How can a fan of 70s cinema not respect the projects Don Johnson picked once he hit 60?
As the corrupt chief of police in Rebel Ridge (2024)
He was always smart at selecting directors to work with (Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Roland Joffe, Dennis Hopper, Ron Shelton) but despite his solid performances, many of those projects turned out to be duds and his movie career never quite took off the way it was expected to.
Up to no good in Brawl In Cell Block 99 (2017)
More recently Johnson has made outstanding crime films collaborating with hotshots Jeremy Saulnier, S Craig Zahler (twice), and Jim Mickle, besides giants Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (also twice).
In the hugely underrated Cold In July (2014)
He's defying the most wussified era since the 1980s by choosing to be in the grittiest and grimiest throwbacks to the 1970s. Often playing the villain, sometimes the young hero's wise, old partner, he's filling the gigantic void left by performers such as James Coburn and Roy Scheider.
Playing the racist vigilante in Machete (2010)
At 75 years old he's still kicking ass and taking names with no signs of slowing down. Mr. Johnson, we salute you!
According to imdb and Letterboxd in the last 2 years I watched 263 films, yet only 23 of them were released during this period. That's not much, that's 9%. Granted, I was never one of those new-releases-only type of guy at the video rental store, but I used to watch a lot more current movies than I do now.
I've been thinking of the reason why. Why am I subconsciously gravitating less and less towards new movies? I'm sure there are a variety of reasons, but the easiest answer I can come up with at this moment is that in my world view modern films lack, for lack of a better word, charm. And with me charm goes a long way.
A big thing that contributes to how charming a movie is to me, is how it looks and how it sounds. Nowadays there is a disproportionate amount of movies that purposely have a cold, detached atmosphere, ominous almost – lots of blues and greys. And that tends to go hand-in-hand with increasingly minimalistic dialogue. It's like they take the look of Paul Schrader's films from the 90s (like Light Sleeper) and make them look colder and then rip out half the dialogue as if trying to create a Takeshi Kitano picture.
It seems that, for reasons unbeknownst to me, directors or producers have decided that this is now what a "classy" realistic movie shall look like, or at least “serious” filmmaking. I don't know who started this fad but you've got so many directors going for it: David Fincher, Denis Villeneuve, Andrew Dominik, Lynne Ramsay, the list is endless.
Let's see how this style fits the storylines...
▪ Detectives investigate the zodiac killer.
▪ A raggedy, lonely hermit searches for his stolen pig.
▪ Scientists try to communicate with peaceful aliens who are visiting planet Earth.
▪ A coward assassinates Jesse James.
▪ Aliens fight over control of spice on the planet Arrakis.
▪ A man armed with a screwdriver impulsively wants to avenge his parents' death.
▪ The private election of a new Pope.
---------------Hold your horses. It's not like there's a gloved killer running amok at the Vatican, so why does even the story of a new Pope require a cold, ominous atmosphere? Simply because otherwise the audience won't know that they're watching a "serious" film that is Oscar worthy. Basically the powers that be have decided this style fits everywhere and nearly every movie shall look and sound like this.
Okay, that’s it, I fold, I'm out. I shall continue headstrong watching mostly older movies until hopefully some punk rock directors will come along and disrupt this nonsense, as happened in the early 90s.
Crime films in the 1980s can be summed up by a Paddy Chayefsky quote from Network:
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job!”
Thankfully the 1990s were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore! Look at how the calendar of the first year of the decade alone was absolutely STACKED with quality crime films.
Internal Affairs (dir. Mike Figgis) – January 12 (USA)
La Femme Nikita (dir. Luc Besson) – February 21 (France)
Miami Blues (dir. George Armitage) – April 20 (USA)
The Krays (dir. Peter Medak) – April 27 (UK)
Q&A (dir. Sidney Lumet) – April 27 (USA)
State of Grace (dir. Phil Joanou) – September 14 (USA)
The Two Jakes (dir. Jack Nicholson) – August 10 (USA)
Goodfellas (dir. Martin Scorsese) – September 19 (USA)
King of New York (dir. Abel Ferrara) – September 28 (USA)
Miller's Crossing (dir. Joel & Ethan Coen) – October 5 (USA)
The Hot Spot (dir. Dennis Hopper) – October 12 (USA)
The Grifters (dir. Stephen Frears) – December 5 (USA)
The Godfather Part 3 (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) – December 25 (USA)
Thirteen! All in the same year! Directed by a who’s who of the world’s best. If I had to come up with a list of top 100 crime films of all time, all these would be contenders. I don’t think they made thirteen good crime films in the entire 80s decade. I’m talking about proper badassery, none of that weak sauce that starts out strong and then pulls all punches in the third act.
I was eight years old in 1990 so I didn’t get to enjoy any of these movies until much later. But I do remember being scarred by the phone booth scene of King of New York that was used as the European trailer, and I do remember Anne Parillaud diving into a ventilation shaft to escape an explosion so I must have watched La Femme Nikita's trailer too. Daytime Italian TV was off the chain back then.
Back in 1990 the movie world needed the same kind of course correction it needs now. Enough of this weak sauce!
After Dellamorte Dellamore/Cemetery Man, I'm going to give my take on this obscure classic. Roger Ebert said understanding the entire plot of this film is missing the point, and he's probably right. Read the following right after you watch the movie.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Nick is a collector of pre-Columbian artifacts, illegal to obtain. He buys these items from stunt director Joey Ziegler who has a neat operation going on using stuntmen to get them from Yucatan. Marv Ellman flies them into the US and drops them off in Florida to be picked up by Tom Iverson and Paula.
All is fine until Tom's stepdaughter (Dilly) leaves her mother, Arleen, to go live with him. This upsets Nick as a horny teenager might ruin the deal they have going on. Therefore, he makes Arleen hire Harry Moseby to fetch her back. Arleen needs to have Dilly back to get her monthly alimony.
Harry finds Dilly in Florida in no time. Things go wrong when Marv has an accident and dies while transporting an artifact. During a dive, Dilly finds the plane and recognizes Marv. Tom and Paula tell Harry they'll call the coast guard, but don't for obvious reasons. Harry takes Dilly back to LA.
Dilly tells her friends Quentin and Joey that the corpse she saw during the dive was Marv's. She's a dangerous witness to Joey, who gets her killed during a stunt.
Quentin smells something fishy and goes to Florida to investigate. Tom kills him.
Harry goes to Florida to investigate too, beats Tom senseless and discovers half this plot from Paula. He makes Paula take him out on a boat ride to the submerged plane. While Paula is diving to retrieve the artifact, Joey shows up flying a plane and kills Paula, then tries to kill the boat owner, Tom. It got too dangerous for Joey - he wants to get rid of all his team. He doesn't know it's Harry on the boat instead of Tom. As his plane is sinking he kind of apologizes to Harry. Then again, since Joey killed Dilly, I don't think he'd have any problems offing Harry too.
Harry is left alone, on a boat that's going round in circles and is angry with himself for not seeing this plot sooner. As Harry had said about that chess player, "He didn't see it. He played something else and he lost. He must have regretted it every day of his life. I know I would have." If he is rescued, he'll regret not solving this case sooner for the rest of his life.
They were a director/actor team like Scorcese and DeNiro, with a much more colorful history due to the fact that Kinski was clinically insane and Herzog isn't quite right in the head either.
When Herzog was a kid, his family shared a house with Kinski for a few months. During that time, Herzog witnessed Kinski assault a critic for saying his performance in a theatrical play was merely excellent. He also remembers Kinski locking himself in the bathroom for 2 whole days, raging and demolishing everything in sight for no apparent reason.
Years later, during a theatrical performance, Kinski hurled a lit candelabra from the stage at an audience deemed insufficiently appreciative, nearly burning the theatre down.
Their working relationship started with Herzog sending Kinski the script for "Aguirre". Herzog: "Between three and four in the morning, the phone rang. It took me at least a couple of minutes before I realized that it was Kinski who was the source of this inarticulate screaming. And after half an hour of this, it dawned on me that he found it the most fascinating screenplay and wanted to be Aguirre."
During the jungle shoot, Kinski nearly split a fellow actor's head open with a sword - thankfully the other guy was wearing an iron helmet. Irritated by the noise coming from a hut where cast and crew were playing cards at night, Kinski fired a rifle three times at the hut, blowing off half an extra's finger.
From the beginning of the production, Herzog and Kinski argued about the proper manner to portray Aguirre. Kinski wanted to play a "wild, ranting madman", but Herzog wanted something "quieter, more menacing". In order to get the performance he desired, before each shot Herzog would deliberately infuriate Kinski. After waiting for the hot-tempered actor's inevitable tantrum to "burn itself out", Herzog would then roll the camera.
Herzog was using all his savings to produce this film, located in the jungle. More than halfway through filming Kinski threatened to leave the production (something he had done 35 times between 1967 and 1972 ruining all those films) because Herzog wouldn't fire a photographer Kinski didn't like. Kinski got on a boat and was about to row away and according to Herzog: "I said, 'Klaus, I don't have to make up my mind. I've had months of deliberating where is the borderline that we will not transgress. This would be the transgression, the borderline. This is something that you will not survive. I do have a rifle. You could try to take the boat and you might reach the next bend of the river but you'd have eight bullets through your head. You know the rifle takes nine bullets... Guess who gets the last one?' And he looked at me and he understood it was not a joke anymore. I would have done it. He understood he'd better behave".
After a few months or years not speaking to each other, things would cool down between them. Then, Herzog would need Kinski's acting prowess for the obsessed characters in his films, while Kinski would need Herzog to "bring out those innermost qualities" he had.
After Aguirre they did the acclaimed Nosferatu remake and followed that with "Fitzcarraldo". Fitzcarraldo is the true story about a man who decided to make money by collecting rubber from an area in the amazon jungle unreachable by boat. He did this by taking a 30 ton boat through the river, convincing native indians to haul the boat over a small mountain(!), reach the rubber, fill the boat with rubber, and carry the boat back into the sea. To achieve authenticity (which Herzog calls "the ecstatic truth") Herzog decided to do the exact same thing using native indians, no models, no special effects. The only difference is that he decided to use a 320 ton steamboat.
Despising miniature models, Herzog chose to shoot the scene in which the steamboat is at the mercy of the raging river, by leaving the real steamboat at the mercy of real raging river with a skeleton crew, Kinski, and himself aboard. A cameraman nearly lost his hand.
Kinski always wanted to be the centre of attention and would get pissed off when this didn't happen, for example when a lumberjack working on the film had to saw his own leg off after being bitten there by a snake, or when a plane carrying 6 of Herzog's crew crashed into the mountains.
Filming in the jungle always made Kinski go nuts.
Kinski's antics scared the natives. Towards the end of the shoot, one of the native chiefs offered to murder Kinski for Herzog. Herzog refused, but only because he needed Kinski to complete filming.
Herzog: "Every grey hair on my head I call Kinski. People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other's murder." Once after receiving a lashing from Kinski over the phone, Herzog drove to Kinski's house with a jerrycan full of petrol intent on burning the house down with Kinski inside. Herzog changed his mind halfway on route, mainly because he was afraid of Kinski's big Alsatian.
They last worked together in 1987. Kinski died in 1991.
Now, let's focus more on the guy who once ate his shoe...
In 1982, Herzog, learned his dear friend, the film historian Lotte Eisner, was dying in Paris. Thereupon, he abruptly stopped all projects he was working on, and set off to walk from Munich to Paris, convinced Eisner would not die before his arrival. He turned out to be right.
Once, Roger Ebert invited Herzog to a film festival. At the time, Herzog was on a plateau in a South American rain forest, so he made his way by log canoe and trading skiff to a pontoon plane that took him to a boat, etc. "He came because it was so difficult. If Werner had been in Los Angeles, it would have been too easy, and he might not have made the journey."
A couple of years ago Herzog helped Joaquin Phoenix out of his overturned car after Phoenix's brakes failed and he collided with another vehicle. Phoenix was saved because he was wearing his seat-belt. According to Phoenix, "I remember this knocking on the passenger window. There was this German voice saying, 'Just relax.' There's the airbag, I can't see and I'm saying, 'I'm fine. I am relaxed.' Finally, I rolled down the window and this head pops inside. And he said, 'No, you're not.' And suddenly I said to myself, 'That's Werner Herzog' There's something so calming and beautiful about Werner Herzog's voice. I felt completely fine and safe. I climbed out. I got out of the car and I said, 'Thank you,' and he was gone."
Recently, Herzog got shot with a .22 Air Rifle during a BBC interview.
The pellet went through his thick leather jacket and into his belly. He asked the interviewer to finish the interview and never checked into hopsital. Herzog: "I didn't want to have police called, because when you report to police you have been shot at by a man with a rifle, they send out a helicopter and a SWAT team. They would have over-reacted, and I thought, 'this is not a serious bullet, this is part of the folklore of LA, this is something we can laugh about it later on,' and we laughed a lot. I have been shot at with much more serious bullets before, in my life, and what I am trying to say, it's something very exhilarating for a man to be shot at with little success."
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