Neglected Gem: Mike’s Murder (1984)

Debra Winger in James Brooks' Mike's Murder. (Ladd Company/Warner Bros.)

James Bridges directed Debra Winger’s breakthrough performance in Urban Cowboy (1980), but almost no one saw her in Mike’s Murder, which he wrote for her subsequently. It got mostly terrible reviews and no support from Warner Brothers, the studio that released it, even after Bridges had made the changes they’d asked for. But it’s a tense, compelling little movie on a subject other filmmakers hadn’t ventured toward, at least not in quite the same way. And Winger’s unheralded performance is one of the best she’s ever given. She plays Betty Parrish, a Los Angeles bank teller who has a casual sexual relationship with the title character (Mark Keyloun), her tennis instructor. She has no expectations that it will turn serious, and he doesn’t lead her on, but she falls hard for him. He approaches their fling the same way he seems to approach everything else – impulsively and without a great deal of afterthought. He doesn’t make much money (and he doesn’t hold onto the tennis pro job) so he sells a little dope and sometimes makes himself available to gay men when he needs some cash. He has an appealing youthful, athletic look, no more striking than that of many other kids in their twenties wandering through L.A., but there’s something sincere about him; the fact that he doesn’t lead her on is part of what makes him likable, and his aimlessness is sexy. (He has one friend, a photographer played by Robert Crosson, who used to shoot him on the tennis court from his balcony, like a voyeur.) Mike is naïve and careless, and his buddy Pete (Darrell Larson) is an idiot who keeps getting them both in trouble. They manage to get away with peddling drugs on someone else’s territory (though just barely), but when Pete gets them hired as coke couriers and then persuades Mike they should steal a small baggie, they become targets for the dangerous people they’re working for, who have Mike killed. When Betty finds out she becomes almost obsessed with finding out what happened to him; she questions some of his friends and even shows up at the crime scene, unseen by the forensics cops. She had no idea how perilous a life he was leading; she can hardly recognize him in the stories she hears about him, and when she sees the quantity of blood in the apartment where he was murdered she’s horrified. It’s as if she’d stepped into a nightmare.

Pirates of the Mississippi

David Hyde Pierce and the cast of Pirates! The Penzance Musical. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

At sixty-six, David Hyde Pierce is so slender and light of foot that he can slip on and off a stage like a wraith. As Major-General Stanley in Pirates!: The Penzance Musical, Roundabout Theatre’s reimagined version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, nearing the finish of its Broadway run, Hyde Pierce always appears ungrounded, off-balance, but you don’t worry that he might fall over; he seems far more likely to float away. He plays the character, written for the popular D’Oyly Carte comedian George Grossmith – whose 1879 performance parodied the mannerisms of the well-known Sir Garnet Wolseley – as a sly boots hiding behind the façade of a dotard, and he’s so funny that you continue to giggle over him after he’s vanished. He’s like a master vaudevillian who can hold an audience in the palm of his hand with the smallest shift in intonation or the subtlest double take.

All Shook Up: Grooving on the Elvis Presley Jukebox

Ryan Mac and the company of All Shook Up. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

The current production of All Shook Up, Joe DiPietro’s parodic jukebox musical, at the Goodspeed Opera House is a homecoming of sorts, since the original version, directed by Christopher Ashley, began there in 2004 before opening on Broadway the following year. It never really caught on in New York; it ran for five months and then toured the country in 2006 and 2007. Seeing the show for the first time in its revival at the Goodspeed, I honestly can’t imagine why it wasn’t a hit from the outset. I can’t say, of course, what the current director and choreographer, Daniel Goldstein and Byron Easley, have brought to the show, but the material is charming and the production is inspiriting. The twenty-five songs were all recorded by Elvis Presley (I recognized most but not quite all of them). The musical revamps the low-budget rock ‘n’ roll movie musicals of the fifties like Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock starring Alan Freed, the DJ credited with popularizing rock. (Freed is also the main character of the vivid 1978 film American Hot Wax, where he’s played, memorably, by Tim McIntire.)

Splat: James Gunn's Superman

Superman (David Corenswet), looking glum. (Warners Brothers.) 

The beginning of James Gunn’s new iteration of the Man of Steel is somewhat promising: Superman (David Corenswet) has intervened to prevent a foreign war, and Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) is running a successful PR campaign to convince people the supposedly apolitical Supe took sides and broke international law. But things rapidly devolve from there. A giant robot machine thingy from the aggressor country is terrorizing Metropolis, except it’s really not a giant machine robot thingy, it’s regular sized, and it’s not really a robot, it’s a supervillain under Luthor’s sway. I’m sure the supervillain’s name was mentioned, but I missed it, and he’s sort of indistinguishable from Luthor’s attack squad, The Raptors, who are either robots or superbeings themselves. Luthor breaks into the Fortress of Solitude and discovers that the message from Jor-el (Bradley Cooper) and Lara (some woman I thought was Lady Gaga but wasn’t) that Superman can only listen to half of—because the second half was damaged—is actually a message telling the Man of Steel to enslave the earth and rule over it. (I’m pretty sure that’s not canon.) Luthor also has a private prison in a “pocket universe” where he keeps his enemies and ex-girlfriends, and there are portals in and out that are in danger of decaying and becoming black holes that could destroy Earth. I think the guards in this prison realm are also Raptors but they might not be. When Superman is captured and put in one of the cells in the pocket universe, there’s a superbeing in his cell who can turn his body into Kryptonite, which is how Supey is kept under control. The superbeing is kept under control because his alien baby is in a cell opposite with someone else who will kill the alien baby if the guy in Superman’s cell doesn’t do what Luthor wants—which, as stated previously, is keep Superman under control. Lex is, of course, a combination of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and it turns out he’s in league with the aggressor country because he wants to develop the lesser one as Trump wants to do with the Gaza Strip. Also the Justice League, which consists of Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) and some really deep cuts from the DC stable, Hawkgirl and Mr. Terrific, is around to help Superman out when needed. Maybe. Green Lantern refers to the group as the “Justice Gang,” and Hawkgirl objects to the name, which you’d better find funny because it happens 87 times. I have no idea what Mr. Terrific’s superpower is, but he’s really good with tech stuff. Not to mention another supervillain called the Engineer—not sure what her powers are either—and a murderous clone of Superman, just for fun. Exhausted yet? I sure am.

Hauntology: Spectral Realism in Literature, Film and Art

(University of Texas Press.)                                   (Duke University Press.)

“What remains to be said about an absence that cannot be undone?”

Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence

“The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living in it from day to day.”

Roberto Bolaño

One dark and storm night, I wanted to find way into the densely obscure and hermetic writing of the late Spanish novelist and essayist Roberto Bolaño and I made it halfway there by sating my obsession for the late American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, his brother from another mother. They were temporal siblings of sorts, eminently talented thinkers and hyperactive writers who ravished their readers with words calculated to astonish and exhilarate. Both were writing concurrently on opposite sides of the world, the first in Chile originally and the second in multiple locations in America. The rest of the way into Bolaño’s gorgeous and terrifying literary dimension I was vouchsafed, as usual for me, via the most unexpected of alternate routes. An additional signpost leading to the capital city of both Bolaño’s and Wallace’s heart was the twin apparition of two books that pointed the circuitous way further in: Haunting Without Ghosts by Julia Martinez and Baroque New Worlds, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup.

Idealism and Identity: Camelot and Out of Character

Dakin Matthews as Pellinore and Ken Wulf Clark as King Arthur in Camelot. (Photo: Daniel Rader.)

Over the years I’ve grown wary of revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical Camelot, but that’s not because, over the six and a half decades since it opened on Broadway, it’s acquired a reputation for having unsolvable book problems. For last season’s production at Lincoln Center, Aaron Sorkin overhauled Lerner’s book – whether in an effort to rescue it or to make it more appealing to a twenty-first-century audience wasn’t clear, but Sorkin’s rewrite was disastrous. It was also unnecessary. I’ve known Camelot all my life and I think it has a script of remarkable depth and substance. As a little boy in love with theatre, I saw it on Broadway with the original cast and I’ve never forgotten the experience. Based on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and set in a magical version of medieval England, the musical is about the birth of idealism and the struggle to keep it alive in a world that defaults so easily to the embrace of human vices. It’s a hunk of a show, all right, but that’s because, like Fiddler on the Roof and Hamilton, it presents a layered, complex narrative with resonant themes embedded in it. And so it makes demands on directors, designers and actors that are perilously difficult to fulfill.

A Few Brief Thoughts on Just a Few More Interesting Short Films

My coverage of short films has fallen off a bit lately, but I’m still keeping an eye out for interesting ones. Here are eight more since my last roundup that I think are worth talking about, listed in the order in which I saw them.

The poster for Drew Marquardt's Act of War.

American Drew Marquardt’s Act of War (2022) is the perfect no-budget student film. On the morning of 9/11, an accountant (David Theune) working at the World Trade Center’s insurance company discovers a loophole that can help them avoid bankruptcy due to payouts: if the attacks are declared an act of war, then military conflict voids the policy. For most of the 8-minute runtime he debates with an in-house lawyer (Johnny Ray Meeks) in a bare office with only a desk, two chairs, and a phone, first about whether to get their Washington lobbyist (Richardson Cisneros-Jones) to act on this information, then about who should call him. The moral weaseling and self-justifications are compellingly scripted and enthralling to watch. Ultimately, they decide to do it, the call is made, and we hear George W. Bush use the key phrase in his televised address to the nation. An opening title card elevates the proceedings: “This really happened.”