Author: S. Brady Calhoun

This movie is still around in my head because of one scene. 

A scene that I kept seeing over and over again as it showed up in various times on cable. That’s how we discovered stuff back then.

Someone who owned a cable network decided to play Roadhouse, The Princess Bride and The Sandlot in a near endless loop. 

The Princess Bride is one of my absolute favorite movies but I know that’s partly because when I needed an escape from the world it could always be found on television waiting for me.

And so it is with this scene in With Honors. 

I almost never saw what happened before that scene and almost certainly lost interest quickly after it. Because the movie can’t really sustain its premise. Though it tries to find other things (a mild love story, a tragic origin, and college theses) to keep you involved. 

But despite the failings of the rest of the movie this scene is near perfect and I’m going to give you the crux of it now.

Brendan Fraser (idealistic student) brings homeless guy (Joe Pesci) to a class at Harvard and they get into it with a smug politics professor played by (Gore Vidal!). 

And after some fooling around we get to the point: 

Simon Wilder (Pesci): You asked the question, sir, now let me answer it. The beauty of the Constitution is that it can always be changed. The beauty of the Constitution is that it makes no set law other than faith in the wisdom of ordinary people to govern themselves.

Proffesor Pitkannan (Vidal):Faith in the wisdom of the people is exactly what makes the Constitution incomplete and crude.

Simon Wilder: Crude? No, sir. Our “founding parents” were pompous, white, middle-aged farmers, but they were also great men. Because they knew one thing that all great men should know: that they didn’t know everything. Sure, they’d make mistakes, but they made sure to leave a way to correct them. The president is not an “elected king,” no matter how many bombs he can drop. Because the “crude” Constitution doesn’t trust him. He’s just a bum, okay Mr. Pitkannan? He’s just a bum.

That scene was fun in 1994. It roars like thunder today. 

My belief, based on nothing, is that screenwriter William Mastrosimone had this scene in his head first, wrote it up and then tried to build the film around it. 

Alas, the rest of the movie, as I said, can’t live up to it.

Pesci gives his homeless character a catch phrase, “boy o boy.” The stakes are too low (no one cares about a Harvard thesis including the people studying at Harvard) and the phrases from classic literature don’t land like they should. 

By 1994 With Honors was joining a smorgasbord of movies about an eccentric guy who teaches young, naive young men how to live. 

Robin Williams had been our captain in Dead Poets Society and Al Pacino was an angry, blind, retired military officer in Scent of a Woman (Hoo-ah!). 

With Honors turned into the nadir of the genre and bombed at the box office despite some other scenes and moments that show promise. 

Watching it 30 years later and I got to enjoy how one character has the Flock of Seagulls haircut, the smooth 90s pop soundtrack and Brendan Fraser’s idealistic government student changing his thesis to say that the internet was coming to usher in a utopia yet undreamed of by our current reckoning. 

Sigh, if we only knew. 

This movie includes every grizzled detective cliche in the crime movie book … and I freaking loved it. 

Jude Law plays an FBI agent who is not so much a human being as he is an angry open wound. 

He chain smokes, his family is gone, he’s got a health problem he’s ignoring and he has escaped a brutal career dealing with the worst the mafia has to offer in exchange for a quiet life as the only FBI agent (initially) in the Rocky Mountains. 

This job transfer does not go well.

Yes, almost all of these things are familiar. This is supposed to be based on a true story but, I’m sorry, detectives like this only exist in the movies. 

Not one bit of all that unreality matters as the flick moves from one cool bank robbery scene, to the next crime, and on the cop side from a murder investigation to a neat interrogation scene to the moment (found in countless crime movies) where the detective actually meets the ice cold criminal but doesn’t know who he is. 

No one in the movies this year is as cool as hollowed out Jude Law in detective mode. By the end he’s no longer an investigator, he’s Captain Ahab going after one more white whale.

Meanwhile, Nicholaus Holt is on point as an evil Nazi cult leader. 

And Marc Maron continues his string of playing guys who are an awful lot like Marc Maron. 

They saturated this thing in that 70s colorvision they do now to let you know the movie takes place in the past. But you could figure that out the minute Law lit up one more cigarette and nobody reminded him that Marlboro man died of cancer.

You should get yourself to a theater and check this one out. And when it comes to streaming play it for your dad. 

He’ll watch it standing up in front of the tv. 

There is a scene in Prizzi’s Honor where a woman throws a baby at a mafia bodyguard during a kidnapping. 

The “baby” is a doll but the bodyguard doesn’t know that and he knocks the flying infant away and pulls his gun. 

After the kidnapping is over (more or less) the two kidnappers discuss what just happened and we get this exchange. 

Irene Walker: I can’t get over it. What kinda creep wouldn’t catch a baby? If it was real it coulda been crippled for life.

Charley Partanna: He wasn’t paid to bodyguard the baby.

Partanna, is Jack Nicholson and Walker is Kathleen Turner and they are both funny and interesting in Prizzi’s Honor. 

Although I may have just given you the best line in the movie I have not given away the best scene. 

Until we got to the baby doll kidnapping I was iffy on this whole enterprise. I’m no fan of mafia comedies as I like my mobsters serious and not screwball. The only obvious example is The Sopranos which was both deadly serious and one of the best comedies on television for its entire run. 

But please save me from all the times DeNiro or Matthew Broderick or whoever decide to make me an offer of laughter. 

Watching this I was reminded that Goodfellas and My Blue Heaven are about the same gangster, Henry Hill. 

The Marty Scorsese picture (serious and funny) is a classic and the Herbert Ross, Nora Ephron screwball comedy (funny but not serious) is mostly forgotten. 

Prizzi is written by Richard Condon and Janet Roach and based on Condon’s book series about the Prizzi crime family.

Legendary Director John Huston was at the helm but this is not the sort of movie that calls for either grand vistas or director tricks. 

One hit takes place in a garage and we hear the gunshots but never see the action. It’s just that kind of movie. 

It’s a movie that is very concerned about turns in the plot and how the characters react and think through their various predicaments. 

At one particular plot point I thought, “I love it when a movie turns the screws.” 

And that’s the long and short of it. Do you go to movies for amazing visuals? Or do you enjoy a good soapy plot? In this case, you won’t get both. 

I can’t believe Angelica Houston won an Academy Award for this for best supporting actress. She’s very good but she’s also barely in it. 

However, I was amused to see that the great William Hickey got a supporting actor nom for his work as the elderly don.

If you know Hickey at all you probably know him as the cigar smoking uncle in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Here he’s once again called on to play someone that is more corpse than man. 

He could be the head of a family of vampires as easily as the son of a crime family. 

But he’s so good here and so fun to watch as he becomes the living embodiment of ruthless cunning.

It took a bit for me to get past the Nicholson casting as I never imagine him as an Italian mobster. He doesn’t look right for that to me but sooner or later you either go with it or you don’t. 

He also is playing against type in another way as this mafioso is no deep thinker or planner in the way a Corleone might be. 

I think the direction Huston gave Nicholson ought to give you an answer on whether or not this flick is for you. 

Before every scene Huston apparently turned to Jack and said, “Remember, he’s stupid.”

Four years ago my then 99-year-old grandmother needed a chauffeur for a shopping trip. I was the grandchild who was both in town and not working that day so the honor fell to me. As we shopped I shared some thoughts about her on Twitter.

And I want to keep this someplace a little more permanent. Please remember it was written in real-time as it was happening.

Looking at it now, I see how much is missing and should have been included, but it was written just for fun and I don’t think I want to rewrite it.

Maybe I’ll write something else about her for her birthday.

Also, she’s still going on shopping trips with her usual companion, my now 71-year-old mother. Grandma turns 103 on December 7.

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Today’s mission: take my 99-year-old grandmother to The Dollar Tree.

She’s been through the Great Depression, World War 2, and COVID. And now what she wants is some fine dollar store products.

She weighs somewhere around 85 pounds and often eats a plain vanilla milkshake for dinner.

Currently, the cart has tissues, sweet mate, chicken noodle soup, and a microwave pizza.

One time she took me to a funeral in Georgia. I’m fairly certain she didn’t know anyone. She just wanted to get out of the house.

Her purchases cost $8. But she picked up a penny off the floor on her way out so she’s already back in the red.

Or is that the black? Whatever.

We are now at Chick-Fil-A. Dinner tonight will be one chicken sandwich.

Grandma met granddaddy outside of her little town in Oklahoma. He was in the service and they started courtin’.

When he was in Okinawa she would get two or three letters at a time and then nothing for a week or two. Cause that’s how the mail worked. The postman figured out what was going on and anytime she got a letter he would honk to let her know.

Grandma’s birthday is Dec. 7. She was 20 (according to my math) when Pearl Harbor was attacked. So every year on her birthday we hear the Pearl Harbor story.

The Pearl Harbor story consists of two elements 1. Army men with bull horns came through town to tell all the military guys to go back to the base. Leave was canceled.

And 2. There were two women who lived together who apparently got no news that weekend and found out about Pearl Harbor on Monday. And that was in some way shocking.

My mom is normally in charge of taking Grandma on her daily outing (dollar store, library, and some small amount of fast food) but she had knee surgery so I was drafted.

Grandma paid for everything with ones. That’s probably her aluminum can recycling money.

Anyway, when we were done I walked out and grandma walked along behind me.

“I’m gonna lock the door,” she said. “It will get dark soon.”

Yes ma’am, I thought, but hopefully not for a while.

An update of Pretty Woman for the age of WAP. 

Annie is a stripper, a sex worker and most of all a hustler. In another movie and another time Annie’s activities would be downplayed and her lifestyle would be explained away with a tragic backstory. 

But this ain’t that movie and Annie ain’t a hooker with a heart of gold.

Without giving too much away Annie connects with a man a few years younger than her who appears to be very rich and very persuadable. 

He wants her for sex and she’s happy to be on the market. But things change when Annie allows herself to accept a proposal and marries the man in Las Vegas. 

What happens next should not be spoiled but it is hilarious and riveting. 

There’s a time in your life where you probably attend a lot of weddings. In my part of the world it was small church services followed by dinner. Rarely any dancing and the couples were all somewhere in their mid 20s. 

Usually the brides weren’t showing. 

I’ll never forget when, at one of these happy occasions, my mom leaned over to me and said, “This will be a nice starter marriage.” 

I was so young and naive that it took four or five years and three or four divorces amongst my friends, before I understood what she meant. 

Anora is not a movie about a nice starter marriage. Or if it is it’s a starter marriage from hell. 

But Writer/Director Sean Baker understands all of his characters the same way my mother knew about marriage. He presents them with razor sharp humor, grace and empathy. 

This is one of the best movies of the year.

Do you listen to murder podcasts? 

This movie is a murder podcast come to life. All that’s missing is one woman to narrate and another to say, ‘oh wow, unbelievable.” 

In Woman of the Hour Anna Kendrick plays a young actress who goes on The Dating Game and is wooed by a dummy, a sleazeball and a serial killer.

“Oh wow, unbelievable.” 

The true life, if corny premise, threw me off until it came to Netflix but I was excited to be wrong. 

Kendrick also directs and wrings every bit of tension out the premise. This is a solid debut from a first time director. 

The story splits allowing us to follow Kendrick’s waning acting career and the killers previous encounters. 

You know where each of those scenes is going but Kendrick still finds a new way into the serial killer cliches, either through unique camera work or just by letting each moment find just the right amount hope before she slides the knife in. 

Kendrick and company also use nearly each scene to express how women are vulnerable around every man, even the “nice guys.” 

A movie with a solid theme that pays off in a decent way. 

Ultimately, it’s a modest film with modest goals. But it achieves them all the same. I’m looking forward to what Kendrick directs next.

A Stephen King town is always damned long before the vampires, werewolves, ghosts or cursed cars reveal themselves. 

King — a survivor of small town life — always understood the beating heart of little villages to be cruelty, racism and generational abuse. In his stories these problems exist alongside the few poor souls trying to be righteous in the land of the wicked. 

However, King had pages and pages and ever more pages to show us every sin and crime. He can build characters up, reveal their quirks, announce their fears and then knock them off the board whenever he got ready. 

But movies have limited time and space. A truly faithful translation of Salem’s Lot would require a multipart miniseries and would probably result in boredom. I haven’t seen Toby Hooper’s miniseries version from 1979 so I can’t comment. 

But I can say that the first half of writer turned director Gary Dauberman’s bite at Salem’s Lot is slow. 

It’s not boring, because it’s doing what it needs to do, but any audience member over say 12 already understands what’s going on and doesn’t need the well trod lore around vampires explained. 

But the opening is all plot and lacks character work as it rushes from one scare to the next. 

In the book Father Callahan’s fate seemed like the crux of the story. Here it happens note for note but the results just don’t linger like they should. 

There is also a whole section about the nature of a haunted house that ties into the main character’s past that is dropped as well.

Instead of a deep dive into characters we get … music. There is a harmonica that becomes important and effective use of Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown. King always wrote about music and used snippets of lyrics to open his books or at the beginning of each chapter to help set certain moods. The good directors bring that over to his best adaptations too. 

Sundown is a great choice for a vampire movie. I didn’t get tired of it even on the third or fourth go round. 

We also get Alfre Woodard delivering lines about vampires in a way that only Alfre Woodard can. It’s also great to see character work from Billy Camp and William Sadler. 

Hand them a juicy role and you can just sit back and get comfy. I smiled every time Camp lit a pipe or Sadler delivered another line about how all of society is headed down into destruction. 

Jordon Preston Carter is electric as a kid turned vampire hunter who understands the rules of the game and refuses to be bullied or talked down to by clueless adults. 

Lewis Pullman and Mackenzie Leigh do what they can with the bland main characters. But they don’t make much of an impression. 

Neither does Barlow, who is presented here as not much more than a creepy face and special effects. His servant Straker somehow makes even less of an impression. 

I remember King writing that with Salem’s Lot that he obviously wanted to do Dracula but that it was also informed by the gross out vampires he discovered in the horror comics of his youth. 

And I’ll tell you, as I keep considering this movie, I think the worst thing that happened to King is that he became respectable. 

Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption proved to even his harshest critics, that he was capable of high art. And then Frank Darabount made one of the greatest movies ever out of it. 

And then, slowly but surely, Hollywood has made a cottage industry out of tasteful adaptations of King’s novels. 

But there is a fine line between tasteful and bloodless and this movie just doesn’t have enough fangs

This is a mild movie with mild thrills doing it’s best to trade on George Clooney and Brad Pitts movie star charisma and shared cinema past instead of doing the work. 

What work? You know the part where you create interesting characters, put them in increasingly dire situations and watch them scramble and bump off each other?

Yeah, there’s not much of that here. 

Instead, it’s Clooney and Pitt playing Clooney and Pitt in a movie where they are hardly ever challenged by any situation. No one wants to play weak and no one wants to be vulnerable. 

There are a couple of moments that got me. I enjoyed every song that magically played in Clooney’s car. A few of the action scenes did fine. And I liked the ending an awful lot because I’m a sucker for that particular way out. 

But the whole thing is weak tea. 

It’s Ocean’s 14 all the way down to the famous Clooney/Pitt shorthand conversations but without all those messy character actors or interesting scenes to gunk things up.

Look, I don’t want you to not watch this. Its out there maybe you will find more of it to love than I did. 

But what I would urge you to do is check out Clooney in Out of Sight and Pitt in Killing Them Softly. In both movies they (and everyone else) does the work necessary to bring interesting crime characters to life. 

And yeah, there’s always Ocean’s 11, which featured one of our greatest directors at the top of his game making a masterpiece while also just goofing around. 

Finally, the one other movie with Pitt and Clooney together that you ought to check out (and which goofs around in a very different way) is Burn After Reading. 

Here’s what I think ultimately of Wolf’s. Somewhere in the process somebody at the top of this thing said, “hey, we got Clooney, we got Pitt, don’t worry about it.” 

And they really should have worried about it. 

This movie, like the characters that live in its frame, has got sand. 

Grit. Guts. 

This movie seduces your spouse and then winks at you and you find you can’t hold a grudge. 

Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is one of the grizzly director’s great masterpieces but only became so long after it was released. The studio cut all the life out of it but it was eventually restored to be closer to Peckinpah’s intentions. 

I’ve only ever seen the restored version. I’m writing about it today because I bought the Criterion edition. 

It looks great.  

Moving on. 

The movie’s scenes feel like dream sequences but the dialogue is full of dry wit and danger. 

It’s also a hang out movie. Billy, Garrett and the gang are always telling stories about old times. From the way they talk you would think these were good times. But it’s funny because all those stories seem to end with some poor bastard getting killed.

Here’s a great scene in a movie that has nothing but great scenes:

Pat Garrett rides into town after finding that Billy the Kid, who he had moved heaven and earth to capture has escaped and killed two of his deputies. 

When he gets there he finds the townsfolk, who had stood by while Billy escaped, are having a something close to a fiesta around the dead deputy.  

“Won’t some of you people get him up off the ground and into it?” Garrett snarls. 

Perfect. 

Also, the way James Coburn says “people” strongly suggests that he does not believe they deserve the designation. 

The movie is full of moments like that, everyone Garrett encounters is pissed at him for betraying Billy and siding with the Santa Fe ring, the corrupt government and the law. 

Notice how every conversation Garrett has is laced with bitterness. Didn’t they all ride into town together as outlaws all those years ago? 

No one dares pull a gun on Garrett, he’s too damn dangerous. But their mouths stay loaded and everybody he meets calls him a son of bitch, whether they use those exact words are not. 

Everyone, that is except Billy. 

He recognizes that Garrett is giving him time to leave. He even knows that he should. But he just can’t do it. 

Here’s their first conversation in the movie. 

Billy: Ol’ Pat… Sheriff Pat Garrett. Sold out to the Santa Fe ring. How does it feel?

Garrett: It feels like… times have changed.

Billy: Times, maybe. Not me.

Not long after Garrett and his gang kill a bunch of people and arrest Billy. And the conversation they have there, backed by Bon Dylan’s acoustic guitar songs is one of the most beautiful moments in guy cinema. 

Billy: You’re in poor company, Pat.

Garrett: Yeah, but I’m alive.

Billy: So am I…

Kris Kristofferson was far too old to play somebody nicknamed The Kid and who historically died at 21. Doesn’t matter one lick. He’s charming and diabolical. 

The movie version doesn’t let him be the full psychopath he was in real life but there are several moments where his cunning shines through. 

Watch how he cheats during a standoff. Or when he toys with a group of bounty hunters who don’t know they’re outmatched. 

And, most significantly, when he waits to kill Bob with the deputy’s own gun. The deputy made sure Billy knew just what that gun, loaded with a mess of dines, would do to a man.

He just never thought Billy would be the one pulling the trigger.

Some of this movie is just part of the real history of Billy the Kid. The jailbreak in particular almost always shows up in these flicks. But a pair of Billy The Kid westerns I loved as a kid (Young Guns and Young Guns 2) clearly borrowed from Peckinpah. 

That’s ok, there’s no doubt that Peckinpah was taking liberally from Leone and all the other Spaghetti Western directors. If this had been dubbed I would believe it came out of Italy or Spain in the 1960s. 

Every scene in this movie reinforces its theme but one in particular stands out. 

Garrett is resting by a river when a family on a boat float by. A boy is throwing a bottle in the river and the dad is shooting at it. Wanting to join the fun, Garrett fires at the bottle too. 

But the dad, alarmed, starts shooting toward Garrett. Garrett barely gets to cover and then he grabs a rifle and prepares to return fire. 

And then the two men see each other, both ready to kill, and they somehow understand that all of this was a mistake.

The family floats by unharmed. Garrett goes on his way. 

The guns were loaded, but both men realized the whole thing was pointless.