My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)

 

My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)

Cast: River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo, William Richert, Rodney Harvey, Chiara Caselli, Michael Parker, Jessica Makinson, Flea, Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, Tom Troupe, Sally Curtice. Screenplay: Gus Van Sant, based on plays by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: John J. Campbell, Eric Alan Edwards. Production design: David Brisbin. Film editing: Curtiss Clayton. Music: Bill Stafford. 

When is a cult film not a cult film? The term is bandied about so often, that I have to protest when people use it about My Own Private Idaho, which seems to me to transcend the label. To my mind, a cult film is one that reaches an enthusiastic audience despite its apparent limitations as a serious work of film art. They Live, for example, John Carpenter’s 1988 movie, is a cult film because it’s part of a genre, the horror/sci-fi flick, looked down on by “serious” critics, made on a shoestring, with some really awful acting and cheesy production values, but carrying a potent subtext that continues to be appreciated by audiences years after others in its subgenre have been forgotten. What lifts My Own Private Idaho above cult level is its wit and intelligence, which should have been obvious from the start, and the sheer brilliance with which its director and actors carry off its audaciously ironic vision of what lesser filmmakers would have treated with message-movie earnestness: The lives of street hustlers. Gus Van Sant’s decision to work in an analogy with the coterie surrounding Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V is a stroke of genius. (Shakespeare is credited – tongue-in-cheek, I think – with “additional dialogue,” even though most of the borrowings are paraphrased into contemporary English.) But it’s only the most obvious of the film’s surprises, which multiply with every viewing. My Own Private Idaho will also continuously engender a sense of loss, from what may be River Phoenix’s finest performance, as the narcoleptic lost boy, hopelessly in love with Keanu Reeves’s controlled and conniving Scott, a character that makes its own wry comment on Shakespeare’s Prince Hal.

Lust in the Dust (Paul Bartel, 1984)

Lust in the Dust (Paul Bartel, 1984)

Cast: Divine, Tab Hunter, Lainie Kazan, Geoffrey Lewis, Henry Silva, Cesar Romero, Gina Gallego, Nedra Volz, Courtney Gains. Screenplay: Philip John Taylor. Cinematography: Paul Lohmann. Production design: Walter Pickette. Film editing: Alan Toomayan. Music: Peter Matz.

The presence of Divine in the cast of Lust in the Dust, and of Tab Hunter, who co-starred with her in John Waters’s 1981 movie Polyester, might make you think this is one of Waters’s films. Too bad it wasn’t: It would probably have been funnier and trashier, but Waters chose not to direct a film for which he hadn’t written the script. Paul Bartel’s movie might be described as “Waters adjacent”: Edith Massey, another member of Waters’s stock company, was originally set to play the role of Big Ed, but died before filming started and was replaced by Nedra Volz. Still, Lust in the Dust is a reasonably funny, reasonably raunchy, and certainly trashy Western spoof, with Hunter playing a character who’s obviously a parody of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name from the Sergio Leone movies. Hunter and his husband, Allan Glazer, also produced the film.

 

Jabberwocky (Terry Gilliam, 1977)

 

Jabberwocky (Terry Gilliam, 1977)

Cast: Michael Palin, Harry H. Corbett, John Le Mesurier, Warren Mitchell, Max Wall, Deborah Fallender, Annette Badland, Terry Jones. Screenplay: Charles Alverson, Terry Gilliam, based on a poem by Lewis Carroll. Cinematography: Terry Bedford. Production design: Roy Forge Smith. Film editing: Michael Bradsell. 

Despite being directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Michael Palin, and featuring a cameo by Terry Jones, all members of the troupe, Jabberwocky is not a Monty Python movie. Gilliam protested when the distributors wanted to market it as “Monty Python’s Jabberwocky.” It might have been better or funnier if it had featured the talents of the group, because as it is, Jabberwocky is mostly a string of gross-out gags held together by a story about a peasant, Dennis Cooper (Palin), who comes to the city to make his fortune and winds up slaying the Jabberwock and winning the hand of the princess – which he doesn’t particularly want. It’s too messy and too choppy, concentrating more on creating a grimy vision of the “Dark Ages” – “darker than anyone had ever expected,” says the Narrator (Palin) – than on bringing Lewis Carroll’s poem to life. That said, the film does feature a splendidly realized Jabberwock, based on John Tenniel’s illustration, a shambling, ratty-winged creature, performed by an actor (Peter Salmon)  who was forced to walk backward inside the costume so the legs would bend in birdlike fashion. The movie has many admirers, so I have to admit that I appreciate Gilliam’s efforts – it was his first solo feature as director after the success of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which was co-directed with Terry Jones. 

The Contractor (Tarik Saleh, 2022)

 

The Contractor (Tarik Saleh, 2022)

Cast: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Kiefer Sutherland, Eddie Marsan, JD Pardo, Florian Munteau, Sander Thomas. Screenplay: J.P. Davis. Cinematography: Pierre Aïm. Production design: Roger Rosenberg. Film editing: Theis Schmidt. Music: Alex Belcher. 

The Contractor begins promisingly, suggesting that it might be a hard-hitting film about the mistreatment of veterans and their involvement in private paramilitary organizations. It even name-checks the odious Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater and a hero of the American right. Chris Pine plays James Harper, a sergeant in the Special Forces, who is discharged because he has been using illicit drugs to treat the pain from a knee injured in the course of duty. Left without a pension or health care and supporting his wife and young son, he reluctantly follows the course taken by his friend Mike Hawkins (Ben Foster) and signs up with an organization headed by Rusty Jennings (Kiefer Sutherland) that does contract work with the Defense department. But when James is sent off on his first mission, which involves what he is told is a biochemical warfare agent being developed by a scientist in Berlin, the movie becomes a conventional thriller involving a series of intricate double-crosses. Pine is a fine actor, and he treats the script with a respect it doesn’t deserve once it strays into Mission: Impossible territory. If director Tarik Saleh had found a way to get the serious part of the film to mesh with the improbable shootouts and hair’s-breadth escapes that James endures, The Contractor might have been a better, or at least a more enjoyable film. But he sticks with the grimly determined characters and the gloomy look and tone even when the story has turned into a routinely familiar thriller. 

Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)

Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)

Cast: Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O’Toole, Ruby Dee, Ed Begley Jr., Scott Paulin, Frankie Faison, Ron Diamond, Lynn Lowry, John Larroquette. Screenplay: Alan Ormsby, based on a story by DeWitt Bodeen. Cinematography: John Bailey. Art direction: Edward Richardson. Film editing: Jacqueline Cambas, Jere Huggins, Ned Humphreys. Music: Giorgio Moroder. 

Cat People is bloodier and kinkier than its source, the moody 1942 film of the same name, directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by the maker of atmospheric horror films, Val Lewton. In the earlier movie, the ravages of the prowling cat persons were off-screen, suggested but not shown. In Paul Schrader’s remake, they’re played to shock, not just to creep you out. The subtext, a fear of sex, remains the same, although the earlier film is more about a fear of female sexuality, while the Schrader version adds incest to the mix. It’s all very stylishly done, with Nastassja Kinski excellent as the woman haunted by a past she is unaware of, and Malcolm McDowell as her unstable brother. John Heard is rather eccentrically cast as the male lead, a New Orleans zookeeper, though he’s an improvement over the dull Kent Smith in the original film. The wonderful Ruby Dee has a smallish but important role as Female – pronounced Fe-MAH-ly.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Peter Farrelly, 2022)

The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Peter Farrelly, 2022)

Cast: Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Bill Murray, Kyle Allen, Deanna Russo, Paul Adelstein, Jake Picking, Joe Adler, Archie Renaux, Will Hochman, Kristin Carey, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis. Will Ropp, Matt Cook. Screenplay: Peter Farrelly, Brian Hayes Currie, Pete Jones, based on a book by John “Chick” Donohue and J.T. Molloy. Cinematography: Sean Porter. Production design: Tim Galvin. Film editing: Patrick J. Don Vito. Music: Dave Palmer. 

I subscribed to the Apple TV+ streaming service so I could watch CODA (Sian Heder, 2021) and The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021), and I stuck with it because I got hooked on the series Severance and For All Mankind. (I haven’t yet dipped into its most popular series, Ted Lasso.) And having invested in yet another streaming service, I felt compelled to check out its other movies. Compared to the major streamers, the offerings are fairly thin, so I gave The Greatest Beer Run Ever a try. Unfortunately, the movie is as clunky as its title and surprisingly inept, coming from a filmmaker who won two Oscars for Green Book (2018). Based on an improbable but true story, it’s about a civilian who decides to take a duffel bag full of beer to his buddies in Vietnam at the height of the war, spurred by a kind of deluded patriotism and boozy camaraderie. But Zac Efron doesn’t have the acting chops or the confident screen presence to carry the central role of Chickie Donahue, and he’s not given much help by the screenplay’s failures of tone. Is the movie a comedy? An anti-war satire? A story whose subtext is the way American politicians exploit the naïveté of the citizenry? It could have been all of those things, but it just falls flat, with an ending which implies that Chickie has been changed by confrontation with the terrible truth of the Vietnam War but doesn’t find an adequate way of demonstrating it. There are some amusing moments, such as the way Chickie gets mistaken for a CIA agent and is able to exploit the misconception. And there are good performances from Russell Crowe as a combat photographer and Bill Murray as a World War II vet who buys into the official line that the war in Vietnam is being won and condemns the media and the protesters for their lack of patriotism. (The pro-war blue-collar milieu from which Chickie comes is treated with sentimentality, such as the woman who wants him to take a rosary to her son, who is MIA.) The real story behind the film is an intriguing one, but it’s wasted in the final product.