Reeling Backward: "Urban Cowboy" (1980)

Let me start by stipulating that John Travolta and Debra Winger, both terrifically talented performers, are crashingly unconvincing as a cowboy and cowgirl. They don't for a second look, talk or behave like people who grew up ridin' and ropin' on the dusty Texas plains.

Travolta's accent, in particular, is a horrid sham of generic Southern clipped consonants and bent vowels that falls just this side of Kevin Costner's Robin Hood in sheer awfulness. And Winger... well, let's just say that she looks more like she sprung from a kibbutz than a frontier claim.

But perhaps that's appropriate.

The film was directed by James Bridges from a script co-written by him and Aaron Latham, based on Latham's magazine story, "The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America's Search for True Grit." It was an exploration of the cowboy myth as it's been transposed to a modern big-city setting, with the accompanying music, clothes and other touchstones reimagined for a new generation that grew up thinking broncos were boxy trucks, not frisky ponies.

It was an era of faux cowboys trying to recreate the image of their forefathers, just as disco'd-up "country" bands were exploding on the airwaves with synthesized beats that would've made Hank Williams Sr. faint in his boots. 

In a follow-up story written 20 years later, Latham opined that "the cowboy is the only truly mythic figure that America had created so far. He comes to the fore in the culture, then he recedes for a time, but he always seems to reemerge when we're uncertain about the future."

The late 1970s and early '80s certainly qualifies for that description. After seeing America diminished by Vietnam, Watergate and polyester suits, there was an undercurrent of fear, of feeling unmoored from the nation's pioneer legacy. Men were trading in their Stetsons for hardhats to work on the ocean of oil wells scattering the state.

So Travolta's Bud is a representational figure standing amidst the crossflow of cultural sea changes. A legitimate cowboy who turns into a fake one, he leaves his tiny hometown of Spur for Houston hoping he can catch a job at the refinery where his Uncle Bob works.

Bob is a mentor and role model to Bud, a fellow cowpuncher who made it "big time" in the city with his own family and spread. Never mind that Bod's homestead is part of a crammed subdivision of cheap prefab houses with a grand backyard view of high-power electrical lines.

Bob is played by Barry Corbin, one of those actors with such a consummate authenticity and workaday solidity that he often plays figures of pastoral authority. (And, like Alec Guinness and Ossie Davis, he was always much younger than audiences imagined him to be -- he was still in his 30s when this movie came out.) He's terrific in a rather underwritten role.

The story revolves around the love-hate romance of Bud and Sissy (Winger), a local gal who lives to mix it up. She and Bud impetuously wed after barely starting to date, and a week later they've already separated. The main cause of friction, at least initially, is that she's better at riding a mechanical bull than he is, at least initially.

The robot bull is the hottest new attraction at Gilley's Club, a real-life honky-tonk where a large chunk of the movie takes place. Run by country star Mickey Gilley, who appears and sings in the movie, Gilley's is practically a supporting character, a modern-day bastardization of the Old West saloon, now splayed out across "3½ acres of prairie concrete" and complete with a dance floor, carnival games and more silliness.

One wonders if they even have whiskey behind the bar.

Other pop/country acts of the day also show up to perform, including the Charlie Daniels Band, Bonnie Raitt and Johnny Lee, whose "Lookin' for Love" became a #1 Billboard hit and helped propel the movie's soundtrack into a top seller. Many in the country music biz even mark "Urban Cowboy" as the demarcation between old-school country and new, when it became more popular but more commercialized.

"Urban Cowboy" is in essence a musical, with long stretches of the action taking place sans dialogue as music blares, rendering the entire endeavor into something of a nascent music video. (It was later turned into an unsuccessful stage musical.)

Don't forget, in 1980 Travolta's two big screen hits were "Grease" and "Saturday Night Fever," so the studios no doubt saw "Urban Cowboy" as a way to extend his run as a song-and-dance star. Of course, Bud doesn't sing in the movie, though there is one scene of him doing some impressive clogging (or "kicker dancing," as they would call it in Texas).

The heavy is Wes Hightower, played by my all-time favorite "That Guy" actor, Scott Glenn. Recently released from prison where he was a champion bullrider in the big inmate rodeo, Wes sidles into the scene at Gilley's like a shark swimming into a school of guppies. Amidst the posers and wannabes, he's a real-deal cowboy, a throwback hardcase who's always looking for a good ride and a big payday -- even if a little blood has to be spilled in the process.

First seen wearing a ridiculous see-through mesh shirt that shows off Glenn's signature chiseled torso, Wes easily sets Bud to shame with his prowess on the mechanical bull, then starts making smiling eyes at Sissy. They scuffle, Bud has his drunken rear end handed to him, and before you know it Sissy is shacked up with Wes in a trailer out back of Gilley's, and Bud has decamped to the arms of Pam (Madolyn Smith), a rich city girl who likes to slum it with cowboys.

The story wobbles this way and that, with a whole lot of behavior and music for music's sake. At 132 minutes the movie is at least a half-hour too long. And certain events have an obligatory feel, such as a sudden tragedy and the build-up to the big bullriding competition worth a $5,000 purse (about $15k in today's dollars).

Still, the film has its memorable moments, such as Winger's sexy slo-mo bull ride, her limbs splayed across the mechanical animal like a white trash Diana prancing with the satyrs. With her liquid, soulful eyes and cantankerous stubbornness, she's the best thing about the movie.

I can't finish this essay without discussing the violence against women depicted. Sissy gets smacked around pretty hard by both Bud and Wes, though the former at least apologizes for it after the fact. Disturbingly, in both cases it's presented as something women just have to put up with if they take up with a guy in a 10-gallon hat.

"Urban Cowboy" isn't a standout piece of filmmaking, but it did launch a bunch of careers, and helped change the tide of country music, whether for good or ill. It's one of those movies that stands as a totem representing a time and place; there are worst inscriptions on cinematic tombstones.

Review: "The Barber"

Scott Glenn is hardly a household name, but he's long been one of my favorite actors. With his taut gaze, sharp-featured face, stoic demeanor and rangy physique, Glenn is the sort of actor's actor who could play a cowboy, an astronaut, a lawyer, just about anything -- and has.

Often when I'm reading a book with a distinctive male character, I unconsciously summon the image and sound of Glenn to personify him. It can even happen more than once in the same novel. Reading Stephen King's "The Stand," I instantly pictured main protagonist Stu Redman as him. But then when I came across the exploits of antichrist-like Randall Flagg, aka "the Walking Dude," I realized that his darkling smile would be ideally suited on Glenn's face, too.

Actors with that sort of malleable screen persona tend not to get cast in many leading roles, and now that Glenn is in his 70s his recent work has been almost entirely in supporting parts -- often playing the villain or the wise old master who tutors the hero, as in the new television version of "Daredevil."

So I was glad to hear about "The Barber," a psychological thriller in which Glenn stars. It's being released in a few theaters nationwide and on video on demand this week. Even if you're not the sort, like me, who'd watch pretty much anything Glenn was in, it's a well-made film with some nice performances and some clever twists of the plot.

He plays Eugene Van Wingerdt, an amiable older man living in an amiable small town in the Midwest, Moraine. It's a picture-pretty place with a main drag of handsome stores, one of which is Gene's barber shop. There he plies his trade, admonishes his young apprentice, Luis (Max Arciniega), not to swear so much, and pals around with the chief of police (Stephen Tobolowsky, another standout veteran character actor).

Then a scruffy young man named John (Chris Coy) comes to town, muttering something about all the girls Gene killed long ago. It seems that Gene, then known as Frank Visser, was the main suspect in a rash of 17 serial killings in which young women were abducted and buried alive. He was released for lack of evidence, pulled up stakes and moved to Moraine for a fresh start 20 years ago.

It's soon revealed that John is the son of the Chicago detective who pursued Visser all those years ago, eventually putting a bullet in his own head over his inability to catch the murderer, who repeatedly called to taunt him about not saving the latest victim. A cop himself, John is determined to catch the guy his father couldn't, by pretending to be a fellow killer looking for a mentor.

Director Basel Owies and screenwriter Max Enscoe adroitly play around with the audience's expectations, first giving us a picture of an innocent man who really was the victim of an overzealous police investigation. Gene walks around with a stooped, stiff-ambled gait, is a regular church-goer and quiet pillar of the community.

"A man's appearance should always show self-respect, not self-importance," Gene opines, like a seer of the Norman Rockwell set.

But the mask slips, revealing a calculating oldster with a bird-of-prey mien who clearly has something to hide. Is Gene really the serial killer, or is he just leading John on in a lame attempt for attention and companionship in his declining years? The way he talks about young girls as "yummies" or "birdies" who tempt his inner demons certainly gives us pause.

But Glenn's grizzled poker face has no tells, so we're left puzzling.

The two men begin a strange sort of tutelage, in which Gene prepares tests for John, and imparts little tricks to put others at ease -- like offering a girl a ride, and looking at your watch when she hesitates so she'll think you're in a hurry.

The film is a little fat in the middle, with a few too many subplots and extraneous characters -- such as Audrey (Kristen Hager), a fellow cop from Chicago who turns up just in time to throw a gear in the works. She's merely a damsel waiting for her distress to appear.

The heart of the movie is Gene and John feeling each other out, like two wary wolves unsure of the other's true intent. It's a twist on the old cop-and-killer game that's a cut above, with Scott Glenn portraying a man adept at blending in as either the hunter or the prey.

Reeling Backward: "Silverado" (1985)

Emmett: "Blind Pete always said you'd hang. I guess tomorrow at dawn, he'll be proved right."
Sheriff Langston: "10 a.m."
Emmett: "Oh, right. I always thought they did it at dawn."

"Silverado" is a film that I've never quite been able to peg. All I know is that I've always adored it.

Made in the dark days of the Western between "The Wild Bunch" and "Unforgiven," it would appear at first glance to be an homage to the genre. Made by and starring Baby Boomers, it reads like a bunch of kids playing dress-up and mimicking the shootin' and ridin' of John Wayne and other cowboys they themselves watched on film and TV.

The plot is essentially a pastiche of every great Western trope -- revenge duel, cattlemen vs. farmers, a corrupt lawman, a hero in a black hat, a pretty woman who tempts a wandering soul into settling down, a young boy who idolizes the gunman who's known only a life of tragedy. There's even a modernist angle with a proud African-American standing up to a bunch of racist cowpokes threatening his family.

(About the only thing it's missing is a subplot involving Indians, of which there's not a one.)

And yet, director Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote the script with his brother Mark, often lets the proceedings wander into the territory of parody. The part I've never figured out is whether it's intentional or not.

Consider the quote above. That's just this side of pure comedy. When the cowpoke Emmett delivers the last line, that's not the stern pronouncement of a well-worn cowhand who's ridden everywhere and seen it all. It's the postmodernist quip of a guy in 1985 making a pun out of every movie he's seen that included a hanging.

(For that matter, who the hell is Blind Pete? He's referenced twice in the movie without any other information being provided. Presumably he's another familiar Western type, the crazy/smart old codger. This way Kasdan gets to summon his image without having to bother with actually creating and casting a character.)

Emmett is played by Scott Glenn, one of my all-time favorite "That Guy" movie actors. With his lean, creased face, rangy physique, squinty eyes and gruff voice, he was born looking like he wandered out of a Hollywood Western poster. Emmett has just finished doing five years in prison for manslaughter after killing the patriarch of the McKendrick clain, the local cattle barons. Taciturn and tough, Emmett comes closest of the film's four cowboys to the classic Western hero archetype.

Technically Emmett is the main character, though Glenn receives second billing to Kevin Kline. He plays Paden, a funny/sad gambler/gunman with a wise disposition and fatalistic bent. When we first meet him he's been robbed of everything he owns and left in his longjohns to die in the desert. After being rescued by Emmett, he proceeds to recover his beloved horse, hat and gun in subsequent shoot-outs with his robbers. Paden is a cynic who often takes on lost causes, and a romantic whose passions drift like a tumbleweed, until they stop in the most unexpected places.

Like Kasdan himself, Kline was just coming off the huge success of "The Big Chill." Jeff Goldblum was also in both movies, relishing a small part as turncoat card-dealer Slick. Technically, Kevin Costner was too, though as is well known in Hollywood lore, Costner's role as the dead friend being grieved was left on the "Chill"-y cutting room floor.

Perhaps that's why the role of Jake, Emmett's callow hot-head of a brother, is so deliberately showy -- Kasdan, perhaps sad over depriving an actor of his breakout role, decided to provide him another. All Jake really does is kiss girls, shoot bad guys with his fancy two-gun rig, and smile at the camera. Soon Costner was landing leads in big productions like "The Untouchables" and "No Way Out," and he was off to the races.

Danny Glover plays expert rifleman Mal, just returned from working in the slaughterhouses of Chicago, only to find his family plot overrun with McKendrick cattle, his mother dead of illness, his father soon murdered, and his sister run off to Silverado to become a whore. He gets a nice introductory scene where he's refused a drink of whiskey in a saloon because of his skin, and takes down three fat-faced white guys who try to enforce the unwritten rule.

He's run out of town by Sheriff Langston, a stiff Brit played for comic relief by John Cleese, who was also planning to hang Jake on trumped-up charges. When the boys break out of town, Cleese delivers the funniest line in the movie: After chasing them into a trap where they're pinned down by Mal's marksmanship, Langston decides to abruptly give up the chase. "Today my jurisdiction ends here," he announces, turning his horse around.

Cleese also got very high billing in the credits unwarranted by his limited screen time, though even he's beaten out by Rosanna Arquette. Billed third, she has maybe four total minutes in the movie, and only two dialogue scenes totaling 119 words. (Yes, I counted.) The character exists solely as a sweet-faced lure to the dusty rawhides who dream of a better, settled life.

If Arquette provides an unsatisfactory female presence, then Linda Hunt makes up any difference. Playing Stella, the pint-sized manager of The Midnight Star, the high-end saloon that bears her nickname, she has a small but solid role as a symbol of decency and workaday toughness. Accustomed to serving on the fringes of other people's indulgences, she's surprised to find herself the object of unexpected affections.

Hunt, having recently won an Oscar -- for playing a character of the opposite gender, still the only performer ever to do so -- shows what you can do with a tiny, tidy role that's well-written and splendidly played.

The rest of the cast is filled out by Brian Dennehy as Cobb, the smiling, winking bandit-turned-sheriff who's firmly in the McKendrick pocket; Jeff Fahey as the local crazy-eyed killer; Lynn Whitfield as Mal's sister Rae; Thomas Wilson Brown as Augie, Emmett and Jake's wide-eyed nephew; the inimitable James Gammon as a gravel-voiced outlaw leader; and Thomas Wilson Brown, a generic and throwaway villain as McKendrick.

Everything in "Silverado" is filmed in a precious way as if trying to recreate the best moments of classic Westerns. The movie opens with a shot from inside a tiny cabin out the doorway into the grand, valley-filled landscape beyond, a fairly deliberate borrowing from "The Searchers." The booming musical score by Bruce Broughton, replete with trumpets and other brassy brass, earned an Oscar nomination, as did the sound crew.

(It was Broughton's song, "Alone Yet Not Alone," that got an Oscar nomination for Best Song last year but got disqualified under some arcane rules of the Academy. Broughton sent out a few dozen emails to his friends in the movie biz asking them to give it a listen, which the Academy disallowed as "campaigning." Yet the annual suck-up-fest perpetrated for whatever Weinstein movie on tap trundles on.)

So is "Silverado" an homage, a parody or something else entirely? After seeing it again for perhaps the dozenth time, I confess I still haven't decided. My gut tells me it's a serious paean, a recreation of the cowboys-and-Indians games (minus the Indians) Kasdan & Co. grew up playing.

But then I watch again scenes like Emmett practicing his gunplay, and I wonder still. There's one part where he's aiming at a cactus plant with his rifle from maybe 50 yards away. Not only does he hit the plant, he shoots off individual spines, one at a time. This is so absurdly ridiculous that I can't believe the filmmakers taking it seriously, or imagining anyone in the audience doing so, either. It's stuff like this that makes me think the movie has just gone momentarily goofy.

Sometimes I laugh at "Silverado," and sometimes I just sit back and admire its fanboy, fetishistic take on the Western. What I do know is, whenever I watch this film, I'm grinning as wide as the dusty plains.

Video review: "Sucker Punch"

An overheated steampunk fantasia of girls in go-go outfits wreaking vengeance with ninja swords and machine guns, "Sucker Punch" is a cinematic bowlful of hot mess.

I'm all for crazy, off-kilter movies packed to the hilt with the fertile imagination of the creators. But this latest from "300" director Zack Snyder (who co-wrote the script with Steve Shibuya) is a greenhouse of cinematic references crammed together, sprinkled with steroid fertilizer and the heat cranked up to sweltering jungle temperature.

The result is an overgrown thicket of ideas, smashed together indiscriminately without any thought of coherence, instead relishing in the sheer cool juxtapositions of loopy elements for their own sake.

Our protagonist is Baby Doll (Emily Browning), a pint-sized pixie with blonde pigtails and a perpetually vacant gaze. Thrown into a mental hospital after tangling with her evil stepfather, Baby is determined to break out. As she is forced to dance for the evil head orderly (a slithery Oscar Isaac), her consciousness slips into the Bizarro-world universe of her "missions."

Here, she's a kick-butt warrior leading a team of hot girls firing hot lead at orcs, robots and -- in the film's one indisputably kooky-cool sequence -- a bunch of World War I Kaiser casualties brought back to life with "steam power and clockworks."

I can't deny there are parts of "Sucker Punch" that are screwy fun: Strange vignettes unhinged from reality or any sense of logic. But it takes more than a scoopful of geekboy fantasy elements to make a movie, and this one just keeps piling ingredients into the gumbo without ever considering how they'll taste together.

Extra features are rather sparse for the DVD version, but improve if you opt for the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack.

The DVD edition comes with four prequel animated shorts totaling 11 minutes, and a 3-minute featurette about creating the soundtrack

Opt for the combo pack, and you get an extended cut of the movie, as well as the theatrical version. The centerpiece of the top-of-the-line package is an interactive Maximum Movie Mode feature with Snyder as your host, including picture-in-picture commentary, video pods and much more.

Movie: 2 stars out of four
Extras: 2.5 stars

Review: "Sucker Punch"

An overheated steampunk fantasia of girls in go-go outfits wreaking vengeance with ninja swords and machine guns, "Sucker Punch" is a bowl full of hot mess of filmmaking.

I'm all for crazy, off-kilter movies packed to the hilt with the fertile imagination of the creators. But this latest from "300" director Zack Snyder (who co-wrote the script with Steve Shibuya) is a greenhouse of cinematic references crammed together, sprinkled with steroid fertilizer and the heat cranked up to sweltering jungle temperature.

The result is an overgrown thicket of ideas, smashed together indiscriminately without any thought of coherence, instead relishing in the sheer cool juxtapositions of loopy elements for their own sake.

To wit: In one scene, our team parachutes from a World War II B-24 into an army of orcs from "The Lord of the Rings" and blow them away with modern weaponry. And when I say the orcs from "LoTR," I don't mean they kinda/sorta resemble the snarly brutes from the fantasy trilogy, I mean they look exactly like them. Their HQ even has the same sharp spires of Mordor. Then, for good measure, the girls take on the fire-breathing lizard from "Dragonslayer."

That follows on the heels of another sequence set in the trenches of World War I where the girls battle zombie German soldiers, whom the Kaiser has reanimated with "steam power and clockworks." They're assisted by one of their crew piloting a giant mechanized warrior, which appears to be straight out of "Avatar" by way of "Aliens." They tangle with the Red Baron and blow up the Hindenburg.

These two scenes, indisputably the coolest in the movie, have their own kooky energy and kinetic style -- highlighted by Snyder's now-familiar spiraling camera moves replete with sped-up and slo-mo action heavily augmented by CGI.

As he falls back on these fancy technical tricks again and again, they begin to grow wearing -- as in a fight aboard a train against a couple dozen Terminators, which despite the nonstop mayhem manages to become downright dull.

And whenever the story drops out of its fantasy realm into the framing device -- in which our winsome warriors are inmates at a Gothic mental hospital in Vermont -- the film loses all momentum.

Or is the madhouse actually a front for a burlesque theater-slash-bordello, in which the girls are captives made to dance and service the pleasures of the customers? Snyder and Shibuya think they're keeping the audience guessing with their morphing prism of reality. But any half-awake observer will figure out the real scheme of things, as clear as the peal of a hammerstroke.

Our protagonist is Baby Doll (Aussie actress Emily Browning), a pint-sized pixie with blonde pigtails and a perpetually vacant gaze. Thrown into the hospital after tangling with her evil stepfather, Baby is determined to break out. As she dances for the evil head orderly/club owner Blue (a slithery Oscar Isaac) and his minions, her consciousness slips into the Bizarro-world universe of her "missions."

She even has a sensai to guide her, a wily, wrinkled warrior played by Scott Glenn. He always has "one last thing" to warn them about, and invariably the worst-case scenario always comes to pass.

Baby's recruits are her fellow inmates/prostitutes: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), the lead girl who doesn't like risks; her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), who dreams of going home; and an interchangeable pair (Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung) who are just around to service the plot.

Their instructor is Gorski (Carla Gugino), who's a doctor trying to help the patients through role-playing therapy in the nuthouse, and the stern dance instructor in the brothel part. Her Russian Svengali accent so drips with rolled r's and glottal clicks I kept expecting her to call out for "moose and squirrel."

I can't deny there are parts of "Sucker Punch" -- I'm clueless as to the title's meaning, btw -- that are screwy fun: Strange vignettes unhinged from reality or any sense of logic. But it takes more than a scoopful of geekboy fantasy elements to make a movie, and this one just keeps piling ingredients into the gumbo without ever considering how they'll taste together.

2 stars out of four