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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: U-TURN (1997)

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FEATURING: , , , , ,

PLOT: Bobby Cooper, a man missing two fingers and toting a suitcase full of money, gets stuck in a ramshackle desert community while fleeing mobsters.

Still from U-Turn (1997)

COMMENTS: About half a dozen times over the first third of U Turn, different people ask Bobby (Penn) what happened to his hand and then, upon hearing his repeated refrain of “an accident,” respond with the sage advice: “You should be more careful!” Bobby is indeed living the life of a careless man, as mobsters cut off two of his fingers after growing impatient with his failure to pay his debts. He’s now on the lam with a suitcase full of the mob’s money and a Ford Mustang. When he blows a radiator hose, he lands in the tiny desert town of Superior, Arizona.

Woe betide Bobby, who enters Superior like a mouse tossed into a rattlesnake terrarium. First, he’s ripped off by the town mechanic Darrell (Billy Bob Thornton as a bafflingly self-assured whacko who’s just bright enough to run a scam, but not a watt brighter). Then he loses his case of money in a store robbery. Next he follows local femme fatale Grace McKenna (Lopez) home and gets seduced right out of the shower, only to get punched by her husband, Jake (Nick Nolte), who makes things up to Bobby with a business proposal: help him kill his wife. (No worries, she’ll immediately flip the script.) But are Jake and Grace really lethal rivals trapped in a toxic marriage, or sadomasochist sickos who trick strangers into their badger games? How about the rest of the town, bristling with testy characters who want to start a fight with Bobby, or at least make him miserable? Sheriff Potter (lantern-jawed Boothe, sporting a five-thirty shadow) seems always on the verge of either saving Bobby from peril or locking him up, but one thing’s for sure: he knows more than he lets on.

What unfolds from all this is a pile-up of schemes and counter-schemes with Bobby trying (and mostly failing) to dodge incoming shots. All he wants is to get out of Superior in the worst way, yet an almost supernatural streak of bad luck thwarts him. The plot dutifully veers down a new hairpin twist every twenty minutes or so,  with a pacing that suggests on a Palm Springs vacation. The eccentric characters of Superior prompt Bobby to exclaim, “Is everybody in this town on drugs?” A blind old beggar (Voight) who panhandles on main street becomes Bobby’s personal Jiminy Cricket, offering him half-mad advice culled from a very rugged life. Can Bobby maneuver his way through this thorny desert maze of scheming reptiles and escape?

This is one well-crafted movie with memorable lines and characters, a sure treat for noir fans. Stone occasionally slips into a bit of cartoonish editing, but dwells longingly on the captivating desert scenery. The camera intermittently cuts to shots of vultures, snakes, coyotes, scorpions, and other deadly desert predators, drawing clear comparisons to Superior’s citizens. As a former southwest desert dweller myself, your humble author can verify that U-Turn perfectly gets small-town life there: the run-down businesses, the eccentric oddballs, the harsh environment, and the philosophy that you’d better have a good survival strategy or you have no business being here. The cast does an outstanding job all around. Penn is perfect as Bobby, because he’s a bit of an asshole anyway—so you don’t feel much sympathy for his plight, allowing the film to linger in comedy territory.

U-Turn had a budget of $19 million (clearly going to its all-star cast) and only made $6.6 million, a complete flop. That’s a shame, because it’s well-done and Stone obviously poured love into it. But this is a very lightweight, almost fluffy work, with the whole film amounting to little more than a shaggy dog story (albeit one with a body count). Some fans might compare it to a southwestern version of After Hours. But that’s the one problem with U-Turn: it feels like filler between bigger and better films. It’s good popcorn viewing while it lasts, but hours later it rolls out of your memory like the cinematic tumbleweed that it is.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The first two thirds of U-Turn is a rude, seductive head bender. But around the time it turns from day to night, the film begins to lose its tricky aura of borderline surreal mystery. It becomes another rigged, what-will-happen-next suspense game, and you begin to sense just how arbitrary the twists are. “–Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (contemporaneous)

U:Turn

U:Turn

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MEGALOPOLIS (2024) – THREE TAKES

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Keep reading for alternate takes from Giles Edwards and El Rob Hubbard

DIRECTED BY: Francis Ford Coppola

FEATURING: Adam Driver, , Jon Voight, , , , Lawrence Fishburne

PLOT: In mythical New Rome, inventor Caesar Catalina can stop time and has invented some kind of miracle substance called “Megalon,” but demagogues and rivals scheme to ruin him.

Still from Megalopolis (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Megalopolis is a movie conjured by an 85-year old film genius that feels like it could have been made by a fresh film school graduate, if someone had given the kid $120 million dollars and tasked him with making an Important Statement. And I mean this all as a compliment: Coppola here is as brash, fearless, ambitious, and pot-dazzled as a twenty-four-year old tyro with stars in his eyes. Acting your age is for politicians, not filmmakers. The resulting movie is a bizarre mashup of Titus (1999), Southland Tales (2006), and Metropolis (1927), and if the entire city of New Rome constantly glows with a golden hue, it’s because the movie’s bananas.

GREGORY J. SMALLEY COMMENTS: Francis Ford Coppola conceived of the idea for Megalopolis as early as 1977, so you would think he would have had some of it plotted out already when it came time to sell his winery and finance the film in 2019. But, by all appearances, he decided to throw away whatever notes he had made in the previous decades and just wing it. The movie is plotted like a Shakespearean epic—when it’s plotted at all. The basic idea is that America today is a lot like Rome as it neared the end of the Republic and slid into the grandest despotism the world had ever seen. The solution, in Coppola’s view? We need more dialogue, because, as Caesar says, ” when we ask these questions, when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” Also, it might help to have the unexplained ability to stop time, and to develop some new material called Megalon, which can do everything from design evening gowns for virginal pop stars to form the basic building blocks of the conveyor belts in an inner city Garden of Eden. Sounds like a job for Elon Musk—no, wait, we were shooting for a utopia.

Cesar Catilina (Driver) is some kind of hard-drinking Nobel Prize winner/architect who sleeps with socialites and reporters. Franklyn Cicero (Esposito) is the no-nonsense mayor who hates Cesar because he’s not pragmatic enough; his bright daughter Julia (Emmanuel) wants to sleep with Cesar (and support his utopian dreams). Cesar’s uncle, Crassus (Voight), is the richest man in New Rome, with all the altruistic humility that position implies. He marries entertainment reporter Wow Platinum (Plaza), who has also been sleeping with Cesar. Crassus’ son, the brilliantly named Clodio Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MEGALOPOLIS (2024) – THREE TAKES →

Canonically Weird (The List)

323. CATCH-22 (1970)

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“You’re a very weird person, Yossarian.”–General Dreedle, Catch-22

“When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”–Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

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DIRECTED BY: Mike Nichols

FEATURING: Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Jack Gilford, , , , Bob Newhart, , Paula Prentiss, , Richard Benjamin, , Charles Grodin, , Gina Rovere, Olimpia Carlisi

PLOT: The story is told out of sequence, but begins with Capt. Yossarian, an Air Force bombardier at a Mediterranean air base, being stabbed in the back by what appears to be a fellow soldier. This leads directly into the first of a recurring sequence of flashbacks where Yossarian tends to a young wounded airman in the belly of his bomber. Further flashbacks reveal a protagonist of questionable sanity in the company of equally insane flyboys, including a quartermaster who schemes with the Group commanders to create a black market syndicate that morphs into a fascist regime.

Catch-22 (1970)

BACKGROUND:

  • Joseph Heller published the absurdist comic novel “Catch-22” in 1961, based on his own experiences as a bombardier in World War II.
  • Orson Welles had attempted and failed to acquire the rights to the novel, a fact Mike Nichols was not aware of when he cast him as General Dreedle.
  • Catch-22 was Nichols’ followup to his smash hit The Graduate. He once again worked with screenwriter Buck Henry (who also played Colonel Korn here). The screenplay took two years to produce.
  • Filming (in Rome and Mexico) took more than six months to complete. Cinematographer David Watkins would only shoot the exterior scenes between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, so that the lighting would be exactly the same. This meant the cast and crew were sitting around for long periods of time with nothing to do, which led to resentment on the set.
  • Catch-22 is credited as the first American film to show a person sitting on a toilet, and the first modern Hollywood film to feature full-frontal nudity.
  • Second Unit director John Jordan plummeted to his death when he fell out of the camera plane while daring to film a flight scene without being strapped into a harness.
  • Although the film did not bomb at the box office, it was overshadowed by ‘s similar (but lighter and more realistic) M*A*S*H*.
  • George Clooney is producing a new adaptation of the novel as a six-part miniseries scheduled to air on Hulu.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The gruesome death of Hungry Joe, who’s cut in half by an airplane propeller while standing on a platform in the beautiful blue Tyrrhenian Sea.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Urine I.V.; offscreen portrait switching; friendly fire for hire

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Catch-22 was a novel of paradoxical, circular logic and inverted moral geometries. The certifiably insane Yossarian is saner than his schizoid comrades and commanders—but only because he is the only one who realizes he is crazy. The movie doesn’t soar to the heights of the book, but it creates its own weird all-star universe of moral decay and dystopian reasoning. There aren’t twenty-one other catches. One catch serves as a catchall. Catch-22. It’s the best there is.


Original trailer for Catch-22

COMMENTS: Adapting Catch-22, a novel whose building blocks are Continue reading 323. CATCH-22 (1970) →

Miscellanea

TRANSFORMERS (2007)

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“What I look for in a script is something that challenges me, something that breaks new ground, something that allows me to flex my director muscle.”–

DIRECTED BY: Michael Bay

FEATURING: , , ,

PLOT: Giant robots attack a military installation. Shia LaBeouf buys a muscle car, but it’s actually a giant robot in disguise. A team of good giant robots from outer space battle a team of bad giant robots from outer space for control of a Rubik’s Cube.

Still from Transformers (2007)
BACKGROUND:

  • The movie Transformers was so successful that it launched a toy franchise and a Saturday morning children’s show.
  • Against the studio’s wishes, director Michael Bay deleted thirty minutes of explosions from the final cut, then added an additional hour of character development. A yet-to-be-released director’s cut incorporates all the explosion footage that was shot, and runs for over four days.
  • Jon Voight was once a respected actor.
  • Shia LaBeouf is a pseudonym which roughly translates from the French as “Made-up name the beef.”
  • Within five months after receiving her paycheck for Transformers, Megan Fox declared bankruptcy. Reportedly, she spent all of the money on unlicensed Mexican plastic surgery, including $500,000 for an experimental procedure which would have installed an expression on her face.
  • Stephen “Schindler’s List” Spielberg executive produced, haters.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Oh, how about just a freakin’ awesome muscle car transforming into a bad-ass killer robot, is all.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: One of the basic tenets of Surrealism is its insistence on juxtapositions and transformations of unlikely objects. As poet Pierre Reverdy said, “the more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be — the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.” In Un Chien Andalou, we see breasts that turn into buttocks; is this any stranger or more poetic than souped-up yellow Camaros that turn into giant missile-shooting bipeds?


Original trailer for Transformers

COMMENTS: Although some snob critics disparage the work of Continue reading TRANSFORMERS (2007) →