The Fractured Mirror entry: With Friends Like These (1998)
over 1 year ago
– Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 11:03:36 AM
With Friends Like These (1998) FM
The professional opportunity of a lifetime engenders feverish competition and back-stabbing among four longtime actor friends in Philip Frank Messina’s smartly observed 1998 show business comedy With Friends Like These.
Veteran character actors David Strathairn, Adam Arkin, Jon Tenney and Robert Constanzo play very different friends with a shared dream: to play Al Capone in a movie directed by Martin Scorsese. Strathairn is the artist of the group, a mysterious man of means his friends think might be mob-connected. Tenney is the handsome womanizer, Arkin the nebbishy Jew while Robert Costanzo is a fire hydrant shaped family man frustrated with an endless series of bit parts as cab drivers and hitmen.
Strathairn, Arkin, Tenney and Costanzo have wonderful, lived-in chemistry as a gaggle of narcissistic small timers angling desperately for a shot at the big time. They’re quintessential supporting players who make the most of juicy lead roles as, appropriately enough, supporting players willing to do just about anything for a juicy lead role.
This is a world the filmmakers and cast know intimately. With Friends Like These works best as an actor’s showcase for its four leads but it’s blessed with hilarious cameos from Michael McKean, Garry Marshall and particularly Bill Murray as a cheapskate producer who seems to have gotten into show-business primarily for the free food.
With Friends Like These stumbles at the end with climactic auditions that ring frustratingly false. The film loses its otherwise sure hand on the material when it focus shifts from acting to ACTING but has built up enough goodwill by that point to make its disappointing conclusion unfortunate but eminently forgivable.
The Fractured Mirror entry: Start Cheering (1938)
over 1 year ago
– Thu, Mar 09, 2023 at 05:56:36 AM
Start Cheering (1938) FM
Four years after 1934’s simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming Hollywood Party, Jimmy Durante and The Three Stooges teamed up for another star-studded, jam-packed look at movie world nuttiness in the 1938 college comedy Start Cheering. The results are every bit as random, silly and vaudevillian as before but infinitely more pleasing.
Lanky cowboy star Charles Starrett, best known as the Durango Kid, plays Ted Crosley, a matinee idol and preeminent Hollywood hunk whose good looks and popularity have earned him the nickname “America’s Boyfriend.” The popular movie star tires of the Hollywood grind and decides to enroll in Midland College.
The movie star’s frustrated manager Sam Lewis (Walter Connolly) follows his star client to college alongside scene-stealing sidekick Willie Gumbatz (Durante) with an eye towards sabotaging his academic career so that he will return to Hollywood and continue to make him money.
The odds are stacked in favor of the Big Movie Star on Campus, however. He’s an incompetent football player but makes the team anyway and when the Dean finds a wild rumpus in his room he simply insists his prize student needs a bigger one.
Starrett is a gorgeous galoot of a straight man but Start Cheering belongs to Durante. The funnyman with the big nose and distinctive rasp slaughters the English language in wildly inventive ways. He’s a hurricane of crazy comic energy who is ably assisted by such novelty acts as The Three Stooges at their fresh and funniest, wild man Louis Prima, vaudevillian Chaz Chase, whose shtick involves eating things that are not food, and even popular radio riddle-master and game show host Professor Quiz.
It’s a kooky Hellzapoppin’-style romp filled with high spirits, peppy songs, collegiate good cheer, free-floating weirdness and laughs aplenty.
The Fractured Mirror entry: Guilty by Suspicion (1991)
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 08:29:43 AM
Guilty by Suspicion (1991)
Blacklisted writer and director Abraham Polonsky was so upset by the changes that writer-director Irwin Winkler made to his screenplay for 1991’s Guilty by Suspicion that he had his name taken off of it as a writer and an executive producer.
It’s easy to see why. The film’s subject matter couldn’t be more personal for the veteran filmmaker. He understandably objected to Winkler watering down his screenplay’s political message by making its hero a bleeding heart Liberal rather than a Communist like Polonsky intended.
In a performance that favorably recalls his turn as an Irving Thalberg-like executive wiz in The Last Tycoon Robert De Niro plays David Merrill, a hotshot filmmaker whose religion is film.
That faith is sorely tempted when he returns from Europe to make a film for Daryl Zanuck in the early 1950s and learns that the cost of working in the movie business is ratting out his friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The frustrated filmmaker must make an impossible choice between his need to work and his dignity and self-respect.
Guilty by Suspicion captures the Kafkaesque absurdism and cruelty of the Hollywood blacklist and the free-floating paranoia and despair it engendered. The evil machinations of the House Un-American Activities Committee were infinitely more un-American than the misplaced idealism of the filmmakers caught in its web.
In a nuanced, understated performance, De Niro conveys the enormous price those who stood up to McCarthyism paid for, ironically, embodying the actual principles our country was founded upon, not the Red-Baiters’ grotesque distortion of our values.
Guilty by Suspicion is powerful in its hushed, somber intensity until a climax that’s big and phony and theatrical in a way that feels like a violation of everything that precedes it. Winkler’s character study goes Hollywood in a way that betrays a fatal lack of faith in audiences. Winkler’s tribute to the creative bravery of the Hollywood Ten and others who were willing to risk everything for what they believed in is undone by creative cowardice and a frustrating willingness to conform to hokey formula.
The Fractured Mirror entry: Madness in the Method (2019)
over 1 year ago
– Tue, Mar 07, 2023 at 05:54:21 AM
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The Fractured Mirror entry: Bombshell (1933)
over 1 year ago
– Mon, Mar 06, 2023 at 10:22:52 AM
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