Uncle Scoopy's Fun House

Since modern medical science extended our life-spans and created a period of "middle age" for us, the greatest problem of that part of life has been its vulnerability to an attack of the crazies. You wake up one morning, and you question everything that you've done. Maybe you're a great success, by the typical standards of society, but you question the value of those successes. You get a longing for a time in your life when you were living closer to the edge, when everything was new, when you still had your ideals, and a full lifetime ahead to realize them. When you remember what those ideals were, you become acutely aware of how few of them you did realize, and you become intensely aware that you got distracted by day-to-day life which offered some detours. You took the detours, they gradually became your new road, and you never even realized it.

I suppose this phenomenon, although prevalent in all modern generations and probably in all developed societies, has an unusually intense psychological impact on my generation, because our youths were so full of violent rebellion, freedom from societal constraints, and being on the leading edge of change, ultimately exercising more cultural power than our own parents.

In that crazy 1968-74 period, we experienced something the the guys before us never had. Instead of crushing us under the weight of conformity, adults started copying us, believing us, changing their own lives because of us. We first began to realize our power on the night LBJ announced he wouldn't run again. Damn, our silly little protests kicked a president out of office. Then the rules started changing in every way. From global issues like minority rights to petty matters like campus rules, they times, they really were a-changin'.

Then the adults started co-opting our speech, clothing, and drugs. Middle aged guys would flash the peace sign and ask you for a doobie. What a trip. It was a wild and heady ride, I tell you, to be steering the cultural ship at that age instead of just sitting in a passenger seat waiting for some destination. It all culminated when another U.S. president, resignation in hand, left office in humiliation and disgrace.

That was the end of it for the mainstream of our generation. Except for a few idealistic stragglers, we set down our protest signs, and in time we traded in our VW campers for Porsches, and most of us created a nest not very different from the one in which our parents had raised us. As I said earlier, every generation of youth loses its ideals, so there's no great story in that, but we sure seemed to fall from a greater height to a greater depth. The sheer vertical drop of that fall seemed to us to be tragic at Aristotelian levels. That's melodramatic, but that's how it felt. Such was our generation's inflated estimation of our own place on the planet.

And that's what this movie is all about. Two guys "have it all", and they can't breathe. So they seek to recapture their youthful passion by adventures, exploration, experimental relationships, mysticism, whatever it takes. The movie doesn't really reach any conclusions. One of the guys returns to his job and family, still confused, with one foot still out the door. The other guy ends up in a Buddhist monastery, not knowing where his next road will lead. The ending is unsatisfactory, unless you believe that the journey itself is the destiny. That may be true and real, but it doesn't make for a very good movie ending.

I think that if you are now a prosperous, white, middle aged former student radical or wild child, you'll see a lot of yourself in this film.

I don't know if the movie is any good. Probably not, because it's only a couple of years old, was produced with a substantial $6 million budget by a major studio in exotic Philippine locations, and yet was totally buried by the studio that produced it.

I can't find any record of a theatrical release, or even a cable showing, and it took two years to get to DVD. Yet I liked it and was fascinated by it. It is so close to the bone for me that I enjoyed watching it, in a painful and depressing sort of way. If you are from my generation, it will ring some familiar chords, and the sounds will be amplified by the growling, despairing, music of Leonard Cohen.

You guys from other generations? Well, MGM didn't seem to think it was much good - what else can I tell you?

I assumed this would be a typical grade B straight-to-vid mob and cops movie, in the manner of Eric Roberts, and I usually hate those things. I was wrong. I ended up being completely surprised and charmed by "Angel's Dance". Who would have guessed? It is an amoral, madly inventive, often hilarious, comedy-drama about the new modern mob, and the casting of James Belushi and Sheryl Lee was absolutely perfect. Belushi was born for this role.

The wiseguys lose their top hit man in a freak accident, so they nominate his successor. But this is the 21st century. You don't just step up and bingo, you're a hit man. They have a complete training program. Turns out that it works just like The Karate Kid. A hit man has to go through all the mind control wax-on wax-off machinations before he can be certified to kill, and the trainer is an aging California Zen master dude played by James Belushi, who knows as much about Nietzsche, vegetarian diet, and surfing as he knows about silencers and nine millimeter assault rifles.

The trainee, on the other hand, is one of those guys who never takes off his suit, dark glasses, and shoulder holster, meaning of course that every person in California knows he is a visiting Chicago mobster. I'm afraid the kid is not exactly undercover material, especially in L.A., and this conflict of styles creates some opportunities for humor.

The final test for the little grasshopper was to kill an innocent person. He had to take a random name out of the phone book and ice her, because if you can kill an innocent, you can kill anyone without remorse. It proves that you're cold and heartless enough to be a hit man.

The aspiring hit man ended up choosing a mousy, bookish technician in the morgue, a lonely freak who takes pictures of the corpses and frames them on her walls. (Belushi was impressed with some of the pictures - "hey, I popped that guy")

Unfortunately for the mob boys, the intelligent little mouse deduced that these two crazy guys were stalking her, and it got to the point where she was tired of living terrified. She decided if she's going to go out, it's going to be with style, so she went to the library and researched the hell out of assassins and the counter-techniques against them, set up her defenses, bought her weapons and body armor, and got ready for battle.

In fact, she figured out the identity of the California guy through the police, and she even took pre-emptive action against his home, then did a drive-by shooting at the two wiseguys as they ate at an outdoor restaurant. In essence, she turned herself into a Home Study Femme Nikita

The mob boss in Chicago, Uncle Vinny (how tough is he? when he doesn't knock down all the bowling pins, he shoots the remaining ones), was not happy with all these developments, because he needed to get his hit man trained in time to assassinate a stoolie accountant before he testified, so Vinny sent a team of his best mobsters to California to see what was going on. Finally, five mob guys all ended up chasing the poor woman through a mortuary and cemetery.

Don't read any more if you're planning to see it, because it has a great ending, and I'm about to tell you what it is.

The mobsters didn't take the little grasshopper along on the final hit in the mortuary. They concluded that he was too soft to be a hit man.

In the last scene, Belushi was just about to kill Sheryl Lee when the little grasshopper came in out of nowhere and shot Belushi in the shoulder, because grasshopper decided that he had fallen in love with Sheryl Lee. Belushi asks why he thinks that, and he confesses that he's finally met his soul-mate, and he doesn't care what Uncle Vinny thinks back in Chicago. Sheryl Lee listens to a bit of his heartfelt speech, then picks up her own gun and shoots the poor sap in the head.

Of course, she turns out to be cold-blooded enough to be the new hit man the mob needs, and everyone is happy.

I recently re-watched L.A. Confidential, and I was so impressed by it that I decided I've give a shot to another film made from a James Ellroy novel. Brown's Requiem is the third feature film based on an Ellroy book. James Harris' Cop, with James Woods in the title role, was based on Ellroy's "Blood On The Moon". I figured I'd give a shot at watching Brown's Requiem, which was supposed to have some nudity. While Brown's Requiem is not in the same league as LAC, I found it a decent watch. You have to understand, however, that I love excessively complicated stories about hardboiled down-on-their-luck detectives taking on the corrupt establishment, and I'll watch almost anything in this genre. Judging by the comments at IMDb and elsewhere, most fans of Mr Ellroy's writing seem to feel that this film is an excellent adaptation of the spirit of the book and its characters, but the film's overall rating is mediocre with general audiences. Hey, the film grossed $3000. That gives you a good idea of its mainstream appeal.

Ellroy's story has all the usual types of plot elements from L.A. corruption stories: a bit of father-daughter incest; an eccentric rich guy who lives with the homeless because he's afraid to sleep indoors; a corrupt chief of police who once fired our hero; grisly murders; obnoxious policemen. Like many such stories, it has a meandering focus. The detective (Michael Rooker) is hired to do one thing, but spends most of the time looking for his client. In fact, the true driving force of the story is the search for the client, which takes Rooker up and down the coast from LA to TJ.

Brown's Requiem was made on the cheap by an auteur who has no other credits at IMDb, so production values are not impressive, and the direction involves some unusual choices. Although voice-over narration is a staple of this genre, in fact a necessity because of the plot complexity issue, there is altogether too much of it in this film, and Michael Rooker is not an especially good narrator, so I sometimes felt like I was back in school, following along with something that the teacher had chosen an classmate to read aloud.

1. The film is supposed to be rated R for "violence, nudity and language". There is no nudity. There is some nudity in the trailer, which is also on the DVD, but that scene was cut from the film. Even that is not very impressive - it is a stripper wearing a thong, with tasseled pasties over her nipples. In the film itself, Selma Blair is seen in bikini underwear.

2. The ad on amazon.com says that there are deleted scenes on the DVD. There are none, although the trailer includes footage not in the film.

Call it a C-, an OK watch for genre nuts like me, but really designed for hardcore film noir buffs, not for mass audiences.

I rented A Reason to Believe when it first came out. There were shots of Holly Marie Combs' breasts and and some badly simulated sex. Nice, but nothing extraordinary. Recently, I came across MPEGs of the scene on two different sites. Both have a version that I didn't see when I rented the tape. I'm pretty sure that I would have noticed. In this version, Holly Marie takes a rubber out of the package and puts it on her lover's erect penis. Do you or one of the members of the Funhouse know the truth about two versions. I can't find any mention of an unrated version and there is no way that scene would have been rated R. I also can't find any mention of a foreign version. Also, I would love to see vidcaps of this in the Funhouse.

These are all the vidcaps we have. Graphic Response's collage shows the pee-pee in question, Arthur Dent's (1, 2) show the pantomime blow job, and Mr Skin's (1, 2) show much more of the topless portion of the scene.