Tag: mimi rogers

Hider In The House

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Hider In The House is pretty much your average ‘unhinged loner stalking a suburban American family’ thriller, and the psycho in question is played by Gary Busey, which seems like your perfect setup for a maniacal ride. However, this film presents its antagonist as a surprisingly sympathetic individual who was abused viciously for year by his own parents until he finally had it and burned the house down around them. Fair enough. Upon being released from psychiatric care and a halfway house as an adult he decides to take up residence in the attic of an empty house, just to see what normal life feels like. Well the house doesn’t stay empty for long as a yuppie couple (Mimi Rogers and Michael McKean) prepare to move in. Busey just keeps on living up there and eventually insinuates him self into their lives under the guise of a ‘neighbour,’ eventually becoming downright disturbed, menacing and dangerous. The film is pretty relaxed as far as thrillers like this go, it takes a while to amp up to anything resembling tension and Busey, given the perfect runway to cut loose and turn in one of his patented loony performances, chooses instead to almost entirely rein it in except when the situation legit calls for a touch of hysteria. It’s decent enough and I’ll pretty much watch the guy in anything, he’s just got such a presence, but this is low budget, melodramatic silliness no matter how you slice it.

-Nate Hill

Tod Williams’s The Door In The Floor

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

We don’t get enough widely released films that show how blunt, frank and confusing life can be. Every day is another hilarious tragedy wrapped in unpredictable instances of comedy, enigmatic human behaviour that can’t possibly stick to script and complexities that defy explanation. Tod Williams’s The Door In The Floor is a criminally underrated masterpiece that sort of defies description in the sense that it’s about nothing other than the lives of several people over the course of one New England summer, and what that entails. Is there sadness? You could say that. Is there comedy? Briefly, yes. It’s tough cinema, a film that deals in truths, but they are hard truths, half truths and hidden truths, ambassadors of the film’s slogan on the poster: ‘The most dangerous secrets are the ones we’re afraid to tell ourselves.’ Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger give the best work of their careers as Ted and Marion Cole, a couple haunted by the worst kind of tragedy, both unable to move on in their own way. Ted is a passive aggressive, alcoholic manipulator, Marion is an emotionally shut off shell. These are two people who in another film would absolutely have not been sympathetic characters. Not here. Ted hires sixteen year old college kid Eddie (Jon Foster) as his assistant for the summer, mainly because he lost his driver’s license. Truthfully, he does this on purpose for reasons I won’t impart here, but soon the boy and Marion are having a torrid affair with sex scenes the film doesn’t gloss over, glance away or back down from. The eerie thing is watching how the passage of time has traumatized two people not only to the point where they have become their worst selves, but also are completely unable to recover or continue on with their lives properly anymore. What’s worse, they have a four year old daughter (Elle Fanning, brilliant in an early role) who is swept up in this storm of malcontent, bitterness and broken lives. It’s not easy to watch but it never gets overly sentimental or cheats you by drip feeding emotional work that it itself hasn’t worked for or earned, there’s a naturalistic way these events play out that had me full well believing this was real, and investing everything I had into these characters. Bridges is fucking devastating here in what has to be his finest and most overlooked performance. Ted is a children’s writer (“I’m an entertainer of children, and I like to draw”) who injects pain into his work, a petty egotist whose light for life is slowly dimming. Basinger too brings us her best, she’s uncomfortably opaque yet somehow sweet and soulful, Marion is a seemingly unforgivable character that we come to feel for despite her actions, like a fallen angel. Foster is a find, it’s interesting because his brother Ben, now something of a star, was originally casted but purposefully relinquished the role to his brother as he thought him better suited. Intuitive move because he nails the roiling hormones and confused pining of adolescence to a T while still somehow appearing astute beyond his years. The supporting cast is fleshed out by great work from Mimi Rogers, Bijou Phillips, Louis Arcella and an adorable cameo from Donna Murphy, but really it’s the Bridges and Basinger show. The New England setting is a beautiful misty coastline dotted with vast country estates and windy bluffs, a picturesque yet oddly mournful locale for this tale to play out, inhabited by Marcelo Zarvos’s score that captures the grief and suffering without obviously highlighting it. David Lynch once noted in his autobiography that when approaching a character in writing, directing or performance, it’s important to remember that a person is not all one thing, there’s a multitude of emotions, feelings and impulses at play simultaneously and this results in confusing, contradictory, often self degrading and destructive behaviour that we aren’t meant to understand, but is there for us to see all the same. Williams and his actors keep that squarely in mind here and work to create human beings that feel like people in the real world, imperfections and all. I would tell you to bring a box of tissues but this isn’t the type of drama that elicits tears in an obvious way, but rather slowly, steadily and without a predictable blueprint, but bring that box anyway. Can’t recommend this highly enough.

-Nate Hill

Roger Donaldson’s White Sands

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Somewhere out there in the gypsum dunes of New Mexico there’s White Sands, a long lost, slightly unfinished yet captivating neo-noir about small town law enforcement, big time gun runners and everyone else who gets caught up in between. Willem Dafoe is Ray, a bored rural sheriff who sees a way out of the dusty hum drum when an apparent smuggler turns up dead on his watch out there in the national park, prompting him to steal the guy’s identity and dive headlong into the illicit arms business with no real crash course or idea of what he’s doing. A risky move that propels the film down an exciting, sexy, ambient journey of untrustworthy alliances, atmospheric shootouts and a dangerously charming Mickey Rourke as Lennox, the kind of reptilian criminal who’s so good at seducing you into the lifestyle that you don’t realize you’re in the snake pit until it’s almost too late. Dafoe and Rourke have shared the screen aplenty before and while my favourite team up has to be their cartel duo in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon A Time In Mexico, this film certainly takes second place honours. They just work so well on camera together, a shaky bromance built on Ray’s deception and Lennox’s unpredictable penchant for violence that proves electric as the narrative weaves around them. The always phenomenal Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio plays an underworld connection who Ray unwisely gets steamy with in probably one of the hottest sex scenes of the 90’s and a complete false advertisement for the success rate of getting it on in the shower. Samuel L. Jackson has a fantastic early career villain role as the kind of corrupt FBI agent in whom it’s very unwise to place trust, and watch for others including the great Maura Tierney, M. Emmett Walsh, James Rebhorn, Beth Grant, Miguel Sandoval, Jack Kehler, Mimi Rogers and a sneaky unbilled double cameo from Fred Dalton Thompson and the inimitable John P. Ryan as slick arms dealers. The setting of White Sands park plays such a role in atmosphere here; the ghostly sight of white sand dunes brings about the thought that something is out of place, rare in nature and the same can be said for Dafoe’s affable sheriff thrown into a mixing pot of big city psychos and genuine menace, a fish out of water shtick that pulls you in the more accustomed to this netherworld the man gets. How about that knockout original score from Patrick O’Hearn too, who only composed for a handful of things since, it’s a hazy, melodic set that suggests both the beauty and danger lurking out there in the Sands, especially in the simmering climax where several characters meet poetically grisly fates. I do have a few minor issues with this film, it could have been at least fifteen minutes longer and rounded out the epilogue with Dafoe’s arc clearer, it almost feels like there’s a missing reel or some editing glitch that marred the final product just a tad, but it doesn’t hurt the film too much overall. This is a lost classic for me, a gorgeously specific film noir with some of my favourite actors giving some of their most fun, playful work, the aforementioned score and some cinematography that won’t quit. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Michael Cimino’s Desperate Hours: A Review by Nate Hill 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Michael Cimino’s Desperate Hours, despite only really being a servicable home invasion/hostage thriller, still has a lot of fun with it’s two leads, brash sociopath Mickey Rourke and even brasher estranged family man Anthony Hopkins. Based on a creaky old Humphrey Bogart film, Cimino obviously vamps up the violence and eroticism that simmers beneath it quite a bit, and when you have Rourke as your antagonist you know it’s not going to be anywhere near a relaxed affair. He plays Michael Bosworth,  a dangerous felon on the run with two other goons, his volatile brother (Elias Koteas) and another creepy lowlife (David Morse). He crashes into the home life of Tim Cornell (Anthony Hopkins) a boorish father visiting his wife (Mimi Rogers) and children. The film mainly takes place inside the house, as the creep factor rises along with the threat of blaring violence which we know will come, made all the more likely by the growing police presence outdoors, and the tensions of everyone involved, threatening to snap at any moment. Rourke walks a tightrope between amiable and unstable, a man sure of himself, who always gets his way, and is capable of bad, bad things if he feels he won’t. Hopkins plays Cornell as a man used to being in control, but his inability to hold his family together is made worse by the gang’s arrival, rubbing salt in an already festering wound. Cimino has a brawny style to his violence, a trademark that’s seemingly born of both De Palma and Peckinpah, rich bloody gun battles and accentuated slow motion death scenes. Most of the film is held back, but the flood gates do eventually open and action hounds will get what they came for. Watch for Lindsay Crouse, Kelly Lynch, Shawnee Smith, James Rebhorn and Dean Norris as well. Not groundbreaking in the least as far as thrillers are concerned, but still an entertaining little piece made memorable by Rourke and Cimino’s ever interesting pairing. 

B Movie Glory with Nate: Wedlock

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

  

Wedlock is one of those shamelessly trashy B-movie romps that the 80’s proudly churned out in droves for our viewing pleasure. Some are shitty and enjoyable, some are just shitty, and some are solid gems, provided you’ve been schooled a bit in this particular, acquired taste of an arena. I spent a lot of my teenage years being a scholar in this sort of lovable junk, so I have plenty of ancient data in my mental hard drive to dust off for the old blog-ski. Rutger made quite a few ventures into this field (come to think of it most of my favourite actors have. Wonder what that says about my taste lol). He’s got genre written all over his acting style, and loves to play broad characters in stylized fare. Here he plays Frank Warren, an amiable jewel thief who is betrayed in an opening sequence heist by his dodgy partner Sam (James Remar), and rowdy girlfriend Noelle (Josie Packard- I mean Joan Chen). He’s sent to an amusingly ‘futuristic’ penitentiary where they implement prisoners with a unique system: each prisoner is fitted with a collar, each collar has a twin collar, and if the two get several miles apart, both detonate rigged explosives and messily decapitate the pair of unlucky inmates. They are not aware who has their twin collar, making escape a risky notion indeed. It’s exactly the type of high concept buffoonery that trademarks these type of outings, and it’s played for both suspense and laughs very nicely. Frank escapes, dragging along the woman who wears the twin collar (Mimi Rogers), pursued hotly by Sam and Noelle who want to find the diamonds that he hid shortly before his arrest. It’s a prison flick, it’s a chase flick, with its own kooky, offbeat sense of style. Hauer is usually so intense he looks like he’s gonna implode in on himself, but here he gives a very laid back, slight and funny performance, which gives the film it’s refreshingly upbeat feel. Remar and Chen are bouncing balls of energy as the dastardly couple out to ice Frank, riffing off each other and cheerfully chewing scenery. Watch out for an early career appearance from Danny Trejo, as well as work from Glenn Plummer and Stepehn Tobolowsky as a hard ass warden who gets the best line of the film: “You non-conformists are all the same”. That alone encapsulates the irreverent, tongue in cheek tone that’s a nice switch from the usually dank, oppressive atmosphere that second tier action flicks often get saddled with. Oh, and I want the number of Hauer’s wardrobe outfitter; those fluffy, technicolor wool sweaters are a sideshow unto themselves.