The Lunch Movie

From Wednesday, March 17, 2008

Directed by John Frankenheimer, starring Rock Hudson, John Randolph and Jeff Corey, featuring an early score by the late great Jerry Goldsmith.

Arthur Hamilton (Randolph), an aging banker, fears his hum-drum yet wealthy life may be sputtering to an end. He is confronted by an agency that offers to give him a new face, a new identity and new youth … by murdering the person with Hamilton’s ideal life and surgically altering him to replace that man. When Hamilton awakens to find that his has become international jet-setter Tony Wilson (Hudson) he also awakens to the greater price that that the shadowy agency charges for their service.

SECONDS was the third in what is considered Frankenheimer’s “Paranoia trilogy,” after THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE in 1962 and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY in ’64. These films were in many ways ahead of their time. Paranoid political/social thrillers became a standard American genre in the 70′s, but few measured up the the hand-held camera/fish-eye-lensed nightmares Frankenheimer unleashed on an audience who had yet to learn to distrust The Powers That Be.

It’ll finish Friday,
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 8.26.10
Aside from an intriguing story and unique photography by James Wong How, SECONDS is also a subtle and evocative study in duality. Arthur Hamilton is a Manhattan bank manager who is well regarded at his job. If he is not overly happily married, he and his wife at least seem content in their manicured Scarsdale home. One could expect a man this established in the east coast in the 1960′s to be living the Don Draper life, but he’s feeling more Bert Cooper. Having acquired just about everything a man of his stature could want, everything he’d worked for, Hamilton remains so unsatisfied that he is willing to pay $30,000 to reboot his life. Bear in mind that fee would translate to nearly $200,000 today!

The new life Hamilton receives, established artist Tony Wilson living a stones throw from the Pacific in a Malibu bungalow, fails to deliver the comfort he seeks. Tony Wilson had already earned his reputation before Hamilton assumed his life, leaving Hamilton with no sense of accomplishment for Tony’s deeds. Further, Tony runs within a circle of counter-cultural folks whose sexually and spiritually liberation outright confuses and scares Hamilton. An extended bacchanalian sequence during harvest in Santa Barbara wine country is staged as a sun-drenched nightmare for a buttoned-up gent like Hamilton.

Arthur Hamilton, the aging repressed solitary man from back east, could not be much more different from young bon vivant Tony Wilson from out west. The one thing unifying these divergent bodies is the ability for their singular heart and mind to despair. The horror of SECONDS is that you can find misery anywhere you seek it, and you cannot afford comfort. Personal note: as a devout fan of Santa Barbara wine country, since before SIDEWAYS brought the world to its door, it is really cool to see from what ragged roots that region sprung.

From Friday April 4, 2008
Directed by Sidney Lumet, written by Paddy Chayefsky, starring Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch and Robert Duvall.

It wouldn’t be Pilot Season without the most vicious comedy ever made about the Television business. The News Division has become an albatross around the neck of the floundering UBS Network. The solution devised by network chief Frank Hackett (Duvall) is simple: fire their over-paid anchorman Howard Beale (Finch) at week’s end, and fold the News Division into the Entertainment Division. Complications arise when Beale announces his firing on-air, and says he will commit suicide on live television at the conclusion of his final broadcast.

It’ll finish Wednesday,
Love, Jim
TRAILER

AFTER THOUGHT from 7.31.10
The television business in the 1970′s, and to a large extent today, has four seasons. They are not called winter, spring, summer and fall. They are called development, pilot, staffing and hiatus. Development roughly coincides with what the rest of us call fall. As new shows air, some under perform and others flat-out fail, networks begin developing new shows for the fall a year away. Pilot season is when a few hundred scripts are bought out of the thousands of stories that get pitched to network development executives. From those few hundred scripts, a few dozen pilots are shot, all in an effort to decide which stories might make a show on which companies will gamble their advertising budget. A lot of hurry up & wait happens during these two seasons, until sometime (it shifts every year) in what the rest of us know as spring, when each network announces next fall’s schedule and staffing season breaks loose. Many young folks working in their first entertainment job find themselves pulling 70-80 hour weeks during pilot and staffing season. They try to hire the best crew they can before another show steals away the person their show’s entire success hinges upon, and get them all working so at least a few episodes are in the can come … whatever the hell the next season is. Each year in that frenzied pace, we would watch NETWORK to remind us that we did not cause this insanity, it is simply the nature of the beast.

NETWORK is a great movie because it is of its time, ahead of its time, and for all time. Virtually nothing in this movie looks artificial; it feels so New York in the 70′s that when Howard Beale hails a cab, we could expect Travis Bickle to show up. Rather than building a set for the UBS News control room, they went to Toronto to shoot in a real control room. NETWORK is so ahead of its time that, as Bob one of my agent mentors pointed out, it was created as a satire that today plays like drama. Among the current phenomena that NETWORK warned us about in sharply witted barbs: the rise of sensationalism, the muddying of objective and subjective analysis, in our nightly news and television in general, and the decline of the position of journalists to challenge their audiences with facts rather than comforting the audience’s own social and political sensibilities. The conundrum of the UBS board’s duty to shareholders, advertisers and other investors versus responsibility to their audience, existing in radio even before television, now rears its head in the digital media world as some try to figure out how to monetize Twitter tweets to advertise Tatter Tots.

All that aside, if you really want to see what makes NETWORK impressive and vital, take a glance at the IMDB message boards. I challenge you to find another film with so many people whining about characters’ use of — no joke — “big words,” “esoteric words” and “long diatribes.” Sadly there is more than one thread devoted to people clamoring for their perceived right to be entertained without needing to “reach for a thesaurus.” NETWORK is a primal scream against illiteracy and willful ignorance. I did all that I could to bring its message to as many would-be television execs as possible.

From Friday, April 11, 2008
Directed by Roland Joffe, written by Robert Bolt, starring Jeremy Irons, Robert DeNiro, Aidan Quinn and Liam Neeson,and featuring an epic score by Ennio Morricone.

In the 18th century Spain and Portugal vied for land in South America. Father Gabriel (Irons) a Jesuit missionary from Spain, ventures deep into the Amazon rainforest to convert Indians and protect them from Portuguese slave traders. One of those traders, Rodrigo Mendoza (DeNiro) is an outlaw unable to return to Portugal. Mendoza is offered asylum and salvation by Father Gabriel if he will lay down his sword and help build a Mission in the jungle. When Spain loses the Mission’s land to Portugal, Gabriel and Mendoza defy the Church and both their nations over the fate of the Indians.

Never mind Christopher Menges’ Oscar winning cinematography. Never mind Morricone’s BAFTA and Golden Globe winning score. Never mind the litany of other nominations or that THE MISSION won the Golden Palm at Cannes. 41 minutes into this film DeNiro captures, without a line of dialogue, a true spiritual epiphany. It’s exhausting and beautiful and I promise you will never see anything like it in any other movie. Even if the rest of the movie sucked, this moment would justify its existence … but the rest of it is pretty impressive too!

It’ll finish Wednesday,
Love, Jim
TRAILER

AFTER THOUGHT FROM 7.27.10
I am not a Christian. I am a hopeful agnostic who’s faith has long been shaken more by men who claim to speak for God than by anything I read in The Bible. The story of THE MISSION is an experience that strengthens my faith by helping me define it in a more positive and less judgmental way. There is a sparseness to the filmmaking that aids the audience’s focus on the story. Joffe refrains from elaborate camera set-ups, allowing the beauty of the Brazilian and Argentine rivers and forests to appear as they would to anyone entering them for their first time. Though Morricone’s score occasionally soars with a full choir, it is rendered most often with an oboe and a pan flute. The presence of those two simple instruments is so natural that one could be forgiven for thinking “yes, of course, this must be what the wind sounds like there!” It is through having all these elements in such perfect concert that moments like Mendoza’s personal enlightenment can become a transcendental experience for the entire audience.

From Tuesday March 29, 2007
CoWritten-n-Directed by Albert Magnoli, starring Prince & The Revolution, Apollonia6, Morris Day & The Time, Jerome Benton, Billy Sparks, Olga Karlatos and Clarence Williams III.

Yeah, the acting is laughable (hence Apollionia Kotero’s Razzie nomination).
Yeah, the story is thin … and also pretty laughable (brooding boy meets pretty girl meets funnier boy!).
Yeah, it’s loaded with rock cliches (a battle of the bands? Who’da thunk?! And your parents just don’t understand?! No way!)
Who cares?!
In all the years of the Lunch Movie, we finally have a TV big enough, clear enough and loud enough to do justice to the Oscar winning soundtrack and explosive club performances. Since those make up more than 1/2 the movie, I can promise most of your time will be well-spent.

I’ll finish 2morro
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 6.30.10

From Sunday May 30, 2010 at Cinespia at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Cinespia, the organizers of summer screenings at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, send out an email each Spring to solicit fans requests for the coming season. Since 2005, PURPLE RAIN has been on my list. Each year I request fewer titles, hoping to give greater emphasis to the ones I hope to see. When I left Los Angeles in 2009, I promised my friends I would return if ever Cinespia played PURPLE RAIN. This Spring I requested a single title. A few weeks later, my friend Sahara told me that it’s put-up-or-shut-up time. Yes, I flew over 6,000 miles round-trip to see a movie I’ve already seen, and already own. And it was worth it.

I have always been a sucker for stories of redemption. PURPLE RAIN is unusual among these sorts of movies in that, if you simply take your cues from dialogue and events, you won’t get much of a sense of epiphany. The script has its shortcomings in revealing the stages of The Kid’s transformation. If you are paying attention to the total experience though, moments that would have been shortchanged by the script are made up for both in Magnoli’s direction and Prince’s songs.

During it’s initial release, PURPLE RAIN did not escape controversy for what some saw as glorifying violence against women. This concern was echoed by a few friends of mine who saw the movie for their first time at Cinespia. Why, isn’t this after all a movie about musicians!?! Aren’t they all supposed to be junkies, especially in the 80′s?! Their vice is booze, weed, blow, horse, whatever else they’ve been getting their hands on between Preminger’s THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, through Eastwood’s BIRD and Stone’s THE DOORS, and as recently as CRAZY HEART.

By rejecting the stereotypical movie-musician’s deadliest sins of Greed or Gluttony and imbuing The Kid (Prince) with a mix of Wrath and Pride, screenwriter William Blinn and co-writer/director Albert Magnoli have also changed the journey The Kid’s transformation takes. Rather than confronting demons within him, he needs to confront his inability to face anyone else. I suspect that scenes of men hitting women would have drawn less scorn had they been in a standard drama about a seemingly regular, i.e. white or non-interracial, Main Street family coping with some terrible secret. Co-writer Blinn created STARSKY & HUTCH, raising television violence to unprecedented levels in 1975. He had earned a pass dealing with domestic abuse before by setting it in police or crime-focused dramas.

A more obvious film would have made a conversational point of the degrees of separation The Kid uses to distance himself from any real emotional or spiritual connection. Magnoli instead illustrates this with repeated use of masks and obscured faces. Look at how often The Kid hides behind one mask or another: the moment he meets Apollonia, on go his over-sized mirrored Lennon-specs. Sure, he thinks he’s being cool and mysterious, but with the shot placing you in Apollonia’s shoes, it’s just friggin’ creepy. The same shades reappear when Jill, a cocktail waitress smitten with The Kid, tries to hand him a cassette of a song written by two women in The Kid’s band The Revolution.

In a sequence as psychologically abusive as any of the physical moments, during his performance of the songs “Computer Blue” and “Darling Nikki,” The Kid taunts Apollonia from stage with his eyes hidden behind a black lace mask. If that is not enough evidence, then I refer you to the epic cast of clowns, harlequins and painted eyes adorning the basement where The Kid lives. Seeing the movie on a large screen for the first time in 25 years showed me two mask-related details that do not play as well on video: Jill’s trembling reflection in The Kid’s shades when she hands him the cassette, and three portraits of beautiful tragic and lonely Marilyn Monroe among the faces in The Kid’s basement lair.

Magnoli keeps more than masks up his sleeve. He manages to exemplify an epic warrior’s journey in a single shot during the montage accompanying “When Doves Cry.” On video you would easily enough spot The Kid riding his purple Honda bike through a concrete underpass tunnel. It takes a massive screen image to spot the details on the sides of the tunnel: graffiti on one side bears the circle/cross female symbol, and the other the circle/arrow male symbol. On one side is spray-painted “Love,” the other “God,” and The Kid needs to ride through all of it to reach his destination. It doesn’t get any more pronounced than that without someone breaking down in a tearful monologue.

We are told by several characters that The Kid’s music only makes sense to him. If you can separate the background songs on the soundtrack from the songs The Revolution performs on stage, you will see what those other voices were saying, and you will also see Prince’s illumination of The Kid’s journey. The Revolution’s opening song “Let’s Go Crazy” is an ode to fun and an anthem of irresponsibility. The next time we see The Revolution, “The Beautiful Ones,” is loaded with wounded suffering and mocking jealousy. If you have any doubt that The Kid has hit a personal rock bottom and lost all sight of himself, I refer you to the aforementioned “Computer Blue”/”Darling Nikki” sequence. It follows a dreary moment where The Kid tries to confront his father for abusing his mother, and instead finds his father drunkenly playing a piano in the basement. “Never get married,” his father admonishes him as we segue into “Computer Blue,” wherein The Kid’s guitar solo — listen carefully y’all — is exactly the same tune his father had been playing on the piano. Coincidence, or learned behavior from an abusive father to a growingly abusive son?

Stories of redemption only resonate when the character being redeemed hits rock bottom, realizes it, and then tries to change. I’ve already said too much about the first two acts. I don’t want to ruin the transcendental lyrics of the final set for the uninitiated, but I urge you to listen most closely to “I Would Die 4 U.” Balance that brief song against the opening “Let’s Go Crazy,” and then chart the course Prince, Magnoli and Blinn have taken you on. PURPLE RAIN is less than perfect, but I respect the hell out of it for trying to tell a more introspective story than often emerges from a Hollywood summer popcorn movie. I leave you with the thought that the photo above does not do justice to the amount of lighters, cellphones, sparklers and souls alight during the finale at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and I wish you could have seen it

From Friday April 15, 2008

Directed by Lewis Allen, starring Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, Nancy Gates and James Gleason.

Sinatra is John Baron, a World War 2 veteran and hit man hired to assassinate the President during a train stop in the sleepy desert town of Suddenly, CA. In choosing a vantage point to shoot from, Baron and his goon-squad take Ellen Benson (Gates) and her son hostage in their home. Can Sheriff Tod Shaw (Hayden) contain the violence that Baron threatens to bring to his town?

The elusiveness of the American Dream, even to veterans who fought for it, is a theme that elevates SUDDENLY above many Film Noirs of the era. That said, there’s still plenty of tough guys in hats threatening people, as in Sinatra sneering “The thing about killing you or her or him is that I wouldn’t be getting paid for it and I don’t like giving anything away for free.” Rumor has it Lee Harvey Oswald watched SUDDENLY a few weeks before assassinating President Kennedy. Maybe that’s true, maybe not, but Sinatra had SUDDENLY pulled from distribution along with THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE for many many years after November 1963.

It’ll finish Tuesday,
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 4.23.10
Frank Sinatra’s involvement in SUDDENLY is an example of what is missing from current star-driven movies. Fresh from his Supporting Actor Oscar for FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, he might have sought out a vanity project allowing him to play a cool hero, enhancing his already cool public image. Instead, like Kirk Douglas in DETECTIVE STORY or Lancaster and Curtis in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, Sinatra plays a man who is at best an anti-hero, and at worst an outright villain. In the days before actors were “brands,” these guys looked for roles that were as different from their public persona as they were from their previous roles. Frank sought out what should have been merely a B-movie because it offered him a chance to show range. Well done, Chairman.

From Tuesday, April 17, 2008
Produced & Directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Clint, Freddie Jones, Ronald Lacey and Nigel Hawthorne, featuring a score by Maurice Jarre.

The Soviet Union redesigns their MIG-25 fighter jet into the MIG-31 Firefox. Among the advances: it flies 6 times the speed of sound, it’s invisible to radar, and it has a thought-controlled weapon system. The West grows nervous. What to do? Steal the prototype while it’s still in the testing phase! Now all we need is a pilot who can think in Russian! Someone get Clint on the horn!

FIREFOX not only came out during the Thatcher-n-Reagan vs. Brezhnev pinnacle of the Cold War, it was also released in the summer of 1982. 1982, as any proper nerd will tell you, is The Greatest Year In The History Of Nerd Cinema. FIREFOX holds is own among Clint movies, Cold War thrillers, and all the other fun that came out that year: E.T., Rocky 3, Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan, Blade Runner, John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Dark Crystal, Creepshow, First Blood, Conan The Barbarian and Poltergeist — to name a few.

It’ll finish Friday.
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 4.20.10
To miss FIREFOX is to miss the simplicity of The Cold War. Regardless of which side of the Iron Curtain you were on, you knew who “your” good guys were and who “their” bad guys were. We had this snappy little pass-time called “espionage” that was widely accepted as a nasty business in which sometimes a few spies would kill or be killed. To their governments, they were preserving a way of life, but to regular people they prevented far greater destruction via full-scale war.

I have read some comments on IMDB message boards-n-such where viewers were surprised by how quickly Mitchell Gant (Eastwood) signs onto his mission. Note to those folks: FIREFOX pre-dates Syd Field and every other false-hopes-to-starving-artists screenwriting tricks of the trade book you may have read. Once upon a time it was not necessary for a character to spend the entire first act twiddling their thumbs and filling us in on their happy home life until (inciting incident!) SOMETHING happens to wreck it (I’m lookin’ at you, Governator in COMMANDO).

FIREFOX is a cold-war espionage thriller. This type of film has not yet been granted the scholarly benefits that film noir has enjoyed for two generations, nor that grindhouse exploitation fun currently wallows in, but wait — their day will come. When it does, prepare to re-watch FIREFOX alongside THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, GORKY PARK, TELEFON and a lot of other movies you’re either too young to have heard of or too old to realize were worth remembering back when you saw them. Either way, they will be as cool a gift as rediscovering noir with Richard Widmark or blaxploitation with Pam Grier. Trust me.

From Friday April 22, 2008
Directed by Oliver Stone, adapted by Eric Bogosian from his play, starring Eric Bogosian, Ellen Green, John C. McGinley, Michael Wincott & Alec Baldwin, and featuring a cold electronic score by Stewart Copeland from The Police.

Barry Champlain (Bogosian) is an infuriating, rambling Dallas talk radio host whose show is on the verge of being taken national by his boss (Baldwin). All Barry has to do is play nice and tone down his show for a few days to make his new sponsors comfortable. And handle a visit from his ex-wife while he’s sleeping with his producer. And deal with Neo-Nazis calling in to threaten his life on-air.

When TALK RADIO was released, Howard Stern made a lotta noise about Bogosian and Stone stealing his life. While parallels to Stern (and Don Imus, Tom Leykis, Morton Downey, Jr. and every other loud-mouth) are easily made, the particular loud-mouth who inspired Bogosian’s play was a Denver DJ named Alan Berg. A political / social rabble-rouser, Berg’s callers phoned in more to fight with him that to fawn over him like Stern’s audience. Bogosian’s theatrical writing and performing have always been similarly politically and socially charged. Luckily he found a director known for subtlety and restraint to transition TALK RADIO from stage to screen.

It’ll finish Tuesday.
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 3.10.10
If ever a play and a movie were ahead of their time, it’s TALK RADIO. Thankfully the play had a recent revival in New York, with Liev Schreiber playing Barry Champlain, so maybe it’s not too much to hope than the film will receive some revived appreciation. Both the play and the film would make outstanding study tools for anyone interested in the art and skill of adaptation. The play contains all the action within Barry’s radio station and features four extended monologues where one character addresses the audience with back-story. Works great on stage, but having a character turn to the camera usually only works in comedy films.

For his film script, Bogosian not only uses the ol’ reliable flashback, but also strays drastically from his play by taking the entire second act outside of the radio station. The end result is a film that is different enough form the play that either would seem fresh and new even if you have already seen the other. Oliver Stone also provides some brilliant touches that might not have played to the back row of a live theater, such as a shot taken from so low across Barry’s desk that he seems like a disembodied head attached to his radio console, a giant cyborg media machine. In one telling character moment Barry informs a Holocaust-denying caller that he is presently holding a Star of David that he found in the dirt at Auschwitz. Stone briefly pans down to a coffee cup in Barry’s hands. Fact versus fiction versus truth is the arena in which the characters of TALK RADIO engage. No shot sums that up better than Barry’s coffee cup.

From Friday May 6, 2008
Written & Directed by Robert Duvall, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Robert Duvall, Luciana Pedraza, Ruben Blades, Kathy Baker and Frankie Gio.

John J. Anderson (Duvall) is a professional assassin who spends his spare time taking his fiance and her young daughter to dance in supper clubs in Coney Island. Anderson accepts a quick job to kill a corrupt General in Buenos Aires, then ends up waiting indefinitely for his target to come available. While killing time in Brazil, he becomes immersed in the tango dancing nightclub scene. As much as the ol’ dog enjoys learning new tricks, he knows that sooner or later he will have to kill a man, and then go home.

In sporadic moments, ASSASSINATION TANGO is a politically charged thriller. In others, it’s a swooning dance movie. At all times, it is a character study of one of the more fully-drawn leading roles to come out of an American movie in years. Never mind Coppola’s involvement, the 70′s maverick who Duvall is really channeling here is John Cassavettes. Duvall makes vivid work of each of John J’s contradictions, strengths and frailties. John J. is, among other things, probably the most arrogantly vain man ever to be a leading character rather than a villain or supporting role. Watching Duvall play that weakness to the hilt is to be reminded that he is among the most nakedly honest and hardest working actors alive.

I’ll finish Tuesday.
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 3.9.10
I have nothing more to add other than a reiteration of what an impressive artist was behind ASSASSINATION TANGO. I have a friend who had the good fortune of acting in a movie with Robert Duvall. He described Duvall as “a man who suffers no fools,” a consummate professional who has no time for the unpreparedness of others. This might explain how a lifelong conservative (Duvall’s narration of a video clip about John McCain was a highlight of the 2008 Republican National Convention) has maintained a legendary career in a notoriously liberal industry: He is more concerned with the success of the entire project than he is with any personal differences with an individual costar, so long as that individual is also delivering their best work. How many of your coworkers can you say that about?

From Tuesday, April 25, 2008
Directed by Stephen Frears, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Audrey Tautou & Sophie Okonedo.

A London hotel employs illegal immigrants from across Europe and Africa. The advantage to an illegal work force is that they cannot call the police when they notice crimes within the hotel. When on of the bellmen, Okwe (Ejiofor) discovers a human heart in a guest room, he and his coworkers become trapped between immigration officers and whomever cut that heart out of it’s owner.

Steven Knight’s original screenplay was nominated for a BAFTA, an Oscar and by the WGA, and won the 2004 Humanitas Prize. No bad for a fella who’s previous gig was writing for the UK “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”

It’ll finish Thursday,
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 2.28.10
I recall writing this blurb in a rush, in time to send it through our office before leaving for the night. I did not begin to do DIRTY PRETTY THINGS justice. The phrase “Hitchcockian” has been tossed about so often since his passing that it doesn’t mean much anymore, but I honestly feel that if Hitch were still alive, he would have wanted to direct this screenplay. This movie fires on so many burners: it’s a look into a world most of us will never know, made all the more fascinating because it is right beneath the surface of the life we see every day. It is a longing love-that-can-never-be sort of love story on the order of WITNESS. And it’s all kinds of scary: intense, shocking, creeping, unnerving. I’m at a loss for a better textbook example of film noir for the entire decade.

I could say so much more, but I would begin to give away plot points. Do yourself a favor: rent it. If you’ve already seen it, rent it again, and ask yourself when was the last time you’ve seen a hero with as noble and decent a spirit as Okwe.

From Friday May 1, 2008
Directed by Paul Bogart, adapted by Harvey Fierstein from his play, starring Harvey Fierstein, Anne Bancroft & Matthew Broderick.

Arnold Beckoff (Fierstein) is a Greenwich Village drag queen who performs under the name Virginia Hamm. We follow Arnold from the early 1970′s thru 1980 in his quest for a man who will love him enough, and for the respect of his mother (Bancroft). Arnold’s rambunctious sarcasm is his best defense against the slings-n-arrows he encounters.

The play of TORCH SONG TRILOGY benefited from a longer running time than the film. A few moments in the film might feel rushed, but Harvery & Co. make it resonate when they need to. If Arnold had been a straight character, TORCH SONG TILOGY would be recognized along with HANNAH & HER SISTERS and WHEN HARRY MET SALLY as one of the quintessential New York romantic comedies of the last generation.

It’ll finish Wednesday,
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 2.23.10
I’ve long had a problem with folks who say they “like music or movies that make you think.” I wonder why they weren’t thinking before. In fairness to those folks though, I see their point when I encounter a song like Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” or a movie like TORCH SONG TRILOGY. These two pieces of art showed me a point of view with which I was unfamiliar, which I guess is what some mean when they say it “made me think.” “Nebraska” and TORCH SONG TRILOGY were watershed moments in my adolescence; they were events that divided everything I thought up until I experienced them, and everything after.

I used to be staunchly pro death-penalty, until “Nebraska” asked me to walk in the shoes of a death row inmate for three minutes. That song made me want to know more about Bruce’s convicted murderer — but if society executes him, we lose the chance to understand how he became who he is. Bruce showed me that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did about convicts.

I knew that I didn’t know anything about gay people when I saw TORCH SONG TRILOGY. I knew that I was nervous around them, due mostly to years of misinformation from narrow minded straight people while growing up in the Reagan 80′s. Harvey Fierstein’s opening monologue immediately had me questioning where my peers had gotten their notions about gay people. When the movie arrives at Fierstein’s growling showdown with his mother by the side of his father’s grave, I had learned that the best thing I could do if I want to understand someone who I think is so different from me is to shut up and listen to what they have to say.