River's Edge Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

A 14-year-old girl was strangled by a 16-year old boy, possibly after he raped her. He left her nude body in a wooded area and then bragged to other students at school and even went so far as to drive them in his truck to have a look at the body. Word spread around school about the presence of a body in the hills outside town and other students went to see for themselves. For two days this went on without anyone reporting it to the police. Screenwriter Neal Jimenez took this very real news story out of Milpitas, CA, and turned it into a screenplay. The resulting film, directed by Tim Hunter, was an atmospheric and lunatic study of disaffected youth before that even became a 1990s moniker attached to a particular type of songwriting and filmmaking.

25 Years Ago This Month: November 1986

The fourth Star Trek feature film, Dennis Hopper's only Oscar-nominated role, Mike Tyson wins his first pro boxing title, a large chemical spill turns the Rhine red, the Iran-Contra scandal gets its first exposure, and the loss of a Hollywood legend, all 25 years ago this month.

Easy Rider as Christian Morality Tale

Was Dennis Hopper's conservatism actually coming through in Easy Rider, emblem of 1960s liberal counter-culture?

Old Movie Review: Colors directed by Dennis Hopper

Here is the last of my reviews commemorating the career of the late Dennis Hopper. Unfortunately, this movie was hardly worth my time, but I stuck with it to the end. The last time I walked out on a movie was Father of the Bride Part II when I was 17. So here we have the 4th movie directed by Dennis Hopper. He left a much better legacy as an actor than as a director.

It’s almost not even worth writing anything about a 22 year old film that time has all but forgotten. The Dennis Hopper directed Los Angeles cops and gangs drama Colors has not survived the long lens of history very well. It’s true that most films from that period have not dated well. The fashions, the hairstyles and the musical scores in particular have a distinct late 80s feel in several police dramas from that period including Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop.

Classic Movie Review: The American Friend

In honor of the late Dennis Hopper, I took a look this week at 2 of his films. Hoosiers I'd never seen and The American Friend I'd seen but had virtually no memory of any single detail. Here I review the latter.

Wim Wenders’ 1977 film Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend) is loosely based on the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game, the third of her novels to feature the sociopathic character of Tom Ripley. The novel was adapted several years ago with John Malkovich in the title role, but the Wenders film stars German actor Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Zimmerman and Dennis Hopper as Ripley.

This is perhaps one of the most inaccessible films I’ve ever seen. The film is almost all mood and atmosphere. After all, that was a primary effect of German New Wave Cinema of the 70s and 80s, of which Wenders (along with Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder) was a key director. It’s filled with opaque dialogue and lines that, upon reflection, probably served as inspiration for American independent film makers such as Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley. The most interesting lines are spoken by Ripley: “I like this room. It's got a good feel to it. It's quiet and peaceful;” and “This river reminds me of another river.” As read by Hopper, lines like these are sinister and forbidding.

A single viewing is probably not sufficient for following the story carefully. What you will get is a great sense of location as the action switches between Hamburg, Paris and New York. There’s Hamburg with its overcast skies and shipyards in the background, a setting as dreary as the subject matter of the film. New York is identified by the World Trade Towers looming in conspicuous solitude in the background as Ripley walks down the West Side Highway. And the Paris depicted is hardly the romantic postcard vision the movies normally provide. Wenders’ Paris is one in which organized crime bosses plan murder and doctors are complicit in medical deception. It’s got elements of film noir combined with a Hitchcockian thriller, which should come as no surprise as Highsmith also wrote the novel Strangers on a Train, most famously adapted by Hitchcock.

Classic Movie Review: Hoosiers

*In honor of the late Dennis Hopper, this week I took a look at two of his films, one of which I'd seen but had no memory of and the other which I'd somehow never gotten round to watching. The second is reviewed in this post. I'll write on the other in the coming days.

In the annals of inspirational sports movies, the 1986 high school basketball saga Hoosiers holds a special place. It made it on two of the AFI’s lists celebration a century of motion pictures, coming in at number 13 on their list of the most inspirational films and number 4 among the top ten sports films behind Raging Bull, Rocky and Pride of the Yankees.

By today’s standards it is in some ways quite conventional yet in most others not. I’m having trouble thinking of another sports film prior to Hoosiers that centers on a Cinderella-story victory under the leadership of an inspiring coach who brings new values and practices. The Bad News Bears may be a kind of example, but that’s more comedic than inspirational. However, following Hoosiers the formula has been repeated over the years in films like Remember the Titans, Friday Night Lights, Mystery Alaska and Miracle.

Interestingly, Hoosiers is the one that really gets it right most of the time. The screenplay by Angelo Pizzo, based loosely on a true story, hones its focus on Coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) without getting bogged down in bloated back stories and side trips. The secondary characters include Dale’s old college friend, Cletus, who hires him for the job of high school basketball coach; Myra (Barbara Hershey), a teacher at the school and caretaker of Jimmy, perhaps the best player the town has ever seen but who refuses to join the team owing to his inward isolation after the deaths of his parents; and finally Shooter (Dennis Hopper), the town drunk who also happens to be a walking encyclopedia Indiana basketball history.

Dennis Hopper Dies

Well, this has been expected for the past few months. Dennis Hopper died today at home in California. He was suffering from metastasized prostate cancer. He turned 74 earlier this month.

He was never one of my favorite actors, but he's always been there. The IMDb lists 202 film and television acting credits for him beginning in 1954. His first two feature film credits were  Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, both starring James Dean. Lots of television work followed over the next decade until he directed and starred in Easy Rider, co-written with his friend, Peter Fonda. That iconic film is often regarded as the beginning of the New Golden Age of Hollywood Cinema that ran through the 70s.

He created some other indelible and iconic roles during his long career. He portrayed Tom Ripley on screen long before Matt Damon in the Wim Wenders directed The American Friend. Then he was the sycophantic photojournalist idolizing Marlon Brando's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

Perhaps his most famous screen role came in 1986 when he played the nitrous oxide inhaling Frank Booth in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Who can forget the Candy Colored Clown scene? Or how about "Baby wants to fuck?" (Both clips are very much NSFW).

But for me the most singularly great performance from Mr. Hopper was in True Romance in which he played the father of Christian Slater, who had unwittingly stolen a large amount of cocaine from the mafia. One scene in particular is what I will always remember him for. The scene was made great by the head-to-head acting of Hopper and Christopher Walken and also by the Quentin Tarantino written dialogue.

And of course we shouldn't forget his wonderful villain roles in the classic action films Speed and Waterworld, both of which were the likely result of his accepting every script that came his way during the last 2 decades of his career.

RIP Dennis Hopper (17 May 1936 - 29 May 2010)