Gotham

Made during her bombshell period, Virginia Madsen is perfectly cast as an elusive femme fatale in Gotham (1988), a made-for-television movie for the Showtime Channel and that was part of a run of sexy roles in the late 1980s that also included Slam Dance (1987), and into 1990s with The Hot Spot (1990) and forgettable erotic thrillers such as Caroline at Midnight (1994) and Blue Tiger (1994). Fortunately, this one stars Tommy Lee Jones and whose angle is a neo-noir fused with a ghost story.

“You ever find yourself walking down a dark street, you think you hear footsteps coming up slowly, somebody just out of sight?” This question kickstarts the story as Charles Rand (Colin Bruce) asks down-on-his-luck private investigator Eddie Mallard (Jones) to find his wife Rachel (Madsen) and tell her to leave him alone. The only problem: she’s been dead for over ten years. Rand offers Mallard a lot of money to take the case, which he accepts even though, as he confesses to his friend Tim (Kevin Jarre) later on, he fears that he’s feeding into this man’s delusions.

Eddie humors his client and his odd ramblings about his wife (“She lusts for daylight. She wants power in the daylight.”). The man is truly haunted by her death and apparent resurrection and this intrigues Eddie – that and the hefty paycheck. One day, Charles spots Rachel across the street and asks Eddie to go over and talk to her. With her long white gloves, vintage hat tilted at just the right angle and retro black dress, Rachel looks like she stepped right out of a 1940s film noir. Of course, she denies knowing Charles and humors Eddie by going out for a drink with him where she explains that she is a woman of expensive tastes.

Rachel shows up at Eddie’s office and apologizes for coming on so strong the other day and takes him out for a bite to eat as a way of apologizing. She comes across as a slightly sad, lonely wealthy lady. He’s intrigued by her stunning looks and enigmatic past. Their paths cross again as she wanders out of the smoke on a deserted city street one night. The deeper he goes into the case the more he realizes it’s not as simple as it seems and like most noirs he finds himself drawn into an increasingly complex web with Rachel at its center. Is she really the deceased wife or is this merely the delusions of a crazy man?
 
The movie has odd beats that occasionally disrupt its traditional narrative, such as a scene where Eddie and Rachel are serenaded in an alleyway by a dirty bum with an immaculate acoustic guitar and a beautiful voice. It’s a poignant moment as the camera stays on Madsen’s face as Rachel reacts to “Danny Boy,” her eyes gradually welling up and a tear runs down her face. With the help of his very talented crew that includes the likes of David Cronenberg’s longtime production designer Carol Spier, legendary cinematographer Michael Chapman (Raging Bull) and composer George S. Clinton (Austin Powers), writer/director Lloyd Fonvielle creates a suitable neo-noir mood and atmosphere with a touch of the supernatural, such as a spooky shot of Rachel submerged in murky water, a gloved hand reaching out to Eddie.
 
With her old school looks, Virginia Madsen could have been a Classic Hollywood movie star and is perfectly cast as an elusive femme fatale cum woman out of time. She does an excellent job of coming across as this sweet, alluring presence and then transforms into a vulgar, vengeful creature. The actor is more than believable as a woman that could seduce men into doing her bidding and destroying their lives in the process.

Tommy Lee Jones is well cast as a world-weary gumshoe who thinks he knows all the angles until he takes on this case and becomes entangled in Rachel’s web. Like Rachel, Eddie undergoes his own transformation and Jones does an excellent job of conveying a man who has seen it all to one obsessed with a woman that tears his life apart.
 
The critics of the time weren’t too kind to Gotham. The Washington Post's Tom Shales wrote, "Madsen is a sensuously spooky Rachel. She is also quite naked in two or three scenes, popping up, literally, in the bathtub, and falling out of a refrigerator. Madsen holds Jones and the camera captive. Maybe it doesn't matter that the whole thing is senseless." In her review for the Los Angeles Times, Lynne Heffley wrote, "What viewers fall victim to is a flawed vision. Suspense fizzles into steamy homage to Madsen’s beauty, clad and unclad; New York City locales are unbelievably underpopulated; a street bum sings “Danny Boy"-all of it-and Madsen’s exquisite lips are either framing romance novel banalities or a favorite obscenity." The New York Times’ Walter Goodman described it as “a lugubrious telling of a story that at its best is incomprehensible.”
 
“It may be a dream but it’s one of those dreams you can’t wake up from,” Eddie says at one point and it is the narrow line Gotham treads between what is real and what we perceive as real. And isn’t that all down to perception anyway? One person’s reality could be another’s dream. Since this movie is a neo-noir typically things don’t go well for the protagonist but Fonvielle twists this convention so that his main character is spared while another character is doomed. He does an excellent job of grounding the movie in its own reality so we’re never sure what is real and what is a dream except for little details that he uses as signposts along the way. It’s a tricky balancing acting between the ridiculous and the sublime but then again, isn’t all a matter of perception?

Electric Dreams

Long before Spike Jonze’s critically-acclaimed Her (2013) featured a relationship between a man and computer operating system, there was the little-seen Electric Dreams (1984) that depicted a love triangle between a man, a woman and his computer. It marked the feature film debut for music director Steve Barron and for emerging film production company Virgin Films. While some of its 1980s stylistic trappings date the film, it was quite prescient in the way it shows how technology is prevalent in our daily lives – even back in 1984.

This is particularly evident in the opening scene where we meet Miles Harding (Lenny Von Dohlen) struggling to get an airplane ticket at a computerized kiosk. As he’s waiting for his flight he notices a kid playing with a remote controlled car. Barron shows other passengers occupied with electronic devices: a hand-held game console, a digital watch and so on. Sound familiar? The situation today is the same only more prevalent and with smart phones. Furthermore, at work, Miles’ every move is tracked by surveillance cameras.

Miles is a bookish, disorganized architect and it’s affecting his work. A co-worker recommends he buy a personal computer as it will help him get his life in order. His trip to an electronics store is an amusing snapshot of how computers were regarded back then. When he tells the sales clerk that he doesn’t know anything about computers, she replies, “Nobody does, but don’t you want one for when you do find out?” He buys one, sets it up at home and naively trusts it with running all of his appliances and home security. What could possibly go wrong?

One day, he runs into his new upstairs neighbor – a beautiful and talented cellist named Madeline Robistat (Virginia Madsen). Barron makes a point of paralleling her impressive first practice with an orchestra and Miles’ newfound mastery of his PC. After overloading his computer with data from a powerful mainframe at work, it somehow becomes sentient, sparked to life by Madeline practicing her cello, playing with her in a nicely orchestrated sequence.

She thinks it was Miles playing along and finds herself intrigued by him. They run into each other again at the local supermarket and go out for dinner. It’s a lovely scene as they tentatively get to know each other and one can sense the growing attraction between them. His computer becomes increasingly jealous of their developing relationship, trying to sabotage it in initially relatively harmless ways but as the movie progresses, becomes more brazen with its efforts.

Lenny Von Dohlen plays Miles as a shy, erudite guy that feels awkward in social situations, especially when it comes to women. The actor is careful not to resort to full-on nerd clichés and Miles is smart enough and good-looking so that you can see why Madeline is attracted to him. He maybe a brilliant architect but he lacks experience when it comes to interpersonal relationships and she gets him to come out of his shell.

Virginia Madsen does an excellent job transcending the beautiful girl-next-door stereotype. Madeline is smart, sexy and sweet and this is due in large part to the actress’ undeniable natural charm and charisma. Her character is clearly a talented musician that knows how to have fun as evident from the montage where she and Miles go on a tour of Alcatraz and veer off from the group to do their own thing.

The scenes depicting the early stages of their romance demonstrates the undeniable chemistry between Von Dohlen and Madsen. The movie comes alive and is charged with infectious energy in the scenes where Miles and Madeline are falling in love. As a result, we begin to care about these two and what happens to them.

Barron employs several of his music video techniques to keep Electric Dreams visually interesting. A computer animated dream sequence must’ve seemed pretty novel at the time and holds up quite well despite the cheesy music that accompanies it. There’s another scene where Miles’ PC takes over his apartment and stages its own noisy party complete with loud music and light show. Surprisingly, it doesn’t date the movie, but the music certainly does and this is true of many movies made in the ‘80s. He also does a decent job of showing off San Francisco and this creates a real sense of place. This isn’t just some anonymous city but one with distinctive architecture and it would make sense that someone like Miles would live there.

Steve Barron made his music video directorial debut in 1979 and quickly made a name for himself with memorable efforts like “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, and “Take on Me” by A-Ha. A video he did for Haysi Fantayzee caught the attention of Rusty Lemorande who was co-producing Yentl (1983) at the time and also finishing up his own script entitled, Electric Dreams. He was looking for a director and asked Barron to do it. The director took Lemorande’s script to Virgin Films, which were becoming increasingly interested in going into film production and within four days agreed to finance it. Two months later, filming began in San Francisco with additional studio work done in London at Twickenham Studios.

Electric Dreams received mixed to positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “It’s not often that a modern movie has the courage to give us a hero who doesn’t seem to be a cross between a disco god and an aerobics instructor, but the von Dohlen character is a nice change.” In his review for The New York Times, Lawrence Van Gelder wrote, “In the failure of Electric Dreams to blend and balance its ingredients properly, plot elements are lost (the brick), credibility is overtaxed (the lovelorn computer), and what remains is high tech without being high art.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “Electric Dreams also shows us just how digitalized, automated and dehumanized our world has become, and in its light, sweet way reminds us to pull the plug on the PC, lest we become one of the data-debased.”

At the time, the film was criticized for cashing in on the music video craze. Barron said, “The fact that there’s so much music has to do with the success of Flashdance. This film isn’t Flashdance 2. Flashdance worked because of the dancing. It didn’t have a story. Electric Dreams does.” To her credit, Virginia Madsen looks back on the film with fond memories:

“I had a mad, crazy crush on Lenny Von Dohlen. God, we were so…we were head-over-heels for each. Nothing happened, and at this point, I admit it: I wanted it to happen. [Laughs] But we both had other people in our lives. We were very young, so our pining for each other was great for the movie.”

Electric Dreams is a self-described “fairytale for computers” and in a way that’s true as a PC becomes magically infused with artificial intelligence and begins to display human emotions like anger and jealousy. The movie is also a warning against the over-reliance on technology and how it controls every aspect of our lives – something which, unfortunately, is now our reality, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still fight against it. Barron’s movie champions human contact over the electronic kind and that is something our world desperately needs.

SOURCES

Harris, Will. “Virginia Madsen on Smelling Christopher Walken, Getting Tax Advice from Arnold Schwarzenegger, and More.” A.V. Club. July 19, 2013.

Mills, Nancy. “Video Director in Virgin Territory.” Los Angeles Times. November 26, 1983.

Pollock, Dave. “The Smoke-Filled Room Leads to Clean Deals.” Los Angeles Times. May 26, 1984.

The Hot Spot

The Hot Spot (1990) is a neo-noir at odds with itself. Dennis Hopper directs as if he’s making an art house film complete with an all-star band that featured the likes of John Lee Hooker, Miles Davis and Taj Mahal performing the score. He even secured a world premiere at the prestigious Toronto Film Festival. However, this is at odds with the pulpy source material – an adaptation of Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams – and the casting of television actor Don Johnson in the lead role. That being said, the film does live up to its title with the casting to its two female leads – Jennifer Connelly and Virginia Madsen – arguably at the apex of their sexual allure. Hopper even admitted at the time that his aim was to make something akin to The Last Tango in Paris (1972) only with the action set in Texas. The Hot Spot is most definitely not on the level of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film, but it is quite faithful to its source material (it helps that the author adapted his own work) and takes a slow burn approach to its pacing with plenty of plots twists as is custom with noirs.

Hopper sets a hot and humid tone right from the get-go as Harry Madox (Don Johnson) arrives from the scorching desert to a small Texas town where he proceeds to impress the owner (Jerry Hardin) of a local car dealership by wandering onto the lot and within minutes sells a car. We’re never quite sure what motivated Harry to do this – maybe he needed some money, maybe he always wanted to sell cars or maybe it was the gorgeous young woman (Jennifer Connelly) he spotted walking into the dealership. Her name is Gloria Harper and Harry accompanies her to collect from a deadbeat by the name of Sutton (played with smug, sleazy hillbilly charm by William Sadler).

Harry senses that there’s something going on between Gloria and Sutton by how uncomfortable she is in his presence. She lies to Harry, but he covers for her back at the dealership. When a nearby fire clears out the local bank (all but one employee are volunteer firefighters), Harry devises a plan to knock it over by staging a fire as a decoy. If this wasn’t enough potential trouble, he starts a hot and heavy affair with Dolly Harshaw (Virginia Madsen), the boss’ wife and a sultry vamp that radiates sexuality with every gesture and look she gives Harry.

Many noir protagonists tend to be a little on the dull side as their sole purpose is to get involved in a complicated plot that ultimately dooms them. Don Johnson plays Harry as something of an intriguing enigma. We’re never quite sure what his motivations are – money? sex? boredom? With his Robert Mitchum-esque physique, Johnson has the look of a classic noir protagonist and plays Harry as a cynical opportunist ambitiously trying to play all the angles. He’s canny enough to plan the bank heist and isn’t afraid to resort to violence as evident in the way he handles Sutton. His weakness, like most noir protagonists, is women and in The Hot Spot he gets involved with two: Dolly and Gloria.

Virginia Madsen gets to sink her teeth into the juicy role of a heartless femme fatale. It was the first time she played such an overtly sexual character that uses her body to manipulate men to do her bidding. Madsen applies a thick Texan accent like her character applies lipstick. The actress gets the flashiest role in the film and makes the most of it, but she falls short of being one of the all-time great femme fatales. It certainly isn’t from a lack of trying. You have to give her an A for effort, but the material isn’t up to her level of performance with, at times, blandly predictable dialogue that her character has to spout or silly moments like when Dolly leaps onto a giant pile of sawdust and proceeds to climb back up it as a form of birth control.

Jennifer Connelly plays the beautiful girl-next-door type that appears to be innocent, but harbors a deep, dark secret of her own. The actress doesn’t really have much to do, but act wholesome and look beautiful, which she does. One wonders if she did The Hot Spot to show that she could make the transition from child actress to more mature roles. She has classic Hollywood looks from a bygone era that were used much more effectively in The Rocketeer (1991).

Hopper rounds out the cast with seasoned character actors like Barry Corbin playing the savvy local sheriff who’s out to nail Harry for the bank job, Jerry Hardin as the perpetually grumpy car dealership owner, Charles Martin Smith playing a useless car salesman, and Jack Nance as, what else, a quirky bank manager with a hankering for strip clubs.

If Dolly reflects the man that Harry is, then Gloria represents the kind of man he aspires to be – nice and respectful, but ultimately he can never have that kind of happiness because he will always remain true to his baser instincts, which is revealed so well at the end of the film. The Hot Spot really comes to life during the scenes between Harry and Dolly as we’re not sure if they are going to devour each other or kill each other.

Based on his own novel, Hell Hath No Fury, Charles Williams wrote a screenplay version with Nona Tyson in 1962 with Robert Mitchum in mind to play Harry Madox. Nothing came of this idea and many years later, Dennis Hopper found the script and updated it. He would go on to describe his version as “Last Tango in Texas. Real hot, steamy stuff.” Don Johnson claimed that he was originally attached to the project based on a heist movie script by Mike Figgis. The actor said, "Three days before we started shooting, Dennis Hopper came to all of us, he called a meeting on a Sunday, and he said, “Okay, we’re not making that script. We’re making this one." That script was the Williams/Tyson version.

The production was rife with tension. Despite a bedroom scene that originally called for her to be naked, Virginia Madsen decided to wear a negligee instead because “Not only was the nudity weak storywise, but it didn’t let the audience undress her.” Later on, Hopper admitted that she was right. There were also reports that Hopper and his leading man, Don Johnson, did not get along. According to the director, “He has a lot of people with him. He came on to this film with two bodyguards, a cook, a trainer, ah let’s see, a helicopter pilot, he comes to and from the set in a helicopter, very glamorous, let’s see, two drivers, a secretary, and, oh yes, his own hair person, his own make-up person, his own wardrobe person. So when he walks to the set he has five people with him.” Johnson felt that the film was “too long and I felt that it was self-indulgent on some levels, which I told Dennis and which the studio told Dennis. The cast was perfect and the script was challenging. But, as a filmmaker, Dennis should have been more responsible.” Madsen had nothing but good things to say about Hopper: “He was very kind and he was respectful of me at a time when a lot of men in the industry were not.”

By the end of principal photography, Hopper and Johnson were no longer speaking to each other with the actor refusing to promote The Hot Spot. Hopper said, “He says he’s not going to do anything for this picture until he reads the reviews.” Johnson claimed that he was unable to because of his commitment to filming Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991) with Mickey Rourke. Madsen remembers that at the time, “I was very upset when I saw the film because I was such a sexual being in that movie. He had given me the freedom to play that part without repercussions.”

The Hot Spot received mixed to favorable reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and praised Madsen’s performance: “It’s the kind of work that used to be done by Lana Turner or Barbara Stanwyck – the tough woman with the healthy sexual interest, who sizes a guy up and makes sure he knows what she likes in a man.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Hopper’s direction is tough and stylish, in effective contrast with the sunny look of Ueli Steiger’s cinematography.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “The film might have been a camp hoot if it weren’t for the fact that Hopper still believes in all this stuff – he likes his women molten, duplicitous, and in kinky high heels.” Los Angeles Times’ Peter Rainer said of Johnson’s performance: “As long as Johnson is playing above the action he’s effective, but his lightweight style doesn’t work in his big scenes with Dolly.” Finally, in his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, “Hot Spot will never go down as timeless, neoclassic noir. But, with its Hopperlike moments, over-the-top performances and infectious music, it carries you along for a spell.”

With its sun-baked Texas setting and pretensions to art house cinema, The Hot Spot, at times, feels like a tamer version of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), but Hopper lacks Lynch’s knack for the absurd and how he can go from oddball humor to nightmarish horror in a heartbeat all wrapped up in Americana iconography. Hopper has the look down cold, but is missing that crucial ingredient that makes Lynch’s films so unique. A few years later, Red Rock West (1993) was more successful at approximating a neo-noir with Lynchian affectations. As a result, The Hot Spot more closely resembles the Jack Nicholson/Jessica Lange remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), which also brought the sex and violence to the foreground as opposed to classic film noirs where so much had to be implied. Out of the class of 1990 neo-noirs, The Hot Spot ranks below After Dark, My Sweet and The Grifters, hampered by a weak script. Hopper tries to give the pulpy material a classy look when he should have embraced it completely. The end result is a flawed film that has its moments.

SOURCES

Harris, Will. "Don Johnson on Cold In July, Dennis Hopper, and auditioning for Miami Vice." The A.V. Club. May 30, 2014.

Hayward, J. “Screen Sirens Sense & Sexuality.” Courier-Mail. June 9, 1990.

Krum, S. “Why Dennis Got Back on His Bike.” Herald. April 18, 1990.

Longsdorf, Amy. “Don Johnson Says He Turned the Right Corner into Paradise.” The Morning Call. October 4, 1991.

Malcolm, Derek. “The Hopper File.” The Guardian. November 29, 1990.

Thomas, Bob. “Director Hopper’s Back in Hot Spot with New Film.” The Advertiser. November 22, 1990.

Topel, Fred. “SXSW 2014 Interview: Virginia Madsen on The Wilderness of James.” CraveOnline. March 7, 2014.

Trebbe, Ann. “Hopper, Hopping Mad at Johnson.” USA Today. September 11, 1990.

Sideways

Alexander Payne is part of an exciting wave of filmmakers who grew up during the 1970’s and were subsequently influenced by the films from that era. His contemporaries include the likes of Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David O. Russell to name but a few. And like his fellow filmmakers, Payne eschews the Hollywood trend of placing an emphasis on special effects and trendy actors in favor of character-driven, comedy-drama hybrids populated with character actors like Laura Dern, Matthew Broderick and Kathy Bates.


Payne’s About Schmidt (2002) continued his fascination with American cinema in the ‘70s by featuring one its biggest (and most prolific) stars, Jack Nicholson. His next film, Sideways (2004), continued the road movie motif from Schmidt and combined it with the buddy film. Jack Cole (Thomas Haden Church) is a failed actor about to be married. He decides to go on one last week of uninhibited fun with his best friend, Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti), a grade school teacher and struggling author. They go on a wine-tasting tour through California’s Central Coast and squeeze in a bit of golfing as well.

Miles is an avid (nay-elitist) wine aficionado while Jack is completely ignorant of wine beyond what tastes good to him and what doesn’t. Miles is trying to get his book published with little success and he’s grown cynical and defeated as a result. Initially, he comes off as an unlikable loser not above stealing money from his mother. Jack counters Miles’ repressed nature by coming off as something of an instinctive kind of person who indulges in his raging id. He was on a hit television show... 11 years ago and is now relegated to doing voiceovers for commercials. Along the way, Jack and Miles meet Maya (Virginia Madsen), a beautiful waitress who Miles knows from way back when, and Stephanie (Sandra Oh), who works at a winery and catches Jack’s eye.

Jack and Miles are complete messes as human beings. They lack direction and are hypocrites. Miles says he’s an author but his book is going nowhere, while Jack is getting married but hits on anything in a dress. They are hardly a sympathetic pair. And yet Payne is able to get a lot of comedic mileage from them. Miles is a wine snob who rambles on about the taste, color, and so on, only to have Jack sum up his opinion simply, “I like it,” which comically deflates Miles’ pontificating. They have an intriguing dynamic. While they lie to others – Miles to Jack’s friends about the status of his novel and Jack being nice to Miles’ mother when he clearly wants to get back on the road – they are no pretenses between each other. These guys are getting to the stage in their lives where they’re looking back as opposed to looking ahead. Jack sees marriage as an institution that will stifle his freedom while Miles has a very negative outlook on life, finding any excuse not to ask Maya out despite obviously liking her because he assumes that it will go nowhere.

An interesting thing happens during the course of the film. At first, Miles starts off as an unsympathetic character while we warm up to Jack’s funny repartee as the charming rogue. Halfway through the film they flip roles and it’s Jack who is exposed as a pathetic womanizer and Miles becomes more sympathetic thanks to Maya’s influence. She humanizes him and is easily his intellectual equal. She knows her wine and this clearly impresses Miles. She’s smart and beautiful so why is she even wasting her time with a sad sack like Miles? She gets to know him beyond his looks and liquefies the pretension of his character. Maya pierces his wine-speak armor that he throws up all the time with her easy-going nature and Miles realizes that he doesn’t need to constantly impress her. There is a nice scene where they get to know each other and it is great to see two skilled actors getting a chance to act and really delve into their characters. In this scene, we finally see someone thaw out Miles and get him to open up, stop worrying and thinking so negatively. They use their mutual love for wine as a way to share their passions and aspirations with each other. It’s a beautifully realized scene because you are seeing two people starting to fall in love with each other. Like a fine wine, Maya allows Miles to breathe and he gets better as time goes on. She’s a romantic who is able to cut through his cynicism and soften his hard edges.

Fresh off the success of American Splendor (2003), Paul Giamatti is one of those actors who make it look effortless as he inhabits the characters he plays so completely. Miles is a neurotic mess; a depressed cynic who is definitely a half glass empty kind of guy. Giamatti is able to tap into his character’s deep reservoir of pain and anger. In a couple of shots early in the film, Payne hints at Miles’ past when he looks at old photographs in his mom’s room. They evoke happier times with his father (now out of the picture) and wife (now divorced). Giamatti’s sad expression in this moment conveys more than any words could. During the course of the film, we find out more about why Miles is so miserable and a lot of it has to do with self-loathing, which explains why he tries to sabotage things with Maya. In some ways, Miles is a variation of Giamatti’s take on the equally acerbic Harvey Pekar in Splendor.

Ever since the short-lived television sitcom Ned and Stacy, Thomas Haden Church has been an untapped resource and with Sideways he was given the role of his career. As Miles’ crass, philandering best friend, he plays Jack as a middle-aged frat boy who still calls women, “chicks.” Haden Church has never been afraid to play abrasive, bordering on unlikeable, characters and he expertly does the same here as a guy who presents a jovial façade but underneath lurks a lot of pain and an insensitive mean streak. Haden Church’s dead-panned delivery of smart-ass lines works well against Giamatti’s uptight straight man. Together, they make an excellent team. After years of playing supporting character roles, it’s great to see Haden Church and Giamatti starring in a film. They play so well off each other that you’d swear they’d acted together before. Haden Church and Giamatti are very believable as long-time friends from the way they interact with each other.

For years, Virginia Madsen has been biding her time in direct-to-video hell and so it is great to see her in a high profile role like this one. From The Hot Spot (1990) to Candyman (1992), she’s always been an interesting actress to watch and with Sideways, Madsen is given strong material to sink her teeth into and she delivers a nuanced performance. Sandra Oh has been quietly building a nice body of work over the years and was unfairly overlooked in the numerous awards that have been lavished on this film. Granted, of the four main cast members, she has the least amount of screen time but she makes every moment she has count.

Producer Michael London was a former Los Angeles Times journalist and studio executive who had become frustrated by the studio development process of shepherding a film from script to screen. He bought the rights to the unpublished semi-autobiographical novel Sideways by Rex Pickett with his own money and gave it to Alexander Payne to read in 1999 while the filmmaker was promoting Election. Payne found himself drawn to “the humanity of the characters” and how it tapped into his desire to make films about “people with flaws,” and “unfulfilled desires.” He was not a wine expert but always liked it and thought that the subculture would be fun to explore and act as a backdrop to the relationship between Jack and Miles. However, he was committed to making About Schmidt next and so he and London kept optioning the book over the years. Then, he and his long-time writing partner, Jim Taylor, wrote the screenplay for free. Payne and London drew up a budget and financed pre-production themselves thereby allowing themselves the kind of creative control they wanted. They only began approaching movie studios once they had the script, budget and a preferred cast in place. Four studios were interested with Fox Searchlight winning out.

Based on the reputation of his previous films, several big name actors campaigned for roles in Payne’s film. Both Brad Pitt and George Clooney were eager to play the role of Jack and met with the filmmaker but it ultimately came down to Thomas Haden Church and Matt Dillon. Edward Norton expressed an interest in playing Miles and Payne seriously considered him for the role. With the exception of Sandra Oh, his wife at the time, all the actors auditioned for Payne and London. Haden Church had auditioned for both Election and About Schmidt (narrowly losing out to Dermot Mulroney on the latter) and even though Payne did not cast him in those films, he had been impressed with the actor. When it came to Sideways, Payne felt that Haden Church “kind of is that character,” and cast him as Jack. At the time, he had moved away from acting and when he read the script in May 2003, thought to himself, “I have no shot at this whatsoever, but I have to answer the call of duty. If I get a chance, then I gotta take it.” When Paul Giamatti auditioned for the film, he had not read the whole script, just an excerpt – the scene where Miles talks about his love of Pinot Noir wine to Maya. The actor found Miles’ obsession with the wine to be “an interesting theme for this guy” who was constantly “striving for transcendence through the wine and the wine milieu, and it just keeps collapsing in on the guy because he’s such a wreck.” After casting Giamatti and Haden Church, Payne insisted that they spend some time together before filming, hanging out and practicing their dialogue so that characters’ friendship would be believable.

The setting of the story was very important to Payne as he brought a documentary sensibility to capturing the people that inhabit the area. Before shooting, he spent four months living in the wine country of California, taking notes so that it would be accurately depicted in his film. The actors spent two weeks of rehearsals with Payne, “shooting the shit and indulging in good food and wine,” according to Giamatti. With a budget in the range of $16-17 million, Sideways was shot over 54 days in the Santa Barbara area. For the look of the film, he drew inspiration from the photographic style of Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970), screening it for his director of photography, Phedon Papamichael (Moonlight Mile), in order to study the softness of colors and the lack of sharp, vivid lighting that he wanted in his own film.

I think it’s safe to say that Sideways received almost universally positive reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “The characters are played not by the first actors you would think of casting, but by actors who will prevent you from ever being able to imagine anyone else in their roles.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss felt that it was “by far the year's best American movie.” In his review for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “Mr. Giamatti gives off soulful sparks with Ms. Madsen, a 41-year-old sultry-noir-dame veteran with generally unappreciated acting gifts. Maya, like Miles, is still recovering from a previous failed marriage, which helps make Sideways even more of a movie for grown-ups.” USA Today gave the film four out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “This is a building-block movie: Its stand-out excellence becomes apparent only gradually.” In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “But it takes more than courage to push actors to their limits of their talents, which Mr. Payne does here. You need to understand that the truth of both a human being and a screen performance doesn't exist only in grace and beauty, but in small fissures and cracks.” The Washington Post’s Desson Thomson wrote, “Church, best known for his character Lowell Mather in the television show Wings, is a revelation. He turns a cad into an unforgettable and, dare I say, lovable rogue.” Finally, in his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “Maya and Stephanie are vivid, fetching abstractions; Jack and Miles are male archetypes, as well as the two most fully realized comic creations in recent American movies.”

Payne’s film harkens to Bob Rafelson’s classic character-driven films from the ‘70s, like Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), featuring prickly protagonists. Payne rejects traditional mainstream tastes in favor of presenting unsympathetic characters and a conclusion that refuses to wrap things up neatly. He even employs multiple split-screen montages and snap zooms, which were very much en vogue during the ‘70s. Miles is the voice of reason while Jack is the voice of fun in Sideways. However, Miles understands who he is and is honest with himself and his lot in life unlike Jack who continues to live a lie, or rather play a role. Jack lives in a bubble and they always break. Miles doesn’t have to worry about that because he bursts his bubble on a daily basis. These men are idiots and it is the women who are smart and truthful. The men lie, cheat and are forced to face the repercussions of their actions. This provides them with a chance at redemption as embodied in Miles who learns to loosen up and finally let someone new into his heart.

SOURCES

Biga, Leo Adam. “A Road Trip Sideways.” The Reader.

Donnelly, Joe. “Here’s What Happened, Sweetheart.” October 21, 2004.

Epstein, Daniel Robert. “Alexander Payne.” Suicide Girls. October 21, 2004.

Goldstein, Patrick. “Moving Sideways to Stay on Track.” Los Angeles Times. December 16, 2003.

Robinson, Tasha. “Thomas Haden Church.” A.V. Club. April 7, 2008.

Ross, Matthew. “In Vino Veritas.” Filmmaker.

Stein, Joel. “He’s Got Good Taste.” Time. October 25, 2004.

Candyman

Based on Clive Barker’s short story, “The Forbidden,” Candyman (1992) is one of the more well-known mainstream horror films to openly acknowledge and use urban legends as the basis for its story. When most people think of such things the first ones that come to mind are alligators in the sewer or razor blades hidden in Halloween candy. The one Candyman uses is much more sinister. A young couple are about to have sex. The girl looks into a mirror and says the word, “Candyman” five times. A tall man with a hook instead of his right hand appears and brutally murders her. Urban legends are, as one character puts it, “modern oral folklore. They are the unselfconscious reflection of the fears of urban society.”

Two graduate students — Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) and Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons) — are doing research on the Candyman urban legend for a thesis paper at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Helen’s husband Trevor (Xander Berkeley) is a professor at the school and teaches a course in urban mythology. Through the course of their research, the two women learn that the residents of a dangerous area in the city known as the Cabrini-Green projects believe that Candyman (Tony Todd) haunts their building. I like that the film shows Helen’s methodical approach to her subject. She interviews several people who have heard of the supposed incidents involving Candyman and she also scans newspaper archives. This all establishes Helen as an intelligent protagonist steeped in the rational. She believes that the Candyman myth is just that.

Helen soon uncovers a news clipping of the mysterious death of one the building’s residents — Ruthie Jean — that may have links to Candyman. She and Bernadette decide to go to Cabrini-Green and check things out for themselves. Helen is driven and has the conviction to brave the dangers of the place to further her research paper so it will have something more than just the same old stories recounted endlessly before. She’s willing to risk potential life and limb to get what she wants. But she’s smart about it. She and Bernadette dress conservatively (they’re even mistaken for plain clothes cops) and are careful not to provoke the gang members that greet them at the building’s entrance. As the film progresses, she becomes obsessed with her work, going back to Cabrini-Green by herself. The deeper Helen investigates the Candyman legend, the more her perception of reality becomes skewed. She starts seeing him in broad daylight. Her life gets more complicated when he frames her for several horrific murders. Helen begins to question her own sanity as her world rapidly unravels before her very eyes.

Candyman opens with a rather apocalyptic image of the Chicago skyline being engulfed by thousands upon thousands of bees and then we hear the ominous deep voice of Candyman saying, “I came for you.” Director Bernard Rose fades to the image of Helen’s face which foreshadows that this horror film is also an interracial love story between her and Candyman, a pretty daring concept back in 1992 which met with some resistance from the studio, according to Rose. The film also touches upon the sexism inherent in the world of academia as one of Trevor’s fellow professors acts condescendingly towards Helen and Bernadette but Helen is defiant and yet also captivated when the professor recounts Candyman’s backstory.

Candyman takes a mainstay of the horror genre — the haunted house — and effectively updates it for a contemporary audience. The Cabrini-Green projects are an imposing structure: an immense concrete monolith covered in graffiti, dirt and trash and crawling with dangerous gangs. This is not a place for a white, upper class academic type to be spending her time and yet Helen makes the perilous journey because she is obsessed by the Candyman legend.

Rose has a strong visual sense. He does not shoot Candyman like a traditional horror film. For example, he uses overhead shots of the city to establish several scenes — it’s a powerful, God’s eye view of the streets and buildings that creates an unsettling mood. Rose presents truly disturbing imagery, from the swarm of bees that engulfs the city in Helen’s dream, to a toilet bowl filled with swarming bees that she finds at Cabrini-Green. This imagery is complemented by Philip Glass’ experimental, elegiac score. It is never overused but instead insinuates itself into the film, lurking in the background.

Candyman stands apart from most other horror films in that Rose spends a lot of time establishing Helen’s character, letting the audience get to know her and thereby empathizing with her when things go horribly wrong. Virginia Madsen is well cast as the smart, strong-willed Helen. She conveys a vulnerability that makes her a sympathetic character and this helps us identify with her. For the film to work, we must be emotionally invested in what happens to her and empathize with her plight. It’s a strong, layered performance that requires her to show a wide range of emotions: the confident grad student to the fearful murder suspect who questions her own sanity. Helen is no damsel in distress but rather a thoughtful, inquisitive person who may be losing touch with reality. Madsen plays a very atypical horror film protagonist and the actress conveys an intelligence and confidence that is refreshing.

The Candyman legend itself is an intriguing one and we are soon as fascinated by it as much as Helen. Its backstory is steeped in cruelty and prejudice, making Candyman a tragic figure and somewhat sympathetic in his own right. He is more than just an anonymous scary monster that must be destroyed. The casting of Tony Todd also helps transform Candyman into a fully realized character. He has the fearsome physical presence with his deep, booming voice and towering figure. Todd manages to convey the tragic nature of his character and this makes Candyman not a conventional monster that must be dispatched outright. He has a clear, understandable motive for why he’s doing what he does in the film.

Xander Berkeley plays another irredeemable jerk. There are early warning signs that Trevor is no good. He flirts with a young female student in his class right in front of Helen and also messes up her research by teaching his urban legends class while she’s gathering data from his students for her thesis. I’m sorry but there is no way a guy like that would cheat on a woman as smart and beautiful as Virginia Madsen. Kasi Lemmons complements Madsen well. They both play smart characters and Bernadette provides a welcome injection of common sense to counterbalance Helen’s obsessive drive.

Bernard Rose got his start directing music videos for Propaganda Films and short films for the Playboy Channel. He shared an agent with author Clive Barker and through him Barker found out that Rose liked several of his short stories, in particular, “The Forbidden.” Barker saw Rose’s film, Paperhouse (1988), enjoyed it and felt that the director could translate his story into a film with “style and believability.” After making Chicago Joe and the Showgirl (1990), Rose met Barker in London, England to talk about adapting the story into a film. They agreed that it should be relocated from Liverpool to the United States because an American studio was planning to back it financially and it would make the film more commercially viable. According to Barker, Rose “took the thematic material in the story and expanded it and turned it into something that was very much his own.”

Rose took the project to Steve Golin, the head of Propaganda Films. Unaware that Rose had not written any screenplays, Golin hired him to write and direct Candyman. The filmmaker wrote the script and only then did Golin find out that he had never written one before. He was angry at Rose and was going to replace him as writer. However, Golin read Rose’s script, liked it and agreed to produce the film. Rose worked on the script for years with Barker supervising the various drafts. Rose actually wrote the part of Helen for his wife Alexandra Pigg to play and Virginia Madsen was going to play Bernadette. However, Pigg got pregnant and was unable to do the film and so Rose asked Madsen to play Helen instead. Casting Candyman was a challenge for the filmmaker who met with resistance from the studio when he wanted to Tony Todd to play the titular character. The actor recalled in an interview:

“I had to do what they call a ‘Personality Test,’ where I had to go to the studio at literally 8 in the morning, in front of a bunch of suits, and display whether I had a personality. So I did my best not to spill the coffee or insult them, and at the end of it, I heard they didn’t think I had a personality. They said, ‘Well, we don’t know if he has personality, but if you believe that he can do the film… Okay… Are you sure?’ He said, ‘Yeah. That’s the guy.’ And then the last hurdle was meeting Virginia Madsen, who’s from the Chicago area, and she just had it in her contract that she had to sign off on me. Then we met, went to lunch, and she said ‘Yes,’ and that was it.”

While working on the script, Rose combined Barker’s short story with two urban legends – the Hook, about a serial killer who murdered people with a hook and Bloody Mary, whose name is to be said in the mirror. Rose decided to set Candyman in Chicago because he had been there once for a film festival and became fascinated with its architecture. Before filming started, he went to the city and did a significant amount of research, talking to people there and learning how they spoke. He felt that it was important not to write “generic-sounding dialogue.” Much of the film was shot in and around the notorious Cabrini-Green, a gang-infested housing project. Rose navigated the gang problem there by hiring many members to play themselves in the film. Madsen had grown up in Chicago but did not want to drive past Cabrini-Green because of its scary reputation. Once she began filming on location there, she found out that most of its inhabitants lived in good homes. However, the place was not without its dangerous moments. Tony Todd recalled, “I tried to come there with no expectations, but I still felt fear. Anybody who didn’t belong there was subject to danger.” At one point, the police told him to watch the rooftops for snipers! For Rose, it was important that they shot on location and included it in the film as an element of social criticism. He said, “how people can be expected to live in squalor, because the housing authority has allowed Cabrini Green to rot instead of trying to maintain it.”

The filmmakers were faced with a dilemma when it came to shoot the scene where Helen is covered with bees. Madsen was extremely allergic to bee venom and the filmmakers had to lie to their insurance company by telling them that the bees being used were so young that they were incapable of stinging her. To avoid being stung, Tony Todd and Madsen were covered with queen bee pheromones so that the insects would be infatuated with them rather than angry. In addition, Rose cleared the set and spent ten minutes putting the actress in a trance! She did the sequence without incident.

Rose consciously wanted to slow the pace of the film down because the “slower and quieter the film became, the more intense it would become.” He also did not want music that would telegraph what would happen next but instead, “just strip the track down to very simple sounds.” He also wanted to “get away from the rape fantasies that one associates with slasher movies. Helen deals with her desires when she summons the Candyman. She’s like a priest who’s always asking for God. But what would happen if God appeared and said, ‘Here I am’? That might be what the priest wants, but it would also drive him mad.”

Candyman had its world premiere at the 1992 Toronto Film Festival, playing on its Midnight Madness line-up. The film went on to enjoy generally positive reviews from film critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “Rose has been clever in his use of locations. Just as urban legends are based on the real fears of those who believe in them, so are certain urban locations able to embody fear. Empty apartments in the upper floors of public housing projects are, it is widely believed, occupied by gangs. We perceive a real threat to the women, at the same time they're searching for what they think is an imaginary one.” In his review for the Washington Post, Richard Harrington wrote, “Rose invests the film with plenty of frightful atmosphere (aided by a Philip Glass score), allowing Madsen to descend into madness at a pace that drags the viewer along, somewhat unwillingly … Madsen is a much better actress than is usually found in such a role.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote, “Ms. Madsen's performance is a lot more enterprising than what the material requires; the same can be said for Mr. Rose's direction.” Empire magazine gave the film its top rating and wrote, “Rose's movie is a triumph on many levels. Not only does it deliver a plethora of visually imaginative, shocking scenes … there's the score by American minimalist composer Philip Glass, which moves from a nursery rhyme tinkle to melancholic, melodic choral histrionics as the true grand guignol erupts.”

However, in his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum felt that the film, “starts out promisingly while the plot is mainly a matter of suggestion, but gradually turns gross and obvious as the meanings become literal and unambiguous.” In her review for USA Today, Susan Wloszczyna wrote, “Too bad the premise is spoiled by some racially condescending overtones – Madsen comes off as the tenement's great white hope. And once she is drawn into Candyman's world, the story loses some of its edge. But Rose wisely concentrates on scares, not sociology.”

Candyman is a horror film that plays it straight. It refuses to resort to irony and self-reflexivity which would dominate the rest of the 1990s with the rise in popularity of the Scream trilogy and its offspring, like I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Urban Legends (1998), which knowingly wink at its audience and lets them in on the joke. Candyman is grounded in realism and this makes the more fantastical elements so unsettling. It is also a rare horror film that wrestles with weighty themes such as academic sexism, urban decay, racial tensions and even interracial romance.

SOURCES

Pearlman, Cindy. “Going Behind the Screams with the Candyman Clan.” Chicago Sun-Times. October 20, 1992.

Ryan, James. “Virginia Madsen Graduates from Sultry Vixen to Brainy Blonde.” BPI Entertainment News Wire. October 15, 1992.

Strickler, Jeff. “Candyman Star Found Movie’s Site Haunted by Real Terror of Gangs.” Star Tribune. October 18, 1992.

Wilner, Norman. “A Candy-Coated Urban Legend for the 1990s.” Toronto Star. October 16, 1992.