Author: S. Brady Calhoun

An older man for reasons known only to him takes a young man who is on his last leg under his wing. 

He shows him how to live the life of a gambler. It is not, let’s say, very romantic. But the old man (Philip Baker Hall) has a certain style and gravity and presence that’s lacking in young men everywhere. 

A cocktail waitress calls him Captain. That name is a lot closer to the truth than his given sobriquet of Sydney. 

We see the young man, (John C Reilly) respects this new mentor and begins to emulate him. 

And then, well, life can take some turns man. 

Hard Eight was written and directed by then first time director Paul Thomas Anderson in 1996. It really doesn’t suggest what Anderson’s movies would become.

The deep pain and longing and need for connection is there, certainly. But they are wrapped in low rent and low budget sort of crime film. 

I wonder if he could have gotten the budget if the setting would have been more glamorous. I doubt it because none of these players are meant to be high rollers.  

I watched Hard Eight years ago and watched it again tonight as I psych myself up and get ready for One Battle After Another. 

IMDB claims that Anderson doesn’t talk about this movie all that often except to say that he didn’t understand back then how he needed to make the relationships between a director and his producer work to get what he wanted. 

The movie was allegedly taken from him and the producer was going to cut it shorter. But Anderson won out when the flick got accepted into Cannes. 

From the outside and knowing what we know now it’s hard to argue that anyone but Anderson should have the Final Cut on his movies. But consider that Anderson really wanted to call this flick “Sydney.” 

That’s maybe the correct name for this film while also being a terrible name for a movie you want people to pay money to see. 

This is probably the definition of a slow burn or maybe the first half of it is just required to be slow. The second half picks up nicely and features several violent crimes and at least one or two all timer “tough guy” lines. 

But don’t misunderstand because this is not what I would call a tough guy flick. Even back at the beginning Anderson would never let a character be anything other than a rounded human being. That rules out most of the archetypes required to make a revenge picture or a crime picture actually work. 

What we end up with is unique people placed in a few extraordinary circumstances. 

A crime picture that doubles as a character study. 

It works. I liked it. But I’m also very glad that Anderson found his groove on his next go round.

Watching The Killer again, this time on Tubi, though I really need to buy it. 

Ok so this is always overshadowed in my mind by Hard Boiled (the greatest action movie of the 1990s) but The Killer might be better. 

The love story is stronger, the connection between the killer and the cop is better and the action sequences … I had forgotten how amazing they are. 

I think Chow Yun Fat looks cooler throughout Hard Boiled than he does here and that is a factor. I don’t think anyone looks as cool on screen as the characters in Hong Kong crime films in the late 80s and early 90s. 

The guys in Heat, and Collateral are ice cold and sharp of course maybe and Al and his crew in Godfather 1 and 2 could rival the cops and gangsters from Hong Kong but, really, there’s nobody else who looks this stylish.

I wasn’t prepared for how good Danny Lee is here. He’s the real heart of this thing and he carries it magnificently. 

Also, John Woo’s camera prowls around like a hungry lion and everytime Chow Yun Fat flies backwards while simultaneously firing two guns I’m thrilled in a way that I can hardly find in any other sort of flick.

Woo had a pretty good Hollywood career that included the high point of Face/Off but what he accomplished in his home country remains unmatched. And not just unmatched by his own work but also by nearly everyone else who imitated his style but couldn’t fly this close to the sun.

That Elmore Leonard thing is hard. 

Caught Stealing is a serviceable entry in the crime genre. It’s got two, maybe three, really solid twists some interesting characters and once it starts moving it stays near the strike zone. 

It definitely strives for that Elmore Leonard intersection of cool characters, crime mayhem and comedy. 

I liked it but I didn’t love it though. First, the tone just shifts way too much. Is this a Hitchcockian thriller? You know, the wrong man caught up in a world of violence he doesn’t understand? 

Is it a caper film? Is it a comedy? Is it about a man atoning for his biggest sin? 

Unfortunately, it’s all of those things and a couple of more besides. 

There is a plot turn really early on that sucked all the energy out of the proceedings. Then a twist a few scenes later kind of brought everything back and gave Regina King a better role. 

BUT Spoiler: 

Zoe Kravitz character, our protagonist’s girlfriend gets killed. 

I don’t think the movie ever recovered from this and I think Aronofsky and screenwriter Charlie Huston should have done something else. Easy for me to say, I suppose. There are plenty of arguments to do it and it drives the movie forward and gives us a nice twist near the end. Also, there is something unique about Austin Butler’s Hank Thompson continually getting his friends killed throughout the proceedings. 

But the time and place for such a thing is in revenge movies. And instead of Butler’s phenom baseball player stalking the guys who killed his girl with a bat he spends most of the movie trying not to get shot. 

Again, killing the girl works in a different movie, maybe, but not the one where Matt Smith is playing a punk straight of central casting and complete with a Mohawk, a leather jacket and an inability to discharge an uzi properly. 

Her death and my belief that they should have just put her in a coma so she could come back at the end reminded me of two classic movie moments. 

The first is that Director Tony Scott overruled then screenwriter Quentin Tarantino who wanted Christian Slater’s Clarence Worley dead by the end of True Romance. 

Tarantino is a movie genius but Scott was absolutely right to let Clarence and his lover Alabama escape all that violence and ride off into the sunset together. 

The second thing was that in Stephen King’s Misery, evil Annie actually cuts poor Paul Sheldon’s feet clean off. In the movie she break’s his feet at the ankles. So at the end, when James Caan survives you see him walking with a cane. Broken perhaps but not completely changed. 

Screenwriter William Goldman argued that a book audience would be fine with poor Paul losing his feet and a movie audience would have never forgiven the filmmakers or the flick itself if the main character as permanently disfigured. 

I’m telling you, put Zoe in a coma and have her come back in the last reel on the beach with our hero and you got movie magic. Instead, you got, a noir story perhaps, a movie about a guy losing everything. 

Except it’s just not quite that either. This movie is a single, maybe a double but it’s nowhere close to a home run. 

Anyway, Regina King is great, and I liked seeing Leiv Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio even if they don’t get enough screen time. 

It’s a wonderful to see Griffin Dunne and Carol Kane even if they only get one scene a piece. 

Everyone is cooking but the meal never quite satisfies. It’s happens that way something’s. Elmore Leonard wrote 45 novels but in the end Hollywood only made three perfect movies from his life’s work. 

This is no Get Shorty. But it’s a damn sight better than Be Cool.

I was a young teenager when Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo, showed up on comic book shelves. I was a voracious reader but here was something completely unlike anything I had ever encountered. 

Jonah was a western anti-hero created by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga in 1972. I don’t think anyone could argue that he was maybe one or two steps removed from Clint Eastwood’s poplar movie screen persona as the Man with No Name. 

By the 1990s there no western heroes on the stand but Two Gun Mojo, written by Joe R. Lansdale with art by Timothy Truman started a mini revival of the genre. Lansdale and Truman reimagined Hex a bit and gave him supernatural villians and the book was, for a short time, the coolest thing on the stands. 

The whole thing didn’t last long but Lansdale built a career that included books, and television and movies. 

Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, once said (I think) that his wife wanted him to just create something normal. Just draw superheroes or create a normal story and the cash will keep rolling in. Mignola, instead, created a hell creature that fought other hell creatures. Mignola later said (essentially) that he couldn’t do normal. As a writer and an artist his brain just wouldn’t work that way. 

I think that applies to Lansdale as well. I mean, his biggest cultural hit was, for a time, Bubba Ho Tep. A book and later a movie (written and directed by Don Coscarelli) that posits that all those National Enquirer stories were true and Elvis never died, and he was now being stalked by a mummy while trying to live out his final days in a nursing home. 

It was a minor hit and celebrated in the kind of fan circles I traveled in in 2002. But that was never going to be a a huge thing. Nobody was going to retire on their Bubba Ho Tep money. 

His other successful stab at all of this is the Hap and Leonard book series. Eventually that was made into three seasons of television on The Sundance Network. A riveting crime show and frequently on critics best of the year of list. 

But, consider the internet description of two main characters: Hap Collins, “a white working class laborer who spent time in federal prison as a young man for refusing to be drafted into the military and serve in the Vietnam War.” 

His best friend is Leonard Pine, “a gay black Vietnam vet with serious anger issues.” Together they solve mysteries and fight crime. 

Again, Lansdale has, as near as I can tell, built a nice career for himself with this and his other books. 

But my goodness, much as I love this stuff, I would have to admit it’s an acquired taste. 

While I’m rambling and before I go further let’s also recommend Cold in July a neo-western based on a Lansdale book and starring Sam Shepard and Don Johnson. You probably never saw it but it’s a cool slice of crime fiction. 

Anyway, having proved my Lansdale bonifides and noting that I am always interested in his work even I didn’t make it to the theater last year to see The Thicket. 

It was only in theaters for a few weeks, with no advertisements, and when I found it I couldn’t make the hour drive to the big nearby city to catch it. I got kids man. 

It’s now on Amazon Prime and most of it is exceptional. Exactly the kind of tough talk and bloody mindedness you want in a movie where Peter Dinklage plays an old west bounty hunter. 

As an actor he always delivers and here he gets to be a cowboy who reluctantly helps a young man (Levon Hawke) rescue his sister who was kidnapped by Cut Throat Bill (Juliette Lewis). Dinklage’s reluctance is more less based on a pretty good western trope. To paraphrase: “You haven’t seen violence, boy, and I have and it should be avoided at all costs.” 

You know, that thing. As motivations go it’s a winner. 

The other, is that the pay won’t be worth the risk. Again to paraphrase: “I might risk my life for something, but it won’t be some woman I don’t know and one third of $300.”

That was another excellent bit of business. 

When we meet Dinklage’s character someone is trying to make fun of his height and cheat him out of money owed. You can guess how that conflict ends.

Meanwhile, Cut Throat Bill is mostly off in her own little movie doing an excellent job at being menacing, creepy and crazy. I suspect Juliet Lewis spent some time watching Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh. 

It’s a movie that falls into a particular category for me which is: if this is the kind of thing you like then I think you will like this thing. 

It succeeds and I enjoyed it but I would also tell you it has modest ambitions. A decent exercise in genre work that squeezes some fun out of Dinklage and Lewis being old west killers.

The movie cooks a bit when we hear a sermon from a doomed priest explaining Cut Throat Bill’s backstory. And again when her part of the tale concludes. Her final words in the movie is haunting.

So the movie gets to a really top shelf sort of place. But it doesn’t get there often and it doesn’t stay there.

Spoiler below: 

The conclusion follows through with the warnings about how all this violence will end. And what the pursuit of righteousness in the face of evil might cost. 

Ultimately, we are presented with a happy ending … for the survivors.

If they had hired a real actor to play Ian Holm’s character this would have been a solid Alien entry. 

Doing it with CGI brings nothing to the table. If someone was making Godfather 2 today they would de-age Marlon Brando and DeNiro’s once in a lifetime performance as young Vito would be lost to the world. 

What I’m trying to say is that the ghost in the machine threw me out of this film just as it was starting to cook. 

Quit doing this. 

The rest of this is fine. I’m not sure there’s any more meat on the bone for Alien as a franchise. The repeat of a famous phrase from the franchise in this flicks’ climax kind of proves the point. 

But my interest in this and predator was never very strong. Make a good one and I’ll see it eventually. Make a bad one and it’s pretty much the same thing.

The final section of the movie had our heroine battling the final boss and her ship’s levers which all have to be pulled so that she can do a thing which will save her and kill it. Two sci-fi movie classics come to mind. A sequence in Galaxy Quest where the viewers discover the space ship is very complicated for no reason at all.

And this classic line from Spaceballs. 

“Even in the future nothing works!”