No Hard Feelings (2023)

I’ll date his brains out. Montauk, New York. 32-year-old Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence) is an Uber driver and bartender at a seafood joint. As she owes property taxes on the childhood home she inherited from her late mother, her car is repossessed and she faces bankruptcy. Her ex Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) turns up to tow her car for non-payment of unaffordable property taxes and she sees it parked as she rollerskates to work and gets arrested attempting to steal it. Her surfing lawyer Gabe Sawyer (Zahn McClarnon) bails her out at court and warns her to stay out of trouble. Desperate to keep the home, a piece of real estate so valuable old classmate Doug Khan (Hasan Mihaj) tries to get her to give him the sale. She reminds him of his scandalous sex history with a teacher. Her friends Sara (Natalie Morales) and Jim (Scott MacArthur) are pregnant and hard up and thinking of moving to Florida. Sara points out a weird posting on Craigslist and Maddie feels forced to consider it even though she’s not a prositute. Wealthy couple Alison (Laura Benanti) and Laird Becker (Matthew Broderick) ask her to date their 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) in exchange for a Buick Regal. Since Percy is shy and has had no experiences with girls, drinking, parties, or sex, his parents hope to boost his confidence before he attends Princeton otherwise he will be hopelessly out of his depth. Maddie attempts to seduce Percy at the animal shelter where he volunteers and she pretends to be interested in adopting a dog but when she offers him a ride home, he thinks that she is attempting to kidnap him and pepper sprays her. Despite this, they agree to go on a real date the following day. Maddie and Percy meet at a bar the next night where one of her exes spills the dirt on her and Maddie introduces Percy to alcohol. Then they go skinny dipping at the beach. While they are in the water, a group of drunken teenagers steal their clothes. Maddie fights them in the nude, frightening Percy, who refuses to have sex with her. When she tries to leave without him, he jumps on her car naked and they outrun the local police. She and Percy try to have sex back at her house but he develops an anxiety rash so Maddie takes care of him. Maddie and Percy continue to date, sharing more about themselves and forming a friendship. He arranges to meet his former nanny but it turns out to be a manny named Jody (Kyle Mooney) and he’s jealous of Maddie because he wants to have sex with Percy too. Maddie and Percy confide in each other that they never went to prom. Maddie never went because her father didn’t respond to her requests to get to know him and that morning a letter arrived marked Return to Sender. He was a guy from the city where he lived with his real family and paid off her mother and ignored Maddie altogether. So they imitate a prom night, going to a fancy dinner where Percy plays the piano – he learned Maneater especially for Maddie. Percy meets an acquaintance from school, Natalie (Amalia Yoo) who’s going to Princeton too and she invites him to a party that night. After he and Maddie disagree about their long-term plans, he goes to the party while Maddie searches for him. She finds him with Natalie in bed, though nothing happened between them, after he took a painkiller with alcohol. After he and Maddie are asked to leave the party Percy confesses his love for Maddie. The next day, Percy tells his parents he wants to stay in Montauk with Maddie instead of going to Princeton … Need a car? Date our son. A return to mainstream non-superhero films for Academy Award-winner and newly married wife and mother Lawrence sees her in this Eighties/ Oughties sex comedy with the bonus of full-frontal nudity – hers. As the older woman educating a diffident younger man she has fun in this breezy if frank romp, high on the star’s charms in a screenplay co-written by director Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips and apparently derived from a real world ad found by the film’s producers. It’s a well-worn story of a sentimental education but told knowingly, referencing everything from The Graduate to The Affair. In a script riddled with ribaldry and lewdness there are lots of good throwaway lines here – such as when Maddie and Sara inform Jim about the different kinds of one night stand a girl can have and when Percy has to have a talk with his parents while he acts as ‘the parents.’ His persistent abstinence is the perfect comic foil to Maddie’s sex drive. However as clever and funny as it is, the mystery persists as to why an A-list actress and producer would do full frontal nudity as Lawrence does here – albeit in an action scene after an open water coitus interruptus that Percy says reminds him of the beginning of Jaws. In the end it all revolves around property – location, pricing, ownership and the hold it has on people. That this ends on a road trip diffuses the issues of identity, class and money that this story is really about. It’s as if Benjamin drove off with Mrs Robinson, which is what should have happened. Isn’t it? Watch out for Achilles-Andreas of Greece (ie almost royalty, not since 1973, natch) in the small role of ‘Teen,’ These people use us so why don’t we use them?

The Amityville Horror (1979)

Houses don’t have memories. Amityville, New York. In the early morning hours on November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. murders his entire family with a rifle at their home at 112 Ocean Avenue. One year later, newlyweds George Lutz (James Brolin) and his wife Kathy (Margot Kidder) move into the house with Kathy’s three children from a prior marriage: Greg (K.C. Martel) , Matt (Meeno Peluce) and Amy (Natasha Ryan). It’s a big deal for Kathy, who comes from a family of renters. Despite George’s lack of religion, Kathy, a nominal Catholic, requests Jesuit priest Father Delaney (Rod Steiger) to bless their new family home. Delaney arrives while the family is out boating on Long Island Sound. Upon entering the house, Delaney is swarmed by flies in an upstairs room and hears a hostile voice ordering him to get out causing him to flee. The next day, Kathy’s aunt Helena (Irene Dailey) a nun visits the house but immediately senses evil within, becomes violently ill and leaves abruptly, confounding Kathy. The Lutzes’ domestic life begins a sharp decline over the ensuing weeks: George becomes uncharacteristically volatile and abusive, and obsesses over keeping the home warm with firewood, despite Kathy’s insistence that it is not cold. George recurrently awakens at 3:15 a.m. – when the DeFeos were murdered – while Kathy suffers disturbing nightmares. Before Kathy’s brother Jimmy’s (Marc Vahanian) engagement party one night, $1,500 cash to be paid to the caterer inexplicably goes missing in the house. Meanwhile, the babysitter Jackie (Amy Wright) watching Amy for the evening is locked inside a bedroom closet by an unseen force. Amy simply says her invisible friend ‘Jody’ told her not to let her out. Further unexplained incidents occur – Greg suffers a crushed hand when a sash window falls on it. Kathy realises that Amy’s imaginary friend has a malevolent nature. One night, Kathy glimpses two red, pig-like eyes outside Amy’s second-storey bedroom window. Delaney makes several attempts to intervene that seem to be thwarted by unusual accidents and occurrences: His phone calls to the home are frequently experienced by Kathy as static noise and on one occasion his car malfunctions en-route to the house, nearly causing a fatal crash. Convinced there are demonic forces at work, Delaney grows frustrated by the lack of support from his superiors in the diocese. Meanwhile, George’s land surveying business begins to suffer due to his lack of attendance, concerning his business partner, Jeff (Michael Sacks). Jeff’s wife, Carolyn (Helen Shaver) who has psychic abilities is both repulsed by and drawn to the things she feels when at the house. In the home’s basement, Carolyn notices a brick wall that the family dog, Harry, has repeatedly scratched at and she begins dismantling it with a hammer. Discovering the damage, George takes down the rest of the wall, uncovering a small room with red walls. Carolyn, in terror, shrieks that they have found the passage… to Hell!, her voice resembling Father Delaney’s. Later that night, Delaney prays passionately at his pulpit for God to save the Lutz family before he inexplicably loses his sight and becomes catatonic. Kathy visits the library to research the property’s history, where she finds county records suggesting that the house is built atop a Shinnecock burial ground and a Satanic worshipper had once lived on the land. She also discovers newspaper clippings about the DeFeo murders and notices Ronald DeFeo’s astonishing resemblance to George … Jody doesn’t like George. Adapted from Jay Anson’s true-ish fact-based 1977 bestseller this is really the tale of a money pit – what happens when a blended family moves into a fixer-upper and sinks under the weight of impending debt, personal dislikes and the little issue of the previous owners being murdered en masse by their own son. The screenplay by Sandor Stern was originally proposed as a TVM written by Anson himself to be produced by American International under Samuel Z. Arkoff, presumably sniffing at the box office from The Exorcist, which had so many films follow in its wake. Brolin’s portrayal of a man dissipating under pressure, incessantly chopping logs, regularly losing his rag and exhibiting signs of psychosis could be straight out of The Shining (the film adaptation was still a year from release). I believe we create our own demons in our own minds. Kidder has to cope with an intuitive grasp of the problems within the house in a more physically obvious fashion and we infer that this might be due to her Catholicism ie a deeper spiritual connection to the ineffable. Steiger’s entire performance is separate from the leads, many of his scenes being in the company of his curate Fr Bolen (Don Stroud) and his hamminess earned criticism at the time. The structure over twenty days lends credence to the premise that this is a document of real incidents, establishing a timeline in which day to day actuality is recorded with no particular buildup to any terror, day or night. This failure to unite the storylines might be true to life as it is proposed here but it presents a screenwriting problem. The experience of the house is quite separate depending on the personality and there is no big moment with the priest which includes the family. The entirety of the communication is static on the phone line. The other issue is that the scares aren’t particularly scary – it seems so much more obvious that the mortgage repayments are the biggest terror and only the flashbacks to the DeFeo rampage are unpleasant. That and the rocking chair that moves with invisible Jody in the seat. And the eyes outside the window. And … ! It’s also odd that with the change of location (this was shot in New Jersey) that more wasn’t made of the waterside situation. With a lilting score for strings by Lalo Schifrin, a house that in no way resembles the original at 112 Ocean Avenue (which had a terrifying Alsatian guarding the gates when we visited) and no mention of Ronnie DeFeo’s likely acid trip motivation for massacring his own family, this is probably more about financial than supernatural horrors and was allegedly mostly a hoax dreamt up over a few bottles of wine. Many lawsuits ensued concerning the original story and the several publications and film sequels. Like most domestic trouble, the answer is simple – move. We’re still packing a crucifix, however. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg.  I checked into the murders. And I checked into the twenty year old boy who killed his parents, and his four brothers and sisters. And when he was at trial, he testified that he heard voices in the house. He heard voices in the house and the voices told him to do it! Now, I was in the house and I heard the voices, too! And I also felt their presence in the house! I’m telling you, there was a presence in that house!

Grey Gardens (2009) (TVM)

Everyone thinks and feels differently as the years pass by. Long Island, the mid-70s. The documentary filmmakers Albert (Arye Gross) and David Maysles (Justin Louis) are showing some of the footage they’ve shot about former members of NYC high society 79-year old Edith Bouvier Beale (Jessica Lange), the sister of Black Jack Bouvier, father of Jackie Kennedy (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and her daughter 57-year old Little Edie (Drew Barrymore) to the pair. The women are living in a decrepit dirty house in East Hampton filled with cats and other stray animals and we learn how they wound up in poverty without electricity and running water, starting in the Thirties when Little Edie refused to marry any pig-headed momma’s boys bachelors and wanted a career on the stage. When her father Phelan (Ken Howard) divorces her mother she lives in the city and tries out for shows and models and falls into an adulterous relationship with Julius ‘Cap’ Krug (Daniel Baldwin) a married member of Truman’s administration. Her father tries to end it but it’s Cap who finishes with Edie and she retires to the beach house effectively replacing the attentions of her mother’s former lover, children’s tutor Gould (Malcolm Gets) and never leaves …  I don’t think you see yourself as others see you. In 1975 Albert and David Maysles released their eponymous documentary about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’s aunt and cousin and people were horrified. It was deemed tasteless and exploitative, its stars clearly not fully compos mentis and their sad lives in a state of utter disarray and poverty. What it lacked was context and that sin of omission is repaired here as we enjoy a series of flashbacks starting in 1936 when Little Edie is such a loser on the husband-hunting trail that would settle her for life while her parents’ marriage falls apart – a situation that would eventually leave her mother and herself penniless and isolated. It’s rare to see a TV movie made with such care and complexity; the word apoplectic appears at key points and has a different resonance on each occasion. Perhaps the makers understood the term palimpsest. This certainly fills the gaps the initial documentary leaves but it also restages certain scenes from Grey Gardens (1975) and the framing story as the women watch clips of their lives unspooling on the wall of the decaying house elicits some priceless reactions by the mother and daughter. This is really a story of women who are left behind and the limited options available even to the supposedly fortunate daughters of the very wealthy:  a priest reporting to Phelan Beale about Little Edie’s behaviour at a party sets the ball rolling disastrously. It’s a deeply felt film about performance on several levels and Barrymore is quite astonishing playing Little Edie in different phases of her life. Her failed debutante, girl about town and finally recluse are brilliantly developed. Her devastation and consequent alopecia when Krug tells her she has naïvely mistaken their sexual escapades for a special relationship is heartbreaking. The possibilities for misunderstandings multiply over the decades and Barrymore masters that flat affectless Boston brahmin drawl, offsetting the emotions in counter intuitive fashion. The final performance for a gay crowd at a NYC club before she leaves the State for good is good natured. Maybe she was in on the joke – at last. Throughout she seems to drift in and out of different kinds of consciousness. We know she definitely can’t stand another winter in the freezing cold of Long Island. She is matched in a different register by Lange whose role requires quite a different set of nuances not to mention a love of cats. There’s a very enlightening sequence when the newspapers break the shocking story about Jackie O’s sad cousins living in squalor and the woman herself visits and promises to have the place redecorated. Little Edie delights in lying to her that she should have been First Lady instead if Joe Kennedy Jr had lived despite having only seen him once at a party. Jackie sadly agrees:  not the anticipated reaction. The Edies enjoy the deceit, setting the scene for their final reconciliation when they finally forgive each other for the destruction of their lives. Perhaps justice is finally done for these eccentrics whose destinies were dictated by men. Written by Patricia Rozema and director Michael Sucsy. Grey Gardens is my home. It’s the only place where I feel completely myself

Knives Out (2019)

I suspect foul play. I have eliminated no suspects.  When crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) dies just after his 85th birthday, inquisitive Southern detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) arrives at his estate to investigate despite the presence of police officers (LaKeith Stanfield and Noah Segan). He sifts through a web of red herrings and self-serving lies to uncover the truth behind the writer’s untimely demise as each of the family members and the immigrant nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) who cared for Harlan is questioned in turn. Harlan’s daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a successful businesswoman with a an unfaithful husband Richard (Don Johnson) and a layabout son Ransom (Chris Evans). Harlan’s son Walt (Michael Shannon) runs the publishing company his father founded for his writing output, but they’ve been fighting. Daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette) is an advocate of self-help and has been helping herself to the old man’s money. His ancient mother (K Callan) never seems to die. Harlan’s devoted nurse Marta then becomes Harlan’s most trusted confidante but who hired him in the first place? … This is a twisted web, and we are not finished untangling it, not yet. The closed-room murder mystery is a staple of crime fiction and it’s not necessarily where you’d expect writer/director Rian Johnson to turn after a Star Wars episode (The Last Jedi) although it harks back to his debut, Brick, a take on Chandler/Hammett with teenagers. The touchstones are pretty clear:  Agatha Christie; the game (and film) of Clue(do); Peter Sellers and Elke Sommer in A Shot in the Dark; and some of the grasping familial mendacity we recognise from Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. If truth be told, it’s not very mysterious and barely suspenseful with two big twists a regular filmgoer or mystery reader will see through easily which means that they of course are not the point. It’s the dismantling of those hoary old tropes that provides the narrative motor. Much of the entertainment value derives from game comic playing by an established cast with a soupçon of political commentary provided by the nurse’s immigrant status which leads to a good line featuring Broadway hit Hamilton and everyone gets her native country wrong, one of the running jokes. Another is her need to vomit when telling a lie. The other one is stretching out the syllables in Benoit’s name so it sounds like Ben wa although personally I find Craig more prophylactic than sex toy and his ‘tec is Poirot X Columbo with an affected drawl. It looks quite sober and already feels like Sunday evening TV. For the undemanding viewer. CSI KFC!

Annie Hall (1977)

Boy I wish real life was like this. Neurotic NYC comic and TV gag writer Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) looks back on his relationship with insecure aspiring club singer Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) and wonders where it all went wrong. He recalls how they first met playing tennis with his actor friend Rob (Tony Roberts) who moves to LA;  his first marriage to Allison (Carol Kane); and his second to Robin (Janet Margolin);  and how when Annie moved in with him he became totally paranoid and thought everything she did spoke to infidelity. When they visit Rob in LA she meets music producer Tony Lacey (Paul Simon) at a party and on the couple’s return flight to NYC they agree they should split up and she returns to LA to be with Tony … That sex was the most fun I’ve ever had without laughing. Co-written with Marshall Brickman, this collage-like film is episodic, digressive, farcical, filled with running jokes, surreal flashbacks and pieces to camera on subjects as diverse as masturbation and being Jewish and Marshall McLuhan (who shows up in a line at the movies). Alvy’s whole problem is a premise derived from the great philosopher Groucho Marx – he can’t be with any woman who would want to be with him. In this battle of the sexes territory there are only departures and very few arrivals. It’s a breezy affair that exists on a tightrope of suspended disbelief and charming performances and Keaton’s is a delight. The supporting cast is outstanding and Jonathan Munk as the flame-haired kid Alvy constantly kissing girls in class is hilarious with adult Alvy moving through these flashbacks as though he’s in Wild Strawberries. Roberts is great as Alvy’s grasping sidekick. And Allen? Well it’s quintessential Woody and at least partly autobiographical. Hall is Keaton’s birth name while he calls himself ‘Singer’:  Freud is never too far away in a film which coasts on psychoanalytic concepts. Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love. Elsewhere there’s Shelley Duvall, Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken as Annie’s brother and for real nerds that’s Sigourney Weaver meeting Alvy at the movies in the last shot. The film’s surprisingly delicate piecemeal structure is held together by Alvy’s narration and according to editor Ralph Rosenblum was put together in post-production:  when Alvy is speaking to camera he’s making up the story that isn’t shot.  Allen is one of the best writers around though and these addresses don’t just fill gaps, they create allusions and deepen the theme. It’s a landmark Seventies film.  A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark

The Great Gatsby (1974)

You can’t repeat the past? Of course you can. Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston) is a young man from the Midwest living modestly among the decadent mansions of 1920s Long Island. He becomes involved in the life of the mysterious Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford), a rich man who throws the most lavish parties on the island. But behind Gatsby’s outgoing demeanor is a lonely man who wants nothing more than to be with his old love, Nick’s second cousin-once removed, the beautiful Daisy Buchanan (Mia Farrow). She is married to the adulterous and bullheaded millionaire Tom (Bruce Dern), creating a love triangle that will end in tragedy when a misunderstanding leads Tom’s lover Myrtle (Karen Black) to her death in a road accident and her cuckolded husband seeking revenge … We hear all about Gatsby long before we meet him, even if Nick imagines he sees him on the end of the dock early on, with that green light winking on and off. It’s the perfect way to introduce a character who is a self-made myth. Everyone has a different idea about the protagonist of a novel which itself is a masterpiece of sleight of hand storytelling:  it tells us on page one just how. There are a lot of things to admire about this film which is as hollow with the sound of money as Daisy’s voice:  the design, the tone, the casting, which is nigh-on perfect, but (ironically) the writing leaves the performances with very little to do. Redford, that enigmatic, elusive, evasive Seventies superstar is the ultimately unknowable, uncommitted actor trying to revivify his past love, even as Daisy cries out to this now-multi-millionaire Don’t you know rich girls don’t marry poor boys? Waterston does his best as the writer/narrator who knows far less than he lets on. Dern probably comes off best as the unfiltered louse Fitzgerald wrote but overall Francis Ford Coppola’s script while faithful cannot replicate symbolic effect and the entire novella represents in the most eloquent language ever written class gone wrong in the ultimate American tragedy. Directed by Jack Clayton.

Sabrina (1954)

Aka Sabrina Fair/La vie en rose – Oh Sabrina Sabrina Sabrina where have you been all my life?  – Right over the garage. Chauffeur’s daughter Sabrina Fairchild (Audrey Hepburn) is an ugly duckling who tries to commit suicide in her employer’s limousine because of a bad case of unrequited love for boss’ son playboy David Larrabee (William Holden). He doesn’t even know she’s alive. So when she returns to Long Island from two years at cooking school in Paris a beautiful young woman she immediately catches three-times married David’s attention when he sees her waiting for her proper English father Thomas (John Williams) at the railway station. David woos and wins her but their romance is threatened by David’s serious older brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart), who runs the family business and is relying on David to marry an heiress Elizabeth (Martha Hyer) in order for a crucial corporate merger to take place. So when David’s back is out Linus tries to distract Sabrina and finds himself falling for her himself  but can’t admit it and plans to ship her back to Paris … This cynical romcom is extraordinary for a few things: its star wattage, its creepy Freudian setup (Bogart looks like Hepburn’s grandfather) and amazing dry wit. Samuel Taylor adapted his stageplay Sabrina Fair with contributions from Ernest Lehman and director Billy Wilder, who was making his last film at Paramount. Bogart behaved badly on set, believing he was miscast (Cary Grant was Wilder’s first choice) and wanting his wife Lauren Bacall in Hepburn’s role. He found Hepburn unprofessional because of her problems learning lines but just read some of the ones they delivered: Look at me, Joe College with a touch of arthritis. Or, Paris isn’t for changing planes it’s for changing your outlook. And, There’s a front seat and a back seat and a window in between. And perhaps its mission statement in a film about class and sex and money: Nobody poor was ever called democratic for marrying someone rich. This is a writer’s movie for sure! It’s really a movie about movies and how they pair off young girls with old men (how relevant is that nowadays with everything in the news?!) But it was the scene of a serious set romance for the blond-highlighted Holden and Hepburn and also the introduction of Hubert de Givenchy’s gowns to Hollywood, credited to Edith Head. When Hepburn walked into his Paris salon he thought he was going to meet Katharine Hepburn. It was the beginning of a long and fruitful screen association:  she is the very epitome of elfin beauty in this film, a duckling who grows into an astonishing swan. And she calls her French poodle David! The fact that she marries the much older, successful brother and heir to the family money isn’t remotely cynical, not at all! There are some very funny scenes, many taking place in the car and some at the boardroom where Bogart gets to fire guns at new plastic inventions. No wonder he apologised to everyone concerned at the conclusion of production. It gave him a role he hadn’t had before – an uptight stick in the mud who turns into a romantic lead – and at his age! 

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

When this was first released I saw it with a friend who promptly re-christened it Mouth Wide Open because I nodded off pretty quickly and woke suddenly during the orgy and announced, Clearly nobody here has ever been to one. And a shocking 18 years later it is still sad to see that Kubrick’s last film doesn’t have the intended shock value, the performances are variable and it’s very difficult to understand how it could have taken 400 days to shoot what are primarily lengthy talking scenes albeit the famously nitpicking Kubrick reconstructed Greenwich Village in London because of his fear of flying. Frederic Raphael updated Schnitzler’s early 20th century Vienna-set Traumnovelle to late 1990s New York City where Alice (Nicole Kidman) confesses to wealthy doctor husband Bill (Tom Cruise) that she fantasised sexually about a Naval officer she saw one day at a hotel where they were staying. Bill then descends into a long night of soul-searching and sex as he imagines what his wife might have done had she made the choice to cheat. He helps a wealthy patron Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) save a whore who’s OD’d during sex, attends a masked orgy on Long Island (a kind of warped tribute to North by Northwest) where his former med school chum is providing musical accompaniment in a blindfold and back in the city realises he’s being followed but it’s more than an existential threat. When Ziegler tells Bill that he’s fortunate not to know the names of the very powerful people in disguise at the sex party you don’t know if it’s raising questions about the Bilderberg group or another political conspiracy at large but it seems pretty daft. Whether you view this as an ineffectual satire of marriage or a cautionary commentary about sexually transmitted disease (there’s a telling scene featuring a prostitute and HIV) or perhaps a plain silly excursion into unerotic escapades, the press at the time made hay of the fact that the married couple at its centre saw their relationship disintegrate in real life and were divorced not long afterwards. The soundtrack which is principally two ominous notes would disgrace a five year old after their first piano lesson. Inexplicable in oh so many ways and yet fascinating and strangely memorable in visual loops precisely because it’s Kubrick. And the last word uttered (by Kidman) is … not expected in such a conservative outing and thereby enhances the legend.

Born on the Fourth of July (1989)

I’m not home. I never will be. I first encountered a Nam vet on Central Park West. He chased me despite being on crutches that were well past their sell-by date. I guess maybe it was because I had more legs than he did. I was waiting tables in a township on Long Island called Massapequa at a ghastly restaurant where a deranged and thankfully distant relative worked. Massapequa is the hometown of the Baldwin brothers and Ron Kovic, the subject of this impassioned film by Oliver Stone, a man whose own combat experiences had informed his previous film, Platoon, that astonishingly immersive journey of a naif to manhood in a horrifying exposition of American soldiers’ experiences. Ron Kovic’s book is the basis of another coming of age tale, this time of a Catholic boy whose parents’ devotion to JFK unwittingly unleashes their sports-mad son’s inner patriot.  I hadn’t seen this since its release and my fresh impression of its first sequences was of overwrought melodrama, underlined by John Williams’ overheated score. But this is all of a piece with the film’s intentions:  starting with a heightened picture of America’s hearth and home;  the futility and horror of war; the brutality of veterans’ experiences in epically gruesome, filthy underfunded hospitals (Kovic’s God-loving mother never even paid him a visit); the utter loneliness of being a castrated, paralysed man with a beating heart and functioning brain who is ridiculed by the anti-war protesters; the recognition that the only people with whom he now has anything in common are the other vets who are even more fucked up than he is. And so it moves into its more austere final sections. Politicisation. Separation from a family who refuse to accept he could have killed women and children and for whom he is a mere embarassment in a block where the other soldiers at least died. Is there a better correlative image in Stone’s entire oeuvre than the crane shot over the Wilson family home, where Ron has confessed to killing new recruit, their nineteen year old son William, in the dunes of Nam as the sun flared during an ambush, then he is wheeled away by a helper amid the scraps and detritus dumped in their yard and the leafy branches fade into a fluttering stars and stripes – and we are plunged into more police brutality at the 1972 Republican convention where he has joined the protest movement? This is elegant filmmaking. It is not without its humour or self-awareness. Ron has finally had his cherry broken by a Mexican whore in a sequence of T&A that reunites Stone with Willem Defoe who welcomes him to this sick paradise and he thinks it’s love – but hides his gift for her when he realises sex with a cripple is just a job for her. These vets’ wheelchair-off is a salve for those of us who might have liked to see one between Cruise and Daniel Day-Lewis, who beat him to an Academy Award that year (DDL gurned more). I’ve never been back to Massapequa or that cruddy restaurant but Stephen Baldwin has a small role as a schoolfriend, Tom Berenger gets him to join up, Frank Whaley is the other surviving vet who helps Ron out of his doomladen hole and Kyra Sedgwick is the gorgeous girl he loved so much he ran through the rain to dance with her at the Prom and she turns him on to the anti-war crusade. Cruise is simply great, giving a complete performance from boy to man in a narrative which exemplifies the art of juxtaposition and emotional arcs. This is cinema, utterly moving and indignant and humane. Watch it and weep.

Metropolitan (1990)

When a down on his luck student gets taken up by a clique calling themselves The Sally Fowler Rat Pack he sees another aspect of the rarefied debutante season in winter on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Whit Stillman’s warm and deftly witty debut is a low budget surprise (financed by selling his apartment) and based on his own experiences home from college living with his divorced mother back in 1970 (his father had worked for JFK). Tom Townsend (Edward Clements)  is the wan ginger protagonist who used to be a trust fund kid before his parents divorce but now can’t afford a decent overcoat and is still pining for his ex, socialite Serena (Ellia Thompson).  Audrey (Carolyn Farina, a brunette preppie Molly Ringwald) has a crush on him that he doesn’t acknowledge. She’s a passionate Jane Austen fan, he’s only read criticism (that’s a funny exchange). Nick (Chris Eigeman) eggs on his new protege while dissing the very girl he himself is sleeping with; Serena is involved with the awful Rick (Will Kempe); and now Sally Fowler (Dylan Hundley) may be falling for him. Charlie Black (Taylor Nichols) is not convinced that Tom is worthy of Audrey and is the naysayer in the group. But when Audrey and Sally get caught up in a plan to spend time at despicable Rick’s in West Hampton someone has to come riding to the rescue (in a yellow taxi).  This is a very winning comedy of manners  (and the screenplay was given a nod at the Academy Awards) which weaves Austen references in so subtly you get surprised when you see motor cars on the streets of Manhattan. Eigeman is fantastic and gets the lion’s share of the best lines which are mostly thrown away in drifts of sentences so that you have to watch this twice to catch some of them (not a problem). My favourite? Playing strip poker with an exhibitionist somehow takes the challenge away. Bliss.