Year of the Dragon

“No one remembers in this country. No one remembers anything.” – Stanley White

A commercial and critical debacle on the scale of Heaven’s Gate (1980), which helped topple a Hollywood studio, would be a career killer for most filmmakers but not for Michael Cimino who came roaring back five years later with the controversial adaptation of Robert Daley’s novel Year of the Dragon (1985). Co-written by Oliver Stone, it starred Mickey Rourke as a hard-charging, unrepentant racist and sexist cop that decides to battle organized crime in New York City’s Chinatown.

The film polarized critics, failed to make back its $22 million budgets and angered members of the Chinese American and Asian American communities that blasted it for being racist, sexist and xenophobic but Cimino defended his film by arguing that it dealt with racism and was not actually racist. This did little to quell the controversy, which hurt its box office performance.

Cimino immediately immerses us in the sights and sounds of Chinatown with a cacophonous celebration in the streets filled with people. Amidst this chaos, one of the local crime bosses is killed in broad daylight sparking speculation that a gang war has begun with young punks moving against their elders. This gets the attention of the New York Police Department who install Stanley White (Rourke) as the new police captain of Chinatown.

He immediately adopts a more proactive approach to crime by barging into newly appointed kingpin Harry Yung’s (Victor Wong) office and telling him and his underlings to keep the young gangs under control, laying down the law in a superbly delivered speech:

“You think gambling, extortion, corruption are kosher because it’s a thousand years old? Well, all this thousand years old stuff, it’s a lot of shit to me. This is America you’re livin’ in, it’s 200 years old so you better get your clocks fixed.”

This tactic doesn’t endear him to his superior, Bukowski (Raymond J. Barry) who scoffs at White’s theory that the Chinese gangs, if they go unchecked, will make in-roads into other boroughs. It’s a fascinating fiery battle of wills as White argues that the reason the Chinese gangs don’t get busted for trafficking heroin is because they’re smart. Bukowski dismisses this notion and tells White to go after the youth gangs whom he regards as nothing more than troublemakers.

One memorable exchange has Bukowski tell White, “You’re not in Vietnam here, Stanley,” to which he replies, “There, I never saw the goddamn enemy. Here, they’re right in front of my eyes. They got no place to hide, no jungle.” In some respects, he has a point and in other ways he doesn’t. New York is its own jungle made of concrete and steel that is just as dangerous and unforgiving as the one in Vietnam as White will find out later on.

Cimino provides valuable insight into White’s troubled home life and his turbulent relationship with his wife Connie (Caroline Kava) who wants to have a child; the only problem is he is never around because of his workaholic tendencies. They’ve grown apart and, as a result, he finds himself increasingly attracted to beautiful young Chinese American television reporter Tracy Tzu (Ariane Koizumi). Their initial meet-cute starts off as a history lesson as White attempts to dazzle her with his knowledge of Chinese history and the ills that plague Chinatown, and it culminates in a bloody shoot-out as a brazen youth gang riddle the restaurant they’re in full of bullets.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the Chinese triad societies have their own problems. The youth gang attacks have made them look weak and no new revenues are coming in. It’s time for new leadership and the ambitious Joey Tai (John Lone), a bridge between the gangs and the elders, has a plan for the Chinese mafia to re-exert their influence in Chinatown and beyond thereby setting up an inevitable confrontation between him and White but not before a series of escalating attacks against each other.

Year of the Dragon is a snapshot of the criminal underworld in 1980s Chinatown, showing how things work in a way that is fascinating to watch. Cimino doesn’t pull any punches and presents flawed characters on both sides of the law. This is best exemplified by Mickey Rourke’s obsessed cop. The actor is not afraid to play unlikable characters and White is one for the ages – he’s racist, sexist and manages to piss off just about everyone that he comes in contact with, including his wife who tells him at one point, “You used me up, Stanley and then you burned me down. And I was a rock,” but he is good at his job, which is all he has left. Even that begins to slip through his fingers as his increasingly aggressive tactics burn his bridges within the police department and the Chinese community. It is Rourke’s natural charisma that makes White an interesting character. Watch how the actor works the room when White confronts Harry Yung and how he controls the space, or the scene where he gives a squad of cops a pep talk – it’s a masterclass in acting.

Cimino and Oliver Stone’s screenplay crackles with intensity and is chock-a-block with tough guy dialogue while also acting as a searing expose of the Chinese triads by pitting two strong-willed men against each other, leaving plenty of bodies in their respective wakes. The script goes to great lengths to show how the drug trade works, like how Joey gets his heroin directly from Southeast Asia, bypassing the Italian mafia who has always marginalized them. You certainly feel Stone’s politics blasting through his pulpy prose. Year of the Dragon is the cinematic explosion of Cimino and Stone’s collective ids writ large over every frame of this gritty, visceral opus (with a dash of Sidney Lumet cop procedural for good measure).

Coming off writing the screenplay for Scarface (1983), Oliver Stone was depressed at being unable to get personal films like Platoon (1986) made. He was contacted by filmmaker Michael Cimino who was adapting Robert Daley’s book Year of the Dragon for Dino de Laurentiis. He had read and was impressed with Stone’s script for Platoon and wanted him to co-write the script for Year of the Dragon. Cimino thought that if Stone worked for a lower than usual fee, de Laurentiis might finance Platoon. Stone told him that no one cared about the Vietnam War anymore but Cimino disagreed. Stone remembers, “It was Michael who convinced me that the climate was right for it.”

Stone met with de Laurentiis and he agreed to write Year of the Dragon if the mogul financed Platoon (he later reneged on this agreement with Stone). Cimino and Stone conducted a lot of research for the film, interviewing anybody who would talk to them about gangs and heroin dealing in New York’s Chinatown, but it wasn’t easy. Stone said:

“We got information finally from a dissident gangster group. These were guys who were on the outs and very unhappy. They took us to Atlantic City and showed us the inner workings of the gambling world, and also showed us their side of what was going on in Chinatown.”

This connection was provided by a line producer by the name of Alex Ho who had been working for de Laurentiis for two years. He remembered:

“One time Oliver and Michael wanted to see this gambling house where only Chinese people are allowed to enter. So this policeman who was really nice to us busted one of the gambling joints that night so we could see what it was like…Another night Michael wanted to see what happens when someone is shot with a shotgun, so we spent the whole night sitting in an ambulance.”

For the protagonist, Stone suggested changing his name to Stanley White, after a police detective friend he knew from another project. White gave them permission to use his name and a lot of his “eccentricities.” Stone, however, was not happy with how de Laurentiis interfered with the ending of the film. While White had two women in his life, so did Joey Tai – one in Hong Kong and one in New York. Stone said:

“In a moment of sentimentality, he brings the Chinese wife to the States and the Mickey Rourke character finds out about it. So, after he can’t get him legally with a bust or a wiretap, he busts him for bigamy.”

De Laurentiis made Cimino change the ending to a more conventional shoot-out, which Stone did not like. The filmmaker said that Cimino also ran into problems casting the role of Stanley White:

“We went to several people, but they didn’t want the part. In some cases, it was because of Michael’s reputation after Heaven’s Gate, but also most actors didn’t care for the character. He’s a right-winger. He’s a racist. That is the way the character was conceived and written. He’s sexist on top of it. You had to have a big pair of balls to play that part.”

Cimino shot on location in North Carolina, recreating nearly all of the New York setting there at great expense. Ho remembered:

“Like there were two Mercedes that were to be in crashes. There was a 380 and a 450, and I said, ‘Could I buy a 380 and then just change the number to 450 for the crash scene?’ And Michael said, ‘No.’ That was like ten or fifteen thousand dollars.”

Not surprisingly, Year of the Dragon divided critics. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “The actors fare particularly badly under such circumstances. Mr. Rourke, who almost always generates a relaxed, knowing magnetism, is entirely lost in the underwritten role of a middle-aged policeman.” The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson wrote, “Year of the Dragon has an arrogant, electric energy that dares you to look away from the screen for an instant. Do so and you miss a furious piece of action that has bubbled up, seemingly out of nowhere.” In his review for the Washington Post, Paul Attanasio wrote, “Cimino might make a good movie if he were forced to shoot someone else’s script, and banned from hiring extras, but he’ll never do it – he’s an auteur, and our best example of auteurism’s limits.” Finally, the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel wrote, “For all of its excesses, Year of the Dragon is a solid entertainment. It marks director Cimino as a man to watch now not for his spend-thrift ways but for the size of his vision.”

Year of the Dragon opened in 982 theaters on August 16, 1985 and was met with harsh criticism and protests by the Asian community in Hollywood, New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Boston. They objected to the racist and sexist attitudes expressed in the film. Many felt that it perpetuated Asian stereotypes. Judy Chu, an instructor of Asian-American studies at UCLA, said that the film “only reinforces the stereotype that Asians have no value for love and no sense of integrity…Even the newswoman is a stereotype. She is a new version of an old stereotype of the Geisha girl.” Even Richard Daley, the author of the novel, which it was based on, became an outspoken critic of the film: “When I read the script, I wanted to cry. I thought about taking out full-page ads…Dissociating myself from Cimino’s work. It is offensive to anybody.” Eventually, a disclaimer was placed before the film.

Stone dismissed criticism of the portrayal of Chinese people in the film: “The thing critics never realized is that the Chinese were at that time the biggest importers of heroin in this country. They outdid the Mafia, but nobody knew about it because they did it quietly.” Cimino also addressed the controversy, saying, “The film was accused of racism, but they didn’t pay attention to what people say in the film. It’s a film which deals with racism, but it’s not a racist film. To deal with this sort of subject, you must inevitably reveal its tendencies.”

While Year of the Dragon features several racist characters it isn’t a racist film. Cimino isn’t afraid to acknowledge the existence of such people and those kinds of ugly sentiments. He lets many of the Chinese characters speak in their native tongues and espouse their history in America, shedding light on decades of horrible treatment. If anything, Cimino’s film is a savage indictment of such attitudes showing how they lead down a destructive path.

Instead of playing it safe in the hopes of getting back in the good graces of Hollywood, Cimino stayed true to his artistic sensibilities and delivered a hard-hitting crime drama that asks difficult questions and offers no easy answers. Year of the Dragon is an ugly film that forces you to engage it on its own terms and there’s a refreshing honesty to this approach. It flew in the face of the rah-rah, America is great sentiments of movies like Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Rocky IV (1985), and Top Gun (1986). Cimino’s film exposes an America that is rotten to the core and built on a foundation of thousands upon thousands of bodies – people that died anonymously. Is it any wonder it failed at the box office? You don’t come out of Year of the Dragon feeling good but sometimes that’s okay, too. Sure, White got his man and got the girl at the end, but it’s a hollow victory at best and one could argue that it didn’t change much. At least he tried and Cimino admires the attempt.

SOURCES

Camy, Gerard; Viviani, Christian. “Entretien avec Cimino.” Jeune cinema. December/January 1985/1986.

Horn, John. “MGM/UA May Insert Dragon Disclaimer.” Los Angeles Times. August 28, 1985.

Riordan, James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone. Hyperion. 1995.

Diner

A great hangout movie is hard to do well. You have to have a cast of memorable characters brought vividly to life by actors with quotable dialogue. All of these elements are crucial because they often distract from the fact that most hangout movies are about nothing and by that I mean they are largely plotless. The godfather of the genre is George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973), which followed a bunch of teenagers driving around in cars and goofing off. It featured a cast of then unknown actors, some of whom would go on to be big-time movie stars (Harrison Ford). It also had a fantastic soundtrack of vintage 1950s rock ‘n’ roll music. This film established a template that many others would follow – most notably Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993) and Superbad (2007).

Another great and hugely influential hangout movie is Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982), which was the first of his four “Baltimore Films.” This semi-autobiographical film depicts the reunion of six twentysomethings during the last week of 1959 for the upcoming wedding of one of their own with much of the action taking place at a local diner. It not only marked the directorial debut of Levinson (who also wrote the screenplay) but also featured an incredible cast of then up-and-coming actors: Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, and feature film debuts of Tim Daly, Ellen Barkin and Paul Reiser. The success of Diner would help launch their careers as well as that of Levinson’s.

Instead of adhering to a traditional narrative, Diner is comprised of a series of vignettes. We meet Modell (Reiser) at a local dance as he tells Robert “Boogie” Sheftell (Rourke) that Timothy “Fen” Fenwick (Bacon) is breaking windows in the basement of the building. We learn that Fen does crazy things as a goof and that Boogie is a smooth talker with the ladies, convincing Fen’s date to go back with him even though he ditched her. As they leave the dance for a local diner, Levinson introduces the funny, observational humor that comes out of Modell’s mouth when he tells Boogie, “You know what word I’m not comfortable with? Nuance. It’s not really a word. Gesture is a good word. At least you know where you stand with gesture.”

We are introduced to the pivotal location of the diner as Eddie Simmons (Guttenberg) argues that Frank Sinatra is better than Johnny Mathis because the former is better in every respect and this leads to a hilarious bit where Modell asks Eddie for the last half of his roast beef sandwich much to the latter’s chagrin. It is so funny to see Modell intentionally wind up Eddie only to feign innocence when his friend tries to call him on it. There’s a loose, spontaneous feel to this scene and Levinson even keeps in Kevin Bacon’s reaction to Eddie and Modell’s bickering. His laughter looks genuine – an unguarded moment of the actor breaking character.

The way the actors interact with each other suggests that these characters have been friends for most of their lives in the way they speak to each other. There is a familiarity and a short-hand that is believable. One imagines that they’ve had this same argument a hundred times before. The diner scene also establishes Boogie’s mounting gambling debt and his schemes to get inside information for his next bet while settling the Mathis/Sinatra debate by stating that Elvis Presley is better than both of them.

These guys still have a lot of growing up to do, like Boogie’s ever-increasing gambling debts or Eddie still living at home, driving his mother crazy, or Fen’s childish pranks, even going so far as to fake a bloody car accident. Only Laurence “Shrevie” Schreiber (Stern) is married but he’s hardly the epitome of maturity, obsessively collecting 45s and cruelly chastising his wife Beth (Barkin) for failing to understand his organizational system. In addition, Shrevie can’t tell Eddie if he’s happily married or not. He tries to articulate it in terms of having sex with his wife. Before they were married they talked a lot about it and spent time planning when to have it and then once they were married they talked about it less because it wasn’t a big of an issue. It basically boils down to not having much in common with her as he tells Eddie, “You know, I can come down here, we can bullshit the whole night away but I cannot hold a five minute conversation with Beth.” Male friendship is the most important thing in these guys’ lives and this is symbolized by the diner because it is the place where they get together regularly. Only William “Billy” Howard (Daly) seems to have any kind of maturity and this is a result of going to college and removing himself from his circle of immature friends.

The cast is uniformly excellent with Paul Reiser getting the bulk of the film’s funny, quotable dialogue. Tim Daly has the lion’s share of the film’s dramatic scenes as Billy reunites with an ex-girlfriend (Kathryn Dowling) and she tells him about being pregnant with his child. Over the course of the film Billy wrestles with the dilemma of what to do about it. The good-looking Mickey Rourke is well-cast as a persuasive Lothario. He’s always scheming, whether it’s placing sports bets or making moves on beautiful women. Fen is the black sheep of his family, dropping out of school, refusing to work and living off his trust fund. Kevin Bacon hints at a checkered family past and this is what fuels Fen’s unpredictable behavior. So long as he lives off a trust fund he will never grow up. The actor does a good job of portraying the prankster side of Fen and also the more troubling aspects as well.

Levinson doesn’t shy away from how badly women were treated back then, from Boogie’s womanizing tendencies to Eddie forcing his fiancée to take a quiz about football and his favorite team, the Baltimore Colts, which she must pass before he will marry her. The most troubling example of this behavior is how badly Shrevie treats Beth. He’s an obsessive record collector and freaks out at her inability to adhere to his organizational system. She is a casual music listener while it is very important to him. She can’t understand this and he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t appreciate it more. He has a very personal connection to music that she doesn’t but this argument is symptomatic of a larger problem – they don’t have much in common.

Levinson immerses us in the sights and sounds of the diner with insert shots of clean plates being stacked and ketchup bottles being refilled. There is also the fantastic attention to period detail, from the vintage cars to the occasional slang that the characters say to what they wear to the period music (a killer soundtrack featuring the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins among others). He also fills in the margins of the film with amusing bits like the guy who eats the entire left side of the diner’s menu causing Modell to quip, “It’s not human. He’s not a person. He’s like a building with feet.” There’s the guy who obsessively quotes dialogue from Sweet Smell of Success (1957). It is these moments that help flesh out this world and make it more real, more tangible, transporting us to ‘50s era Baltimore.

Barry Levinson worked on the Mel Brooks comedy High Anxiety (1977) and used to tell the filmmaker Diner-esque stories about growing up in Baltimore. Brooks told Levinson, “You should write that as a screenplay,” but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. Levinson went on to write several scripts with ex-wife Valerie Curtin and during a period where she was acting in a film he started writing Diner. It took him three weeks and during that time he figured out the framework – it takes place over a five-day period – and that it was “all about male-female relationships, lack of relationship, lack of communication.” He frequented the Hilltop Diner in Northwest Baltimore and some of the conversations in the film, like the Mathis or Sinatra debate, came out of actual conversations he had. In addition, the six guys in the film were composites of friends and family and things they did and said.

Producer Mark Johnson met Levinson on High Anxiety and originally they were going to work together on Toys (1992), which they made years later, but it didn’t happen. Johnson went on to work for producer Jerry Weintraub at MGM while Levinson wrote Diner. When he read the script he loved it and wanted to make it. Johnson gave Levinson’s script to Weintraub who set it up almost immediately at MGM. At the time, the studio had several other larger budget movies and because the one for Diner was so low ($5 million), he was left alone, able to shoot on location in Baltimore, and cast relatively unknown actors in the lead roles.

When it came to casting the film Levinson saw around 600 guys. Kevin Bacon had just quite television soap opera Guiding Light when he got the call to audition for Diner. He originally read for Billy and Boogie. He met with Levinson who asked him to read for Fenwick, a character the actor had difficulty relating to. When he came back to audition, he was quite sick with a 103 degree fever. “I had a kinda slowed down and out-of-it quality, just based on the illness, that sorta worked for the character.” He ended up using that approach in the film.

Tim Daly auditioned in New York and read for Levinson who liked him. The actor came back repeatedly and read as well as doing a couple of screen tests. The studio wanted another actor but that person didn’t want to do the film and Levinson liked Daly and cast him as Billy. Paul Reiser came in with a friend and had no intention of auditioning. The casting director saw him and thought he’d be good in the film and told Levinson who met him the next day and cast the Reiser. Levinson purposely under-wrote Modell because he knew that if he “put in more stream-of-consciousness stuff, I’d have gotten some resistance [from the studio].”

Levinson only saw one person for the role of Beth and that was Ellen Barkin. The studio didn’t want her because they felt that she wasn’t pretty enough. The filmmaker lied his way into casting Barkin anyway. According to the actress, her on-screen relationship with Daniel Stern mirrored their off-screen one: “We’ve since made amends to each other, but it was a little difficult.”

Levinson remembers that they shot the film mostly at night and this resulted in keeping an unusual schedule: “Coming back, daylight is coming up and you’re coming back to the hotel to go to sleep at the Holiday Inn. Everybody else is getting up to go to work.” One of the biggest challenges was finding the diner. He wanted to use the Double-T Diner but they wanted too much money. Fortunately, Johnson found one in a diner graveyard in New Jersey. They transported it on a flatbed truck and placed it where they wanted it, which was Fells Point.

Levinson shot all the diner scenes last so that the cast would have time to bond and “draw on the rapport they’d developed over seven weeks. By that time they had their edges, little things that bothered them about each other, and those unspoken tensions enriched the movie,” the filmmaker said at the time. This method paid off. Steve Guttenberg and Mickey Rourke became good friends during filming and at one point they told Levinson they wanted to do a scene together because they didn’t have one. The filmmaker went back to his trailer and a few minutes later came out with a scene where Eddie talks about being a virgin. They went ahead and filmed it that day.

Reiser was Levinson’s secret weapon and he allowed the comedian to improvise dialogue. For example, during the “nuance” scene, Reiser remembers Levinson telling him, “’You’re bothered by the word ‘nuance.’’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, it’s a strange word, just play with it.’” The “roast beef sandwich” scene was also completely ad-libbed and came out of the actors talking in-between takes, eating whatever they wanted.

During post-production, MGM executive David Chasman wanted Levinson to cut the roast beef sandwich scene from the film but the director refused because he “wanted the piece to be without any flourish, without anything other than basically saying, ‘This is all it was.’” The studio wanted a sex comedy like Porky’s (1981) and didn’t like what Levinson had done. As Johnson recalls, “They didn’t know what to make of it.” When it came to test screenings, audiences in Levinson’s hometown of Baltimore hated the film and even the local newspaper The Baltimore Sun gave it a negative review. It didn’t help that the studio advertised the film by putting an emphasis on the soundtrack of classic rock ‘n’ roll music (perhaps trying to ape what American Graffiti had done) but this did not appeal to test audiences. Levinson was not happy with this approach: “They were expecting Grease and they didn’t get it.”

MGM was hesitant to release Diner and didn’t set a date. One of Johnson’s mother’s best friends was influential film critic Pauline Kael. He snuck a print out and showed it to her. She loved it and called the studio telling them, “You guys are about to have a lot of egg on your face because I’m about to give this movie a rave review and it’s not going to be available.” The studio finally released it in one theater in Manhattan.

Diner started getting strong reviews and in each city the film played it broke house records but, according to Levinson, “it never went wide because they never had any belief that it could play to a broader audience.” Pauline Kael wrote, “It isn’t remarkable visually but it features some of the best young actors in the country.” Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “Diner is often a very funny movie, although I laughed most freely not at the sexual pranks but at the movie's accurate ear, as it reproduced dialogue with great comic accuracy.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote, “These characters are individually well drawn, and they're played beautifully. Mr. Levinson has found a first-rate cast, most of them unknown but few to be unknown for long.” In his review for Newsweek magazine, David Ansen wrote, “But while seeming to traverse familiar ground, Levinson and his superb young cast are sprinkling it with sparkling insights.” The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott wrote, “Rhythmically, Diner is uneven. The strong opening gives way to a somewhat lassitudinous half hour but, when the pace does pick up, it never wobbles – the film works slowly, but surely.” However, in his review for the Washington Post, Gary Arnold felt it was “an oddly disappointing nice try.”

Diner failed to connect with audiences and quietly began disappearing from theaters. MGM was prepared to write it off but then strong reviews from influential New York critics gave it a second lease on life. The studio realized that they could possibly make money off the film and re-released it in seven theaters where it managed to gross approximately $1 million. The New York Times ran a favorable review and followed it up with an in-depth article on Levinson and the film, which generated word-of-mouth business.

Levinson does a nice job of juggling each character’s storyline, whether it’s Boogie’s gambling problems, Eddie getting ready for his wedding, or Fen’s increasing erratic behavior, and having them all dovetail nicely by the film’s conclusion. They’re not all entirely resolved but that’s the point: life’s problems are not easily solved within the confines of a film and one imagines these characters dealing with the fallout of the events depicted in Diner long after it ends.

The six guys in Diner come across as fully-fleshed out characters (with perhaps the exception of Modell) with rich backstories that are only hinted at and this adds to their authenticity and how the actors portray them that invites repeated viewings. This is why Levinson’s film still holds up after all these years. Diner feels like a very personal film and this is due in large part to all the personal touches and little details that populate it.

Diner is about a group of young men still acting like boys. They are on the cusp of being adults and either make the transition willingly or are forced to through marriage. The film depicts this transitional period in their lives when they have one foot in adolescence and one in adulthood. It is a film about male friendship and examines the dynamic between these six guys and why it is more important than their relationships with girlfriends and wives. Diner excels at presenting memorable characters that are funny and real, dealing with real problems. The film is full of quotable dialogue but also deals with serious issues that aren’t glossed over and aren’t all resolved by the end credits.

SOURCES

Farber, Stephen. “He Drew From His Boyhood to Make Diner.” The New York Times. April 18, 1982.

Harris, Will. “Ellen Barkin on Great Directors and Her Favorite Roles, from Diner to Buckaroo Banzai.” The A.V. Club. August 15, 2014.

Harris, Will. “Tim Daly on Madam Secretary, Voicing Superman, and Killing Stephen Weber.” The A.V. Club. September 19, 2014.

Price, S.L. “Much Ado About Nothing.” Vanity Fair. March 2012.

Serpick, Evan. “Diner: An Oral History.” Baltimore Magazine. April 2012.

Williams, Christian. “The Diner Opens.” Washington Post. May 14, 1982.

Homeboy

The Wrestler (2008) is generally regarded as Mickey Rourke’s comeback film and proved that given the chance, with the right material, he could be a great actor again. This film oddly echoes another one he made 30 years prior, entitled Homeboy (1988). Interestingly, both films are underdog sports stories with the actor playing down-on-their-luck loners looking for redemption. What makes Homeboy a more interesting film than The Wrestler is that it was a personal, passion project for Rourke as opposed to Darren Aronofsky’s film, which was tailored to the actor’s talents. Homeboy was a film that originated with Rourke and one that he had nurtured and massaged for years, even writing the screenplay under the nom de plume of Sir Eddie Cook.

It’s hard to believe that by 1988, Rourke’s career was considered washed-up – at least in Hollywood where he started off strong with memorable roles in Diner (1982), The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), and then scored his biggest commercial hit with 9 ½ Weeks (1986). This would mark a high point for the actor who’s reputation for being difficult was overlooked so long as his films made money, but three consecutive underperformers saw Rourke increasingly relegated to the margins. It also didn’t help that he fancied himself a boxer – an obsession that would help derail his career even further in the 1990s.

Johnny Walker (Mickey Rourke) arrives at a sea-side resort one rainy night and takes refuge in a nearby bar populated by African Americans who, by and large, look at him with contempt and disdain. It could be that he’s white and it could also be the cowboy attire that he’s wearing. He joins in on a dice game and pretty soon he’s been accepted and is dancing on the bar with a woman while chugging from a bottle of whiskey. Johnny’s handler Lou (Thomas Quinn) arrives to take him to a boxing match he’s supposed to be fighting in.

To say Johnny is an unorthodox boxer is an understatement. When he first climbs into the ring he plays mind games with his opponent by testing the ropes and staring at him silently in a way that could be mistaken for being mentally handicapped. The fight starts and Johnny spends the first round taking all kinds of punches from his opponent and getting in close. He comes out fast in the second round and proceeds to knock his opponent out. This catches promoter Wesley Pendergass’ (Christopher Walken) eye.

Wesley is a shifty promoter cum small-time crook who talks a good game but is clearly trouble. He also moonlights at a local strip club as a stand-up comic/song and dance man who tells jokes badly and sings even worse. Imagine Christopher Walken doing these two things, badly, in his very particular way and you get an idea of just how awesome it is to behold.

Johnny ends up frequenting an amusement park on the boardwalk, drawn to Ruby (Debra Feuer), a good-looking woman that runs a mini-horse ride. She is struggling to get by but dreams of fixing a broken down carousel her father left her before he died. Johnny soon gets roped into a dodgy scheme with Wesley that you know can only end badly. Added into the mix is Grazziano (Kevin Conway), a grizzled low-rent version of Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle, complete with the porkpie hat. He is shadowing Wesley and Ray (Antony Alda), his junkie sidekick, just waiting for them to screw-up. The rest of the film plays out Johnny’s dilemma – does he continue participating in a sport where he’s only one or two fights from possibly dying or go in on Wesley’s ill-conceived scheme or give it all up and help Ruby realize her dreams?

Mickey Rourke is fantastic as a punch-drunk boxer living on the margins of society. It is the kind of character he excels at playing – one that has a tragic-romantic vibe to him. Like many of the characters the actor plays, Johnny is a thinker, a brooding type that could easily be mistaken for dumb, but Rourke’s performance suggests a man that observes others and takes in the entire scene before he responds or acts. We also get a brief glimpse of how he sees the world and it’s in slow motion with distorted sound as if everything is underwater.

Our first glimpse of Wesley Pendergass sees him playfully trying to comb fellow promoter Moe Fingers’ (Jon Polito) balding head before primping his own luxurious head of hair with a mischievous glint in his eyes as only Christopher Walken can do. It’s a brief teaser for the full reveal a few beats later when Wesley works the room, poking fun at Lou: “And Lou, why was God so good to me and so awful to you?” in his trademark patter that is a thing of beauty to watch. Walken’s Wesley is all smiles and flamboyant moves but in certain scenes he reveals the menace that lurks underneath the gregarious façade. He talks a big game but is strictly small-time.

Not surprisingly, the main draw of Homeboy is the scenes between Rourke and Walken. It is great to see two talented performers like them play off each other with the former portraying a man of few words and the latter playing a flashy motormouth. Each actor brings their own unique energy to their respective roles and it is a lot of fun to see them bounce their distinctive acting styles off each other.

Debra Feuer brings the tough sensibility of someone that has survived a lot of hard times but it hasn’t stopped her from trying to realize her dreams. There’s a nice scene where Ruby recounts memories of watching her father work that Feuer delivers with an air of wistful nostalgia while Rourke, the generous performer, just listens, giving his co-star the space to have her moment. She and Rourke have excellent chemistry together (they were married at the time) as evident in the scenes they share, bringing out the vulnerability in their respective characters.

Lou, as played by Thomas Quinn, is a burnt-out, disheveled variation of Burt Young’s trainer in Rocky (1976). He perfectly encapsulates the seedy charm of this world, populated by broken down boxers and small-time criminals. Over the course of the film, he reveals that Lou really does care about Johnny’s well-being, to the point that he admits his own shortcomings as a trainer to the fighter. This is a world that Rourke knows well and it is evident in the details, from the bustling gym where you can almost smell the sweat, to the seaside carnival where you can almost feel the cool wind coming off the ocean.

Mickey Rourke came up with the idea for Homeboy while he was a struggling actor. When he was younger, he attempted a career as an amateur boxer but after a few fights, a severe concussion ended that aspiration. Rourke never forgot and wanted to depict his boxing experiences on film. He based the character of Johnny Walker on someone he knew as a child, and a boxer who frequented the same gym in Miami as he did: “He had all the tools. He just had a little trouble upstairs … There was no guidance in his life. There was no love. And if you don’t have a certain amount of love, you’re going to turn out like a piece of shit.” Rourke hero worshipped the boxer but was also intimidated by him: “There was some dark fucking thing when I looked at him. When I looked at him, I was looking at myself.”

While working on Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), Rourke met and became friends with Christopher Walken. Over dinner one night Walken told Rourke about his theory on how the dinosaurs died out. Rourke was intrigued by Walken’s theory and told him about a film he wanted to make some day about a boxer. Rourke told Walken that he would play the fighter’s manager. Rourke remembered, “I thought, ‘Wow, here I’m having this one chance to have dinner with one of my favorite actors in the world, and he’s talking about dinosaurs in outer space.” Rourke initially wrote what would become Homeboy on coffee-shop napkins as far back as 1984. In an interview from 1985, he described the film as being “about a guy who never was a champion, he’s a guy who was pretty much the reason I stopped boxing.”

When it came time to make Homeboy, Rourke was only interested in casting friends and childhood buddies in supporting roles as opposed to well-known actors. He also cast his then-wife Debra Feuer opposite him and picked Angel Heart’s cinematographer Michael Seresin to direct his first and to date only film.

While Homeboy was released in Europe, it failed to find a theatrical debut in North America when Rourke had it blocked because of a lawsuit he filed against the film’s producer Elliott Kastner for failing to pay him and denying approval over final editing and music. Rourke said, “I felt violated. I learned a great lesson—never trust someone on a handshake. People’s words mean nothing in this business.”

Homeboy is a fascinating study of a self-destructive man. Johnny could be a half-decent fighter if he didn’t drink so much and had enough in the tank to finish off his opponents. Rourke’s actual boxing skills certainly give the fight scenes an authenticity. This is a film about making choices and being smart enough to make the right ones. This sometimes involves learning from many bad ones and this doesn’t always happen. Over the course of the film Johnny has to figure out what’s important to him and make some serious choices that will affect his life forever. Homeboy is no Raging Bull (1980) and it doesn’t aspire to be like that film. It’s an intimate slice-of-life story about people just trying to get by and finding compelling drama in their day-to-day struggles.

SOURCES

Caulfield, Deborah. “Dragon Rourke Breathes Fire.” Los Angeles Times. September 16, 1985.

Dutt, Saurav. Stand Alone: The Films of Mickey Rourke. Lulu.com. 2011.

Goldstein, Patrick. “The Last Anti-Hero?” Los Angeles Times. February 24, 1991.

“Rourke in Dispute Over Homeboy.” Los Angeles Times. May 27, 1989.

Smith, Gavin. “Out There on a Visit.” Film Comment. July/August 1992.

Walken, Christopher. “Mickey Rourke.” Interview. January 16, 2009.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

In 2005, Robert Rodriguez adapted the comic book Sin City into a film with help from its creator Frank Miller who co-directed it. Convincing the veteran comic book writer/artist to come on board was a smart move on the filmmaker’s part as it assured that Miller’s luridly violent noir tales would be faithfully translated. This was achieved through a then-groundbreaking green screen environment that allowed Rodriguez to place his actors in Miller’s stylish world with a striking look comprised of black and white with strategic splashes of color. This innovative approach attracted a star-studded cast that included Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro among others. The final result dazzled audiences and was a commercial success.

A sequel seemed inevitable, but instead Rodriguez went on to team up with Quentin Tarantino on the box office misfire that was the Grindhouse double bill (2007) while Miller applied the Sin City aesthetic to a disastrous adaptation of Will Eisner’s comic book The Spirit (2008). Over the years, talk of a sequel surfaced occasionally with the likes of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie being mentioned in potential leading roles. Nine long years later and the stars (and money) aligned for Rodriguez and Miller to reunite with Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014). The film promptly tanked at the box office and received mixed to negative reviews. What happened? Did Miller and Rodriguez wait too long? A green screen-heavy film is no longer a novelty. Two cast members with characters in the film had passed away and some roles have been recast. The general consensus seems to be that they waited too long to make a sequel and interest in the film had waned.

Some might complain that A Dame to Kill For is just more of the same. As a big fan of the first film this is not necessarily a bad thing. After seeing Sin City, I wanted to see more of Miller’s stories brought to life. In addition to adapting A Dame to Kill For and the short story “Just Another Saturday Night” from the Booze, Broads, & Bullets collection, Miller created two new stories specifically for the film – “The Long Bad Night” and “Nancy’s Last Dance.” By doing this, he has given the fans a real treat by offering two stories where the outcome is not known and introducing new characters into this universe.

In “Just Another Saturday Night,” Marv (Mickey Rourke) wakes up amidst a car accident unable to remember how he got there. He proceeds to recall what happened via flashback on a snowy Saturday night. This segment is a nice way to reacquaint us to the brutal yet darkly humorous world of Sin City.

“The Long Bad Night” introduces us to Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a confident gambler who decides to take on Senator Roark (Powers Boothe), the most powerful man in the city, in a high-stakes poker game and gets more than he bargained for. It’s a lot of fun to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt square off against Powers Boothe, the former playing a young upstart and the latter an evil, influential man.

The centerpiece of the film is “A Dame to Kill For”, which features Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin) as a private investigator taking photographs of a businessman (Ray Liotta) cheating on his wife with a hooker (Juno Temple). When the man tries to kill her, Dwight intervenes. He has a tortured past, which involves keeping his homicidal impulses in check.

Afterwards, Dwight gets a call from an ex-lover by the name of Ava Lord (Eva Green), a beautiful woman married to a very rich man. She’s in some kind of trouble and he finds himself drawn into her tangled web yet again. He soon runs afoul of her imposing bodyguard Manute (Dennis Haysbert) who proceeds to work him over. Realizing that he’s out of his depth and bent on rescuing Ava, Dwight enlists Marv’s help, which only complicates things in typical noir fashion.

In “Nancy’s Last Dance,” Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) is an exotic dancer still haunted by the death of her lover John Hartigan (Bruce Willis) and is obsessed with avenging his death by killing Roark, the man responsible for it. Over time, she’s counseled/haunted by Hartigan’s ghost, which drives her increasingly crazy.

Actors Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Eva Green slip seamlessly into the Sin City world. It helps that they have that old school noir look, especially Brolin with his chiseled tough guy features and gravelly voice – perfect for his character’s voiceover narration. In no time the actor makes you forget that he plays a character once portrayed by Clive Owen. Gordon-Levitt is excellent as the young newcomer with a secret and manages to elicit sympathy for his ultimately doomed character. Green plays Sin City’s reigning femme fatale. The stunning actress has an alluring, exotic look and can turn a vulnerability on and off at will all the while playing a cold-hearted manipulator of men. Green gives key line deliveries the right venomous spin that makes Ava Lord a fearsome figure in this world.

It’s great to see Mickey Rourke return to the role of Marv, a character he inhabits so well. He brings a world-weary charm and a much-needed dose of dark humor to the film. Powers Boothe, who only had a minor role in the first film, gets a much meatier part in A Dame to Kill For and it’s a lot of fun to see him sink his teeth into such a deliciously evil character. Unfortunately, Jessica Alba is once again miscast as Nancy, the stripper with a heart of gold. While she looks the part, the actress doesn’t have the chops to pull of the tricky evolution of character that goes from sweet girl traumatized by the death of loved one to a revenge-obsessed vigilante. Miller’s stylized dialogue needs to be delivered a certain way. Some actors can pull it off and others can’t. Alba falls into the latter category and it becomes painfully obvious in her segment. Even her dancing is unconvincing.

While it no longer has the technological novelty factor as an incentive (shooting it in 3D really didn’t help either), there is certainly no other film out there that looks like Sin City. There have been a few imitators since, most notably The Spirit and Max Payne (2008), but the look of the film is so specific to its universe that few have dared to emulate it. Rodriguez has said that with the first Sin City he held back somewhat stylistically for fear that it would be too much for audiences. Emboldened by its commercial success, he took the look further and made it even more faithful to Miller’s comic book. So, there are things like Ava being rendered in black and white accentuated with red lips and green eyes, and visual flourishes like Marv recounting past exploits while a tiny car chase revolves around him, or the moody storm clouds that hang heavy in the cemetery where Nancy visits Hartigan’s grave. And why not? It’s not like the characters or the world they inhabit are based on any kind of reality. They exist in a hyper-stylized neo-noir universe drenched in atmosphere.

The dialogue in A Dame to Kill For is riddled with clichés and the characters are drawn from archaic stereotypes, but that’s the point. Miller is paying homage to the Mickey Spillane crimes stories he clearly idolizes. The film immerses itself in noir clichés and wears them proudly like a badge of honor, refusing to make any excuses for trading in them. There’s really nothing more to it than that, which may make the film seem instantly forgettable, but Rodriguez’s film never aspires to be art as it is unrepentedly sexual and violent with very few if any redeeming characters. The first Sin City film came out at the right time and tapped into popular culture zeitgeist. A Dame to Kill For is not so lucky, but you have to give Miller and Rodriguez credit for sticking to their guns and delivering another faithful adaptation of the comic book which may only appeal to fans and probably won’t convert the uninitiated.

DVD of the Week: The Expendables

For fans of action films from the 1980s and early 1990s, it has always been a pipe dream to see their favourite action stars team up or, better yet, battle each other. Think of it as the cinematic equivalent of fantasy football. With The Matrix (1999), the heyday of muscle-bound action stars like Sylvester Stallone was well and truly over as more normal-looking (physique-wise) actors, with the aid of cutting edge CGI, started doing their own stunts. Former marquee stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Segal were relegated to direct-to-home video limbo.


However, over time, people began to look back at that era of action films with nostalgia and Stallone wisely capitalized on it by resurrecting two of his most popular characters, Rambo and Rocky, to critical acclaim and respectable box office. The success of those films culminated in Stallone’s penultimate film, The Expendables (2010). Using his rejuvenated clout and reputation, he cast veteran action stars like Dolph Lundgren and Jet Li, bad boy character actors Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, and ultimate fighters and professional wrestlers like Randy Couture and Stone Cold Steve Austin. The real coup for Stallone was coaxing two of the other popular action stars from the ‘80s, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, to appear in the same scene with their fellow Planet Hollywood owner. The end result is an action film fan’s wet dream.

Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) is the leader of an elite group of mercenaries and, in a nice nod to current events, we are introduced to them wiping out a gang of Somalia pirates with plenty of cheeky one-liners, swagger and ultra-violence, including a cool bit where the good guys eliminate some baddies via night vision. Soon afterwards, the enigmatic Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) hires Ross and his crew to take out a ruthless dictator who controls a small, South American country. It turns out that the dictator is just a puppet for James Munroe (Eric Roberts), an ex-CIA operative now corrupt businessman. Ross and his crew of four men are forced take on a small army. The odds sound about right and much carnage ensues.

The cast of The Expendables is uniformly excellent. Mickey Rourke shows up as the guy who fixes Stallone and his gang up with jobs and we get a nice scene where the recent Academy Award nominee, in all of his Method acting glory, banters with Stallone and Jason Statham. Bruce Willis, complete with his trademark smirk and steely-eyed stare, plays the mysterious Mr. Church. Stallone shares a scene with him and Arnold Schwarzenegger that is the action film equivalent of the famous scene between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat (1995) – an understated meeting between legendary movie stars sharing the same frame. Eric Roberts gets to play a deliciously evil scumbag with just the right amount of suave menace complete with slicked-back hair and expensive suits.

All of the action stars get a chance to strut their stuff with Stallone and Statham getting the bulk of the film’s screen-time as if the former was symbolically passing the torch to the latter. One of the film’s most pleasant surprises is Dolph Lundgren as a psycho junkie ex-member of the Expendables who ends up working for the bad guys because Ross didn’t approve of his sadistic killing methods. Lundgren even gets a very cool fight scene with Jet Li.

There hasn’t been a decent men-on-a-mission film (a la Dirty Dozen) in some time. Inglourious Basterds (2009) could have been that film but Quentin Tarantino mutated it into something uniquely his own. Stallone goes for a meat and potatoes approach with The Expendables that has a refreshing old school feel to it. It has everything you could want from a film like this: bone-crunching violence, tough guys cracking wise, lots of earth-shattering explosions, and bad guys you love to hate. For fans of ‘80s action films, this is a dream come true and one hell of a fun ride.

Special Features:

There is an audio commentary by actor/director Sylvester Stallone. He talks about how he established his character and his crew visually with very little dialogue. He also defends the sparseness of dialogue against criticism that it wasn’t very well-written. Stallone praises Mickey Rourke’s performance and how he only had the actor for 48 hours because he was making Iron Man 2 (2010) at the time. Naturally, Stallone talks about the logistical nightmare of getting Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis to have time to do their scene together. Stallone speaks eloquently about the nuts and bolts aspects of making the film and what his intentions were for a given scene.

“Before the Battle – The Making of The Expendables” is an excerpt from an upcoming feature-length documentary called Inferno: The Making of The Expendables that is on the Blu-Ray version. He narrates over behind-the-scenes footage about how The Expendables came together. He talks about his motivation behind casting all these famous action stars and athletes. We see Stallone take all kinds of physical punishment, including a nasty injury as the result of a fight scene with Steve Austin.

There is a deleted scene which is just a bit of extra footage early on where Dolph Lundgren tells a bad joke needlessly reinforcing the craziness of his character. Yeah, we get it.

“Gag Reel” is an amusing blooper reel of the cast flubbing their lines.

Finally, there is a theatrical trailer, T.V. spots and posters.