The Flash (1990, Robert Iscove)

As a pilot movie, The Flash is a success. It establishes its regular cast—John Wesley Shipp, Amanda Pays, Alex Désert, Paula Marshall (who wasn’t back, but sure seemed like she would be)—and doing an admirable, post-Burton Batman live-action superhero. Danny Elfman even contributes the theme, while composer Shirley Walker keeps the rest in Elfmanesque line.

There are also some solid guest stars—Tim Thomerson and Priscilla Pointer—and some okay ones—M. Emmet Walsh (he’s just barely putting in any effort) and Lycia Naff. No superhero (even TV) movie can be without a villain, which is where The Flash shows its age. Michael Nader plays the villain, an ex-cop who escaped prison when arrested for highway robbery and recruited the city’s unhoused twentysomethings into a motorcycle gang. They’re the “Dark Riders,” which the movie pretends is a scary name. A few times, it seems like they changed something with The Flash–including the Dark Riders having a blood spot on their jackets–and it seems like that name came in late. Like, Shipp’s supposedly watching the news about them and grinning, even though it’s during his dark arc.

Shipp’s a crime lab scientist in the days before “CSI” made it popular. Big brother Thomerson is the city super cop, and dad Walsh used to be on the beat (mom Pointer had Shipp promise to stay in a safe job)–the first act’s about Shipp’s resentment about not being a real cop. The third act will be his “with great power comes great responsibility” arc, recovering from the death of a loved one, which motivates him to seek revenge against the villains.

He was trying to solve the case anyway because he wanted to show Walsh he could do it and to help out Thomerson. The Flash is copaganda by default, but the cops can’t keep up with the villains—even if they’re just seventies exploitation baddies done with a budget and “90210” extras—so they need a superhero to help them out. Luckily, Shipp just happens to have been struck by lightning and doused in various chemicals–the result: super speed.

Shipp’s super speed discovery subplot is a lot of fun—Shipp’s got a dog to play off, which gives the pilot a surprising amount of texture—and the pilot leans into the wonderment value for a while. Shipp’s got to team up with Star Labs scientist Pays (they’re the local super-lab, the one with the government contracts and super soldier programs) to figure out his new powers and, even though he’s dating Marshall and Pays is a tragic widow, they have some chemistry from go.

The movie’s third act, when it’s all about Shipp exacting his suitable-for-prime-time vengeance on the bad guys, is where The Flash gets lost in the fog. It’s trying not to be too mean—giving Shipp one-liners, for instance—but it doesn’t want to take any time giving them characterization. Especially not in case it makes them sympathetic. It’s cruel about its callousness, though the pilot does okay rendering cartoon villains in live-action.

In addition to the Batman ‘89 vibes, The Flash lifts a bunch from Robocop, including the police uniforms. The Flash cops are just missing the helmets, really. Though I guess only the motorcycle squad, who goes after Nader. The Flash doesn’t have any great motorcycle scenes. There are a bunch of places it feels like they skip around for budgetary reasons. Like Nader’s reign of terror. The opening scene establishes the streets aren’t safe, but then Shipp’s superpower discovery arc is full of nice restaurants and lovely parks. It’s apparently not unsafe until dark, at which point it becomes a hellhole.

Shipp works better in the brighter sections. He’s only got a handful of dramatic scenes, and he does okay with most of them. Not really the most important one, but it’s also a rough scene, thanks to the costars. Shipp handles it adequately. Some of the problem is writers Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo don’t know how to end the pilot. Or, if they do, it’s way too rushed.

The special effects are excellent for TV. More impressive is the production design, which has many art deco touches but also very late eighties modern designs. The sets are always interesting to see; it’s inviting. It works out very well (Dean Edward Mitzer did the production design, Jeannie Gunn decorated sets, and an uncredited Hugo Santiago was on art direction, which is a lot—the murals are gorgeous). Good photography from Sandi Sissel, and good editing from Frank E. Jimenez. At first, it seems like Jimenez has problems cutting conversations, but then it becomes clear director Iscove wasn’t getting the coverage. Iscove’s direction hurts Walsh’s performance the most.

Biff Manard and Vito D'Ambrosio are a hoot as the Mutt and Jeff cops (they continue into the show).

The Flash finishes with a promise for more but isn’t specific about what more will be, other than Shipp in a red suit, running fast, Pays nagging him to think about his limitations, Désert being the charming straight-man sidekick, and Marshall… well, Marshall’s apparently just going to moon over Shipp. Based on how little Marshall got to do in the third act versus the first, maybe they adjusted since they knew she wasn’t back.

Shipp’s a good lead, and Pays—who keeps very busy onscreen even when she doesn’t get material, which makes the character immediately distinctive—is a good confidante. Bumps aside—thankfully, no lags—The Flash sets the show up quite well. Next week, same Flash time, same Flash channel.

This post is part of the 9th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon hosted by Terence Towles Canote of A Shroud of Thoughts.

Leather Underwear (1990) #1

Lu1 I’m trying to imagine how Leather Underwear would’ve read when it dropped in 1990, one of the first comics from then early twenty-something creator Roger Langridge. The comic is entirely a riff on religion, specifically Christian, more specifically Catholic, starting with a strip about the Catholic abortion service run by one Sister Knuckles. She’ll be back later, after the opening story… Professor God and Doctor Jesus.

They’re a father-and-son comedy team. They’re hanging around Heaven, experimenting on the humans, bickering, smelling the Holy Ghost. It’s a quick mood setter for the comic, with Langridge getting to do some physical reaction humor with the characters. The Sister Knuckles strip is almost too confrontational a way to start the comic, too jarring without context; God and Jesus come through.

Until someone farts, anyway.

The second story is about Sid Bicycle going on a Divine Comedy-esque adventure, starting with seeking enlightenment from a heathen on a mountaintop. Sid ends up in the afterlife, rightly or wrongly, and meets God—who Langridge writes a little harsher here than, say, Ennis will do in Preacher—and then goes off for tea and crumpets with Satan. It’s the best-written story in the issue, just because Langridge is going all over the place without having a strong character to fall back on if the story thins down.

Not a problem with the following story, which is the promised Knuckles the Malovent Nun feature. Knuckles has broken out of her original convent and is setting a new religion with herself as Pope. Langridge finds the right balance between obscene and funny. He never makes too extreme a joke if he can get by with a tamer variant, so when he does unleash, it’s always justified. Knuckles is a lovably loathsome character who finds immediate success and fame and fortune because it’s religion.

Then comes a Noah retelling, which is fast and funny. It’s not quite an illustrated prose piece, but closer to it than a comic. Langridge still has a fine sense of layout, though. While it’s interesting to think about how Langridge would develop after this book, there’s a lot of great art in it, even if his lines are a little thicker. His expressions are already dead-on. So such good faces.

Speaking of, the next comic is a single-pager written by Cornelius Stone: Clockedin Facehead in Face Value. It’s six panels of contrast humor, some better than others. It’s fine.

Then Professor God and Doctor Jesus are back to close out the issue in a few pages. One of them cheats at Scrabble. Poorly enough to get caught. It’s very funny and a nice way to close the issue.

Finally, inside back cover, another one-pager written by Stone with a couple characters writing in a Book of Destiny and making things happen. The end’s a little pat, but the pace is better than the other one-pager. The problem with both strips is the setup’s fine, but there’s not enough for six or eight panels.

It’s a really good comic. You can see where Langridge changed and where he grew since, but Underwear stands up just fine on its own.

Joe Versus the Volcano (1990, John Patrick Shanley)

Joe Versus the Volcano’s final punchline comes during the end credits when it turns out Industrial Light and Magic did the special effects. Volcano’s got terrible special effects, especially for an Amblin production, but for ILM to have done them? Yikes.

Now, the film’s an absurdist riff on sixties comedies, so the obvious artifice could work if director Shanley weren’t quite bad at both his jobs on the film (writing and directing) or if cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt were in on the gag. Goldblatt spends the entire film competently lighting it—even when Shanley’s misunderstanding of headroom becomes a near-universal eyesore—but he never does anything more. Goldblatt ably executes all Shanley’s bad ideas. It’s an incredibly qualified situation.

Volcano’s got several unsuccessful bits running throughout the entire film, starting with a recurring lightning visual. It’s the logo for lead Tom Hanks’s terrible job, it’s the path the workers take up to the door (see, thirties), and it comes back at least three more times. Shanley does a lousy job emphasizing it, but it’s also a weak sauce logo. While Bo Welch’s production design isn’t bad—Volcano’s a cross between Coen Brothers and Tim Burton—that lightning strike is awful.

The film starts with Hanks as an office drone at a medical supply company. Dan Hedaya’s his boss. Volcano’s one of those movies with a bad Dan Hedaya performance, entirely because Shanley’s really bad. And, at this point in the film, desperate to be John Patrick Shanley Coen.

The medical supply company makes anal probes and petroleum jelly. The movie makes fun of the idea of someone having something wrong with their butthole, so not zero chance Joe Versus the Volcano meant someone didn’t get the medical intervention they needed.

Fingers crossed some proctologist got revenge.

Meg Ryan, with a jaw-droppingly bad Noo Yawk accent, plays Hanks’s coworker, who he’s always crushed on but never asked out because he’s an office drone. He’s also got one hell of a mullet. Hanks gets a haircut later, and it’s like he’s playing two different people; Shanley’s not good at character establishing or development (Hanks actually just says he doesn’t have a personality, so don’t hope for one). Ryan does play different people, three of them. She’s the office mouse, a high-strung L.A. girl with substance abuse issues and another bad accent, then she’s the L.A. girl’s half-sister, a free spirit who wants to travel the seas.

Ryan’s usually likable, even when she’s bad. The third role, the free spirit, ought to be the best, but it ends up being the worst. At least the first two have impressive hair and makeup; the third one looks like she’s wearing a bad wig, and then she’s unconscious most of the time, waking up to fall for Hanks at just the wrong moment.

Because Hanks is dying. His new doctor, Robert Stack, gives him the bad news. So Hanks heads back to work, causes a scene, peaces out. The next day, weird industrialist Lloyd Bridges shows up with an offer—throw himself in a volcano on a remote island so Bridges can get mineral rights and Hanks can live like a movie millionaire until then.

The most successful part of the film is when chauffeur Ossie Davis shows Hanks how to live it up on Bridges’s AMEX card in Manhattan. And only because it’s Davis. Davis gives the film’s only actual good performance because not even Shanley can write so bad Davis can’t make it work.

After a day in Manhattan, Hanks heads to L.A. to meet Ryan #2; then, it’s off for an ocean voyage with Ryan #3. Amanda Plummer shows up for a scene and a half on the boat. She’s probably the second-best performance.

On the boat, Hanks and Ryan will be cute and weird as Hanks realizes the real way to live life is as a millionaire, and having to work for a living on Staten Island sucked.

The volcano stuff waits until the third act. Abe Vigoda shows up as a Polynesian-Jewish-Celtic chieftain. It’s worse than it sounds because Vigoda’s entirely hacky without being charming, and the island is a bunch of big, poorly shot sets.

It’s godawful.

Hanks is likable about thirty-five percent of the time, good five percent of the time, bad ten percent, lost the rest. Ryan’s often quite bad; whatever Shanley thought he was doing with “many women, one face” doesn’t work. Especially since Ryan never gets a part, just a caricature.

Besides Davis (and Plummer), Stack’s probably the most successful. Then Bridges. Shanley ought to be ashamed of himself for what he made Hedaya essay.

Joe Versus the Volcano undoubtedly has some bewildering behind-the-scenes stories, but who cares. Despite being desperately eccentric, it’s never an interesting failure.

Birdland (1990) #1

Birdland1

So, I wasn’t actually aware Birdland is a porno comic.

I also wasn’t aware it was from during Love and Rockets: Volume One’s run and not immediately following it, meaning Fritz Herrera from Birdland goes on to become Luba’s half-sister in Love and Rockets. I was also unaware strippers Inez and Bang Bang are from the early issues of Love and Rockets, where they fought monsters and killer snowmen and did not have an affair with the same guy, one of them unknowingly. That guy is Fritz’s husband. And then Fritz’s sister—Petra, also Luba’s half-sister in Love and Rockets, wishes she were having an affair with Fritz’s husband.

The husband’s name is Mark. One of the issue’s running gag is he almost has an earth-shattering epiphany when he has or causes an orgasm.

I’m not sure what else there is to say about the comic. Creator Beto Hernandez sets it up as a series of sex scenes and reveals thanks to the identity of the participants. Bang Bang and Mark, Petra fantasizing about Mark, Bang Bang and Inez dancing, Fritz and her patient, Inez and Mark, Fritz and her patient (revealing he’s a patient), then Inez in for therapy with another big reveal. It’s a bunch of sex and gotcha connections.

Even though Inez and Bang Bang didn’t make it through the second year of the Love and Rockets comic (and I thought Beto moved Fritzi over to a porno comic, not brought her out of one), I sort of thought I’d remember them. But the comic opens with a flashback to what seems to be Palomar and Bang Bang and Inez were separate from those stories. Though maybe I’m not remembering.

I feel like it takes a lot of work to contextualize Birdland #1when it’s really just an x-rated soap opera with most of the soap opera cut out.

Good Beto art, I guess. He’s got some mildly amusing running gags. Knowing it’s Bang Bang and Inez, I wish they were fighting killer snowmen instead.

I Come in Peace (1990, Craig P. Baxley)

I Come in Peace is a Dolph Lundgren versus alien movie. It’s from the period before Lundgren went to acting classes but had gotten rid of his Swedish accent, which ends up working against the picture. The terrible one-liners might have some personality if Lundgren had some accented inflection. Or if he just lost the accent. But no. He’s monotone. He’s not unlikeable; he’s just monotone.

Brian Benben is his partner. Benben’s unlikeable but not incompetent. The bad guy–Peace doesn’t have Predator, Robocop, Terminator 1, maybe Trancers money, so the bad guy is just tall guy Matthias Hues. He’s got in opaque white contact lenses, and he grins in what someone thinks is maniacal. He’s unlikable and incompetent.

Peace has some ingredients for being a good sci-fi action camp, but it always messes them up. Lundgren without the accent, Hues in general, Benben. Then the supporting cast. First is Lundgren’s girlfriend, Betsy Brantley. She’s got too good of timing for the movie. Director Baxley likes to blow things up and shows his most enthusiasm when there are pyrotechnics going off. And he’s apparently competent enough with them to convince Lundgren, Benben, and Brantley they’re safe enough they don’t need stunt people for all the shots. So when Peace goes “boom,” the booms are impressively boomy. The scenes aren’t, you know, well-directed or even better directed, but the boom is impressive.

Baxley’s also particularly bad with things like headroom. And, what’s that other sort of important one… actors. He’s terrible with the actors. The best performance in the film is Sam Anderson. He’s got one scene. It’s the same lousy material, but Anderson does better with it than anyone else. Anderson’s the vice president of the yuppie gang in the movie—The Whiteboys. Peace is shot on location in Houston (which it doesn’t really emphasize until the third act set pieces, so it’s got more a Toronto vibe), and a better movie could’ve done something with a yuppie gang. The script’s from Jonathan Tydor and David Koepp; Koepp wanted more work in the future, so he went with a possibly Pychonian pseudonym Leonard Maas Jr. (cousin of Oedipa?); one of them definitely knew what worked in Robocop. Then there’s the alien thing.

Hues is an intergalactic drug dealer, come to Earth to harvest our endorphins. How do you get the best endorphins from humans? You o.d. them on heroin then suck out their brain juices. So it’s remarkably similar to Predator 2 at times. Peace is an entirely inconsequential bad sci-fi action movie from the era of bad sci-fi action movies. It’s a knock-off twice removed but still (academically) interesting.

Good guy alien Jay Bilas is trying to stop Hues, Houston is their battleground, Lundgren is the toughest cop in the city with a heart of gold and great taste in wine, of course, titans will collide. It’s so much more entertaining when you pretend the aliens are Battlefield Earth Psychlos (because they’re alien in their height and discount store Predator weapons). I Come in Peace: A Saga of the Year 1990; they wish.

Jim Haynie’s terrible as the police captain. Ditto David Ackroyd as the FBI suit (though Haynie’s worse). No one knew yet in 1990 to get actual good actors in supporting roles to legitimize a picture instead of getting good performances out of middling character actors. Or at least not Baxley.

Sherman Howard’s appropriately slimy as the lead “Whiteboy.”

For some reason, Michael J. Pollard is also in the movie.

Bad photography from Mark Irwin doesn’t help anything—especially not with Baxley’s wanting composition.

Peace is a laborious ninety minutes. Its lack of personality makes even its badness bland.

Avalon (1990, Barry Levinson)

Avalon is not a success.

It very frustratingly waits until the very end of the picture to clearly not succeed. After trying real hard, there’s just nothing to it. Writer and director Levinson makes a whole bunch of big swings in how he directs the narrative, which is an attempt at doing lyrical structure–just one based on sort of protagonist Elijah Wood’s experience over three momentous years in his childhood—while still keeping some big epical trappings. There’s a rising action but only to get certain kinds of drama. Levinson also drops Wood as the even pseudo-protagonist like a hot potato in the third act, as his relationship with grandpa Armin Mueller-Stahl makes way for Aidan Quinn (as Wood’s dad and Mueller-Stahl’s son), but only barely. The film’s strength was Levinson’s way of orbiting these characters and finding imaginative ways into the scenes, particularly with Joan Plowright (who gives the film’s best performance as the matriarch of the family), and then he completely fumbles it for the hurried conclusion.

Avalon is really good throughout. The remembrance stuff Levinson gets away with is great. He’s got this ode to television tracking shot; he stops the story to do it, showing the way life was for these people before they’d be glued to the tube, and it’s beautifully melancholic. Levinson is sentimental about everything, he picks no favorites—but he does choose very carefully what he’ll showcase. The coming of television sequence has no bearing on the story—Quinn and cousin Kevin Pollak start their eventual discount department store with a TV-only storefront, but it’s a detail along the way in the story, not an ongoing theme, even though it’s a recurring detail. Very weird.

Instead the tracking sequence is just what Levinson did with this particular footage, what he very intentionally did with it, begging for attention. The sequence would seem a lot less intentional if the first act weren’t full of visualized flashbacks. The film opens with Mueller-Stahl telling the story of how he came to the United States, Fourth of July, 1914, Baltimore. Levinson, cinematographer Allen Daviau, editor Stu Linder, and composer Randy Newman create this distinct style for the flashbacks. You can feel the silent movie influence more than you can see it, though Daviau never loves color anywhere else near as much in those sequences. The vividness of memory.

The flashbacks are an indulgence, then a shortcut as Quinn has one to set up a couple other scenes later on, but then they’re nothing in the finale. Levinson gives up on them, but still tries to leverage them. It’s such a rushed finish. Levinson runs screaming from the narrative promises, all of a sudden desperate to make them vignettes. Avalon is a vignettes movie in its third act, but not in the first and second acts. The flashback sequences don’t work with the vignettes. Conceptually. Basically it’s just got a bad third act and it’s bad enough it’s kind of disrespectful to the cast. Levinson shafts every actor in the movie, leaving it all for a tepid stunt cast.

In just a few minutes, Levinson pulls the rug out from under Mueller-Stahl and Plowright, demoting them in what’s been equal share their film. In their place… he puts in filler, taking advantage of the lovely wistful techniques they discover earlier, using them to skip along. Levinson doesn’t want there to be any voice in Avalon except Mueller-Stahl’s, but he goes so extreme he doesn’t just end up silencing Mueller-Stahl, he straggles the narrative distance. Avalon has a point of view from jump, an unspeaking narrator guiding us through the experience; Levinson can’t make it work in the finish and doesn’t even try. It’s an incomplete.

Albeit one with some beautiful filmmaking and great performances. Even Quinn—whose Baltimore accent comes and goes. But it’s Plowright and Mueller-Stahl’s show. Elizabeth Perkins and Eve Gordon are good as Quinn and Pollak’s wives, respectively, but they don’t get anything to do themselves. Wood’s good. He gets a good arc and then gets chucked just like everyone else.

Wood’s absence is actually the most notable, because as Avalon has just become his story, Levinson immediately wrestles it back from him.

Gorgeous editing from Linder, just wonderful cuts. He and Levinson do nostalgia well.

Avalon’s almost kind of great. Excellent pieces. Real bad ending.

This post is part of the American Experience on Film Blogathon hosted by Debbie of Moon in Gemini.

Flatliners (1990, Joel Schumacher)

I spent much of Flatliners’s first half trying to figure out if there was anything technically redeeming about Jan de Bont’s photography. While it’s easy to qualify certain failings—with Schumacher’s bad directing, with Eugenio Zanetti’s obnoxiously ostentatious production design, could de Bont actually shoot it well? No, he couldn’t. But it also doesn’t somehow excuse the photography, which doesn’t improve on any of Schumacher’s bad ideas. The nearest I can get to a compliment is to say it also doesn’t worsen any of Schumacher’s bad ideas; it’s also impossible to imagine Schumacher’s bad ideas being worse so it’s all a wash.

We get a sense of Flatliners’s race towards the bottom from the first scene, which has “star” Kiefer Sutherland unable to essay talking to Lake Michigan on the morning he’s going to die. Peter Filardi’s hack script skips the first act where medical student Sutherland decides he’s going to shock himself to death to see what’s on the other side. Instead, the film starts in the second act with Sutherland ready to go ahead with his plan and trying to cajole his classmates into helping him (basically combination grooming and guilting them, or threatening them with vague sexual assault in Julia Roberts’s case). Though, on that last one, it’s not like Sutherland’s an outlier in predatory behavior towards only girl on in the club Roberts, all the other guys—William Baldwin, Oliver Platt, and Kevin Bacon—treat her similarly. It’s just a question of who’s going to successfully coerce her into the sack.

I think even “good guy” Bacon is the one who tells her it’s not okay for her to be friends with dudes and not hook up with at least one of them.

Bacon ends up being the good guy because after Sutherland dies and comes back—the Museum of Science & Industry stands in for the extremely unsanitary medical school (there’s no medical advisor in the credits, not sure if they couldn’t find one or Schumacher thought he knew all the possible doctor stuff) and the “lab” where they’ll be killing each other and bringing each other back to life looks like a thirties Frankenstein set, albeit with a bunch of wall-size Rembrandt reproductions. But when Sutherland comes back, he doesn’t tell his friends the truth—they all want to be on “60 Minutes” talking about proving Heaven is for real—because the truth is a ghostly little kid, Joshua Rudoy, has followed Sutherland out of the afterlife to beat the shit out of him on the regular.

The only good thing about Flatliners is Rudoy’s scenes where he beats the crap out of Sutherland. Everything else is one kind of garbage or another, with the only not incompetent performances coming from Roberts, Bacon, and Platt, though it’s a stretch with all of them. Overall Roberts is probably best because she’s got the least bad to do, while Bacon’s lousy for the first quarter of the film but gets better once he’s got to play hero opposite Sutherland’s jackass villain. Platt’s just around for occasional comic relief and to drop expository hints from the things we missed in the absent first act of the story.

Baldwin’s bad but Sutherland’s terrible. Baldwin’s just playing a sexual predator himbo, which he can handle through his impressions of his older brother(s)—his hair’s a trip though—whereas Sutherland’s supposed to be complicated and complex but is really just a potentially murderous dick (he wants to screw with Bacon’s afterlife experience because Bacon’s better at conning Roberts into the sack than Sutherland, who’s just creepy and threatening with her, not charmingly grooming her).

It’s a very long, very stupid movie with hilariously bad composition from Schumacher—who shoots it Panavision but composes it for the VHS pan-and-scan transfer—with bad music from James Newton Howard, bad editing from Robert Brown, atrocious writing from Filardi, and that unfortunately indefensible photography from de Bont.

Flatliners “flatlines” from the first scene. Waiting to see if it somehow improves from rancid garbage is on the audience.

The Match Factory Girl (1990, Aki Kaurismäki)

The Match Factory Girl is a hyper-focused character study. It opens with the visually fascinating process of a match factory before introducing lead Kati Outinen. Technically protagonist, obviously more subject. She quite noticeably doesn’t talk for the first twenty minutes or so, which says more about her situation than her character—no one’s interested in what Outinen has to say.

She works, rides the bus home reading romance novels, then cooks and cleans for mother Elina Salo and stepfather Esko Nikkari. When she’s feeling adventurous, she goes out to the neighborhood dance hall and waits in vain for a man to ask her to dance. Then it’s back to work, back to the romance novels, back to cooking and cleaning; she even gives her paycheck to Salo and Nikkari ostensibly for rent, but they clearly don’t work. We don’t get any exposition laying it out, but when we meet Outinen’s brother, Silu Seppälä, he’s got a couple informative lines.

Director Kaurismäki’s script fills in very little on Outinen’s ground situation; outside Seppälä, there’s a little bit implied about the relationship between Outinen and Salo, done through set dressings and lingering shots, not dialogue. From the start, when Outinen’s just moving through her days, Kaurismäki juxtaposes those silent activities against television news coverage of Tiananmen Square. Heavy contrast between events in the world and Outinen’s despondently mundane existence.

At least until she decides she’s had enough and she’s going to get something for herself. She gets a pretty dress, which leads to trouble at home—and establishes the financial situation Salo and Nikkari, as well as some of the extent of the abuse Outinen has been suffering at their hands—and then to Outinen breaking bad. Of course, Outinen’s breaking bad is just, you know, going out and having a bigger beer than usual at a night club and not the local dance joint.

At the night club, Outinen meets greasy yuppie Vesa Vierikko; after a night together, she thinks they’re dating, he does not. Lots of complications ensue.

Match Factory Girl doesn’t even run a full seventy minutes, so when Kaurismäki veers off the predicted trajectory for the third act, it all of a sudden becomes a (muted) thrill a minute. We’ve spent the entire film seemingly understanding at least Outinen’s capabilities but as her environment becomes more and more hostile to her… she goes a different route. The story’s always tragic in one way or another, but Kaurismäki takes it to new heights (depths?) of tragedy by the end.

Outinen’s fantastic. She’s good throughout but the big character “change” in the third act is entirely through her performance whereas Kaurismäki’s direction has been doing a lot of framing until that point. It’s still a character study at the end, just with Outinen running the show instead of Kaurismäki and… oh, he edited it too. So Kaurismäki. Timo Salminen’s photography is excellent but it’s all about the editing when it comes to how Kaurismäki crafts the narrative distance.

The supporting cast is all good. But they’re all entirely in support of Outinen, even when she’s not in the shot with them—which only happens a few times.

Exceptional work from Outinen and Kaurismäki. It’s amazing what they can do in an hour and nine minutes.

The Hunt for Red October (1990, John McTiernan)

Sean Connery, who’s so important to the workings of Hunt for Red October he could easily be “and special guest star” credit instead of top-billed, has his last scene on the bridge of his ship, giving a very Captain Kirk read of a quote. It’s something about sailing and it’s got to break the cultural barrier and touch the audience too, which says something about the target audience.

The film has an Oppenheimer quote earlier so I thought maybe they’d do something with him again but no. Connery goes out on a Christopher Columbus quote, which dates the thing more than all the Soviet and U.S. Cold War stuff. Though there’s a funny part where Connery mopes to first officer and confident Sam Neill about how the decades-long submarine cold war hasn’t had any battles or memorials, just casualties. So I guess if there were battles and memorials… it’d be… good?

It’s unclear. We don’t get a lot into Connery’s character—that scene ends up being more of a showcase for Neill than anything else—but apparently the core of the character is he wants to fights with sticks and stones, not nukes. Or something. Maybe he’s sad about his wife dying. Everyone acts like he’s super sad about it, but Connery’s barely in the movie and there’s no character development for him.

Meanwhile, Alec Baldwin gets all sorts of pseudo-character development though he’s only around to bring the plot threads together. There are three main ones, with a couple splinters; first, there’s Connery, who’s either defecting from the USSR and giving the United States a fancy new Russian submarine because reasons or he’s lost it and is going to nuke the Eastern Seaboard. Then there’s CIA analyst, desk jockey Baldwin who flies from London to Washington on a hunch for something tangentially related but not enough; luckily the script’s perfectly comfortable being entirely contrived, so pretty soon Baldwin’s on an adventure. Then there’s Scott Glenn and Courtney B. Vance. They’re on an American submarine and they’re tracking Connery’s sub before Baldwin even gets to the plot.

I’d hope someone realized if they were taking it seriously, one of those four actors would have to be the protagonist but Red October does what it can do minimize its need for a protagonist. Sure, it’s Baldwin. But not really at all. And not just because Baldwin’s performance is goofy. And the range of Red October’s performances seem to be who can best combine macho and stoic, with silver fox Connery (it’s a stunning hairpiece) the obvious top dog. McTiernan’s direction of the actors is middling, with no one ever paying off as much as they should. Baldwin excepted because he’s so absurdly miscast. The part’s crap, sure, but McTiernan especially should’ve realized when the male action hero talks to himself during tense situations it needs to create at least an empathetic response.

Instead, Baldwin’s whiney and exasperating and artificial. He does get into his action sequence at the end, however. Shows more energy than anything else he does in the entire film. Rolling with enthusiasm. Literally.

Connery’s got no meat to the part but he’s pretty good. Likable for sure. Red October works with him being omnipresent but not overbearing. Neill’s almost good but the part’s too shallow. The only thing worse than no personality in Red October is some personality dump in exposition. Tim Curry actually makes out best as far as personality just because he’s only got to play annoying and screenwriters Larry Ferguson and Donald E. Stewart can do annoying.

Scott Glenn’s the best of the leads. Even he’s not particularly good, he’s just good for the circumstances. The movie doesn’t need good actors, it just needs competent ones. It’s about a Russian submarine nuking New York—maybe—the stakes are inherent.

James Earl Jones is fine as Baldwin’s boss. Ditto Richard Jordan as a government guy. Fred Thompson’s good, of course, as one of the places Baldwin goes on his quest to find Connery and the grail. Whoops, wrong movie.

Vance is really good, which isn’t easy because the movie makes fun of him for being a Black man who knows classical music and is good at his job. Anthony Peck’s great as Glenn’s first officer.

It’s a big cast and it takes a lot for anyone to be actually bad. Not when Baldwin’s running around making it seem like a car commercial on steroids. Though Joss Ackland’s pretty blah as the Russian ambassador. He’s only got two scenes so who cares.

Technically, Red October starts better than it finishes. McTiernan holds back on the big underwater submarine special effects sequences, making it seem like they’re going to be great. Only then it turns out they don’t have the torpedo composites down so all the best special effects are the submarine suspense ones. Even the peculiar “race through the underwater canyons” sequence has solid effects… it’s just a complete waste of time.

The movie hinges on something it hides from the audience to get from the second act to third so it’s not like Red October’s aiming particularly high anyway.

Basil Poledouris’s music is low mediocre. A big disappointment. Ditto Jan de Bont’s photography; it’s never particularly impressive but there’s some terrible lighting in important scenes—neither McTiernan and de Bont seem to have a handle on the submarine parts of the movie, which seems like it’d be important but whatever.

The Hunt for Red October is a long two hours and fifteen minutes. A compelling lead—any compelling lead—would probably help things quite a bit. It does pick up in the second half, which is quite nice. It’s not like the pace improving makes it obvious the first hour is boring… the first hour is very boring as it unfolds, so the speed-up is welcome and unexpected.

If Baldwin weren’t such a flat lead, who knows. But there’d still be lots of other problems. Like Terence Marsh’s occasionally anachronistic, occasionally silly production design.

Finally, doesn’t matter, but the sound editing and design is excellent.

Foolkiller (1990-1991)

The last time I read Foolkiller, almost fifteen years ago, I really liked it. I wish I knew what I’d liked about it because it’s really not good. Even back then I know I thought the art—Joe Brozowski on pencils, Tony DeZuniga then Vince Giarrano on the inks—was bad. And the art’s bad. It appears DeZuniga had been handling the facial features and without him, the people start looking real bad, but then Giarrano adjusts or something. Very rocky, art-wise. Never good, sometimes less bad than other times.

But the art’s not the problem. The problem’s the script, which is from Steve Gerber, who’s not just good, but also not the guy you expect to do a comic all about how the “super predators” are real. At one point they even do a Central Park Five reference. In Foolkiller, it’s a string of Central Park attacks on cyclists where the gang beats the victims to death, enraged the victims can… afford bicycles. Even the killers’ parents are okay with their sons brutally murdering those better off bicycle owners.

Of course, one of the other bad guys is a right-wing TV host. The first few issues of Foolkiller have a different feel than the rest of the comic and not just because the noses go bad at some point. The comic’s about a new Foolkiller, inspired by the original, who’s actually the second one, and is currently in a mental institution in Indiana. The protagonist, Kurt, has just lost his father, his job, his house, his wife, and finds Foolkiller—on the right-wing TV host’s show—aspirational. Pretty soon Kurt’s going around killing bad guys, romancing his shift manager at the burger joint—the only job he could get because savings and loans—and working out in garbage. On one hand, Foolkiller feels like Gerber amping up the absurdity over this kind of character but Gerber’s also grounding it as he goes along. It’s like Gerber’s too dedicated to the actual narrative to subvert it with jabs at the protagonist’s philosophy. Taxi Driver: The Comic.

And outside a mention of The Avengers and Spider-Man swinging through an issue to sell at least one to the Spidey collectors, Foolkiller doesn’t feel very Marvel comic. Outside the art, which—even bad—looks like Marvel and the lettering, which is perfunctory and somehow inappropriate. Foolkiller’s journals are all supposedly written on the computer but they appear in handwriting. It’s also unclear how the journals are supposed to be read—contemporary to events, past tense. It’d be nice if it mattered. Something in Foolkiller should matter.

Yeah, Gerber created Foolkiller, didn’t he. At least the most famous one—and he was in Man-Thing. I just can’t figure out what happened to the joke in Foolkiller. The comic takes a shift when it starts dealing with the Iraq War in the last few issues; that news is pushing Foolkiller’s killing spree out of the headlines. The other headlines are about crack babies and something else kind of iffy, even for the early nineties. The first half of Foolkiller is Randian objectivism with some sprinkles of libertarianism, the second half of it is the lead dispassionately offing examples of those philosophies. Maybe if there were a connection there’d be some impact but Gerber introduces the relevant supporting characters—outside the TV host—when he needs them, not before. And the TV host doesn’t really provide much texture. Foolkiller confuses hyperbolic with effective.

Nothing in the comic stands out. None of the characters, none of the moments Gerber tries out with the supporting cast. He’s got a lack of empathy for everyone involved, which matches the protagonist I suppose but… it’s a little long—ten issues—to go just to prove you can do something. Though Foolkiller is from the old days, back when publishers never would’ve dreamed off cutting issues off a limited series. Or at least it seemed like they wouldn’t. What do I know? I used to be a big Foolkiller (1990) fan. And not when I had any excuse to be.

Maybe the most disappointing aspect—other than Gerber’s exaggerated, almost defensive classism—is the pointlessness of the narrative. It doesn’t add up to anything for anyone involved, not Foolkiller III, not Foolkiller II, not Foolkiller II’s too liberal psychiatrist, not the girl who falls for Foolkiller III, not the stupid villain who can’t seem to die… no one. One of the villains is even a New York City real estate developer who is way too competent to be confused for any real figure.

Either something went very wrong with Foolkiller or it was always a terrible idea.

I’m not sure I wrote about Foolkiller the last time I read it, but if I did, the posts are long gone. I don’t know if I want to know what I thought but I’m frankly embarrassed about it.

Foolkiller (1990) is most decidedly not good. From the start. I kept thinking maybe it turned around in the last few issues and Gerber finally acknowledged the nonsense.

But no.

It’s just bad all the way through.