Different Slants

Doc Hollywood (1991) starring Michael J. Fox who was born in Western Canada in 1961, who is now 47 years old and sadly very  ill with Parkinson’s disease, which terminated his career in the movies, is one of my favorite, romanticized views of small town life and the discovery of love when you weren’t looking for it. 

Fox is a skilled, overworked, underpaid, wise-ass, self-centered and tense emergency room doctor in a public hospital in New York City, repairing gunshot wounds, drug overdoses and other grim urban disasters who is totally unpopular with his fellow workers.   When he receives an inventation to join a very upscale plastic surgery practice in LA, he finds that no one wants to come to his farewell party, and he leaves his years long job without making a ripple.

That is our first impression of Fox, a subtle, sensitive, funny and very ingaging actor, whom audiences don’t so much like him as they want to adopt him.  Slight in stature at about 4′10″, he projects confidence, and irony and a willingness to endure what he cannot change, in this complicated story.

Eagarly leaving NYC behind on the Interstate going west, he encounters a road block far from any major urban areas and had to make a detour which takes him deeper into rural fantasyland in South Carolina.  He is driving his beloved snow white sports car, his prized possesion, and after suddenly missing a turn and becoming confused, plows into the white picket fence of the Mayor’s house.

Sentenced to community service, until his smashed up but rescuable car is repaired, by that Mayor, whom I believe is also the judge in a typical small town movie role where one character has multiple and unrelated jobs, just like in Baby Boom, (last week’s column) where the guy who comes to fix Diane Keaton’s dry well (or was it the roof?  Or both?  It doesn’t matter…)  is also the featured singer at the town dance.

After meeting a range of amusing townspeople, some who like him and some who scorn him as too stuck up for their little town, he is assigned to work with the very old but (naturally) beloved cranky Town Doc, who measures his wealth in babies born long ago who now are having their own babies, instead of material wealth.  His nickname, Doc Hollywood, is not attached to him with admiration.

There is a plan afoot, hatched by the devious Mayor and other co-conspirators, to somehow lure the dashing (to them) big city doctor to stay in their beautiful homey little town.  They even offer him a house, for free.  Not as chance, responds Fox, who yearns for the big bucks he will pile up reshaping floppy breasts, double chins and sagging rear ends.

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Baby Boom (1987), one of my favorite fish-out-of-water romantic movies is closely related to Doc Hollywood (1991), both depicting very self-assured, smug, sophisticated, highly educated New York City people who unashamedly act openly condescending toward rural towns and types.

Both involve an unexpected re-evaluation of core values, re-categorizing old priorities and slowing w-a-a-a-a-a-y down.  Or, to quote Simon and Garfunkle (both men, unbelievably, now creeping toward seventy years old!) : Slow down! You move too fast! Got to make…the moment last…just kickin’ ’round the cobblestones………………

This week, I’ll attempt to transmit the magical romance that the first film, Baby Boom, bathes me in whenever I see it.  Farm Country real estate brokers ought to make seeing this sweet film a requirement before they show city people rural acreage, and perhaps make those buyers more aware of what already is, doesn’t need an injection of giant and ugly boxy architecture just because there’s so much land available at much cheaper than big city prices.  Just because a person can afford to dramatically change his surroundings doesn’t mean that is reason enough to do it.  Charm is a fragile thing.

Diane Keaton, the film’s star, unlike most film heroines is more linear than curvy, yet to me she conveys an irresistible allure of intelligence, spontaneity, unorthodox speech patterns and pronunciation, sexy indignation and exasperation, studied humorous theatricality in her movements and gestures and did I mention I think she’s beautiful?  Not just twenty years ago, but today too? 

Well, she’s the dream schiksa to me.  Endlessly interesting to watch on the big screen, and the little one, too.

She’s an account manager of some big name companies in a high-powered marketing firm, who has chosen to remaine single because she’s ‘married to her career’ and no man she’s met yet has the stuff to deter her from her hungry ambition to dominate her surroundings and be universally recognized for her accomplishments.  She is the self-described “Tiger-Lady” and buddy— better stay out of her way.

(Read on …)

In Shining Through (1992), Melanie Griffith plays a different sort of ethnic role than she did in last week’s review (KCK, # 6) of A Stranger Among Us (1992).                          

In the first film, she portrayed an undercover cop pretending to be a returning member of a Jewish Hasid sect in New York City.  So…she was an actor pretending to be someone, who was also pretending to be someone else. 

Which by some eerie coincidence is exactly  what she does in the next film. 

In the second film, she’s a young woman in pre-World War II days, about 1940, living near the US Capital.  Her mother is Irish, this time, and her father is Jewish.  She also has Jewish cousins living a fragile existence in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.  Although she doesn’t assume any obvious or familiar ethnic stereo-typical mannerisms to establish that she’s a young East-Coast Jewish girl–which is a good thing to me–the filmmakers must have assumed that the audience would take it on faith that she was who she was supposed to be.

Melanie’s character also has an encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of obscure movie plots from that post-Depression time and earlier, and that is a key element in the overall story.  All her clever ideas, ways of saving herself when in great danger and the way she chooses to complete the complex and perilous task she is entrusted to do, are derived from moments she’s remembered from the uncountable movies she’s seen.

Well, I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a mind like that, totally filled with memories of thousands of movies.  It seems like you’d have to be a Cyborg to retain all that minutia.  Pass the oil, please, Arnold….  (Read on …)

On the topic of: Unexpected Pleasures of viewing  sexy blonde actresses pretending to be Jewish (excluding Marilyn Monroe – who would be 82 now if she was still living — and who converted before she married Arthur Miller, in July 1956, and the stunning Scarlett Johansson, who doesn’t need to)  I offer the delectable:

                               Melanie Griffith

Who, in an interesting example of strategic career choices, decided to make movies about these exotic Biblical people, twice.

In A stranger Among Us  (1992), she play a tough cop who goes undercover by assuming the identity of a Hasidic single woman who has ’strayed’ from the sect and then chooses to return to it.  This allows her to have no connections to any of the other Hasidic communities in the Northeastern US area and therefore eliminating any way of tracing who she was, if some suspicious person wanted to do that. 

She is first introduced as gorgeous, physically competent, brave, very effective with a gun and sexually free young woman, but whose life is going nowhere.  She comes across as vaguely unhappy and aimless.  But, of course, still well built.

Then a murder occurs in a New York City’s Jewish Hasidic community and she is assigned to find out who did it–a difficult task in the insular, extremely observant religious community.  

After she is allowed to live in a kind of dorm as a single woman with no money, and gradually blends in with the sharply gender-divided responsibilities each person assumes, she displays a kind of fascination with what she learns and wonders why the women put up with so many restrictions on their freedom of choice, or in other words, the unrestricted  life Melanie is living.

Besides being a murder mystery, the movie is a glimpse into a seldom seen on the screen, every day frozen-in-time world of the Hasids, who also speak Yiddish almost exclusively among themselves, but not around Melanie.  Yiddish–a Middle-European dialect that arose about a thousand years ago as millions of Jews gradually migrated north and east from their original Middle Eastern homeland–is a blend of German, Polish and Hebrew.                                                 (Read on …)

Now, here’s a perfect reason for me to wish I had a world-wide readership of hundreds of millions of movie lovers who shared my taste in great films:

Along comes a truly superb new movie, “Honeydrippers”, a new John Sayles film that is playing in probably twelve art theaters, total, across America and it’ll probably disappear beneath the radar without making barely a ripple.  What a travesty!!

To me, power is the ability to do good on a large scale, not just to savor one’s invincibility.

If I had power like that, I’d compel writers all across America to command movie theater-goers to rush down to their local movie houses, buy lots of tickets and to support Sayles’ wonderful new movie.  Or maybe people would go just because I told them to, because they trusted my taste and judgment.  I’m pretty sure I’m not there yet, in terms of my powers of persuasion.  But…that could change.  Persistence helps, and this is my column # 5.

I met Sayles once, years ago, at the Javits Center in New York City where they held the National Stationary Show every May.  I had a bookstore at the time and we sold tons of postcards and movie posters and other items you could only find at a giant showplace like the Javits Center.  I was addicted to independent cinema since I was a teen, so even though indie movie director/writer/producer John Sayles was not a face you’d ever see on the cover of any magazine, like say, Alfred Hitchcock was, years ago, or Martin Scorsese might be today,  I knew immediately who he was. 

(Read on …)

On Christmas Day, I always close my back-issue magazine store, Magazine Memories, just north of Chicago, and I try do something else more spiritually stimulating.

This year, my son David, then 29, and I decided to spend the day together, going to movies and also have dinner. He is a filmmaker and had just returned from eighteen days in Asia after being hired to record the daily activities and performances of a DJ called Jazzy Jeff.  He went all over, including Hong Kong; Jakarta, Indonesia;  Taipei, Dubai; and Bangkok. He especially liked Bangkok.

So, after hearing that, I suggested we go to an intimate Thai restaurant I knew about for dinner, because that’s one of my favorite Asian cuisines, as well.  We had green tea, mild tom-yum soup with shrimp, bamboo and lemon-grass, mini toasted egg rolls, spicy crispy chicken wings with sweet and sour sauce, and then roasted duck. Great food and great conversation, too.

For Dave’s 12th birthday in 1990, my wife Joy and I gave him a video camera, and it must have been the right thing to do, because now he’s traveling the world, filming it.

After dinner, I went to pay our very cute and slender Thai waitress, who was also the cashier. After handing me my change, she wished me a “Merry Christmas” as people had endlessly said to me that day and other recent days. Then she looked uncertain, her lovely black eyes looking into my dark brown ones and she said, quietly: (Read on …)