Steak and eggs At Aunt Meg's

Alright pop quiz: Vacation. Indiana Beach. Movie fan. In between the sun and sand and hotel, a drive-in is playing a double feature for the ages: True Lies and Speed. You're asked to come along. What do you do? 

Jump up and down in excitement of course!

At the time I was an Arnold fan who counted Terminator 1 & 2 amongst my favorites. Will this Cameron/Arnold collaboration be three times a charm? Turns out it was. What I wasn't counting on was the second feature: Speed. I had no idea who Jan De Bont or Keanu Reeves were. Or Bullock and Hopper for that matter. My wave of interest was mostly through cultural osmosis. The movie about a bus that will blow up if it goes under 50 mph. What made it even more pleasant was that it lived up to that hype. Two years later, Jan De Bont would chase down storms in the 1996 blockbuster Twister. 

Now that I've gotten the appetizers out of the way, let's get to the main course: 

Tornadoes have been used to great effect for the endings of A Serious Man and Take Shelter. One of my favorite sequences in Wizard of Oz has one. The storm in itself isn't enough to hold my interest. The first viewing confirmed this. It also created a sour taste in my mouth. Flying cows, driving through houses, poor effects. The stuff that culture picked up on from the movie were the very things I didn't like about the movie. 

Storm chasers who count themselves as fans of the movie have said the one thing it nailed was the storm chasers themselves. Forget the impossible science of surviving an F5 by using a belt tied to a pipe. It's that intoxicating sense of chasing danger. And for any one scene to capture it better, it would have to go to the one where our cadre of misfits go to Jo's Aunt Meg's house for food. They crave sustenance. 

It is at this point where it becomes a hang out movie. A scene so lodged in my memory that anytime I watch it it gives me a sense of what could have been. You don't get this kind of chemistry from any type of acting group. So let's look at who's at the table:

Bill Paxton- Established from a cameo in The Terminator, Aliens and True Lies, Paxton was the Ace card in James Cameron's backpocket. Going into Twister, Paxton was the one actor in it who I was a fan of.  

Helen Hunt- She'd become Oscar winner Helen Hunt a year after this movie. 

Philip Seymour Hoffman- Twister would be the first film I would see him in. His character Dusty oozes off the screen with charisma. Every line he says just puts a big goofy grin on my face. Out of all the new faces, this was the one I was looking out for. It paid off. Probably...no definitely my favorite actor from my generation. 

Jeremy Davies- A consummate character actor who just so happens to be in two great TV shows: Lost and Justified. As much as I love him in those shows, his career performance is in Herzog's Rescue Dawn. 

Alan Ruck- For many of us, Ruck will always be Cameron Frye. "Rabbit is good. Rabbit is wise." 

Todd Field- Beyond just getting a substantial role as Nick Nightingale in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Field became a director in his own right. Gifting us too solid dramas in In the Bedroom and Little Children. What happened to this guy? 

Add it all up and you have a group of actors able to harness an energy that jumps off the screen and into the audience. There's the gravy that is practically a food group. Rabbit's realization of where all the beef comes from. The backstory of a naked 'Evil Bill' chucking a bottle into the air and "it never hits the ground". All this fodder adds up to an A+ scene too good to be included in a movie that otherwise is around the B/B- range of enjoyability. It's a hang out scene imprisoned in a disaster movie. 

There's only one other scene that can go toe to toe with the Steak and Eggs scene here. And that is the Tales From the Crypt episode What's Cookin'. 

So if you just woke up and have a hankering for some beef, you could do no better than watching Twister back to back with this TFTC episode. Let that gravy run all over the plate. 

Until next time kiddies, restauranteur in peace! 

-Luke

Why Are You Holdin' Out On Me? Deleted Scenes That Should've Never Been Cut

    Deleted Scenes used to be the Special Feature I went to when I got a DVD. Sometimes it didn't even matter the substance of the scene itself, it just meant there was MORE. That was routinely followed up with bloopers and then the commentary tracks. But it got to a point where that fun bit of extra gave way to the realization of: What Could Have Been...

   Suddenly I didn't want to invite the nagging frustration that a movie I was either in love with, or on the way to loving, wasn't whole. Sure, plenty of movies are plagued with a superfluous scene or two that definitely needed snipping (like Mia's 'Elvis Or The Beatles' scene from Pulp Ficiton). And there are some scenes that definitely should be deleted but ended up making the cut anyway (more on those in a future post). But there are some perfectly fine--or downright necessary--scenes that were unjustly cut and never had their share of the limelight in an eventual extended cut (like Midsommar's Director's Cut enriching Christian's arc). So I would fantasize about creating my own cuts, which is an idea I got from Tarantino; He doesn't just remix shit into his own art, he'll reshape an entire movie to fit his liking. But that's not always easy to do seamlessly, so I've given up seeking absolute cohesion.

    As a kind of immersion therapy I've started to embrace deleted scenes again. So if you're still reading through my coping mechanism, that Luke & Jake will be joining in solidarity, here are a few REDACTED Scenes off the top of each of our heads that we can't let go of.

The Music Shop
JAWS

 
  I know every line to Jaws. That's not a flex nor a shameful admission - it's just a fact. I've seen it hundreds of times but a version I haven't seen in nearly 15 years or more is the TV cut. My Mom had recorded it off of TNT and I wore that tape out until, around 2004, we leapt into the 2000s and got one of them Digital Versatile Disc players. The gore was new but something was missing among the fresh carnage. I watched it over and over but I had no idea what it was.

  I went to the special features and low-and-behold: Quint in the music shop. Just like that 4th Of July boater's leg, I couldn't believe it'd been separated. This is what triggered the What Could Have Been neuroses.

 
  If you haven't seen Quint's original introduction, it's incredible! While picking up some piano wire, He goes out of his way to harass a boy playing the clarinet for his own amusement. It's not necessarily better than the "The Head, The Tail, The Whole Damn Thing" scene, they both establish who Quint is; whether he's disrupting a meeting with literal nails-on-a-chalkboard or shouting at a poor band kid, he's a crass son of a bitch. I just prefer the clarinet scene because it's funny - that's it. But Spielberg, being Spielberg, opted for the chalkboard scene; with him seated next to the shark drawing, delivering a galvanic monologue, it's a more cinematic pronouncement for sure.

  But it's not necessarily more memorable than the music shop scene. That said, pitting them against one another isn't my point - these two scenes compliment one another. The clarinet scene functions as a means to let your guard down so that when this obnoxious ass sits down and talks about how this shark is going to put everyone on welfare...it hits even harder. So does the Indianapolis Speech, for that matter. Quint's whole arc is richer. Is it lacking as it is? No. But could it be better? Absolutely.

Kaiju Tumors
SHIN GODZILLA

  Shin Godzilla is a Gojira movie by way of Dr. Strangelove, a political satire where red tape bureaucracy works in tandem with the monster to destroy Japan. This iteration of Godzilla isn't some guy in a goofy rubber suit knocking over cardboard buildings, nor some watchful titan protecting us from greater threats to restore balance or whatever. This is an apathetic, devastating, horrific beast like the original 1954 Godzilla. And since this is a remake, liberties were taken.

  Director Hideaki Anno does what he wants with Godzilla's anatomy:

   Its first land form is a frantic, nubby, unblinking fish creature - spilling boiling-hot blood from its gills all over the streets it's hurtling through. That eventually evolves into a reptilian nuclear reactor; pulsating red from the inside and textured with what look like endless keloid scars on the outside. Those unblinking eyes have gone from barracuda buggy to dotty moray eel orbs and its teeth are a jagged, painful-looking mess of excess. It's purposely hard to look at but what's going on inside is even more unsettling.

  We're told that its blood is not only infectious radiation but it can metastasize and turn everything, essentially...into cancer. If it isn't stopped it could 'infect' the entire world. This is all delivered through exposition but there's a deleted scene that makes this shit visually explicit and it mutates the movie from Strangelove into Lovecraft.

  While surveying aftermath, a cadre of soldiers stumble upon some rubble dripping with Godzilla's flesh. When they shine their flashlights on it, we see a gooey mass of eyes and teeth. They aim their lights upward and the rubble is just overrun with more toothy, pink, multi-eyed masses -and they're throbbing. This means Godzilla's blood cells are a microcosm of monsters that, like Godzilla, are constantly growing. His entire body is made up of living tissue that could go on living outside of him. It calls to mind the creature(s) from The Thing (1982), which I never expected in a Godzilla movie. Then there's the added bonus that it's emitting an invisible plume of radiation so there's some extra Yikes!!!

  They apparently deleted this because it was deemed "too disturbing," which is the shittiest reason to omit something from your monster movie. But this very reason sort of makes it just as effective. Like, it wasn't cut for pacing issues or anything technical, it was just too dark. So when I watch it now, I know it's there, it's just... off to the side, waiting...

  So did deleting it make it any less disturbing? No, it just made it more taboo.

  Again, the real villain is bureaucracy.

Harlan's Beach Ball Collection
Best In Show

  When I think of Best In Show I inundate myself with every memorable line, gag, and everything in between; Gerry's two left feet, Beatrice's missing busy bee, Fred Willard's commentating (that I could watch 4 hours of, R.I.P.), Harlan Pepper's Ventriloquism, John Michael Higgins' campy gay performance (balanced out by Michael McKean's grounded gay performance) - I could go on and on and on and ON. But, [un]fortunately I always come back to this [deleted] scene.

  In one of the funniest movies in existence, this is up there as one of its funniest scenes. I laughed so hard the first time I saw it that I saw stars - that's not an exaggeration, I had a reaction so severe that I damaged my brain and saw tiny floating lights for a few seconds. I didn't even hear what he said because I was so dizzy and drowning him out with my cackling. But even as a sight-gag, alone, it deserves to be in the movie.

  Just... how he opens the door and they don't come spilling out - that'd be too kooky and unclever - they're so tightly crammed in there, and there are so many, that there's no room to move around. Like every scene, it's aggressively silly but it's played so expertly straight. From here he goes on to explain the technical details about each one, which Guest improv'd, and it's the perfect thing to pull out of Harlan's character: of fucking course he knows the engineering specs on beach balls.

  You could make the case that it has no 'reason' to be there considering his dog Hubert is nowhere in the scene and Harlan has plenty of other eccentric moments, like when he's namin' nuts, but in a movie that's not necessarily story-driven or narratively compelling, one more scene like this wouldn't hurt anything at all. Well, except my brain, but goddamn is it worth it.

Now for Jake's Takes:

Delahunt's Confession

The Departed

 
  Departed is probably the most fun movie Marty's made since the '90s and that’s largely because he dumbed himself down to make it (a wager he would double down on in 2013 to similar financial and critical success). Backhanded compliments aside, it wasn’t a massive hit for no reason. Granted, I’ve never been the biggest fan of Wolf of Wall Street, but the crucial difference between the two films is that Wolf contains no scene like this one - deleted or not. What I’m getting at is: underneath the sassy sausagefest of desperately quotable dialogue, macho charisma, incomparably brisk pacing, and fashionably breakneck editing, there lies a warm, beating heart that recalls Marty’s maturer work. It was consciously buried in the editing room, as evidenced by the fact that this scene was deleted.

   Here’s the deal: Delahunt’s been shot and, in his final moments, he calls Billy over to have a word with him. The scene’s plot function is left intact in the final cut but the thematic character stuff that the scene originally intended to convey is missing. It’s one thing to cut a good scene, it’s another to cut a great scene, but it’s even worse yet to cut what would’ve been possibly the most essential scene in the entire film; Delahunt confesses to Billy that he knew he was the rat but he couldn’t kill him because, although he's loyal to Frank, he didn’t want to die a murderer, nor did he want his body to end up in some dumpster. He says, gargling with blood, “I’m nearly the departed.”

   I don’t know what William Monahan thinks of the movie but if I was him I’d be pretty annoyed that the scene from which the film’s title derives was removed.

Becky Needs Help
Boogie Nights

   I can’t say I’d know exactly how to make this sequence work tonally in the editing room - considering where it fits into the story, it’s bordered on all sides by plenty of dark moments - some more so, some less so. But in keeping with the film’s theme of degenerate violence, the scene finds Becky Barnett cowering on her bathroom floor, bleeding from the nose and mouth, discreetly calling Dirk for help as her violent, abusive husband pursues her (cut hauntingly to Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk).

   The movie doesn’t necessarily need more darkness or melodrama and, maybe from a pacing standpoint, it makes sense to omit it, but from a story standpoint it’s a shame to lose such a crucial warning about the dangers faced by female pornstars who date or marry ‘civilians’ (in the past few years we’ve seen at least one real-life example of this exact scenario play out). And, from a directing standpoint, this could have been one of my all-time favorite uses of music in a P.T. Anderson Picture.

Let's Not Leave Out Luke:

Old Biff Vanishes
Back To The Future Part II

 
  One of my favorite aspects of the Back to the Future trilogy is how the domino effect of time travel is utilized by the writers. If you don't do X, then Y and Z doesn't happen (Marty riffing on Johnny B. Goode is a prime example). The photo of disappearing loved ones tucked away in his guitar strings ups the stakes, especially when Marty's own hand starts to fade.

  Part II takes that domino effect to an eerie place in this sorely deleted scene. Old Biff Tannen has just come back from the future and, as he watches Marty and Doc fly off in the DeLorean, sputters his last gasps for breath and disappears. We never saw this happen to Marty so to finally see the evidently painful effects of it is welcome tonal shift in downright creepy territory - not just in the way it reminds us of what could have happened to Marty, but how just one event can cause you to be erased from

Good Movies, Bad Opening Title Sequences Vol. 2

Cue Ennio...

Quentin loves his title scrolls (or used to). This card is the only one in his filmography that I’ve got gripes with (I even kinda dig the janky, low-fi Dogs credits). If I could, I would switch this text with Vol. 1’s (and adjust the numerical values accordingly) because Vol. 1 isn’t a movie I plan on revisiting much in the future. Quentin likes to re-edit his favorite movies for his own personal viewing pleasure, and so I wonder if he’d consider swapping these title cards to be a step too far.

 An upgraded version of The Village’s title sequence (which didn’t make the cut because the movie doesn’t meet the other half of the criteria). The kick-ass soundtrack goes a long way, and hey: if you forget about context this could be an all-around kick-ass title sequence for a kids horror movie (which the title itself suggests, ironically). But it’s very not. 

An unbalanced movie in general -- part hokey pastiche, part gritty human drama, and the opening prepares you for the wrong ‘part.’ Indeed, whenever the laughable aliens or their tripods aren’t on screen it’s one of Spielberg’s (and Cruise’s) contemporary highlights, which is thankfully most of the movie, but in order to enjoy it you have to wade through shit like this.  

You might get away with that ‘TV noise’ visual effect (and the fart SFX accompanying it) in an early 2000s DVD menu animation, but a feature? It’s not even good enough for a TV spot. And considering how otherwise surreal the film is, the vanilla mediocrity of this opening comes across almost like surrealism in itself. *shrug* 

This is a peculiar movie because on its surface it seems like many throwaway thrillers from the oughts (and it’s certainly directed like one), but when you dig into the writing you discover it contains some of the most fun psychological horror of any King adaptation (as well as some of the best casting). And that initial dismissiveness you might feel toward it is only compounded by its dime-a-dozen opening.

This could pass for an opening to a Home Alone film, and maybe somehow that’s the point? To kick off an ultraviolent love affair with a marimba, like, ironically? Cuz the title is also kinda subversive, y’know? But if so, then why set the opening against the nightmarish backdrop of Detroit in winter? The whole thing’s a tonal mess. “But the music fits Alabama’s voiceover perfectly!” Look, even her voiceover is somewhat problematic to me, okay? P.S. never underline your main title, just as a rule. 

It was either gonna be this or The Thing, but at least The Thing’s main title card is cool enough to forgive the stupidity that precedes it: an unnecessary teaser of our alien antagonist flying its goofy-looking ship into Earth’s atmosphere. In both cases, I wish the film had just opened with a black screen (and beyond my personal preferences, it seems like logical filmmaking). In the case of Predator, specifically, the first image we see shoulda always been the helicopter silhouetted against the red skyline accompanied by Silvestri’s sinister theme. And on that note: why do we see the main title card before we hear that theme? Pfft. 

Okay, I don’t hate this one; it’s more of a minor annoyance, but an annoyance all the same! There is no bigger Michael Mann stan in the world than Peter Berg - whose entire aesthetic is based exclusively on this movie - and this credit sequence (titles + music) feels like the opening to one of his lesser thrillers, like The Kingdom. That’s always kinda irked me and always will.

Who's Afraid Of MALCOLM & MARIE?

  It shouldn't be a surprise that Malcolm & Marie, the first great movie of 2021, has polarizing reviews. It's got a 58% on RT and that's mostly because critics...don't like being criticized. It's a simple movie about a couple fighting because Malcolm, a director, didn't thank his girlfriend, Marie, at his movie's big premiere. There's no plot, no structure, no corny twists or contrived bullshit - just two adults hashing their shit out in a festival of dialog and exceptional acting.

But why do Critics not like it?

  There's a lengthy, jocular scene where Malcolm goes on a tangent about the piss-poor state of film journalism as he hate-reads a critic's positive, but condescending, review. I happen to agree with everything he says but this isn't what M&M's about. But critics, being myopic, got tripped up over it. Nearly every review stinks of snide, near-sighted accusations that writer-director Sam Levinson is "angry" and "having a meltdown." I guess, to someone simple-minded, Malcolm is the only character acting as Levinson's 'mouthpiece' since he, too, is a man...? And a director...?

  Considering Levinson wrote both characters, the damp identity-politicking critiques zip past simple-mindedness and plunge straight into sexism. They write off Marie as someone created just to absorb Malcolm's vitriol but she has more agency and interiority than Diana Prince did in both Wonder Woman movies combined. She challenges Malcolm's critical criticism, drying his sweaty ass out with a simple "You're not making pottery for a living. You are a filmmaker and filmmaking is the most capitalist, mainstream artform on the planet". She even sides with the writer of that condescending LA Times review, saying that the criticisms of Malcolm's movie can double as criticisms of their relationship.

  But if you think you're on Marie's side...that's bound to change within 5 or 10 or even 2 minutes and vice-versa. It's funny, challenging, infuriating, heartbreaking, romantic, and cathartic, but your allegiance is never set in stone. There are no absolutes in this world - who knows, I might fall out of love with it someday -  but, for right now, I'm holding on for dear life.