a ukulele folk ballad with the rest of the precinct belting out the chorus. Things don’t go very well for our heroine, as the dark forces playing with her seem to close in for a suffocating finale that leaves you feeling violated and disoriented. This is a film that seeps right to the root of human unpleasantness and psychosexual decadence, and one should firmly equip oneself mentally before going in. It’s also a film of startling dark beauty and alluring atmosphere, like a dreamy black velvet orchid that warbles a lullaby both dangerous and seductive, beckoning you to let your guard down until you wish you hadn’t, and are under it’s spell. One of the most overlooked mood pieces of the 80’s, a gorgeously horrific phantasm of a film that gets under your skin and crawls into your dreams.