Tag Archives: Lili Taylor

207. ARIZONA DREAM (1993)

“Hollywood bureaucracy has been established precisely to prevent films like this from being made.”– Roger Ebert on Arizona Dream

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, , Faye Dunaway, , Jerry Lewis

PLOT: Axel, a fish-tagger in New York City, dreams of an Eskimo boy who finds a fish with both eyes on one side of its head. His old friend Paul, an aspiring actor, visits him and tricks him into returning to his childhood home in Arizona to attend the wedding of his uncle, a Cadillac dealer, who wants Axel to join the family business. Axel decides not to return to his old life when he becomes romantically entangled with an emotionally unstable older woman and her suicidal stepdaughter.

Still from Arizona Dream (1993)
BACKGROUND:

  • This was Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s first (and so far, only) American film. For some reason, Warner Brothers threw gobs of money at a Yugoslavian director known for his surreal political art films, then was surprised when the result wasn’t a typical romantic comedy. The film was completed in 1991 but Warner sat on the property, not releasing it in the US until 1994, after a successful European run. Warner also cut 20 minutes from the film so that it would come in under 120 minutes. Kusturica and Hollywood did not make a good match, as both parties would surely agree.
  • A 12-minute final sequence that featured Uncle Leo (Jerry Lewis) flying to Earth from the moon in a Cadillac was cut from the film.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Clearly, as every film poster and DVD cover for the film demonstrates, the halibut swimming through the desert air past a Saguaro cactus is the movie’s unforgettable bit. Kusturica himself agrees: “Isn’t this image of a fish swimming in a deserted architecture… the image of what we are? Dumb fishes, unable to do anything essential for their existence…”

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Eskimo dreams; floating fish; pantyhose suicide

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: With intrusions of magical realism and cod-philosophizing by a cast of fish-counting dreamers, madwomen who dream of flying, and suicidal turtle-loving accordion players, Arizona Dream plays out like a European attempt to make a Coen brothers comedy. It’s quirkiness magnified to a metaphysical level.


French trailer for Arizona Dream

COMMENTS: Gently floating by, Arizona Dream winds up nowhere in Continue reading 207. ARIZONA DREAM (1993)

LIST CANDIDATE: THE ADDICTION (1995)

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DIRECTED BY: Abel Ferrara

FEATURING: Lili Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco

PLOT: An NYU grad student is bitten on the neck one night, leading her down a rabbit hole of moral and physical degradation.

Still from The Addiction (1995)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The Addiction strips away the clichés from the vampire formula, replacing bats and theatrics with a personal disintegration reminiscent of Repulsion.  What it lacks in weird imagery is more than made up for by its melding of Sartre, heroin addiction, and the supernatural, as well as the eerie atmosphere established by its chiaroscuro photography.

COMMENTS:  Throughout his career, Abel Ferrara has made New York-centric films with a grindhouse flavor and an aspiration to artistry.  In Ms. 45 (1981), he took on the rape-revenge film; with Bad Lieutenant (1992), he made a Scorsese-esque crime drama.  Similarly, The Addiction is a one-of-a-kind vampire movie, marrying urban realism, graphic horror, and several films’ worth of existentialist banter.  Although the latter attribute occasionally renders the film inaccessible, it also grants the characters’ neck-biting intrigues an unexpected gravity while making Ferrara’s serious cinematic intentions very clear.  This is The Hunger for the smart set.

I Shot Andy Warhol star Lili Taylor plays Kathy, who’s en route to getting her Ph.D. in philosophy when a late-night run-in with a mysterious seductress (Sciorra) leaves a bloody gash on her neck and spurs a metamorphosis from mousy student to loud-mouthed blood junkie. In a series of violent encounters, Kathy’s newfound aggression (coupled with severe photosensitivity) spreads like a virus to her friends, professors, and even the strangers who harass her on the street. Late in the film, she meets an elder vampire named Peina (Walken) who teaches her to control her addiction while quoting William S. Burroughs and Charles Baudelaire; the ending that follows is puzzling but weirdly suggestive, as orgiastic indulgence and Catholic guilt come into play.

The Addiction is shot in high-contrast black and white, bringing expressionistic shadows in conflict with a tendency toward naturalism, especially as Ferrara’s camera prowls the classrooms and hallways of NYU. Taylor gives a stand-out performance as a woman rotting from the inside out, matched by her poetically hard-boiled voiceover. When she enters a university library, for example, she growls, “The smell here’s worse than a charnel house.” These lurid monologues color our perceptions of Ferrara’s New York like the saxophones in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Taxi Driver, drawing us deep into Kathy’s dissipation. And Walken, as usual, is the voice of demented authority, cavorting around Kathy’s exhausted body with his slicked-back hair and daffy energy. He’s only in one scene, but he casts a long shadow across the preceding film.

At times, The Addiction teeters dangerously close to being unforgivably pretentious; it’s packed wall-to-wall with philosophical jargon, grandiose statements about hell and morality, and vampiric metaphors for sex, drugs, and genocide. But the film’s saved by its (and Taylor’s) sheer conviction that something intelligent and well thought-out is being said. Even when the film’s open-ended chronology and its abstract conception of vampirism threaten to make the plot totally incomprehensible, you can hold onto Ferrara’s sincere interest in spiritual redemption and moral culpability. In the end, this thematic integrity, when brought out through Taylor’s uncompromising performance, blasts away any doubts: this is a totally different species of vampire movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this is one wild, weird, wired movie, the kind that really shouldn’t be seen before midnight… Scary, funny, magnificently risible, this could be the most pretentious B-movie ever – and I mean that as a compliment.”–Time Out London