Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As you may have heard unless you've just gotten back from an alternate dimension with no public relations industry, The Dark Knight opens this weekend, and even our resident skeptic Scott Von Doviak is hailing Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker as one of the pinnacles of big-screen malevolance. Batman is the perfect illustration of the principle that a hero is only as good as his villains; the Clown Prince of Crime is the outstanding member of an unforgettable rogue's gallery that throws the lonely heroism of Bruce Wayne into sharp relief by illustrating the other facets of his personality and demonstrating how terrible he might have been had he not taken the path of righteousness. Indeed, there are any number of genres, from true crime to film noir to serial thrillers to even Shakespearean tragedy, that prove that a story is only as strong as its most detestable character. Crime, as the man once said, is only a left-handed form of human endeavor, and for every enigmatic nihilist like the Joker who simply wants to watch the world burn, there's a figure whose vileness and evil are the result of a good man gone just a little bit bad. If your showing of The Dark Knight is sold out, here's five movies featuring some of our favorite big-screen villains to tide you over until you get to hear Ledger's deadly cackle for yourself.

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

These days, Terry O'Quinn is best known for his portrayal of John Locke, the mysteriously healed castaway from Lost who can be both hero and villain as he attempts to forge a mystical connection with the island. But 20 years ago, when the veteran stage actor first came to the attention of the moviegoing public, it was in this smart little thriller about a man so obsessed with having the perfect family that he was willing to kill to get it. His face an affable blank, O'Quinn goes about his father-knows-best routine with barely a harsh word for anything, until something goes wrong. That's when the devil inside him comes up, and he moves quickly from tearing up his tool room to butchering his whole family. O'Quinn's tightly controlled performance here is what makes the movie, and his quiet intensity is what makes it so devastatingly effective when he temporarily forgets the careful fiction he's made of his life and asks, with genuine confusion, "Who am I here?" -- before remembering, and delivering the news to his new wife in an especially brutal way.

THE MINUS MAN (1999)

Though a flawed movie, The Minus Man -- directed by Hampton Fancher, best known for penning the screenplay to Blade Runner -- is also a compelling one, thanks to the strong performance by Owen Wilson as the main character, Vann Siegert. Turning the usual serial killer narrative on its head, The Minus Man presents Siegert as a kind, handome, likable young man who wants to put down roots, to fit in, to be somebody -- but most of all, to help people. The problem is, he thinks that most people are so miserable that the best way to help them is to kill them (gently, of course, with a fast, painless poison). So decent is this mass murderer that his own conscience has to step in occasionally and remind him that what he's doing is wrong, in the person of two imaginary FBI agents who torment him. And so convincing is Wilson in making Vann a likable figure that more than once, the viewer finds himself wishing they would just go away and leave the poor boy alone.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984)

Great villains don't always have to be grim, sinister, humorless killing machines. Sometimes, as in this delightful neo-pulp sci-fi musical comedy, they can be goofy, pompous, overblown killing machines with the worst fake Italian accents since Chico Marx. Dr. Emilio Lizardo, the nefarious Red Lectroid living in the body of a long-dead rocket scientist, is played in the film by John Lithgow, who hams it up like there's no tomorrow. He sticks electrodes on his toungue, he tortures helpless women with honey, he gives plagiarized inspirational speeches to his handful of followers, and he deliberately mispronounces the names of his underlings -- and he has a hell of a time doing it. Dressed up in cobbled-together bits and pieces of a dozen pulp archetypes, Lithgow gets support from a colossal cast of veteran character actors, including Dan Hedeya, Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli, but he outshines them all, investing each one of his often hilarious lines with hooty gravitas.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

Some critics found the character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers' masterful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel to be so over-the-top as to read like a cartoonish supervillain. Others, though, found the understated psychopath, played by a preternaturaly detached Javier Bardem in one of the big screen's most memorable haircuts, to carry surprising depth for someone described by another character in the film as "the ultimate bad-ass". The most compelling thing about Chigurh is that, while everyone else perceives him as totally insane, his madness has the impenetrable integrity of the lunatic. To himself, his actions make perfect sense, and the more time we spend around his insanity, the more we begin to understand it: in the chilling scene near the movie's end where he pays a visit to the tragedy-stricken Carla Jean, we know that he's playing his own deranged interpretation of fair with her, and the terror we feel as the tension mounts comes from the fact that we know and she doesn't.

ROCKY III (1982)

Made at the exact moment in time that the Rocky franchise was becoming a laughable self-parody, but Mr. T had yet to do the same, Rocky III, while more or less a disaster in its second half and filled with hokey, ridiculous moments, does manage to give us some of the most thrilling scenes in the series. Why? Because it also gives us the greatest villain in the series: the brutal, granite-hard, contemptous Clubber Lang, a street-fighting brawler who has nothing but loathing for the soft celebrity smooth-talker that Stallone's Rocky Balboa has become. Patterned partly after the young George Foreman, Clubber Lang is a monster in the ring who lives to destroy his opponents and has developed a line of trash-talk so electrifying that it sends the gregarious Rocky into a rage while providing the most quotable dialogue in the whole Rocky series. And though he never showed himself capable of doing more than he does here, Mr. T is stunning: his hostile, spitting hatred of everyone but himself is so exciting to watch that for the film's first hour, it's hard to take your eyes off him.

OST: "Blade Runner"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Blade Runner has been described as a movie where everything comes together. This might seem like an odd description for such a rambunction mess of a film, which was marred by so much studio interference and difficulties in editing that director Ridley Scott felt that the director's cut of the movie left something to be desired, but what's meant is that it was a movie that in many ways was the career peak for everyone involved. Scott, a talented visionary but also an undisciplined egomaniac, never again made a film where he was so fully in command of his powers. Screenwriter Hampton Fancher went on to do some interesting work, but nothing on this level. Harrison Ford became a superstar, but one often defined by mediocrity and flatness; Sean Young's career would be sunk by rumors of her unpredictable emotional state; and Rutger Hauer would sabotage his own acting talents by appearing in anything that came with a paycheck -- but all three turned in fantastic performances. Even the movie's rich population of character actors, all of whom did great work elsewhere, seemed to hit their peak in Blade Runner -- including Edward James Olmos, M. Emmett Walsh, William Sanderson, Brion James, and Joe Terkel. Even Daryl Hannah isn't an embarrassment. The cinematography is among Jordan Cronenweth's best; the set direction, costumes, and production design are all top-notch; and it would be far and away the best movie adapted from a Philip K. Dick novel -- not that the author would live to see any of the rotten ones to come.

Even the composer of the film's score did what many consider to be his best work in Blade Runner. Vangelis (born Evangelos Papathanassiou) had built a career around his light New Age compositions that, if they weren't exactly triumphant, were at least slightly less boring than the music of most of his peers, but he scored a major success in 1981 with his stirring soundtrack work for Chariots of Fire. On the strength of that album, director Ridley Scott personally selected him to write the score to Blade Runner, instructing him to capture the film's mixture of depressing urban dystopia and shimmering, artificial advertised reality. Vangelis himself claimed he was attracted to the tortured character of ex-cop/blade runner Rick Deckard, and some of the thematic movements reflect this, shying away from the composer's usual use of high-toned, open chords to indicate triumph and transcendance, replaced with contracted, moody, jazzy movements and a sense of melancholy and despair. Much like the movie, the album fools you: the key notes, fills and musical cues are all a bit off, a bit subverted and turned around, leaving you uncertain how to feel, just as the script intends with characters like Deckard and Roy Batty. Vangelis would go on to have a rich and rewarding career as a film composer, but he'd never do anything this good again. Unfortunately, legal disputes with the record company -- as well as objections from the composer himself -- kept an 'official' soundtrack from being released for many years; the most widely available one featured the score being played by a thrown-together and inferior group of studio musicians. The multi-disc set released decades later at least features the original music, but it's lacking a number of cues, bits of incidental music, and one of the best compositions on the record; let's hope that a "final cut" of the film music is imminent, just as we now have the definitive version of the film.

BEST TRACKS: The "Blade Runner (End Title)" theme is the most recognizable piece of music on the album, and in many ways, it's the best: the soaring synth riffs cut off at their zenith with menacing rolls on a kettle drum as a relentless percussive beat worthy of Giorgio Moroder drives the entire thing along. The haunting "Rachel's Song", an inchoate piano piece with jazz chords and a peculiarly eerie feel, perfectly suits its scene, where Sean Young's character learns that she's a machine and that all the memories she has -- including taking piano lessons -- are inventions. And the "Love Theme from Blade Runner" breaks up the otherwise almost impenetrable darkness and moodiness of the score with a romantic saxophone melody that seems lifted from classic noir. (Sadly, one of the best pieces of music from the film -- the bizarre middle eastern techno piece played in a strip club, with vocals in the wierd melange of languages used by street people in the movie's futuristic setting -- is not included on any official release of the score.)

The Screengrab : hampton fancher

Take Five: Bring On the Bad Guys

OST: "Blade Runner"