Movie Review: The Hot Spot (1990)

A film noir drenched in immorality, The Hot Spot enjoys suitably depraved characters but surrenders to excess.

Drifter Harry Maddox (Don Johnson) arrives in the small town of Landers, Texas, and secures a job as a used car salesperson at the dealership owned by George Harshaw (Jerry Hardin). Harry immediately sets his eyes on the dealership's young accountant Gloria Harper (Jennifer Connelly), and learns she is being blackmailed by local sleazoid Frank Sutton (William Sadler).

Harry finds the local bank's security extremely lax, with no electronic surveillance and all the tellers quick to abandon their posts on volunteer fire-fighting duty. He starts to plot a bank robbery, but then tangles with George's over-sexed wife Dolly (Virginia Madsen), who wants Harry all for herself. 

Adapting the book Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams, director Dennis Hopper unleashes and modernizes all the noir artefacts. The Hot Spot features selfish motives, criminal behaviour, unconstrained lust, and characters stooping to base instincts. It's also set in an abstract, isolated small town that appears to exist on its own desert-like planet somewhere between the 1950s and 1990s. Everyone is perpetually drenched in sweat, the daylight scenes bathed in the yellows of a scathing sun.

With Don Johnson in excellent form as a man resigned to drift, the morally flawed Harry Maddox is stuck between desire for Gloria's fragility and an inability to resist Dolly's malevolence. Harry has flashes of conscience hinting at a better man within, perhaps worth salvaging. He rescues a drunk from a burning building, and pulls back from his aggressive advances on Gloria upon learning how young she is. But driven by crass instincts, he is also less smart than he thinks he is and all too easily sinks into Dolly's clutches.

Hopper exploits the cinematic era with scenes of steamy sex and nudity, this noir less about suggesting and more about demonstrating lust in full flow, losing the artistry of less is more. Commendably but also excessively, Virginia Madsen plunges into the deep end as an out-of-control vamp in heat, her performance like her character devoid of subtlety. And at 130 minutes the film drags on well past the story's limits, several scenes awkwardly padding the running length with lazy editing.

Colourful riff raff surrounds the main characters, most notably William Sadler having fun as the seediest kind of redneck pornographer and blackmailer. Charles Martin Smith as another salesperson and Barry Corbin as the local sheriff add interest to the supporting cast. 

Abandoning constraint out in the desert, The Hot Spot is admirably dedicated to bad behaviour.



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Movie Review: Firewall (2006)

A feeble hostage drama, Firewall abandons technothriller ambitions and settles for a bland recycling of tired ideas.

In Seattle, Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford) is in charge of network security at Landrock Pacific Bank. His colleagues include fellow security expert Harry Romano (Robert Forster), executive Gary Mitchell (Robert Patrick) and President Arlin Forester (Alan Arkin). With the bank in the middle of merger negotiations, tensions are high.

Master criminal Bill Cox (Paul Bettany) leads a group of armed men who invade Jack's house and hold his wife Beth (Virginia Madsen) and two children hostage. Cox wants Jack to digitally break into the bank's network and transfer $100 million into off-shore accounts. With the help of his assistant Janet (Mary Lynn Rajskub), Jack has to find a way to thwart the criminals and save his family.

A haphazard and immediately forgettable thriller, Firewall finds Harrison Ford trading on his old hits. The well-worn concept of a man forced into action while his family is held hostage is trudged out for yet another go-around. Other than a grand hilltop architectural marvel of a house that suggests Jack and Beth are well-paid indeed, writer Joe Forte and director Richard Loncraine cannot conjure up any new or interesting angles.

The initial intent to focus on the world of digital security is half-hearted and all but abandoned, with no firewall in sight. And after pairing Ford with a 19-years-younger Madsen, the script defaults to an inane climax subjecting the 64 year old to physical altercations that would challenge men half his age. Meanwhile, back at the bank Robert Forster, Alan Arkin and Robert Patrick represent a trio of utterly wasted veteran talent.

But maybe worst of all is the motiveless Cox as a crime boss who has thought of everything except the most important things, while his group of bumbling armed men have all the necessary weaponry and technological toys yet spend the movie watching television and getting outsmarted. Fox's main method of intimidating Jack is to kill his own men. 

With no one expressing any rational plans as the climax approaches, Firewall literally defaults to man chases dog. And only the dog maintains a semblance of dignity.



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The Movies Of Virginia Madsen

All movies starring Virginia Madsen and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Class (1983)

Dune (1984)

The Hot Spot (1990)

The Rainmaker (1997)

Sideways (2004)

Firewall (2006)

Red Riding Hood (2011)

Joy (2015)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Sideways (2004)

A tender yet funny drama about middle-aged men dealing with life's disappointments, Sideways excels as a quest for joy when all options for happiness appear exhausted.

Failed writer Miles (Paul Giamatti) and his friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a has-been actor, head out for a week-long trip to California's wine country to celebrate Jack's upcoming wedding to Christine. Miles is broke, lonely, and deeply depressed due to his divorce two years prior, and his lack of success in getting his book published. Meanwhile, Jack is not really sure he wants to get married, and is more interested in having sexual flings than tasting wine.

Miles and Jack settle at a motel amidst all the wineries. At the Hitching Post restaurant, they connect with waitress Maya (Virginia Madsen), who vaguely knows Miles from his previous trips and is herself nursing scars from a recent divorce. At a local winery, they also connect with server Stephanie (Sandra Oh), and Jack is immediately attracted to her. Miles and Maya start a tentative courtship based on their mutual love of wine, while Jack and Stephanie engage in a passionate affair. But with plenty of deception and half-truths generated by Jack's selective interpretation of the truth, trouble lies ahead for both men.

Written and directed by Alexander Payne, Sideways finds humour in the ordinariness of middle age pathos. The film honours the achievement of nothing where many men wallow, as both Miles and Jack have little to show for lives half lived except failed attempts at happiness and false expectations of a better future. The film stays focused on the men, their fading hopes and divergent attitudes towards the future, as Miles is weighed down by the past while Jack is intent on living for today.

Despite the odds they find suitable mates in wine country. Maya is just as emotionally scarred as Miles but is handling it better, while Stephanie is enjoying a life of carefree adventure. The relationships take on the colours of the men, as Miles and Maya proceed slowly and carefully, Jack and Stephanie rush into physical intimacy with wild abandon, and the outcomes carry echoes from the past into the future.

Payne's writing is stellar, and the film stands on the shoulders of the sturdy yet complex friendship Payne creates between Miles and Jack. Although a study in contrasts, the foundations of the relationship are clear: Miles is downbeat but smart, Jack is a dense optimist. They complement each other, and both are at crossroads in life where they need each other, warts and all. Miles needs Jack's encouragement to have any chance to move past his depression, and Jack needs Miles as a logic check against his impending marriage. Miles can't always trust himself because of his depression, and he wonders how much he can trust Jack, who is, after all, an actor, albeit a fading one.

The film uses wine as shorthand for depth of sophistication, if not exactly intellect. Wine is portrayed as a tragic ending worth celebrating, the more convoluted the plight of the fragile grape, the more worthwhile the taste. Wine and whine are also companions, Miles' endless laments about his failure in love, life and publishing matched only by his eloquent descriptions of all things related to wine and winemaking.

In the two lead role, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church create an enduring pair of friends. Giamatti has never been better, and in Miles finds the perfect role to suit his persona: cerebral but flawed and weighed down by luggage of his own making. Church is the perfect foil, and gives Jack a bounciness stemming from an inability to admit that with fading looks and creeping age, Jack's bright future as an actor is firmly behind him. Virginia Madsen turns Maya into a rich, complex red, while Sandra Oh mimics an in-your-face blast of popping champagne.

Sideways finds the sorrow and the laughs that come when forward momentum is well and truly lost, life starts drifting sideways, and it is suddenly apparent that for now, sideways is better than backwards.

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