Sunset Gun

My Guy--Guy Pearce

Channeling Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and the palpable feelings emitting from a faded photograph taken in the late 19th century, Nick Cave wrote one of the year's best films with The Proposition. A dark,  elegiac, gorgeous, blood soaked Western that boasts a cast of actors who'd (god bless them) be right at home in both the era they're portraying and the 1970's, this is grit (directed by John Hillcoat) most true. 

Opening with a hideous outback killing at the end of the 19th century in the former penal colony (Australia), we see the lawless, murdering Burns brothers do their especially heinous deed. Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce, looking his hungry best) and his younger brother, Mikey (Richard Wilson) are captured by lawman Captain Stanley (the barrel chested wonder Ray Winstone) with a proposition. If Charlie turns in his older brother, Arthur (a terrifically vicious Danny Huston), Stanley will keep Mikey alive. It's Charlie's Choice with lots of beatings, shoot-outs, rotted teeth and glorious, glorious decay.

Pearce is stunning in a performance that made me recall interviwing the actor a few years ago. I wondered why he wasn't a bigger star and then, was happy he wasn't. He's too offbeat, too interesting.

An engaging man (to say the least), he was also exactly how I'd imagined (or hoped)--honest and even a touch sad. There's just something immediately poignant about the guy.

Guy Pearce:

Of the two relatively unknown Australian talents to emerge from 1997's L.A. Confidential, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce, it's been the lower profile Pearce who's remained the most fascinatingly enigmatic. Crowe, of course, has gotten all the glory -- sometimes at Pearce's expense. Take 2000, when Crowe appeared in the impressive, epic Gladiator and Pearce made the masterful, inventive Memento. The latter film's unique told-in-reverse structure and Pearce's magnetic performance as a shady, grieving widower plagued with short-term memory loss made it one of the most dissected, talked about and admired films of year.

But when it came awards time, Gladiator (well deserved since I love the picture) steamrolled over the field, leaving little room for Memento and Pearce. Just as L.A. Confidential barely made a dent on Oscar night, Memento failed to get an Oscar nomination for best picture -- which went, ultimately, to Gladiator -- and Pearce wasn't nominated for his performance while Crowe took the best actor Oscar. As much as I admire Gladiator and Crowe, Pearce should have been nominated. That set of circumstances, produced some clarity for Pearce.

"I used to have a lot of confusion about the Academy Awards," he said. "I had it on a pedestal. But then I always thought, it's kind of weird that amazing things didn't get through, and rather mundane or popular stuff would win. After the whole L.A. Confidential and Memento experience, I thought, well that kind of solidifies it for me. I don't really feel confused anymore. It's knocked off the pedestal now."

Pedestals hardly seem important to Pearce. The finely chiseled, handsome, reedy actor whose tattooed body was a walking puzzle in Memento, hasn't pushed for that specifically hunky Aussie superstardom a la other talents like Crowe, Heath Ledger or Hugh Jackman. Even in more mainstream fare like the disappointing The Time Machine or the solidly entertaining The Count of Monte Cristo, Pearce maintains an effortless mystery and a distinct eccentricity.

Inhabiting the more fascinating arena of leading men who double as character actors, he's particularly desirous of shedding his skin. "I read something the other day with elements that mirrored the experiences in the character in Memento, " he said, and "my immediate response was, 'Oh, I don't want to go there.' I have a real thing about people doing the same thing over and over again."

The 39-year old -- who started on the popular Aussie soap Neighbours (Crowe is another alum) -- is a positive chameleon whose characters have ranged from a drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to an earnest, ambitious policeman in L.A. Confidential and a cannibalistic Civil War general in the vastly underrated and brilliant Ravenous (seriously, you can't get me to shut up about this movie). His range is exemplary, but the friendly, forthright Pearce isn't one to boast.

Case in point: He makes sure to qualify his praise for Memento as something he'd normally have a hard time with for fear it'd sound like bragging. Giving all the credit to Memento director and co-writer Christopher Nolan, Pearce claimed it's easy to exalt the film's brilliance because "I don't feel like I had anything to do with it." He then added quickly, almost dismissively, "I mean, obviously I did have something to do with it" -- yeah...a real understatement.

In The Hard Word, Pearce added another figure to his engaging portrait gallery. Playing Dale, the oldest of three bank-robbing brothers, he's scummy and prison-tough, but also sexy, smart and surprisingly decent. Attracted to the role for its multi-layered character, Pearce also admired the film's regional Aussie cheekiness that highlights the underdog psyche and, Pearce contended, "probably originated from Australia being a convict colony." He added, "Even in dire situations Aussies are good at being a bit sarcastic."

And he also liked the chance to work from his Australian home, which he has rarely done since making an international name for himself. "I'd get up in the morning and forget to go to work," he laughed, "I'm so used to being home representing not working."

"Not working" was something that entered his mind a few years ago. Although he says acting is therapeutic for him, doubt and anxiety do creep in: "I definitely for a couple years back there was saying to myself: 'I hate this. I don't want to do this anymore. I want to work on myself to be a better person. I just want to be me.' Because, as therapeutic as it is, you're kind of perpetuating your insecurities as well. It's a tricky little double-edged sword."

Pearce confessed that his thoughts about acting are all part of his personality. "I'm quite extreme," he admitted. "If I drink, I get really drunk. I go all the way. I need to feel like I've been taken all the way in order to feel the depths of something, in order for me to actually feel. And if I don't, I just feel like a fraud."

This tendency translates into the way he makes certain career choices. As he put it, "There's always that control freak element one has, and you know in a sense it inadvertently becomes your responsibility because you're the one up on the screen and you're the one doing interviews, you know, a year later, justifying the movie!"

With that he laughs and tells a story about John Gielgud. In a perfect Gielgud, complete with dramatic pause, Pearce declares: "You can be good in a good movie. You can be good in a bad movie. You can be bad in a bad movie but never, ever be bad in a good movie."

Although you'd never get him to say it, Pearce is never anything but good. Great, really. I have never watched an even mediocre Pearce performance. He's real, he's raw, he's truly, one of the best. 

Tuesday, Death Race and Guitar Wolf

Not too many DVD's I'm that excited about this week. Most notable are The Proposition, The Henry Fonda Signature Collection and the Criterion editions of The Spirit of the Beehive and Jigoku. Hmm...I guess that should be enough. I'm becoming greedy.   

As for now, Three Obsessions:

1. Pretty Poison God I love Tuesday Weld. I love her so much it almost hurts. Lord Love a Duck, Wild in the Country, The Cincinnati Kid, Play it as it Lays, Thief and on and on... But my favorite Weld performance? As Sue Ann Stepanek in Pretty Poison. Finally released on DVD, Pretty Poison is the definitive Tuesday Weld movie. Playing the beautiful but deadly high-school majorette to Anthony Perkins twitchy, creepy fire-starter, she is the deliciously deviant underbelly of America's heartland. Where blondes are supposed to be good girls but, in her case, are most definitely not. Made in 1968 and directed by Noel Black, the picture was something of a dud upon release (too sexually disturbing? Too strange?) and has achieved cult status ever since and deservedly so. With its violence, pitch black comedy and sexy viciousness (watch Tuesday commit murder and immediately desire sex after) the picture is wonderfully subversive and deeply strange. And Weld...she is charming, scary, beautiful and sickly erotic. Need I explain the plot? The manipulation of Perkins (who thought he was doing the manipulating)?  The killing of her mother? The crazy, beautiful, psycho intensity of Weld? No. You really should watch it for yourself. Again, Tuesday, Tuesday. As Tiny Tim sang, "If only Tuesday Weld would be my wife." Update: Read my extended take on Pretty Poison, six years later, for Weld's 70th birthday, at the top of Sunset Gun, August 27, 2013. And on a Tuesday! 
 

2. Death Race 2000 Paul Bartel directed (and Roger Corman produced) this infamous cult movie that coupled a whacked-out dystopian future with a bizarre, violent long distance car race. You know how it goes: Drivers stack up points for mowing down totally innocent pedestrians as they speed across the country. The sport has become a national obsession complete with nutty contestants (check out a young Sylvester Stallone as a goombah racer and David Carradine as the scary anti-hero) and insane fans who want to get run over. I recently re-watched the picture and it remains as deranged, goofy and gonzo relevant as ever.  I hope that re-make idea ran out of gas. There's no topping this original.

3. Guitar Wolf  Guitar Wolf, leather, guns, blood and of course, their kick ass rockabilly/punk/jet rock music that puts every so-called new punk band to shame. Dig the Japanese trio as they make their film Wild Zero. One of the coolest looking bands ever? Yes, I do believe so. Why did Bass Wolf have to die? Why?

Diabolically Yours--Alain Delon

Alain Delon always seems not of this Earth.

The French, after all, dubbed him the "Ice Cold Angel" for his glacial beauty and laconic demeanor. But the iconic actor came from a world far from the perfect alignment of his facial features, one full of dirt, spit, blood and guts.

Born in 1935 in Sceaux, France, the star of Purple Noon, Rocco and His Brothers and Le Samourai had a rough-and-tumble start. Leaving a broken home at age 4, he lived with foster parents near a French prison where the future actor bid his time playing with the guards. His foster parents were killed, and Delon moved back in with his mother. Drop kicked from countless schools, the troubled teen worked as a butcher's apprentice with his stepfather. He was deeply unhappy. He entered the French military and at the young age of 17, became a parachutist and served in Indochina.

Returning to civilian life in 1956, Delon worked as a porter and soon after as a waiter in Paris where he smartly made countless connections with actors. One was Jean Claude Brialy, who accompanied the no doubt, excited Delon to the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. There, as a nobody, he, like a male Brigitte Bardot attracted copious attention for his staggering good looks and mysterious charisma. He was in.

At the onset of the French New Wave, France liked bad boys, and Delon was a bona fide baddie. Sure, he was supremely pretty, almost eerily so, but he was rough and truly shady. He would later prove to have ties to the French criminal underworld. Perfect. A movie star was born.

Though Delon's acting debut came in Yves Allegret's 1957 film When the Woman Gets Confused, his big break was Rene Clement's Purple Noon, in which he was cast as the sociopathic but somehow sympathetic con artist Tom Ripley. Filmed with an undercurrent of homoeroticism, the film established Delon as France's answer to James Dean by way of Greta Garbo. To quote Dean's rebel, if anything was tearing Delon apart, the audience wasn't so sure how much was affecting him. And perhaps they didn't want to know.

And yet interestingly, Delon bypassed the French New Wave (parts that would go to the more energetic and rubber faced expressiveness of Jean-Paul Belmondo) and instead worked with Luchino Visconti on Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard, Michelangelo Antonioni on The Eclipse, Jean-Pierre Melville in Le Samourai, Le Cercle rouge and Un Flic, and Joseph Losey on Mr. Klein. I could list all of his credits (including the sexy Girl on a Motorcycle with Marianne Faithful, the experimental Nouvelle Vague, his only picture with Jean-Luc Godard, Spirits of the Dead in Louis Malle's William Wilson segment and dear lord, Zorro--I love him as Zorro) but check them out for yourself.  They are impressive, masterful and at times, bizarre.

Delon is a legend in France, not just as an actor but also as a celebrity -- for his long list of wives and lovers (most famously, Nico, whom he had a son with and Romy Schneider) and legal dust-ups, as well as his *rumored open bisexuality (star to rumored as the word was missing in the first post -- apologies -- and Delon is certainly against homosexuality now). In 1968 Delon was implicated in a sex-and-murder scandal involving the death of his bodyguard. Though he was cleared of the charges, his dealings with Marseilles crime figures as far back as 1956 were revealed, including criminal gun-dealing. Gun dealing. Delon was a regular George Raft. Of course, this only helped his career in crime films, toughening up his gorgeous image with messy, dirty street credibility.

It's tough to think of a film actor so finely featured with such dark depths -- even Steve McQueen doesn't have the otherworldly intensity of Delon. And Delon had his own kind of range. In Rocco and His Brothers he plays a good son trying to keep his family together, but there's nothing sappy about his performance. And in one of his greatest films, the brilliant Le Samourai, his hired killer is both ice-incarnate -- as he murders his prey in a nightclub -- and an alienated innocent -- a warrior obsessed with his craft. He’s never easily evil or simplistically decent, and the conflicted characters he crafts don't have the obvious, melodramatic contradictions that lesser actors project.

Delon, 70, is still around. He has created his own lines of perfume and watches, and in spite of threats to retire, he continues to act. And the essential tension at the root of his performances is still obvious. Delon contrasts a terse, world-weary, corrupt image against a pure beauty that’s truly remained unmatched.

"I had a physique in contradiction with what I carried inside," he once said. "I've fought it all my life."

The Bitch Is Back--'The Wicker Man'

Here's the deal with The  Wicker Man--if Neil LaBute intended the film be a darkly comedic male nightmare, the kind of vision Norman Mailer wakes up to in a cold sweat, it's a smashing success. If not, I don't know what the hell to make of it.

The picture sure didn't scare me (though it may scare men), but it was weirdly entertaining and at times, hilarious.

LaBute is no stranger to pitch black comedy between the sexes. Check his Carnal Knowledge salvo's In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, The Shape of Things and the softer, gentler Nurse Betty. All films propel the viewer into a world in which men and women say and do despicable things to one another. Because of this, LaBute's often been labeled a misogynist. I've always thought that unfair since his men are frequently worse than his women. If you remember Jason Patric's speech in Your Friends and Neighbors regarding the greatest sex of his life (ahhh...locker room rape), you'll know what I mean. And what about Nurse Betty? Greg Kinnear is the supreme asshole in that scenario, not poor confused Renee Zellweger. And I tend to agree with HL Mencken when he said, "a misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women hate each other."

But The Wicker Man? Well...wow.  The women making up the matriarchal community Nicolas Cage finds himself stuck in are bad. They are bad-bad. These women will break every man's spirit to the point of not allowing them to speak. Even the cute little blonde girl-children are pint sized bee-otches.

Which is why the picture is intriguing, bizarre and downright daring. Casting Cage was one weird move. Try as he might, there's nothing regular about Nicolas Cage and I think that's the point. When we first see his cop, he's checking out a self-help book in a diner. He's not drinking a cup of Joe or flirting with the waitress, he's thinking of ways to improve his  beaten down life. After he witnesses a car accident, he's traumatized, eating psychiatric medication and sitting around his house in a daze. Soon he's searching for the lost daughter of an ex girlfriend on a remote PNW island inhabited by a bunch of severe, hippie dippy/Amish-looking women who aren't friendly and treat their few men folk like slaves.  At times their community reminded me of certain gals (sorry, womyn) who taught Women's Studies at my old college, The University of Oregon (sorry, that was so easy but so true). It also recalls all those ladies who run goddess shops, wear lots of purple and glare at anyone not shopping with a cotton sack.

Or is this community of bee-keeping, white-wearing lasses an exaggerated portrait of what all women secretly desire? To tame and control their men? Is this LaBute's wickedly funny point?

Again, I don't know. Or rather, maybe I'm choosing to believe that, instead of a bad horror re-make of a cult classic (the original I won't get into), he's crafted a subversive comic polemic concerning militant feminism. I'd like to think the latter because, well, that's just a lot more interesting.

And again, a lot more amusing. Truly. Because, are we not supposed to laugh when, near the end of the film, Cage delivers a roundhouse kick to Leelee Sobieski's face? This nice man (and Cage gives us no reason to think he's anything but) is reduced to his most primal instinct by first punching a woman in the face (shades of Steve McQueen socking Sally Struthers in The Getaway) and in the film's second moment of shock (and humor), pulling out the karate on Sobieski. Please don't misunderstand, I'm not for smacking the ladies, but in this instance, I laughed. I laughed a lot.

And please, Mr. LaBute. You meant for me to laugh. Right? Because I strangely enjoyed your movie and I'm not sure if I want to discover even more flaws within myself.

But hey, I am a woman after all.

*Note: Another amusing bit of weirdness. The film is dedicated to Johnny Ramone.