The Tall Guy (Smith 1989)

It is kind of amazing how much charm can play a role in my like or dislike of a film. For example, take the film The Tall Guy, a 1989 film directed by Mel Smith (Bean), written by the great Richard Curtis (the writer and director of one of my perennial Christmas time favourites, Love, Actually): for the most part, the film is a whimsical romantic comedy and lampooning of the world of British stage acting. Yet late in the film, a character makes a rather serious transgression whose ramifications go unexplored. Worse, the film then asks audiences to forgive this transgression, and to buy that another would be willing to forgive when no real penance has been paid.

And yet forgive I do. I forgive not just the character of his transgressions, but the film as a whole for its flaws; I forgive the filmmakers for their missteps. And I forgive because, when all is said and done, the finished film is so damn charming that I want to ignore the flaws and the nagging moral questions my critical self brings to the film. I want to root for these characters, to get the “happy” ending even when the film doesn’t quite earn it.

The story of The Tall Guy is that of Dexter King (Jeff Goldblum), an American actor living in London who for six years has held the less than glamorous position of being the straight man to Ron Anderson (Rowan Atkinson) in a successful comedy stage show. Ignored by audiences and detested by the arrogant Anderson, Dexter seems to be stuck in a runt until a visit to the doctor for his hay fever leads him into the path of Kate (Emma Thompson), a nurse whom he becomes smitten. While the initial stages of their relationship result in Dexter’s firing by Anderson, Dexter soon bounces back when he lands the lead role in a musical stage adaptation of The Elephant Man. Of course, being a romantic comedy, complications arise from Dexter’s success, resulting in Dexter having to make a last ditch effort to try and save his relationship with Kate.

If the plot sounds like standard romantic comedy fare, it is. Yet what saves the film and gives it much of its charm is the way in which it captures a particular slice of London life at a specific time. Yes, the film is filled with flights of fancy and broad comedy, yet between Curtis’s script and Smith’s direction, the film feels like it has a level of emotional and situational authenticity lacking in other romantic comedy efforts, particularly with regards to the film’s satirical jabs at the worlds of musical theatre and stage comedy. The crowning achievement of the film is the sequence in which viewers are presented “highlights” from the musical Elephant, though sadly in the twenty-three years since The Tall Guy’s release, the concept of a musical based on The Elephant Man has gone from being a satirical gag to probably a more reasonable idea than what actually has been turned into a stage musical in recent years (Legally Blonde and Spider-Man, anybody?).

While the satire of the film is perhaps its strongest element, it is the chemistry of the leads which keeps the film together even when it starts to become muddled. While the pairing of Goldblum and Thompson is not an obvious one, the choice turns out to be a rather inspired, as both manage to ground their rather eccentric characters in a way which allows viewers (well, at least this viewer) to accept the more fantastical scenes of the film, including a rather absurd sex scene. Goldblum also has an excellent comic rapport with Atkinson, the latter who is given a delightfully dick-ish character to play in Anderson.

Yet for all of the film’s positive points, the second half of the film in which the relationship of Dexter and Kate fractures does not quite work. (NOTE: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD) The drama of the third act hinges upon an issue of infidelity, and while the subject is one worth exploring in film romances, it feels tacked on in this film, seemingly coming out of nowhere and only serving to break up the central relationship because, well, that’s what most romantic comedies do. At no point does the film make much of an effort to explore the subject, and the resolution to this part of the story is far too clean, undermining whatever little dramatic weight the plot point had to start with.

But darn it, there is still that issue of just how charming the film is. Made on a modest budget, the film feels like a real homemade effort despite the presence of Hollywood star Goldblum, whose presence in the film is reportedly due to an actors’ strike in Hollywood. There is clearly such passion put forth on the part of the filmmakers that no matter how clunky the film gets as it goes on, it is hard not to stay engaged and root both for the film’s protagonists and for the filmmakers themselves.

The film is available on DVD from Echo Bridge Home Entertainment, who controls most of the Miramax film library at the moment. The DVD is a serviceable effort for a budget title, though the film deserves a better release, one which at least features the longer cut of the film released in the UK but was trimmed for some baffling reason for the North American market. Still, the film comes recommended, especially for fans of Curtis who wish to take a look at his earliest effort in the romantic comedy genre.

Sudden Impact (Eastwood 1983)/The Dead Pool (Van Horn 1989)

(Working on three new reviews right now, plus some real life stuff, so here is a heavily re-edited "classic" review from my "Facebook only" days)


Ah, Dirty Harry. The name alone brings up images of Clint Eastwood in his prime, spewing out memorable quotes and dishing out violence against lawbreakers. The character is real pop culture phenomenon, moving beyond being a cinema icon to become something more abstract; a representative symbol of a cultural and political attitude.

It is this very cultural status that is investigated in the final two Dirty Harry films, Sudden Impact (Eastwood 1983) and The Dead Pool (Van Horn 1989). These films appeared after a sizable absence of Harry from the screen: Sudden Impact (Eastwood 1983) was released a full seven years after The Enforcer (Fargo 1976), while The Dead Pool would follow six years after Sudden Impact. The gap between the 1970s instalments in the series and these 1980s productions seems to mark a shift in the tone and look of these films, a change resulting not only from the evolution of film technology but from the awareness of the iconic status that the character eared after the earlier films. However, the manner in which this awareness manifests in the films Sudden Impact and The Dead Pool are entirely different, as one seeks to critically examine how the character reflects and responds to reality, while the other sets out to outright exploit the character‘s iconic status.

Sudden Impact appears to be star and director Clint Eastwood’s attempt to work out the problematic contradictions of the preceding films in the series regarding their political content and function as entertainment. The original Dirty Harry (Siegel 1971) was a straightforward police thriller about an officer who operates as a hero from a western rather than as a modern cop, who ultimately seems to lose his faith in the law and finds himself outside of society that doesn’t seem to like him. Dark, violent and featuring a lead character in Harry who, as portrayed by Eastwood, is pretty darn miserable, Dirty Harry is a film that is a fairly cynical commentary on American after the 1960s. It is this political nature of the film which gives it a powerful edge and transforms it into more than a mere thriller.

However, the 1970s sequels increasingly try to reintegrate Harry into society and mute his harder edges, attempting to make him into a seeming didactic voice of reason whilst simultaneously trying to make him seem less authoritarian. Thus, Harry’s violent streak in these sequels becomes less shocking as it lacks the aggressive political stance of the original. By The Enforcer, the series is little more than a collection of action set pieces with no point or commentary, with Harry as the gruff but loveable lead. Sudden Impact tries to bring back the seriousness of the original film while layering on an additional goal of pointing out the vapid nature of the preceding direction the series was taking, even criticising how commercial filmmaking hides the harsher realities of the subject matter in the name of entertainment.


The central thrust of the film is that a series of murders are being committed by a woman named Jennifer Spencer (Sandra Locke), who ten years preceding the events of the film was raped along with her sister by a group of men with the assistance of another woman. Spencer’s targets are those who committed the crime against her and her sister, one of whom is in San Francisco, where she exacts her revenge before returning to the small town of San Paulo where her remaining targets live. However, the San Francisco murder becomes the excuse for the SFPD management to get Harry out of town for a while, with the investigation taking him to San Paulo and directly into the life of Spencer.

The key to understanding the film’s themes and ideas is within the flashbacks to Spencer and her sister’s rape. The flashbacks to the rape reveal that the location was beneath a boardwalk near the town carnival and the sequence in the film is completely disturbing, jump cutting between the rape and the carnival as people carry on, not noticing the horror being carried out nearby. The crime is quickly covered up in a due to a set of circumstances I will not spoil here, but it leaves Spencer and her sister to internalize the event, with the psychological scars rupturing to the surface in Spencer’s art, a rupture which is mirrored cinematically as jump cuts to the flashback appear throughout the film.

For a large period of time, the grim narrative of Spencer’s revenge is kept separate from Harry Callahan’s narrative, in regards to location, plot and even Harry’s involvement in the case. As the film starts, Harry is once again in trouble and carrying out his usual brand of justice, causing an aging mobster to have a heart attack and getting firebombed in his car by a group of fairly moronic young men. San Francisco here is not the same dire city falling apart at the seams as in the original: it is now a playground where Harry and criminals of various sorts shoot it out, giving the audience what they seem to want. These sequences are exciting and often full of humour (Harry’s heart attack inducing visit to the mob boss at his daughter’s wedding is priceless), but they carry no weight when contrasted to the far grimmer narrative of Spencer.


As Harry moves into the town and into Spencer’s life as both an investigator and as a form of love interest, the fun and humour of the early San Francisco portions of the film give way to a much grimmer story. Spencer soon becomes the target of the remaining rapists and Harry finds himself in a world far from the over the top shootouts of San Francisco, entering into the grey areas of the law and his role as upholding it and questioning his own views and values. The audience is thus dragged away from any concept of pure entertainment, and forced to try and reconcile their own desires and the two halves of the film.

Eastwood’s staging of the final shootout at the carnival crystallizes the criticism of entertainment, as personal violation, rage, and the law confront one another and take on a perversity within the surroundings. I will not spoil the ending, but I will note that the film leaves the viewer with more questions than answers, as it should.


The Dead Pool however is an entirely different beast. Once again, the idea of Harry’s role in popular culture and as a figure of entertainment comes to the surface, only this time more overtly. In the film, Harry has become famous for his arrest of a noted mobster, managing to get good publicity for the police department for a change and leaving him the target of the media, a position he could care less for. Soon Harry is assigned to investigate the murder of a rock star, Johnny Squares (Jim Carrey in an early role), who was filming a horror film with director Peter Swan (Liam Neeson). It is soon discovered that Swan and members of his crew are involved in a game titled “the Dead Pool” where bets are made on whether or not the individual can correctly guess which celebrities will die in the coming year, and Harry’s name is on the list.

If Sudden Impact is an attempt to question the co-existence between entertainment and the complexities of reality, The Dead Pool is the exact opposite. It is a film which seeks to be pure entertainment and functioning as a love letter to the character of Harry Callahan and his status as cinematic icon. Oh sure, there are vague themes about the media, celebrity and social responsibility, but the film never lets these themes get in the way of basically letting Harry kick ass. Nor does the film allow logic, character development, or solid screenwriting get in the way either, as all is swept aside for over the top action, bad one-liners and police thriller clichés.


More often than not however, this superficial approach works as a piece of sheer entertainment, if only because of some the bizarre elements that make it into the film. This includes Jim Carrey as a hard rocker lip-syncing to “Welcome to the Jungle,” and Harry being chased on the streets of San Francisco in his car by a radio controlled toy car with a bomb in it. However, the film’s presentation of horror films, filmmakers, and rock stars feel like an episode of Matlock rather than a hard edged police action thriller, showing no sign of understanding any of these elements of the popular culture . While this is funny, it also illustrates why the series needed to be retired at that point, having drifted too far away from the cultural relevancy of the original film. Eastwood more than manages to hold the film together however throughout its running time, by sheer force of screen presence. As such, the film remains an entertaining experience.


At the end of the day, I have no problems recommending either film, although I admit your enjoyment of The Dead Pool may not match mine, while Sudden Impact, by its very nature is a dark piece of cinema that is sure to turn off its fair share of viewers through its challenging of what one expects from a Dirty Harry film. Still, for those fascinated by cinema’s attempts to reflect on its own nature, these films will prove to be enlightening, showcasing the various sides of a truly legendary character.

How to Get Ahead in Advertising (Robinson 1989)

Let me get this out of the way: I am not exactly the biggest fan of the auteur theory, or at least in the way that it has been adopted by modern Hollywood and other film industries. The idea of an auteur, of a discernable author to be found in a director who, in a very personal way shapes a given film, is wonderful in theory and problematic in practice most of the time, with very few directors honestly having a firm sense of being personal authors over a given work. Yet in practice, we frequently see the cursed “Film By” credit on films by the most impersonal of filmmakers, including Brett Ratner and Ron Howard. At best, their work is workman like and effective at carrying a film; at worst, vapid and hollow, doing little more than pointing a camera and calling shots. These are not filmmakers who a filmgoer gains any insight or understanding of, a point which even Michael Bay has managed to accomplish with his films, even though that personal insight amounts to little more than “I like to blow things up.”

So it is always nice to come across a film like How to Get Ahead in Advertising from writer/director Bruce Robinson, a film which is a work of a legitimate auteur. There is not one moment in this film where the guiding hand of Robinson isn’t to be found, not one scene where the audience cannot tell that Robinson is talking directly to them. This is all the more apparent because when all is said and done, regardless of how funny the film may be, How to Get Ahead in Advertising is a film boiling over with anger. And if there is one emotion that everyone can recognize, its anger.

The story of How to Get Ahead in Advertising is as simple as it is absurd: advertising executive Dennis Bagley (Richard E. Grant) is stressed out over his inability to find a way to sell a new brand of pimple cream. This stress reaches a point where Bagley seemingly snaps, turning against advertising at the same time he develops a stress boil. His wife (Rachel Ward) believes that Bagley has gone almost completely insane when Bagley starts to claim that the boil is talking to him and other people. As the boil grows however, it begins to take control of Bagley’s life, leading to a series of surprising and disturbing developments which leaves Julia questioning her husband’s supposed insanity.

While consumerism and advertising are the obvious targets that Robinson attacks in the film, Robinson is most interested in the way language has been usurped, twisted and corrupted by the forces which control mass media, distorting language to the point that greed, hate and other vile concepts are naturalized and accepted. Moreover, the manipulation and alteration of language has made resistance within the world of the film impossible, with Bagley having so internalised the corruption that his initial resistance manifests as signs of insanity.

If some of these concepts sound familiar, they should, as they in part derive from the concepts of “newspeak” and “doublethink” from George Orwell’s masterpiece of fiction, 1984, which is directly referenced in the film and is the key intertext needed to understand the themes of How to Get Ahead in Advertising. Robinson goes beyond suggesting that advertising is engaged in a similar manipulation and reduction of language found in Orwell’s text by expanding the concept to show how visual arts have also been co-opted in a similar manner, thus evoking the cinematic apparatus in its criticism. The media not only have the power to shape realit here, but do so by naturalising the worst aspects of humanity.

Given this inclusion of commercial cinema as being part of the problem, Robinson deliberately sets out to make the film as artificial as possible in order to avoid being guilty of the very things he is attacking: the characters are more caricatures than real people, the situations that the characters find themselves in are contrived, and even the visual look of the film is heightened to appear clearly constructed as the film goes forward, including the practical effects which are deliberately rubbery and cheep. In the central role, Richard E. Grant is allowed to go for broke, brining a level of megalomania that seems more in place with a 1960s Bond villain, with Rachel Ward’s performance coming off as natural only by comparison.

All of this will likely be off putting for audiences expecting a narrative and character driven film. While the central premise would seem to be open to psychoanalysis as an analytical approach, particularly given the similarities of the premise to the concept of body horror, How to Get Ahead in Advertising only uses a loose narrative as a means of exploring and “dramatising” the ideas and concepts it seeks to talk about, with characters functioning as overt symbols. As an idea driven film however, the approach is appropriate and seeks to engage the audience on an intellectual level rather than an emotional level.

The irony of this approach though is that it does damn the film, in a manner of speaking, with regards to its audience. The bluntness of the film’s approach will likely be off putting to those seeking a greater sense of subtlety and complexity from the film, yet given the film’s resistance to commercial narrative practice and emphasis on ideas over cohesion and character, the film will likely be off putting to the audience Robinson’s arguments would be most important to. Robinson himself seems to be aware of this, as an early scene in which Bagley tries to explain to the very nature of language manipulation fails due not only to resistance from average consumers to the idea, but also because Bagley openly distains these people.

As such, How to Get Ahead in Advertising is hideously bleak film, while being a conflicting but fascinating work of art. Within the context of similarly themed films, such as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, the film will likely be found lacking, but it remains a complex and engaging work none the less worthy of viewing and study. Most importantly though, for those seeking a film looking to know and feel the artist behind a work, How to Get Ahead in Advertising is Bruce Robinson at his most raw.

Black Rain (Scott 1989)

After the disappointment of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (2010), both as entertainment and as art, it was interesting to dip back into the work of Scott with Black Rain, a 1989 police thriller starring Michael Douglas. While a heavily flawed film, featuring lapses in logic and pulling out nearly every cop film cliché in the book, Black Rain is also a film which serves as a reminder as to just how visually powerful Scott’s work can be, especially in his 1980s heyday. Unfortunately, the impressive visuals also happen to go along with a confused and conflicted cultural and political subtext that borders on being xenophobic.

Black Rain’s narrative is the stuff of typical police thrillers: New York police officer Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas) is under investigation by internal affairs, when he witnesses the slaying of a Yakuza member in a restaurant along with his partner Charlie (Andy Garcia). The killer is another Japanese criminal, whom they capture. Forced to return the criminal to Japan, Conklin and Charlie act as curriers, only to accidentally turn the killer over to his own fellow criminals. Looking to make up for the mistake, Conklin and Charlie are forced to work with a Japanese detective named Masahiro (Ken Takakura), with the usual cross cultural misunderstandings taking place as they take to the streets to crack the case.

While the film is a police thriller, the real concern of the film is with the increasingly encroachment of capitalism, industrialism, consumerism and conformity upon the world, with Japan, and by extension its citizens, being a culture representative of these elements within the world of the film. Visually, Japan in the film is an industrial nightmare of oppressive buildings and advertisements,suppressing the personal for the supposed sake of society as a whole. Given this, it is no surprise that the opening image of the film is of the red sun of Japan’s flag being overlaid on a globe of the world, the first indicator of the film’s near racist paranoia of cultural invasion through globalisation. If not racist, the film is at the very least reductive in its portrayal of Japanese society and culture, playing up the noted “-isms” to the negation or submersion of other cultural attitudes and elements which make up Japanese society.

The fear of these “-isms” is given voice by Conklin, a detective who is something of a throwback to the cowboys of American mythology with his repeated resistance to “suits,” by any-means-necessary approach to policing, and visually in his navigation of urban, industrial spaces with his modern horse, a motorcycle. Conklin’s resistance to the forces of capitalism stems from a fear of being emasculated: divorced and attempting to keep his kids in private schools, Conklin has turned to occasionally skimming from the criminals he captures to function in the society he finds himself in. Conklin’s arrival in Japan places him in a society which, as already noted, has become a symbol for all these elements, increasing his feelings of distress and giving his rage a racist dimension as he becomes angered at the attempts to sideline him in the investigation.

In a different and much smarter film, Conklin’s behaviour and rage would have been explored while giving room to the possibility that his anger towards the noted “-isms” have a legitimate root. The narrative trajectory of Black Rain however is one in which the East and West move closer to one another, as represented in the relationship between Conklin and Masahiro, and as a result the film attempts to suppress or negate the thematic concerns with mixed results. An example is the way in which the film addresses the issue of Conklin’s theft from the criminals he captures, where Conklin explains that his theft was motivated by the needs of his family. While the film rightfully doesn’t allow this to justify Conklin’s behaviour, Conklin’s reasons and sense of emasculation in his inability to perform well in a consumerist society does hold a grain of legitimate criticism.

(SPOILERS)

However, such issues are brushed aside in the final as Conklin finally comes to wear a suit himself, now officially having “bought” into the mentality he has thus far detested. The film even goes a step further in having Conklin give a gift to Masahiro of a high end suit shirt (along with a certain plot device). Handled differently, this moment could have been a note of ambiguity, but instead, Scott presents the moment as one of bonding and light heartedness, failing to take note of the question of just how Conklin is, in his newfound state of being a brainwashed consumer, able to make his way without needing to steal. Instead, we are expected to simply accept this for the “happy” moment it is.

The film is also unable to rectify Conklin’s supposed transformation with the oppressive nature of the capitalist society, as visualized by the endlessly dominating cityscape of the film. The film never manages to convincingly give Conklin power over his environment, and thus instead allows him to regain a sense of masculine authority by being able to engage in his cowboy antics in an open, rural environment which descends into a one on one battle between Conklin and the film’s villain. Given this, Conklin more or less lucks out in being given an opportunity to police his way rather than successfully demonstrate any ability to function in the world around him. As such, the ending “transformation” is made all the more hollow and artificial, and more over, upholds an American sense of law enforcement and justice over the approach taken by the Japanese police in the film.

(SPOILERS DONE)

While the finished film is a thematic mess, upholding the values of capitalism, consumerism and industrialism while at the same time giving a half hearted critique of them, one could at least hope for a cohesive thriller narrative. Unfortunately, even the basic narrative is something of a mess, with lapses in logic, plot holes, plot conveniences and typical police procedure clichés. Given that Conklin is under investigation by internal affairs as the film starts, the very idea that he would even be allowed to leave the country is questionable, and the film’s subplot involving Kate Capshaw as an American bar tender in Japan serves little purpose beyond keeping the plot moving and giving Conklin some sort of romantic foil. Seeing as how the film never actually manages to give any screen time to this supposed romance however, it instead feels like a tacked element from another script, and the idea that Capshaw’s character would honestly be as well connected to the Yakuza as she is defies all sense of logic.

The film is furthermore done no favours in having Michael Douglas in the lead. While Douglas does capture the emasculated side of Conklin, Douglas performance more often than not is not that of a man raging against the world around him, so much as it comes across like a child throwing a temper tantrum. A scene is which Conklin supposedly gets down to business by searching a crime scene for clues is particularly glaring, as Conklin, without any rhyme or reason, merely starts destroying the area in broad sweeping gestures. Scenes such as this occur often in the film, and raise questions as to why he has any respect on the force at all, as there is clearly no real method to his approach. Thankfully, the rest of the cast aside from Douglas is able to keep the film afloat, though no one is given much to do in the film.

As much as I am ripping the film apart, there is one thing which ultimately holds the film together and makes it worth at least a rental, that being Ridley Scott’s visuals. Working with director of photography Jan De Bont, Scott creates a world that is utterly beautiful in just how bleak it is, mixing rich blacks and neon colour together in their representation of the city of Osaka. Every frame of this film is simply a stunner to look at, layered and full of life, even in the starkest of scenes. While it certainly doesn’t forgive the film’s other faults, the visual power of the film was such that I often was willing to go with the narrative just because of how beautiful the film looked. For those with Blu-ray players and HDTVs, Black Rain is worth every penny to see how good a film from that era can look.

Still, I can hardly make an honest recommendation of Black Rain beyond those fans of Scott. The film is simply too thematically confused and lacking in anything to make it engaging to be worth watching. The same however, cannot be said for another 1989 film looking at commercialism and consumerism: How to Get Ahead in Advertising, the film to be reviewed in the next few days.