Tag Archives: Meg Ryan

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (1990)

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: John Patrick Shanley

FEATURING: , , ,

PLOT: A terminally-ill sales executive quits his dreary job and agrees to jump into a volcano.

Still from Joe vs. the Volcano (1990)

COMMENTS: What makes a man give up a career as a firefighter—enthusiastic, feeling good all the time, and casually courageous—to become an administrative drone at the worst factory this side of Staten Island? Apparently it’s three-hundred dollars a week. That’s small change for getting your spirit crushed eight hours a day: working under a foul-tempered boss, drinking arsenic coffee, and feeling your brain fry as you soak up the rays of droning fluorescent lights.

And what makes a man throw everything away and opt to willingly toss himself into a volcano?

This second question makes up the bulk of John Patrick Shanley’s directorial debut, Joe Versus the Volcano. (Which, for the longest time, was the famed screenwriters only directorial outing.) Shanley is at his peak picaresque powers, impressively avoiding the “cutesy trap” as he maneuvers his charming leads—and guest actors—through a well-paced, well-plotted, well-shot adventure, toward a seemingly inevitable end. Indeed, there’s so much buoyancy in the cast and tone that the semi-demi-hemi-twist of fate ends up being, in hindsight, the only viable fate for our passive hero.

Odd and awful, Hedaya steals his ten minutes as a supervisor; despite half his lines being over the telephone—and half of those lines being “I didn’t say that!” Comedy stalwart Lloyd Bridges swans in as a rogue fairy godmother, belittling Joe and his apartment before offering the improbable plot hook, just after opening a canister of salted peanuts and emptying them on the coffee table. And thrice-credited Meg Ryan delights as the three women Joe pursues (well, ends up in the vicinity of by mere happenstance…), showing a playful versatility which mirrors the trajectory of Joe’s self awareness.

Joe Versus the Volcano does more than immolate us in a firewall of charm. Joe’s job at “Parascope” (famed both for its rectal probes and impressive petroleum jelly sales) is a Dantean combination of German Expressionism and grime. The jagged pathway to the godawful factory (which mimicks Parascope’s trade logo while bringing to mind Caligarian sets) delivers us, from the start, into the blurry, grit-sheened hell of industrial living. We meet Joe here, and Joe needs must be Hanks. We need to like this loser, who has fallen from grace (or whatever echelon former-firefighters fall from). His performance is a charismatic variation of Ryan O’Neal’s turn as Barry Lyndon. But whereas O’Neal’s Lyndon was mired in a cynically reactive worldview, Hanks’ Joe is capable of awe and appreciation—which is why Shanley’s fluffy romcom works so well, and why we end up heartily rooting for Joe to overcome the looming trial-by-magma.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gradually during the opening scenes of Joe Versus the Volcano, my heart began to quicken, until finally I realized a wondrous thing: I had not seen this movie before… Hanks and Ryan … inhabit the logic of this bizarre world and play by its rules. ” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

Joe Versus the Volcano [Blu-ray]

Joe Versus the Volcano [Blu-ray]
  • Polish Release, cover may contain Polish text/markings. The disk has English audio.
Check Price
Capsules

CAPSULE: THE DOORS (1991)

2 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Kathleen Quinlan

PLOT: In the 1960’s, Jim Morrison (Kilmer), the lead singer of the rock group The Doors, plunges headlong into the world of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. He doesn’t make it out alive, dying at the tragically young age of 27 (just like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin); the film ends on a shot of Morrison’s gravestone in Paris in the same cemetery as Chopin, Bizet and Oscar Wilde.

Still from The Doors (1991)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Just because a movie features a large number of hallucinatory LSD “trips” doesn’t necessarily make it weird.

COMMENTS: No one does overblown insanity like Oscar-winning writer-director Oliver Stone (Platoon, Any Given Sunday). On a huge movie theater screen, with huge movie theater sound, The Doors was a stunning, overwhelming experience—particularly the concert sequences, which Stone said were inspired by the orgy scene in DeMille’s Ten Commandments. But on television—even a big screen HDTV—all that spectacle is reduced to an entertainingly silly and pretentious camp exercise, redeemed by one unforgettable performance by Val Kilmer that almost alone makes the film worth seeing. Although Kilmer essentially reduces Morrison to a caricature (he never seems to be sober), he looks and sounds so much like the real thing that it’s eerie. How Kilmer didn’t get at least an Oscar nomination for this is beyond me. He blows everyone else off the screen (with the arguable exception of , perfectly cast in a cameo as ). Meg Ryan fights her girl-next-door-image as Morrison’s doomed lover Pamela Courson, and Kyle MacLachlan, Kevin Dillon and Frank Whaley have nothing to do but a slow burn as “The Lizard King”’s increasingly frustrated bandmates. Morrison is increasingly haunted by visions of his own death, the ghost of Dionysus (or something), and an elderly Native American man (Floyd Red Crow Westerman); as everyone on screen descends deeper into drugs and despair (Morrison and Courson each try to kill each other), the movie spins so far out of control it almost ventures into territory. The result is that nearly everyone in the film comes off as seriously unlikable. Morrison seems to believe he deserves to be buried with Balzac, Proust and Moliere–which he ultimately was—from frame one. That being said, some of us like silly and pretentious spectacle, so, if you are one of those, try to see this film on the biggest possible screen and the best sound system around. This would at least attempt to do justice to the Doors’ legendary music and Robert Richardson’s staggering cinematography.

Stone’s 141-minute wallow in hysterical excess and bombast is nutty and ultimately exhausting, but far from weird, particularly when it comes to movies about drugs and/or rock music.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What’s most peculiar about the film is Stone’s attitude toward his hero. He’s indulging in hagiography, but of a very weird sort. A good part of the film is dedicated to demonstrating what a drunken, boring lout Morrison was. But while on the one hand Stone acknowledges how basically pointless and destructive his excesses became, on the other, he keeps implying that it’s all part of the creative process… Amid all this trippy incoherence, the performances are almost irrelevant.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

The Doors [Blu-ray + Digital HD]

The Doors [Blu-ray + Digital HD]
  • The disk has English audio.
Check Price