The Greatest Night in Pop

Rather than watch 1965’s “The Greatest Story Ever Told” on Easter Sunday, I watched “The Greatest Night Pop,” along with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, and a few Friends of the Blog. Our viewing choice was hardly any less apropos if you believe, as some culture writers would, that celebrities are the morally bankrupt modern world’s true religious icons. After all, the title of Bao Nguyen’s Netflix documentary refers to the one-night recording of the famous, partially infamous “We Are the World” charity single of 1985 in which scores of celebrated musical recording artists gathered in Los Angeles to record a track drawing attention to the famine crippling Africa, which is why they christened their uber-supergroup, of sorts, as USA for Africa. Whether “We Are the World” made it good on its benevolent intentions is a question I cannot really answer in this review not least because the movie itself barely mounts a case as the song being a genuine force for good, just proffering a few broad statistics, boilerplate observations, and perhaps most revealingly, Kenny Loggins noting that he “wasn’t that aware of what was going on in Africa, but, at that time, whatever Michael (Jackson) did turned to gold.” No, given that Lionel Richie, the song’s co-writer along with Jackson, and driving force in its recording, functions as executive producer, “The Greatest Night in Pop” becomes a victory lap. And yet, if that slanted perspective naturally call this whole enterprise into question, the peek behind the curtain is so good, that it’s difficult not to come away entertained, if not also a little in awe that the whole thing happened in the first place.

For starters, did you know that “We Are the World” was recorded the same night as the 1985 American Music Awards? The same American Music Awards where Lionel Richie not only won seven times but hosted? Hosting an awards show is an exhausting process in and of itself and then afterwards Richie, exhausted, went to a recording studio and exhausted himself all over again by wrangling 50 of the biggest egos on the planet. That’s insanity. That’s like if after hosting the Academy Awards, Jimmy Kimmel went and tried to herd 50 standup comedians into recording a standup record to benefit [insert your preferred current global crisis here]. Maybe even more impressive than that, though, is how the song that Richie and Jackson wrote, and that crucially, Quincy Jones produced, never became a muddled mess but found a way to incorporate all those voices by utilizing their strengths in all the right places, effectively transforming pop music’s best and brightest into a genuine choir, and dispensing a compelling argument that made me reconsider my longtime blithe dismissal of the track.

Above all, “The Greatest Night in Pop” is a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes footage and more often than not, Nguyen makes the most of it. Not just in granting a figurative backstage pass with intimate glimpses of so many pop superstars just sort of milling around like hesitant kids on the first day of camp, but in demonstrating how “We Are the World” was much less lightning in a bottle than into the wee hours of the morning blood, sweat and tears. Bob Dylan, reduced to so many severe, sweaty close-ups, virtually drowns amongst his peers before rising to the occasion for his solo and the hero’s journey of Huey Lewis, to quote My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, when he is asked to pinch-hit as one part of a three-part melody for no-show Prince and becomes to this doc what Elaine Stritch was in trying to nail “The Ladies Who Lunch” in D.A. Pennebaker’s “Original Cast Album: Company” (1970). That direct cinema documentary utilized Pennebaker’s preferred fly on the wall approach, one that Nguyen rejects, preferring to interject all manner of talking head interviews, repeatedly yanking us back into the present. It’s not a wrong approach, really, frequently enjoyable, even insightful. And yet, it also comes to feel like something is being left on the table, layering an unmistakable sense of post factum varnish epitomizing “The Greatest Night in Pop” as a final accounting for the historical record rather than a living, breathing document of history as it is being written. 

Love Lies Bleeding

“Love Lies Bleeding” begins with Nevada gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) unclogging a toilet. This unclogging, we don’t see it from afar or abstractly, no, we see it from above and right up close. I can’t imagine a more blatant metaphor for someone’s life having gone down the crapper, but then, that’s why this moment is so indicative of director Rose Glass’s neo-noir, not so much portending gritty realism as excess. “Love Lies Bleeding” is set in 1989, after all, tail-end of a decade defined by excess, including, though in no way limited to, anabolic steroids and bodybuilding, two details that are key. Indeed, describing something as being that thing on steroids might be a hackneyed rhetorical tic, but rest assured, “Love Lies Bleeding” is not just a movie quote-unquote on steroids but a movie that in its intense motivations, gruesome violence, and occasional aesthetic exaggeration seeks to put us not in the shoes of its characters, so to speak, but on its steroids.

Virtually every noir begins with a look of love, nay, lust, and “Love Lies Bleeding” is no different. On her way to Las Vegas for a bodybuilding competition, transient and aspiring bodybuilder Jackie (Katy M. O’Brian) stops by Lou’s gym for a workout, the two exchange looks, and just like Burt Lancaster putting the hook in his own lip when he sees Yvonne De Carlo in “Criss Cross,” it’s all over but the murder and the mayhem. In this case, though, it’s not just the flouting of gender stereotypes but the flouting of the push and pull. It’s not just Jackie who draws in Lou, but Lou who draws in Jackie. The latter might claim her physique is au natural, but when Lou brings out her syringes and steroids, Jackie accepts as “Love Lies Bleeding” essentially brings to life those scenes infamously described by one-time Oakland A Jose Canseco of plunging a drug-infused needle into the butt cheek of his Bash Brother Mark McGwire in a bathroom stall, just with an erotic twist. This is a roid rage romance, in other words, like if Dee of the Hundred Dollar Baby episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” was a femme fatale.

To make ends meet, or just make enough to pay her way to Vegas, Jackie takes a job at a gun range that happens to be run by Lou’s father, the appropriately named Lou Sr., who essentially runs the whole town, and who is played by Ed Harris with a tremendously bad wig that is also tremendous because it feels like the kind of hair an overcompensating kind of guy would sport. Lou also has a sister, Beth (Jena Malone), married to the abusive J.J. (Dave Franco), and that abuse comes to a head very early on in “Love Lies Bleeding” which is what causes a spiral of brutal violence, secret revelations, and desperate measures, mostly by Lou to keep Jackie out of trouble and their love alive. Those desperate measures are neither meticulous nor shrewd, the kind to make a certain sort of viewer throw his or her hands in the air and incredulously demand, “What is she doing?!”, but in her omnipresent anxiety, Stewart renders it believable that everything Lou does is what Lou would do.

Stewart is better than the script, in fact, so affectingly jittery that she hints at Lou suffering a psychological scar that the ultimately rote explanation of not wanting to be a chip off the old man’s block inadvertently douses. The same is true of O’Brian, both her turn and her character, rife with potential but ultimately just two-dimensional. Yet, despite that lack of dimension, and deeper meaning, it’s hard to deny a pervasive feeling, nevertheless, that carries through. It is best epitomized in some potent image making near the end that appropriately takes the whole thing over the top, providing a gleeful high even if you know that feeling is artificially enhanced. The closing credits, in fact, prove to be the funniest thing in the whole movie; they’re the crash. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Straight Time (1978)

What sticks out in finally watching “Straight Time” 45 years after the fact isn’t, as it turns out, how Bruce Springsteen lifted the title for “Ghost of Tom Joad” Side 1, Track 2 but just how much it influenced resident American movie directing genius Michael Mann. In fact, Mann worked on the screenplay of director Ulu Grosbard’s movie, though did not end up with a credit, not that it really matters. You can see the fingerprints of “Straight Time” all over parts of the exalted Mann oeuvre, from “Thief” to “Heat,” right down to an inverted version of the canonical 30 seconds flat speech. Indeed, “Straight Time” was based on a novel by one-time real-life convict Edward Bunker, who co-wrote the script, and he would become something of a spiritual collaborator with Mann from that point forward. Mann, though, is a perfectionist, and so were his thieves, Frank and Neil McCauley in, respectively, “Thief” and “Heat.” Max Dembo (Dustin Hoffman), on the other hand, of “Straight Time” might think he’s a perfectionist, but events demonstrate otherwise, and unlike Neil McCauley, who wasn’t going back to the clink no matter what, Max is drawn to it like a tractor beam.

“Straight Time” begins with Max being released from prison after six years on a burglary charge and the first thing he does is buy a hot dog from a street vendor, which Hoffman does not play like a newly free man indulging joy so much as lack of a better idea, underscored by his weird indifference, sort of staring into space, at first forgetting to pay and then just sort of shuffling off. He is supposed to check into a halfway house but ditches for a hotel instead, explaining to his parole officer Earl (M. Emmet Walsh) that he wanted to spend his first night of freedom feeling truly free. He says things like this, about enjoying his freedom, about living on the straight and narrow, but the movie never seems to take it all that seriously. With the help of Jenny (Theresa Russell) at an employment agency, Max lands a job at a canning factory, but “Straight Time” barely bothers with that subplot. And though Earl’s condescending air denotes a system not necessarily designed to help, in their conversations, you can also sense Max already pressing to find the cracks, to see what he can get away with. More than a guy used to life on the inside, really, Hoffman portrays Max as a simmering pot, and by the time he breaks parole, he has come to boil. 

Walsh is a marvel as Earl, acting as if he’s patting Max on the back even as he’s hanging him out to dry. Russell, meanwhile, effects something past mere sympathy for Max, more a kind of youthful ennui that goes a long way in suggesting how she would be carried away by him even after he goes on the run and even though her character mostly exists just for him to jettison at the end as recidivist representation. More effective, is the reflective character of Jerry Schue (Harry Dean Stanton), a career criminal like Max who has managed to go straight but yearns to break free by breaking bad. In the scene where Jerry confesses this, Grosbard almost lays the dichotomy on too thick, putting Jerry and Max beside the former’s backyard pool, the two of them eating hot dogs, though how Stanton says it cuts right through all that anyway, the plaintive B-side to Tom Sizemore in “Heat” admitting the action is the juice. Jerry’s subsequent rendition of an old gospel tune begging forgiveness might have been laying it on thick too, though the way the camera drifts, up, up, and away renders it poignant, evoking God not turning His back, per se, but putting a little distance between the two of them, nevertheless. 

He Is His Hair

As I near 50, the physical wear and tear of middle age seems more acute with each passing day, one creak eternally giving way to another moan, and yet, despite it all, I still have my hair. I’m lucky, I know, and I don’t intend to rub it in, I truly don’t, because hey, if I could trade my hair for a mere average mouth of teeth, I would seriously consider it. But nope, hair is what I got and it’s what I still have, and so I’ve tried to take advantage. I’ve aimed for a European soccer player look for most of my 30s and 40s, and now have been trying to reconfigure that look into Timothy Olyphant from “Justified: City Primeval.” Looking a few years into the future, however, when my hair undoubtedly will start to thin somewhat, I’m thinking the windswept style of Daniel Day-Lewis might be a better tack. And beyond even that, I find myself thinking that Michael Douglas would be a good hair idol. Because of throat cancer, Douglas almost lost his voice, and losing a voice that rich would itself be tragic, but as he nears 80, he’s still got his hair, and what hair it is. I did not see “Ant-Man and the Wasp” (2018), but I did see Michael Douglas’s hair in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” and cosmetologically, the dude still brings it. 

I thought about this over the weekend while reading Matthew Garrahan’s interview with Douglas for the Weekend Financial Times. Douglas is currently starring in an Apple TV+ miniseries as Ben Franklin who, as Garrahan notes, did not wear a wig, unlike most founding fathers, meaning Douglas could still show off his hair. “Jack Nicholson always accuses me of being a hair actor,” Douglas told Garrahan. “I find a lot of my character through hair.” As evidence, Garrahan cites the actor’s slicked back look as Gordon Gekko for “Wall Street” (1987) and crew cut in “Falling Down” (1993). These might be two of the more blatant examples, but they also demonstrate the wide variance in Douglas’s movie hair, how he can transition from Coach Pat Riley to peeved peon without missing a beat, the length he’s willing to go to get under the coiffure of his character.

He does not simply excel at broad leaps with his hair, however, proving equally successful at subtler shades. In “Haywire” (2011), his hair is like a G-man play on the Gekko look but styled with a little more volume, as if shady ostensible civil servants and greedy corporate raiders are separated by mere degrees, and his “Haywire” hairstyle is contrasted against his role as the chief executive of government in “The American President” (1995) where he opts for a tamped down but distinguished grey. And that distinguished grey is juxtaposed against his role as America’s drug czar in “Traffic” (2000), tamped down, distinguished, and with a nearly identical part but conspicuously colored, as if the face of the war on drugs has not quite figured out how the war on drugs is not what it really appears to be.

Between “Wonder Boys” (1998) and “King of California” (2007), and with the help, respectively, of hair stylist Joseph Coscia and hair department head Jennifer Bell, utilized key distinctions in scraggly grey haircuts to evince a messy literary professor and then a conspiracy kook.

In “Black Rain” (1989), Douglas plays a requisite on the edge cop named Nick who at one point proclaims, “Sometimes you should forget your head and grab your balls,” which fair enough, except as his hair evinces, he thinks about his head a lot, an intense mullet that renders the part as close as Michael Douglas has ever come to portraying a Michael Mann protagonist. And though his cop, also named Nick, three years later in “Basic Instinct” has got some troubles too, his hair is far more reined in, a means to underline how he lets it down and comes unglued when his character encounters Sharon Stone’s.

With his wig in “One Night at McCool’s” (2001), Douglas was essentially playing Liberace before he played Liberace in 2013’s “Behind the Candelbra,” and if I’d had a Letterboxd account in 2001, not that I have one now, I would have written a review that went something like, the whole movie should have been made in the image of Michael Douglas’s hair. Perhaps that’s a good rule of thumb for any movie; if Michael Douglas starred in this, would it be worthy of his hair?

Like “Romancing the Stone” (1984) and its subsequent sequel “Jewel of the Nile” (1985), not as good as the original save for Douglas’s coif, convincingly playing the cover of a romance novel come to life by ensuring that you could hear his mane of hair roar. It’s funny, as a recent New York Times article by Bob Mehr remembering the late Diane Thomas, who wrote “Romancing the Stone” remembered, Douglas, who also produced, originally wanted Jack Nicholson for the part. But for all his qualities, in that role, Nicholson’s hair would not have been up to snuff. You can almost imagine Douglas saying, “You wish you were a hair actor, Jack.” 

What Movie Will Margot Robbie Make Next?

On the heels of Cinema Romantico quite possibly predicting Tom Cruise breaking into a submerged submarine in the next “Mission: Impossible” movie, this blog’s esteemed powers of prescience are at it again. Longtime and extremely frustrated followers might recall that last spring, to mark the release of “Air,” detailing the birth of the Air Jordan Nike sneaker, we proposed some other products that Hollywood could exploit for entire movies. Bartles & Jaymes Wine Coolers, the Rubik’s Cube, even Monopoly, the boardgame that I think was supposed to be teaching me the basics of finance but that I mostly treated the same as the classroom, a conduit to daydreaming, in this case, imagining the extravagant beauty of places like Marvin Gardens and St. Charles Place, and hey, before I slip into another St. Charles Place daydream right now and forget, did you hear, fresh off her “Barbie” triumph, Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment will produce a Monopoly movie. [Searches blog for bugging device.]

Margot Robbie after drinking too much Surge.

What a Monopoly movie might look like, whether it’s a tense game of a family stuck at home during a blizzard that comes to life, a murder mystery on the Reading Railroad, or something that causes Marco Rubio to take out an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about Marxists, is difficult to determine and undoubtedly dependent on who winds up directing. No, the question of what a Margot Robbie Monopoly movie might look like interests me less than wondering what movie based on which product this blog pitched will Robbie and LuckyChap take on next? 

United Airlines probably needs to put its focus elsewhere these days, and a movie based on the Dominique Wilkins sneaker is probably less likely at this point than one about Caitlin Clark’s forthcoming footwear. No, I think Robbie’s most likely post-“Monopoly” move is a movie about Surge, the ostensible Mountain Dew Killer that was advertised as the soda of the extreme sports crowd, meaning her performance could combine Glenn Howerton in “Blackberry” with Dan Cortese, which could maybe paint economics as nothing more than a version of extreme sports, or vice-versa. I’m picturing an ending where her character is reduced to eating at the Shakey’s Pizza buffet, wistfully noting they still have Surge on tap. 

Road House

A commercial and critical failure upon its theatrical release in 1989, Rowdy Herrington’s “Road House” found a cult audience through cable TV and home video. And though I understand director Doug Liman’s frustration at his “Road House” remake not receiving a run in theaters, I also sort of understand the impulse of its distributor Amazon to send it straight to streaming, the cable TV and home video of our time, as if seeking to maximize its cult potential right up front. If watching at home worked for “Road House” (1989), why wouldn’t it work for “Road House” (2024)? We’ll see how that goes. As of this writing, the audience score for “Road House” (2024) on Rotten Tomatoes is lower than the critics score, though, c’mon, what do those snot-nosed, horn-rimmed glasses and black turtleneck wearing ‘audience’ members know anyway? True, this remake isn’t at the level of the original, or maybe, merely not in the same zone as the original, which in its violent flamboyance became something like the camp version of a movie for guys who like movies. Liman’s model is more akin to a traditional jokey-kinda action movie, and on those terms, it proves generally successful, not least because of the secret weapon that’s staring you right in the face and getting shirtless, what, two, three minutes in – Jake Gyllenhaal.

Like Patrick Swayze before him, Gyllenhaal plays a dude named Dalton, though unlike his predecessor, he’s not a bouncer by trade. He’s a UFC fighter with a UFC-centric secret that has made him so feared people pay not to fight him in the ring. This prompts Frankie (Jessica Williams), who runs a roadhouse called the Road House in the Florida Keys, to hire him to help tame her unruly place. The Road House, though, despite its beachside betting is never as evocative a place as the original’s Double Deuce. No one is likely to teach David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkin’s script for Herrington’s movie in a screenwriting class, but it’s all relative, and I found myself yearning for a similar block by block structure in Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry’s screenwriting update. The place never stands out, the characters surrounding Dalton never emerge, not so much as fully rounded people as entertaining presences. Dalton’s bar-taming is achieved in nothing less, really, than the space of a montage, demonstrating how this Road House exists mostly as a venue for a rotating cast of musical guests and a stage for Dalton to fight. (The script also does an exceptionally bad job with the crocodile set-up and payoff, which comes way too early and is, oddly, too muted when it does, like it knows this can’t be the real payoff.)

The original “Road House” might have been released in the 80s, but it evoked a western of Hollywood past in so much as Dalton tamed a whole town as much as he cleaned up the club, freeing it from the grasp of grizzled kingpin Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara). The new “Road House,” then, evokes not so much a western as, well, an 80s movie in so much as its villain is a spoiled brat, Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), who wants to build a resort in the Road House’s place which sounds like the plot of an 80s movie. But because Ben is not the kind of guy that can mano-a-mano with Dalton, the script engineers an excuse to bring in a second heavy played by real-life UFC star Conor McGregor. He is playing a character named Knox but really, he is just playing Conor McGregor playing Conor McGregor. His whole performance feels like he took Liman’s notes, threw them out the window, and did whatever he wanted, way too much, in fact, and virtually to the point of distraction, yet paradoxically, simultaneously fitting right in. Dalton might romance a local doctor and make friends with the father and daughter proprietor of a bookshop, but his real reason for being here isn’t so much to save the town as meet Conor McGregor, er, Knox in the ring, so to speak, to become Ultimate Fighting Champion, a showdown with a gleeful undercard on a speedboat that’s like the end of “Patriot Games” on a multi-colored upper, to quote Hunter S. Thompson.

Despite so many monster trucks and polar bears, the original “Road House” was ultimately defined by Patrick Swayze, and not just in the image of his chiseled abs and exultant mullet but in the air of his Zen countenance and his omnipresent smile, the one that seemed to know every character better than they knew themselves. Gyllenhaal has a small smile too, though a countenance that’s less Zen than charismatically blasé. When one of the myriad baddies calls him rage-filled, Gyllenhaal’s response is quietly astonishing, like he’s living an LOL text, so bemused by the insult that he’s actively trying to wrap his head around it. Given that we meet him by way of a suicide attempt, and considering the bloody carnage to come, this Dalton feels a little like Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire,” but in Gyllenhaal’s air, Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire” manifested as a Parrothead, as if telling us to just let go and be carried away by the blood-splattered, limb-snapping breeze. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Split (1968)

1968’s “The Split” is a heist movie in which the heist comes to feel perfunctory. It might be elaborate, pulling down a half-mil from the LA Coliseum while an LA Rams game is in progress, but it goes off without a hitch, and is conveyed in such a way by director Gordon Flemyng to accentuate that cool-eyed execution as opposed to ratcheting up suspense. No, the heist is more about happens after, when the money goes missing and the participants suspect the ringleader McClain (Jim Brown) is seeking to keep it all for himself, though even these games of cat and mouse, as well as the climactic shootout, don’t really rise to much. Neither do the interpersonal relationships, as the intriguing nature of McClain’s relationship with his older white partner (Julie Harris) goes unexplored, and his desire to start over with his ex-wife Ellie (Diahann Carroll) comes across like screenwriter motivation than anything real. And yet “The Split” still leaves mark, and not just because Donald Sutherland in an early role leaves one. The “Parker” novel on which it was based, “The Seventh,” was by all accounts, dark and tough, and though the overall tone of the movie never mirrors it, there are these incredible jolts, not exactly of grim reality but reflections of it, rendering a movie that is not quite more than the sum of its parts, per se, but rememberable for the parts that stand out, nevertheless.

Though the specific narrative ingredients of “The Split” do not necessarily concern race, released in the racially tumultuous year of 1968, it is notable just how much Flemying still finds ways to effectively inject race into the proceedings. Indeed, “In the Heat of the Night” had made waves a year earlier for Sidney Poitier’s black detective slapping Rod Steiger’s white southern sheriff and in “The Split,” McClain slaps one of his white colleagues, too, though it is at once much less sobering and much more intense even if it is conveyed in a manner approaching slapstick: in other words, anyone can come get it now. It is surpassed by an earlier moment when McClain seeks to test potential members of his crew by secretly turning the screws on them, like he does by showing up at Bert’s (Ernest Borgnine) place of work and punching him without a word, just to see how he will react. Never mind that Ernest Borgnine could never credibly contend in a fight with Jim Brown and just revel at the raw impact of this moment, Jim Brown, costumed not unlike a Black Panther, socking a white dude straight in the face with nary a warning.

And even if “The Split” fails to render Ellie as true character, setting her up just to sacrifice her life, the manner in which her life is sacrificed still manages to make her matter. Confronted by her jittery white, underline, landlord (James Whitmore), who recognizes McClain as being wanted for the LA Coliseum heist, he first demands money to keep quiet, and then he demands something more. Eventually he stumbles upon a hidden cache of automatic weapons, taking a machine gun and pointing it right at Ellie, the scene ending the way you might assume, a metaphor for racial and sexual violence so wrenching, it virtually stops “The Split” right in its tracks.