The Screengrab : diner

Mickey Rourke Gets Up Off the Canvas

Phil Nugent — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As the opening of the New York Film Festival draws near and with it, the American premiere of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Scott Foundas checks in with the movie's star, Mickey Rourke. Given the reception to Aronofsky's last movie, The Fountain, his new one (which won the Best Film prize at the recent Venice Film Festival) would qualify as a back-from-the-dead comeback even if it starred Michael Phelps, but the fact that it's a Mickey Rourke movie--the first time that Rourke has claimed the starring role in a full-length, non-multiple-story movie in many a moon--makes it even bigger news. Looking back to his early days, when he moved from Miami to New York with an itch to act, Rourke recalls, ""I wanted to be like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Chris Walken, and Harvey Keitel. I wanted to be a really great actor. And if I worked really, really fucking hard, maybe one day I could do that. And I worked really, really hard. I had no social life. I lived like a monk. For weeks on end, I slept on the couch at the Actors Studio, working on scenes nonstop." And when he followed up his scene-stealing small role as an arsonist named Teddy in Body Heat with his performance as the overgrown tomcat Boogie in the ensemble picture Diner, a lot of people were very impressed with his charisma, his seductiveness, his "look into my eyes" audience rapport, and his ability to overcome playing characters with really dopey names. Thinking back on what happened next, Rourke says, "I look at these guys like Matt Damon, George Clooney, Sean Penn—they're all very bright, educated guys who understand that it's a business and there's politics involved. I wasn't educated or aware enough. I thought I was so good I didn't have to play the game. And I was terribly wrong."

Here, as in his other post-crash interviews, Rourke is admirable in his insistence on blaming himself for screwing up his career. Still, talk of office politics can scarcely convey how weirdly Rourke began to handle himself, and to style himself, as soon as he began to get a little control over his movie roles. In such horndog entertainments as 9 1/2 Weeks and Wild Orchid, he seemed to be trying to prove that, given the right wardrobe, leading ladies, and exotic locales, even a Miami boy could qualify as Eurotrash. In Angel Heart and Barfly, he continued to bang away at his female co-stars like a screen door during a typhoon, while also demonstrating his "authenticity" as a manly Method actor by reporting to work looking as if he'd been tied to the back bumper of a jeep and dragged through a swamp. All this time, he was living far beyond his means and turning down roles in movies that might have made his status in Hollywood a lot sturdier. Meanwhile, stories about his unmanageable behavior on the set and the storm surrounding his on-again, off-again marriage to his Wild Orchid co-star Carre' Otis (who accused, and then non-accused him, of spousal abuse) were helping to turn him into a joke. Rourke dates the point of no return to his decision to co-star with Don Johnson in the 1991 Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. The movie was a critically derided bomb, and for once Rourke, who had done it because he desperately needed the money, couldn't claim to have had any grand artistic hopes for the finished product. "They paid me a lot of money, and I went fuckin' bonkers because I sold out and I hated myself for it. Some kind of anger kicked off, about the fact that I'd put myself in a position to have to do that movie. The demons took over." Rourke's sense of shame over having done the kind of movie that most stars routinely laugh off drove him to abandon acting for several years and take up professional boxing, a sport he had practiced as an amateur back in the early seventies. (Although Rourke remains vague about his age, he must have been around forty when he climbed back into the ring.) Eventually he started shopping around for movie roles again, having concluded a physical testing that one hopes did more good for his soul than it did for his face. He was very funny as a self-pampering, sleazeball lawyer in Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of the John Grisham thriller The Rainmaker. He worked a long time filming a good-sized role in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, but sadly, his whole performance was edited out of the movie. He played the villain in the Tsui Hark film Double Team, which co-starred Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman, but sadly, his performance stayed in the movie.

Rourke's real salvation came from fellow actors who, when they took their own turns directing movies, reached out to him as a worthy brother in need. In small roles as a bookie in Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66, as a prison drag queen in Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory, and as a man who can't get past his daughter's murder in Sean Penn's The Pledge, Rourke was given the chance to demonstrate both his range and, especially in the Penn film, his daring willingness to go very deep emotionally while remaining handsomely in control of his effects as an actor. In 1994, Rourke had been too occupied with boxing to say yes when Quentin Tarantino invited him to play the Bruce Willis part in Pulp Fiction. Now, Tarntino's sidekick Robert Rodriguez cast him in a small role in Once Upon a Time in Mexico and then in a biggerm, showier (and CGI-augmented) one in Sin City, a movie whose most awesome special effect was Rourke's ability to make his presence felt through all that latex and computer trickery. But in the eyes of the suits, he was still unbankable and probably insurable.

But Aronofsky and his screenwriter, Robert D. Siegel, had planned The Wrestler with Rourke in mind, and when Rourke agreed to meet the director, Aronofsky gave him what sounds like one hell of a pep talk. As Rourke describes it, "He sits down, and for the first five minutes, he tells me how I fucked up my whole career for 15 years behaving like this, and I'm agreeing with everything. Yes, I did. That's why I haven't worked for 15 years, and I've been working real hard not to make those mistakes... He goes: 'You have to listen to everything I say. You have to do everything I tell you. You can never disrespect me. And you can't be hanging out at the clubs all night long. And I can't pay you.' And I'm thinking: 'This fucker must be talented, because he's got a lot of nerve to say that.' " But Aronofsky discovered that he couldn't get the movie funded without a big star, and when Rourke was told that he was going to be out of the picture, part of him was relieved, ""because I knew that Darren wanted me to revisit these dark places, these painful places." Then suddenly, he was back in again. If Rourke had any complaints about the resulting collaboration, he's keeping them to himself. "He knew how to push my buttons," he says of Aronofsky. "I do a take, and I nail it. I look over at Darren and I think: 'OK, we're moving on.' And he walks over to me and says: 'Do it better.' And you know what surprised me? I did it again, and I did it better. He knew that if he challenged me, that's what I wanted. A lot of people don't like that; me, I need it."

Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen, Again, to Steve Guttenberg

Phil Nugent — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

We would be remiss in not mentioning before this week fades away that Steve Guttenberg's latest fifteen minutes ran out when he was voted off ABC's Dancing with the Stars. In order to find this event deserving of comment, let alone a reason to break out the good champagne, one probably has to have lived through the 1980s, a period when Guttenberg's high public profile and cockroach-like staying power seemed to be one of the great pop culture mysteries of the time: to see Guttenberg starring in a movie was to better understand what some people saw in Judd Nelson. In the 1960s and 1970s, such performers as Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, and even Al Pacino had played smart but alienated guys who may have felt physically inadequate compared to the bigger, more conventionally attractive people around them but who suspected that if they didn't fit in with the societal ideal, then that meant there was something wrong with society. In the 1980s, a time that was both celebrated and assailed as a period when America (or, at least, American media culture) tried to get back to a smoother, quieter, more Leave it to Beaver kind of atmosphere after the upheavals of the preceding decades, Guttenberg came across as a sweet dork, a none-too-bright guy who just wanted to fit in, and maybe he was able to coast for a long time partly on the feeling of reassurance it may have given some people to see someone so spectacularly unexceptional starring in whole string of movies, even if four of them had the words "Police Academy" in their titles.

Guttenberg's movie career basically died overnight at some point--in a spirit of generosity, I'd pinpoint its absolute last gasp at 1990, with the sequel to Three Men and a Baby--and except for a recurring role on Veronica Mars and the occasional guest shot on a Law & Order series, he's been undetectable on radar ever since. The Dancing with the Stars appearance was his Rambo IV--the sum total of what '80s nostalgia is able to do for him now. Unlike his recent TV acting jobs, where he seemed rather grumpy, he was clearly overjoyed at having a camera pointed at him again and made no attempt to play hard to get. His dancing was more notable for the facial expressions he assumed while on the floor than for anything that his body was doing below the neck, but his beaming, nearly radioactive happiness at being seen by millions while a studio audience cheered his name struck many people as very touching. On his last show, he was paired with a male partner and later that night appeared on Jimmy Kimmel's talk show, where he said, " "I did what I was told and I had a great time." There, in a nutshell, is the essence of Guttenberg's screen persona--he may not get it, and whatever part of him that does get it may not be sure he likes it, but he does what he's told, and is thrilled to be a celebrity who does what he's told. In his last minutes before disappearing again from the face of the Earth, he passionately delivered what I suspect was an adjusted version of the speech he wrote in his head more than twenty years ago just in case he won an Academy Award for Coccoon, and then, just as he was saying, "If I can just say one thing," he was interrupted by the show's host, Tom Bergeron, bluntly telling him, "You can't." (The show was in danger of running overlong because of his babbling.) It was the closest that Steve Guttenberg has come to being associated with a perfect moment since the strip-club scene in Diner.

The Ten Worst Hairdos In Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Yeah, we know, we know, that haircut soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Javier Bardem sports in the soon-to-be-Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men is pretty disturbing and awful. But that's not even the worst haircut of Javier Bardem's career. (Read on!) Indeed, thinking about No Country got us thinking about some of the other truly monstrous 'dos we've encountered over the years on the screen. Here's our list of the Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History.

Mickey Rourke, YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

In his shambling youth, Mickey Rourke had a tough veneer with a sensitive undertone. He might have become a major movie star (as opposed to an object of cult worship in France and some of your better dorm rooms) in the Hollywood Heartthrob, Good-Bad-but-Not-Evil division, if he'd found a few more roles like the Baltimore honeydripper he played in Diner. But he drove his career into a ditch in a misguided effort to show what a tough, hard-slugging badass he was. His performance in this descent into the Michael Cimino-Oliver Stone Thunderdome tells you everything about what went wrong, and much of it is concentrated on his hair. Twenty-eight years old when the film was shot, Rourke seemed a little young for the role of a much-decorated NYPD veteran who learned about the deviousness of the Asian criminal mind while serving in Vietnam, more than ten years earlier. So the decision was made to send him down to the high school and have the erasers clapped together over his head. His chalk-encrusted tresses here make his entrance a guaranteed laugh-getter, especially since he wears a hat that he must have borrowed from a flatfoot in a Bogart movie; when he plops it down onto his noggin, you expect a cloud of white dust to envelop the room. (In some scenes his hair darkens to a grayish tint and then goes white again, suggesting that the testosterone release of beating up Chinese punks and having sex with Dutch-Japanese-supermodel-slash-godawful-actress "Ariane" has youth-restoring benefits, but they wear off fast.)

Sean Penn, CARLITO'S WAY (1993)

Penn's performance as Al Pacino's fast-talking lawyer, who lusts after the bad-boy cred and sleazy thrills that his client has outgrown, is a beautiful comic turn, and the selflessness that makes it possible extends fully to his scalp. With a little mop of frizzy curlicues that suggest that he's had his pubic hair transplanted onto his head, he looks like Art Garfunkel, Superstar. (This effect was especially funny back in 1993, when it was possible to go from this movie to see Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena and see that the actual Art Garfunkel had turned into Larry Fine, C.P.A.) His red mop grows more excitable and unruly as his character grows ever more dangerously unhinged. At the end, we hear a gunshot that signals that his character has been put out of Carlito's misery, and it is a great disappointment that the camera cuts away without showing his hair scurrying away under its own power. Nobody in Hollywood knows how to set up a sequel anymore.

Javier Bardem, PERDITA DURANGO (1997)

You think his hair in No Country for Old Men is bad? Pfft. For some of us, our first impression of Javier Bardem was with another bad hair cut, the one he had in Alex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango (aka Dance With the Devil). Playing a homicidal, kidnapping voodoo priest, Bardem sports an unholy mullet that could scar your eyeballs. It's a scary character, and the hair cut makes him scarier because you know he knows he can get away with it. And you fear what would happen if you accidentally made fun of it. Nobody's making "business in front, party in the back" jokes around him, we guarantee you.

Anne Bancroft in THE HINDENBURG (1975)

In 1937, a German passenger zeppelin caught fire and exploded as it was preparing to land in New Jersey. The catastrophe was captured on film by a newsreel cameraman, and in 1975, some master of taste and sensitivity got the inspiration of trying to tap into the mid-'70s "disaster movie" fad by making a period melodrama leading up to the horror. Looking to tone this idea up a little, the movie posits that the explosion was set off deliberately, as an act of anti-Nazi sabotage. An alternate theory is that the saboteur felt that it was necessary to wipe Anne Bancroft's hair off the face of the Earth, whatever the cost. Bancroft plays a German countess who is also a morphine addict, which must be pretty mild stuff compared to whatever the hell her hairdresser is on. Since this is the kind of movie that tries to impress you with the historical accuracy of its fashions and knick knacks, Bancroft's grisly coiffure must have been the result of intense research. But could the researchers not have kept it to themselves that the stylish German junkie of 1937 walked around looking, as Pauline Kael put it with baleful accuracy, as if she had "black potato chips stuck to her head"?

Keith Carradine in TROUBLE IN MIND (1986)

Every once in a while, the writer-director Alan Rudolph feels the need to make a movie so strange that all his other movies will consider reporting it to Homeland Security if it threatens to move into their neighborhood. At present, the holder of this title is probably his 1999 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation Breakfast of Champions, but Trouble in Mind, a sort-of-futuristic daydream set in "Rain City", a drizzly place where the local criminal kingpin is played by Divine, took on all comers for quite a while there. This is one of the few times Divine played a non-drag role, but he must have brought his make-up case with him, because it looks as if Carradine got into it and made a hell of a mess. He plays a dopey young punk from the sticks who falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes overly enamored of the decadent thrills that Rain City has to offer. The most garish of these are apparently dispensed at the local Supercuts, because he keeps disappearing for awhile and then returning with his hair drenched in sticky-looking glop and twisted into fun house shapes, with his face painted as if he'd gotten a job as David Bowie's stunt double on the cover of Aladdin Sane. All in all, this may have been Keith Carradine's unstudliest hour.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

Click here for Part 2!

Location, Location, Location: Baltimore

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Hooker on the corner, waiting on a train
Drunk lyin’ on the sidewalk, sleepin’ in the rain

That’s the picture Randy Newman painted in his 1977 song “Baltimore,” and it hasn’t gotten much better for Charm City since then – at least, not as far as its portrayal in the popular culture is concerned. Nowadays the city is best known as the setting of The Wire, this week’s season premiere of which was greeted with the customary round of “greatest TV show ever” reviews, as well as the usual grumbling from residents that the program tends not to portray their home as a nice place to visit, live or even think about.

To add insult to injury, the wasteland that is the January movie release schedule today serves up the execrable First Sunday, a Tyler Perry knockoff starring Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan as a couple of B-more bad boys who decide to rob a church stocked with dismaying stereotypes.

It’s not so much that Baltimore has never been treated right by the movies – it’s that it’s rarely been treated at all. If Barry Levinson and John Waters had gone into accounting or narcotics distribution, we might never have seen the city on the screen, but instead they have both used Baltimore as their respective canvases, to very different effect.

Levinson’s Baltimore is primarily nostalgic and gentle; there’s not a whole lot of slingin’ on the corners of Liberty Heights or Avalon. Instead, it’s “a little place where people gather to enjoy the banquet of life”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxjL0Ifd6gI

That’s a little more Chamber of Commerce friendly than The Wire, and although Levinson doesn’t shy away from the sticky issue of race relations in his hometown, it’s hard to imagine Marlo or Snoop finding much to identify with in this clip from Liberty Heights:

John Waters also took a nostalgic look at Baltimore’s racial divide in Hairspray, but that’s about the only point of comparison between the two directors’ depictions of the city. Not many things could scare the corner boys of The Wire, but here’s a sight that could do it:

So you can see why it’s been hard for the good citizens of Baltimore to hold onto their dignity when all the world thinks their city is nothing but a teeming cesspool of run-down row houses, drug dealers and oversized drag clowns with slabs of meat clenched between their thighs. But cheer up, Baltimore! Somebody loves you: