Well you know that you have something solid, when your immediate thought is, "This is the movie I will be comparing everything else to for the rest of the year". It's already April and we have a contender for the best film of 2023. It stars Matt Damon and was directed by Ben Affleck, yea, those guys. They did not write the movie but their presence certainly gives it the vibe of their collaboration from twenty-five years ago. This is a drama, set in 1984 and it focuses on the greatest basketball player of all time with him being a practically invisible character for the story. The plot focuses on a business deal and that hardly sounds like the subject that would make a movie compelling. Also, we know the outcome before the film even starts. So how does this end up working?
First of all, you have intrigue that most of us were unaware of. Getting Michael Jordon to commit to a shoe company that had negligible impact on basketball in the time was an arduous task. The competitors were better prepared and financially able to fulfill the athletes wishes, his agent was aggressively dismissive of Nike's attempt to set up a meeting, and Michaels parents were naturally suspicious of everyone as he is making the leap to the pros. Phil Knight to founder of Nike was a successful shoe innovator but his athletic apparel di not have any cache with the basketball community at the time. What Nike did have was Sonny Vaccaro, a basketball scout for talent in the endorsement industry, who had a deeper understanding of the game than his rivals, and a better instinct about Jordan than anybody outside of his family.
Damon plays Sonny as a driven gambler with good instincts and a dogged personality. He is also not an athlete or user of Nike products. He is a middle aged guy working in a rapidly changing environment, but he is never put off by the obstacles in front of him. Damon gives him the conflicting auras of passion and hopelessness. Fortunately, he is also better able to articulate his vision than any one else. There are two great spots where he has to be persuasive, primarily on the spot. In a sequence where Sonny talks with his friend Basketball coach George Raveling, he learns that Martin Luther King Jr. extemporized the second half of the "I have a Dream Speech", and learned the lessons that you have to read the audience. When we get to the pitch that he makes to the Jordans, he does basically what King did, listen to his audience and speak to their inspirations and aspirations.
Of course the characters in the film have to be interesting to hold our attention. Vaccaro is a gas, flippantly joking about Nike's dismal reputation in the basketball field, while simultaneously projecting the conviction of his visions. Jason Bateman plays Rob Strasser, the marketing executive at Nike who wants Vaccaro to succeed but doubts his gambler's instincts. His realization that Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." is not quite the world affirming anthem he thought it was is very amusing. The two of them are great exchanging criticism, life lessons and gallows humor. Affleck plays The founder, Phil Knight, who has delusions of eastern insight, moderating his business sense. Chris Tucker is another executive with a story to tell and a personality to match Sonny when it comes to speaking enthusiastically. Once again, Viola Davis shows off her thespian chops as the gracious but steel minded mother of Michael Jordon. The phone call she has with Sonny, trying to close the deal with a set of unprecedented demands, is another standout sequence in the film.
Those of us who remember those days will recognize the production design and soundtrack of the era. There is great fidelity to the times and the sense of the world. The story is a salute to the vibrancy of an entrepreneurial attitude and the power of capitalism, combined with the right vision and direction. Everting ultimately depended on Vaccaro being right about Jordon, and we know how that turned out. This movie almost does the same thing, we'll see how it all comes out eventually.
Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy.
Mitchell
It's going to happen a few times more this year, you will get a Throwback Thursday 1975 post on a film that I have never seen before. In addition to revisiting the films of my youth, this project will plug a few holes in the watchlist I have of 1975 films. I don't remember hearing about this film back when it came out, but over the last few years there have been occasional references to it that encouraged me to toss it on the pile. That is an appropriate euphemism because this movie has thew lowest rating on IMDB for any film I have ever written about myself, a 2.7 out of 10. There are a lot of people who don't like this movie very much.
The low rating is probably a result of the film being the subject of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode back in 1993. The star of Mitchell, Joe Don Baker, took exception to the treatment given to the film by the writers and threatened to "kick their ass". I suspect that fans of this show followed up after another Baker film was mauled by the parody show, by visiting IMDB to kick Baker's ass. The movie is not very good, but it is certainly not deserving of this dismal score. Having never watched MST3K, I am going to stay out of this particular fight and just talk about the movie I watched. That may still be influenced by the TV show because the version of the movie that is available for streaming, seems to be the one edited for the show without the riff track.
"Mitchell" is a very typical cop movie from the era. A loner detective is doggedly pursing criminals that he refuses to ignore. This cop has integrity but he is also a bit of a slob and definitely not cooperative with his higher ups. There are two crimes being investigated here, one is a self defense killing that Detective Mitchell believes was actually a murder, and then there is the drug case he has been assigned to that no one wants because it involves other agencies and politically connected mafioso types. John Saxon is the sly businessman who used a burglary as cover for shooting a guy for kicks. Martin Balsam is the mid-level crime syndicate guy who doesn't want to cooperate with the family on a drug heist, but also doesn't want Mitchell to nail him.
If there is a mystery here, it is in how these two cases get connected to one another. I did not think that was clear at all. Eventually it seems that Balsam and Saxon have some business arrangement but it never becomes clear what that is. Their connection does lead to the one cool action sequence in the film, where dune buggy racers are being used to hunt down the cop and try to kill him. It is not a perfect scene but it is believable, unlike the later action scene where Mitchell uses a helicopter, dangling a large compressed gas tank, to attack a yacht and then repel down to the boat for the final confrontation. This must have been the scene that inspired the movie to be selected by the MST3K team, because it is preposterous, despite being a lot of fun.
Linda Evans plays a high priced hooker who shows up at Mitchell's door and takes him to bed, without telling him who is paying her. Their relationship never seems straight, but we are supposed to get the impression that she actually starts to go for him. Baker is not exactly matinee idol material, and his character sleeps on a fold up couch in a crummy apartment, so where the attraction comes from is never credible. She gets paid a lot of money and he will never have any. It is a little amusing that he does bust her over some minor drug possession charges and she keeps showing up anyway.
Like a lot of 70s films, there are more car chases than needed. The cop also kills a lot of people and there is never a lot of follow up, so it does sometimes feel like we are watching a TV movie rather than a feature, but remember, it is a low budget, drive-n feature, so don't expect much and don't ask too many questions. The one element of the show that has some verisimilitude, is the physical threat from Balsam's character's henchmen. Joe Don Baker is a big dude, so how could someone be intimidating and a real threat to him? By casting Rams Defensive back Merlin Olsen, who was 6'5". Olsen had made three films before this and this was his last feature before he transitioned to television both as commentator and actor. He may not have been much of a thespian, but he looked like he could take Baker, and that's about all that was expected of him.
Joe Don Baker is one of my favorite character actors of the 1970s. He was in "Junior Bonner", "Walking Tall", "Charlie Varrick", "The Outfit" and "Golden Needles, all right before this film. He continued to work but never had a streak like that again. "Mitchell" seems to be the period at the end of those hard scrabble character parts that I loved so much in that era. There is another 1975 film that he made, "Framed", that I have not seen, so maybe I will catch up with that one later this year as well.
This film was my gateway drug into the "Evil Dead" Franchise. I saw it originally on a VHS copy, but ultimately added the laserdisc to my collection of films.
Who would not want this blood red beauty in among all the other film flotsam that makes up your collection? I have subsequently seen it on the big screen a couple of times, but it has been a long while and when Alamo Drafthouse decides to throw a watch party, you know I am not going to turn down an invitation.
"Dead by Dawn", which is the subtitle, is such an odd sequel because it is basically a reboot of the story, not a continuation. With more money and a chance to add some humor, Sam Rami took his horror masterpiece and turned it into his horror/comedy masterpiece. There is still the requisite gore but it is matched by irony, slapstick and farce with this entry. Bruce Campbell is not only the hero, he is the chump. Tossed about like a rag doll, muttering to himself, and screaming at his own hand.
The movie is loaded with clever shots of the interior and exterior of the isolated cabin in the woods. This is in fact the franchise that basically invented the cabin in the woods horror trope. Maybe "Night of the Living Dead" featured an isolated cabin first, but "The Evil Dead" made it the origin point of the horror rather than the last stand . Evil Dead 2, begins the long history of horror films where attractive young people end up in an isolated spot and have to battle evil. The supernatural kind of evil.
In addition to the wild camera style of the director, there is an audio ambiance about the film that is also fairly distinctive. The deadites in the woods make noises like sick car engines as they converge upon the structure. The walls of the cabin creak and groan, like another character in the story. Inanimate objects that suddenly seem to be alive also make themselves known through sound. Once the chainsaw starts and the shotgun comes out, there is an assault on your audio senses that really adds to the discomfort and horror we are watching.
While there are jump cut scares, they are usually accompanied by a great makeup or lighting effect, so they are not just getting a scare out of our surprise. When Ed gets possessed, his sudden transformation is startlingly revealed, but the jump is as much due to the face appliances as his sudden appearance in the frame. We know some views from the cabin looking out are going to be suddenly filled with evil Ash, but we still respond as our minds and our bodies command.
As a "watch party", the audience was given greater freedom than is usually available at an Alamo Screening. Shouting out lines in unison with the characters was encouraged, and we came equipped with foam hand chainsaws, a mini necronomicom and a gummy eyeball to pop in our mouths at the right moment. The theater was packed on a Monday night for this forty year old horror classic. We all thought it was
One of the things I remember vividly from growing up in the 1970s were the record labels of my favorite artists. In the 60s, Capitol Records or Motown would have been the most important to me, but in the 70s, was was enthralled by two bands, each of which was on a rebel, independent label, and both of those labels were lead by bigger than life characters.
Robert Stigwood led the RSO Label and parodied himself in the movie he backed with his biggest band, "The Bee Gees" in Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Real fans got the joke because we paid attention to the labels. Casablanca Records was also a player, taking big risks, like releasing four Kiss Solo Albums at once, and sticking with artists that were taking a while to break. "Spinning Gold" is a biographical film of Casablanca's creator, Neil Bogart. His story is as outrageous as any of the biopics of artists that you may have seen in the last few years, but as an executive, he had different reponsibilites and different opportunities to screw it up or hit it out of the park. He did both on a regular basis, in the cocaine fueled music industry located in New York and Hollywood.
The film comes from a son, Timothy Scott Bogart, who wrote the screenplay and directed this movie about his father's career. There are still warts in the story that get told, but the movie has a quality to it that treats the subject with kid gloves anyway. Neil Bogart as played by Broadway star Jeremy Jordan, warns us that the story is all true, at least from the perspective of the person narrating it. This attempts to give license to some big claims about his contribution to the creatives and not just the business part of their successes. Of course there is also a basis for the ability to make those claims because Bogart was not just an executive, he was a musician, performer, producer as well.
From the opening of the film, the stage based musical styling of the storytelling is apparent. This will probably work as a Broadway Jukebox Musical, more effectively than as a drama for the screen. There are well over a dozen musical sequences, some of which are complete presentations of the work done by artists like Donna Summer, The Isley Brothers, Bill Withers and Kiss. The actors portraying these artists seem to have been chosen for their musical ability rather than their resemblance to the singers and bands. This allows the film to have some credibility as an entertainment but it leaves the drama to the same tropes that you will find in a dozen other films of this ilk.
Although littered with flashbacks and flash forward segments, the story is still narratively a rags to riches to ruin and then redemption arc. I did like every time the stakes were rising that we got a talley of the debt the label was accumulating. As a Kiss fan, I think the story shifts the rescue of the label a little more to Donna Summer's single than the breakthrough that the band finally achieved with it's live album. Still there are legitimate moments in the film story that come from reality. Kiss did have a financial standoff with Bogart at a critical juncture in the labels history. Bogart did back them, but the relationship was not always a positive one, although in the long run everybody made up, because success solves a lot of wounds.
The film is also a nice historical look at the music trends of the era. 70's soul, disco and hard rock are all evolving and this movie attempts to depict some important moments in those movements. Regardless of the accuracy of the story, and it is mostly on target. the craziness in the film never works the way it should. The drama feels manufactured and the staging is inconsistent. Sometimes we get a great musical moment but it is followed by a flat musical sequence or a dramatic moment that is overplayed by the script.
Overall I can recommend this to fans of the music and the label, but regular movie goers are likely to yawn with a been there, done that attitude. You can enjoy the music, and the label history, but the clips of the real Neil Bogart in the credits talking to Merv Griffin or being interviewed by some other show business program, suggest he was a much more interesting character than was created in this film. There is a Kiss Biopic coming from Netflix down the road, It will be interesting to compare the version of Bogart that they come up with to the one in this film.
Keep your popcorn full and your soda handy, this will be the Saturday Matinee pleaser that you have been looking for. If Ray Harryhausen were to make a movie based on the game "Dungeons and Dragons", this might have been it. As it is, we are forty years past his prime and the technology has changed, but the sense of adventure and fun is pretty much the same. In terms of style the only real difference is the snarky commentary offered by the characters as they go through the adventure, otherwise, this could be "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" or "Jason and the Argonauts".
From a family perspective, there is little reason to worry about taking your kids to this. It is fantasy scary, but not gory or violent like so many contemporary adventure films. Chris Pine is a noble scoundrel who fits in the mold of Han Solo or Jack Sparrow. He may not always have the right reason for doing the right thing, but it usually balances out in the end. Michelle Rodriguez is the badass warrior that you expect her to be, she is fast and furious in dispatching the soldiers that stand in her way, and you know she will have a heart of gold in the end. Once upon a time Hugh Grant might have had the Chris Pine role, but now, in his maturity, he is regularly playing villains and having a blast doing so. The only thing that parents might be concerned about is that the word "S#@t gets dropped three times. That's it as far as vulgarity. Otherwise I can't account for the PG-13 rating rather than simply PG, except I am sure the producers don't want to position this as a kids film, but it is family friendly.
If you played the game, maybe you will be in on some of the references and understand the magic items that come into the story. There are also multiple cultures referred to and creatures of all sorts that are both dangerous and friendly. I never played once, but I could follow everything that was going on. Maybe a gamer would be more satisfied, but I doubt it. I also appreciated the humorous references to elves, dwarves and what could be hobbits in the film. Those may be part of the game, or maybe they are quick parody references to LOTR tropes, but they were fun and welcome whenever they popped in.
This movie is full of ironic escapes, dashing confrontations and conventional conflicts. It is all put together in a fast paced fantasy that should keep you entertained for an afternoon or evening. There is a lot of humor, both in story points and in character development. The effects look good enough for the film, and there are plenty of turns in the story to keep you engaged in spite of the well worn game structure of obstacle, solution, complication, completion and then new obstacle. Does any of it mean anything? No. Does it need to? No, It just needs to keep us entertained for 2 hours and it does so quite well.
Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy.
The Great Waldo Pepper
It was almost impossible for me to believe, but it turns out I have not written about this film before. I could have sworn that I'd done a post on it for the original project in 2010. As I looked back and could not find it, I realized that the movie opened in March of that year, which was outside of the parameters' of that original summer project. My vivid memory of seeing the film is something I will discuss at the end of this post, but the movie itself deserves quite a bit of attention.
This film comes from Writer, Producer, Director, George Roy Hill. His previous film was "The Sting" for which he won the Academy Award. He co-wrote the screenplay with William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay for Hill's earlier film, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". Both of those films also featured actor Robert Redford as the star. At this point, Hill was a successful film maker, but critics suggested that he did not have much style. "The Great Waldo Pepper" represents an opportunity to do a film based on a subject he was completely fluent in, flying. Hill was a fan of barnstorming pilots from the 1930s and got his own license to fly when he was sixteen. We was also a flying veteran of both WWII and Korea. The story idea for this film came from him, and he frequently was flying the planes in the show as he was directing the flying sequences in this movie.
Waldo Pepper is a charismatic pilot, making a living as a barnstorming flyer. He lands his plane in a farm field in Nebraska, and for five dollars, gives local a chance to experience flying themselves. Set in 1926, it is a different world than the one we live in. Aviation is barely twenty years old, WWI is less than a decade in the past, and commercial aviation is on the horizon. Pepper is a combination of Charles Lindbergh and P.T. Barnum, being both a good pilot and a good storyteller. The fact that some of his best stories are not his own comes out pretty early, but it does not undermine the investment that we make in him as a character. In the first part of the film, he bests, gets outed by and partners up with another flyer played by Bo Svenson. This was a break for Svenson who would go on to star in several movies and tv shows after this. He was replacing Paul Newman, who declined Hill's offer to star in this picture along side Redford once more. For the rest of the story Axel Olsson and Waldo Pepper, trade off which of them is going to be most injured.
As good natured as the relationship between the two pilots becomes, there is some serious tragedy in the story as well. Death is a real possibility for the stunt flyers and it comes with legal consequences and survivor's guilt. It may be that the reason the film was not more successful, is that it has an aura of sadness that hangs over it, including the conclusion of the film. Hill was able to pull this off with "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", but it does not quite work here. The tone is elegiac with the era of bi-planes coming to a close and air travel becoming a shared experience. The opening of the film suggests that this will be the way the film ends as well, with a nostalgic and sad look at the chapter we are closing.
I was hooked from the very beginning of the movie, as the huckstering Waldo Pepper, gets a young boy to be his gas runner on the promise of a free ride. There is a teasing moment when it comes time to pay up, and that shows Waldo can be a bit of a cad but will come through in the end. I love the fact that the kid not only gets the ride, but that he brings his dog with him, that's the kind of childhood most of us would love to remember, even if we did not live through the depression. The following scene, when Waldo enthralls the kids family over dinner with a war story of aerial combat was hypnotically told, with the kind of details that seem like they must have come from first hand experience. We later learn that it wasn't Waldo's own story, but it should have been.
There is a cute sequence where Waldo picks up a girl at a movie by adopting the perspective of the screen character they are watching, and suggesting his actions before they come up on screen. Either Waldo is a hero like the Valentino-like character, or he has seen the movie before and he is exploiting the naivete of the girl. She is played by Susan Sarandon who is making her second appearance on the Throwback Thursday 1975 project, after having starred in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". I've admitted it before, in my post on "Bull Durham", I have a little crush on Susan Sarandon. She has beautiful big eyes and a voice that a hummingbird could gather nectar from. She is an innocent who gets caught up in the idea of the fame of the aerial act the partners are planning for the flying circus that they join. You can certainly understand how the owner of the circus would encourage her to bring a little sex to the show. On of the reasons that this film may have under-performed on it's initial release could very well be Sarandon's character's story arc.
If there is one very strong element to the film, it is the authenticity of the flying sequences. The actors are really in the planes as they are flying. The stunts are being performed for the camera, they are not special effects. As far as I could see, there was only one process shot used in the flying sequences, it was very brief, and it was to show how the propeller of a plane was eating the tail of another plane. Everything else is authentic. There were not a lot of quick cuts and frantic editing, most of the scenes were shot complete with very little cutting except between perspectives.
A surprise about the film, and probably not a good one, was the relative lack of music on the score. There are some piano themes, that reflect the era, provided by the great Henry Mancini, but their presence in the film is sparse. George Roy Hill was a music lover who preferred Bach and understood music well. It is puzzling that the emotional beats of the film lack a musical track to set them off. Maybe the goal was to let the flight stunts speak for themselves, but audiences react to music and I think some opportunities are missed. It is puzzling since "The Sting" used the music cues so well and his later film "Slap Shot" is filled with contemporary music prompts.
Redford is great in the film. He has a natural likability that seems to fit with that era. He worked perfectly for movies set in that time period, including "The Natural" and "The Sting". In fact, it looks to me like Redford liked the era so well because he looks good in the newsboy style hats that were part of his costume. Edward Hermann had appeared in a film with Redford, right before this one, "The Great Gatsby" and here he is an old friend who understands aeronautics but even better, has a sister that is Waldo's sometime lover, played by Margo Kidder, pre Superman. Marking his third appearance in the Thursday Throwback 1975 series is actor Geoffrey Lewis, who has been in "Lucky Lady" and "Smile" so far. This will not be his last film on the project either. He plays Waldo's old Platoon commander and the Civil Aviation Authority official who is forced to crack down on the antics of his old friend.
I said at the beginning, that I had a memory to share. Let me give you a little trigger warning, it is a tough memory connected to a tragedy in my life.
In April of 1975, my older brother, Chris, died at the age of 24. My parents were of course devastated. My Mother went into a period of almost agoraphobic mourning. She was unwilling to leave the house and she stopped working with my Father in the magic act they had been doing since before they were married. We were all in a pretty fragile state when my father decided we all needed to get out together as a family. "The Great Waldo Pepper" was playing at the Garfield Theater, about a half mile down the street from where we lived. We all went to see it, probably in late May or Early June. My younger brother, Mom , Dad and I all sat together in the dark and did a little healing by spending some time together out of the house. We went across the street to The Pizza Pub, and had a late dinner after the movie. My Mom was not cured, and we did not stop mourning, but we all drew a collective breath that evening, and we knew we could get on with life. A film can have a powerful effect on people for reasons that may have nothing to do with it's qualities. That is one reason I love the movies and a reason that I remember this film fondly.
I joined my friend Todd Liebenow for a discussion of this film on his podcast the Forgotten Filmcast.
Well it has happened, my fellow film blogger Eric Friedman has completed a trilogy of books that discuss both movies and his life. You might ask yourself why you should be interested in an autobiography of someone you have never heard of . That is an understandable question, and there are times in the current volume when frankly, it might be a question that you would answer negatively. This seems to me, to be the most personal chapter in Eric's life, and unless you were a close friend you might believe it is a bit voyeuristic to look in on his life. There is a continuing vein of personal pain in some of the stories he writes. A broken heart does not mend easily, and some of the phases that you might go through are not pleasant and may not reflect well on you. The reality is that the author is being honest about his life and when the movies reveal part of his sense of abandonment or clinginess, he does not hesitate to show us the warts and all picture.
This entry in his series of "Strictly Personal" books, focuses on the films of the 1990s, particularly 92 to 99. In his personal biography, this is the era right after he has finished college and is searching for a job in a field that sounds like it is his fallback career. Eric Friedman has the ambition that a lot of film fans do, of actually being part of the industry, and in his case, doing so by screenwriting. In his entry on "The Player" from 1992, he strongly identifies with the frustrated writer who has been told once too often, "I'll get back to you", never to hear from the person again. This seems like the right film to connect to this frustration because the writer dies, the executive gets away with murder, and the story in the film gets swallowed up by the production machine and does not resemble what was written in the first place. These are the kinds of stories that you will find throughout the book. There are parallels to the author's life in the films that he is writing about. If there is one thing that could have enhanced these chapters when they come up, it would be some details about the pitches Eric made when he had the chance, or maybe some pages from one of the screenplays that he wrote. Those would give us a greater sense of how his career aspirations connected with the industry elements he encountered.
Just as often however, the focus of Eric's movie stories is not on a potential screenwriting career, but on those personal demons we all face. Sometimes we indulge in a little schadenfreude, when someone who disappoints us, gets disappointed in return. He freely admits that he has carried a torch for someone, long after the relationship was over. It feels at times that he is writing his own version of a Woody Allen screenplay when he repeatedly makes an effort to keep that relationship going, frequently by connecting through a movie. At times he recognizes that the object of affection does not relate to the film the same way he does, but he only sees the red flags later. Twenty-five plus years after some of these events, this journey of self discovery is likely to be more honest and accurate than if it had been written at the time. I did enjoy reading about those moments when a film was an escape from his own thoughts. Richard Kimble, searching for a one armed man becomes a block on his internal monologue, at least for two hours, and I'm sure film fans can relate to that.
The book is organized around the films of an individual year, and the discussion of the films he has chosen to write about, is often connected to an event in his life. In his previous volume "It's Still Strictly Personal", the dominating life subject was the on again off again marriage of his parents. In this edition of his life, the issues hang on his employment, heartbreak, and especially his love affair with a house at the beach. When his home was essentially denied to him by a coastal erosion problem, he sought an alternative that led to some great summers but not a meaningful relationship. He uses the Kenneth Branagh version of "Hamlet" as a reference point to the turmoil in his life, and the satisfaction of returning to the beach house is punctuated by his adoration of the film. Ironically, a completely different issue intrudes on his happiness, and it gets compounded by betrayal inside of his own family. Damn that Shakespeare was a good writer.
Like many books that reflect on film, and like way too many reviews I read on line, a large amount of energy is expended on recapping the story for us. Sometimes this is necessary because a film may be esoteric or unfamiliar to the reader. I can get behind a two page reworking of "Lost Highway", a film I saw once and it was strange to begin with. I don't know that as many people will need the recap of "The Matrix" or "Goldeneye". Of the seventy or so films he writes about, I'd seen all except a dozen or so. When the plot or the performances is relevant to a point that he is making about his life, the recaps feel useful. It's probably the fact that some of the films are so familiar to me that makes the occasional long summary feel unnecessary. Of course your mileage may vary, so maybe it won't be an issue for you.
Be warned that the titles of his book series is honest and upfront disclosure. These are his opinions and he does not hold back. While acknowledging that different people may experience films through their own perspective, his expression of his own opinion is often hyperbolic. I myself find his dismissal of Cuba Gooding Jr. in "Jerry Maguire" to be a bit flip and a bit egocentric on his own opinion, but that's me. I would probably take him to task for his defense of "The Phantom Menace", but not with the venom that he sometimes releases on a poor film that was just sitting there. It is part of his style to go big, and in the right context, that feels appropriate. Readers who have experienced the films he is writing about and have had a different opinion, the climate for an understanding disagreement is not always favorable.
There are plenty of reasons to self disclose in an interpersonal relationship. You want to gain the trust of your partner, you want to influence them in a decision they are making, or maybe you are simply reciprocating a disclosure they have made. When writing a book, which could be read by people with whom you have no existing relationship, the reasons are going to be different. I think Eric gains a bit of catharsis by sharing a movie experience and how that played out in his life, especially his romantic life. Get the Carens out of your psyche and move on. Writing a book like this can also be an invitation to build on a relationship. So, if Eric wants people to continue to read his blog or other books, screenplays or essays that he generates, having shared his life with us will help us appreciate his other material. Revealing the personal is usually done in a proper time and sequence. Although the films in this book stand alone from the previous decades of his life, the personal stories are more interdependent. As such I would suggest reading "It's Strictly Personal" first, as a way of working up to the intimacy of this volume. The second book is a deeper dive into the personal, so "It's Still Strictly Personal" would be a proper next step. If you start with this third biographical enterprise, be prepared for some frank personal details that might be awkward out of context. I've been reading Eric's blog page for years and both of the earlier books went down smoothly. I was happy to have this third volume, but being prepared probably helped me react to it more positively.
Eric Friedmann can be proud of his accomplishment with this book. He has faced some of his weaknesses and overcome them with the help of a good movie. He generates some interesting thoughts on favorite directors like Woody Allen, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. Without hesitation he speaks his mind on the films and the people in his life. It may not always be comfortable, but it is always interesting, and of course, it is always Personal.
Eric was a Guest on the Lambcast Two Years ago, and you can hear our conversation at the link below. I hope to talk to him about his third book in the not too distant future.
