Movie Review: Crash (1996)

A weird drama about sexuality fuelled by a fascination with car accidents, Crash pretends to have something important to say but fails to articulate. 

In Toronto, film producer James Ballard (James Spader) has an open marriage with Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), and they both enjoy kinky sex with each other and with strangers. James is hurt in a head-on car collision and forced to recuperate at a hospital. He is strangely aroused by the idea and reality of vehicular carnage, and is soon having car sex with Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), who was in the other car involved in the crash. 

James, Catherine, and Helen are drawn into the strange orbit of Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a man obsessed with scars and death. In front of a live audience, Vaughan theatrically recreates famous car crashes that claimed celebrity lives. His entourage also includes Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), who needs braces to support severely damaged legs. A pernicious mix of arousal, sexual coupling, dangerous driving, and road crashes irresistibly draws the group together.

In adapting the J.G. Ballard book, director and writer David Cronenberg deserves some credit for going out there and looking for something new within the dark recesses of the adult human psyche, and his cast join him for a raw journey into a bizarre world. Filmed with an aloof, cold core dominated by mechanical eroticism, highways scarring cities, and traffic dominating the landscape, Crash invents a sexual fetish and runs with it.

The problem is that beyond the shock of the premise, the story has nowhere to go. The circle forming around the whacko Vaughan is too far gone to ever pause and generate sympathy. The characters are undefined and stuck in an emotional void only satisfied by pushing deeper into the invented space where crashes, scars, and sex come together. Not surprisingly the audience is left behind, somewhere between bewildered and exasperated by the incessant coupling and the concept of crunched automobiles as aphrodisiacs.

In the absence of a traditional narrative, the large blanks can be filled with any explanation. Pick from humanity subsumed by machines, crashes as metaphors for the human imperative to come together, a symbiotic cycle of machine damage causing human scars both physical and mental, and the uncomfortably close distance between flirting with death and creating life. It's all up for grabs, but all profound attempts at psycho analysis are, at best, bent out of shape.

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Movie Review: 8 Million Ways To Die (1986)

A moody crime drama, 8 Million Ways To Die features plenty of fiery characters but the flimsy plot lacks both depth and logic. 

In Los Angeles, narcotics detective Matt Scudder (Jeff Bridges) is involved in yet another shooting. His life disintegrates into the bottle, and he loses his job, house, and family. He eventually joins Alcoholics Anonymous and sobers up. Six months later he is contacted by high-class prostitute Sunny (Alexandra Paul). She works out of the home-based casino run by suave gangster Chance (Randy Brooks), but now seeks protection because she fears Chance wants to harm her.

Matt is unable to help Sunny in time: she is killed and he reverts back to drinking. Chance claims to be uninvolved in the murder, so Matt turns his attention to combustible drug lord Angel Maldonado (Andy Garcia), who frequents the casino and is most enamoured by Sarah (Rosanna Arquette), one of the other prostitutes. Matt teams up with Sarah and tries to lure Angel into a trap, but violence awaits.

Despite ample star power and a glitzy visual style, director Hal Ashby is unable to salvage a troubled production. The script was cobbled together from uncoordinated contributions by the trio of Oliver Stone, R. Lance Hill and an uncredited Robert Towne, collectively botching the adaptation of Lawrence Block's book. Gangsters, drugs, alcoholism, gambling, money laundering, and prostitution are lined up and left exposed in a remarkable display of disassociated filmmaking.

8 Million Ways To Die lands as a limp salute to a noir world where all the men are deeply flawed or knowingly corrupt and all the women are cynical or vacuous sex workers. The collection of ideas never gels into anything more than rivals hissing at each other at close quarters, interrupted by prostitutes undressing in attempts to manipulate or survive.

The writing gaps were apparently papered over by plenty of improvisation, and in several scenes it's apparent Jeff Bridges and Andy Garcia are desperately trading made-up lines just to fill in the blanks. Unsurprisingly, Ashby was fired after principal photography.

The few positives include a sun-drenched, too-hot aesthetic, and a couple of beautiful sets representing Chance's casino and Angel's Gaudi-inspired residence (known as the O'Neill House). The climactic showdown at a massive but empty warehouse is an out-of-control but fun collision of pointed guns and agitated profanities hurled in all directions to obscure the lack of substance. 

Bridges and Garcia almost make up for the dross with sheer screen presence, but both Rosanna Arquette and Alexandra Paul flounder in thoughtlessly sketched-in roles. 8 Million Ways To Die is a great title, but unfortunately also a demonstration of demise by dissonance.



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The Movies Of Rosanna Arquette

All movies starring Rosanna Arquette and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Silverado (1985)

After Hours (1985)

8 Million Ways To Die (1986)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Crash (1996)

Hope Floats (1998, uncredited)

Draft Day (2014)

Frank And Lola (2016)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Silverado (1985)

A valiant attempt to revitalize the Western, Silverado packs in all the genre elements but lacks the required subtlety and sophistication to craft a memorable experience.

In the wild west, Emmett (Scott Glenn) shoots dead four assailant trying to kill him. He then saves the life of Paden (Kevin Kline), who had been left to die in the desert, and the two men join forces and make their way to the town of Turley. Emmett helps his brother Jake (Kevin Costner) escape from the clutches of sheriff Langston (John Cleese), while Paden renews acquaintances with Cobb (Brian Dennehy), his former riding partner. Emmett, Paden and Jake then team up with Mal (Danny Glover), a black cowboy and expert marksman who was driven out of Turley.

The four men head to the town of Silverado, and on the way rescue a wagon train of settlers from bandits. Hannah (Rosanna Arquette), a member of the wagon train, is soon widowed and catches the eye of both Paden and Emmet. In Silverado Emmet and his new friends walk into the middle of a land dispute where Emmett's past will catch up with him, a professional gambler (Jeff Goldblum) will complicate matters, Paden will have to confront Cobb again, Mal reconnects with his father and sister, old scores are settled, and new lives are started.

Despite featuring a dream cast and boasting Kevin Costner's breakthrough role, Silverado is merely competent. The film's fundamental weakness is a simplistic good versus evil narrative that, while enjoyable as a straightforward romp, recalls the genre's earliest era, where characters were all good or all bad with no place for shadows of complexity. Silverado pretends that the 1960s and 1970s never happened when it comes to the genre's evolution, maybe in an attempt to reach out to a younger 1980s audience just looking to cheer on the good guys without straining any mental muscles.

Also contributing to Silverado's problems is a sprawling script, written by director Lawrence Kasdan and his brother Mark, that attempts to cover too much territory. The film bounces from one set-piece to another searching for all the traditional genre elements and squeezing them in, whether they belong or not, and extending the running length to a wholly unnecessary 133 minutes.

Thrown into the mix are the strangers who become allies, the canyon ambush, the wagon train in danger, the land dispute with ruthless cattlemen, the revenge story across generations, the black cowboy fighting racism, the father/son bonding, the saloon confrontation, the good girl forced to become a whore, the corrupt law officers, the expert marksman and the quick draw, the mysterious gambler, and the final shootout on the dusty main street. Silverado lines them all up and ticks them off a master checklist in what becomes an eye rolling exercise in unfocussed and soulless filmmaking.

With so much going on the characters remain superficial, the heroes and bad guys defined as such and growing only in the most predictable directions, as the film rushes to the next derivative climax. Some of the characters, including Rosanna Arquette's Hannah and Jeff Goldblum's Calvin, are quite poorly underwritten.

On the positive side, Silverado projects and maintains a jovial attitude thanks mainly to Kevin Kline's performance. Without veering into comic territory, Kline injects just enough dry humour to ensure that the film avoids taking itself too seriously. Scott Glenn, in a rare but welcome starring role, provides the counterbalance as quieter, more intense presence. Costner is a bundle of barely controlled youthful energy in a vivacious performance that launched him on a charisma-fuelled career.

Kasdan and cinematographer John Bailey bathe the film in bright yellows to create an upbeat, sun-drenched visual aesthetic, and the sets recreating Western towns are intricate if a little too polished. And the air of good intentions and professional delivery permeates the movie, with the galaxy of stars clearly having fun but also doing a fine job of bringing the disparate characters to life, Brian Dennehy a standout as the gruff Sheriff Cobb profiting from the business of being the law.

In pursuing a long-shot resurrection of a much loved genre, Silverado is difficult to dislike but also infuriatingly naive.

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Movie Review: After Hours (1985)

A relative oddity in Martin Scorsese's career, After Hours is one man's intriguing journey through a single wild night. The film may lack Scorsese's typical intensity, but the small scale quirky nightmare creates its own aura.

Paul (Griffin Dunne) has a fairly boring life as a word processing support technician at a faceless corporation in New York. After work one evening, he meets Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at a coffee shop, and she gives him her phone number after they seem to hit it off. Later that night Paul finds the courage to call, and Marcy invites him to her apartment, all the way downtown in the relatively wild SoHo district.

The night starts off badly when during an insane taxi ride (and yes, the crazed driver looks like Robert De Niro), Paul loses all his money. He arrives at Marcy's flat to find the sculptress Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) hard at work, with Marcy arriving late after a mysterious trip to the drugstore. The more Paul discovers about Marcy, the more agitated he gets. Hints of her body being gruesomely burned and what appears to be a nasty spat with a boyfriend convince Paul to split. But he is penniless and far away from home. His night will include a sojourn into a wild nightclub, encounters with hyperactive neighbourhood burglars (Cheech and Chong), a vigilante mob of local residents, at least one dead body, and unexpected encounters with a bartender (John Heard), a waitress (Teri Garr), a prostitute, and another creepy sculptress (Verna Bloom).

Dancing throughout with black comedy, After Hours is what a nightmare feels like when everything is going wrong and waking up is impossible. Paul recognizes early that he does not belong in SoHo, but finding a way out is another matter. Fate conspires to block him at every turn, from his money flying out of the taxi window to the subway fare increasing that midnight above the value of the few coins in his possession. And every character he meets proves to be progressively weirder, demanding his attention and in some cases literally wanting a piece of him.

Interestingly, all of the mortal dangers encountered by Paul during his dreadful night stem from women, and he is initially enticed to SoHo by a woman. The women themselves are all both victims and predators, Paul realizing that SoHo at night is world of unhinged extremes, whereas he belongs in a much more mundane daylight corporate environment dealing with computers and bland professionals.

After Hours does not quite reach madcap levels that could perhaps have been anticipated, but Scorsese was unlikely to have been trying to go overboard. The film derives its creepiness from remaining almost plausible as a trip that provides persistent reminders why some forbidden places need to remain forbidden.

The large cast of actors who never quite made it as superstars is a perfect fit for the story of a suddenly side-tracked life. Dunne has the everyman looks that allow his nightmare to be adopted by anyone, while in support Arquette, Fiorentino, and Garr work hard to project dangerous hidden attributes that are quite spooky but never quite revealed.

After Hours is a stimulating quest to escape from the consequences of a wrong turn, filled with the wild yet kinky beasts that occupy the fringes of dark and unexplored pathways.

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