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Dog Day Afternoon – 5 stars

June 26, 2024
5 stars, 70s, Crime/Mystery, Drama
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I took my cat to the vet yesterday and had that strange interregnum – too late to go back to work and too early to have a drink. So I flipped on the TV and lo and behold, Dog Day Afternoon was starting.

“Prescient” doesn’t even begin to capture Sidney Lumet’s masterpiece. Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) rob a bank in Brooklyn and before you know it, everything goes to shit, it’s a hostage situation, and they are surrounded by 100 cops, led by the overmatched and harried Charles Durning.

This is one of those 70s “New York City seems like hell” flicks. The robbery occurs on a sweltering summer day, and the police seem itching to gun down Pacino if only to get out of the heat. But soon, the TV cameras roll in, the crowds arrive, and before you know it, Pacino is a street-performer, not negotiating so much as whipping everyone up, screaming, “Attica! Attica!” and otherwise savoring the moment and, for lack of a better phrase, sticking it to “the Man.” His rage and theatrics are infectious. The crowd bays, bystanders want “in”, the hostages (plucky New Yorkers all) play-act and become featured cast members, and soon, the cops are the ones being led by the nose. Everybody has their 15 minutes.

But Sonny’s ride must end. Sal is a dimwit (when Pacino asks him what country they should fly to in escape, Cazale responds, “Wyoming”). The origins of the heist – to get money for Sonny’s boyfriend Chris Sarandon’s sex change – become public when Sarandon is sprung from a suicide attempt at Bellevue to come talk some sense into Pacino. The hostages start to lose the fun of it as well, and Cazale’s biggest worry becomes the fact that the networks are reporting “two homosexuals” in the bank. When Pacino is put on the line with his wife, you can see how he could be driven to such extremes and also what an awful person he has been to her. His mantra is, “I’m dying.” He is, in front of us, in slo-motion, but we sense we’ve missed a lot of the decline.

There is a great scene where the manager, having suffered a diabetic episode, is tended to by a doctor, gets his shot and chooses to stay with his employees:

               As Sonny grabs him to try to help him up, Mulvaney wrenches

               away.  A little physical here.

                                     SONNY

                         Hey!  I’m tryin’ to help you.

                                     MULVANEY

                         I stay here.  Damn it.  I just needed the insulin.  I’m used to it.

                         Go on.  Go on.

                                     SONNY

                              (to Doctor)

                         You tell me.  Is he endangering his

                         health, because if you tell me he

                         is, I’ll get him out.

                                     MULVANEY

                         I’ll be God damned if you will.

                                     SONNY

                         Oh, Jesus!  You want to be a martyr

                         or a hero or what?

                                    MULVANEY

                         I don’t wanta be either, I just want

                         to be left alone.  You understand

                         that?  I wish the fuck you never

                         came in my bank, that’s all, don’t

                         try to act like you’re some angel of

                         human kindness!

You can see Pacino’s hurt.  As if maybe he really thought this would work out and that he is a good man.

But soon, the FBI take over, and they are helluva lot more together than poor Durning and company.

Pacino is riveting,  alternately electric and doomed, eliciting your scorn and then sympathy. He’s all furtive energy minus the excess and “hoo ah!” You know this had to go bad, and so does he, and it’s depressing to see him hope, just for a minute, and then know he’s a loser and finished. Sarandon is fantastic (he was nominated for supporting actor), ridiculous and yet, affecting in his affectations, as if he knows he’s absurd but can’t shake the affliction.

It won an Oscar for Frank Pierson’s (Presumed Innocent, Cool Hand Luke) original screenplay, which doesn’t have a false note in it.

Presumed Innocent – 3.75 stars

June 20, 2024
3 stars, 90s, Crime/Mystery
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Crisp and taut work by the reliable Alan Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men), expert enough that you don’t think about the silliness of it all until the end.

And boy is it silly.

Harrison Ford, with a bad haircut, plays a deputy prosecutor (Rusty Sabich) who has an affair with a subordinate colleague, Greta Shacchi. She is young, exciting, a risk taker, and sexually promiscuous/irresistible.

Rusty, however, is a family man with a loving Plain Jane wife (Bonnie Bedelia), a nice suburban brick house, and a lot to lose. When Scacchi is brutally murdered, Rusty is given the task of prosecuting the killer. But the evidence implicates Ford and soon, he is fighting for his life, enlisting top flight defense lawyer Sandy Stern (Raoul Julia) to defend him. Turns out Scacchi slept with pretty much everybody in the entire judiciary system. Rusty just wasn’t all that special and she was no wide-eyed ingenue, despite his own obsession with his young charge.

Then the twist. [SPOILERS ON A 34 YEAR OLD MOVIE FOLLOW]

Bedelia, sensing the younger woman’s threat to her own family, is the killer! But it’s not enough for her to eliminate the competition, she must teach Rusty a lesson, tame him. So she not only killed his lover, but, per Wikipedia, “left enough evidence for Rusty to know that she committed the crime but did not anticipate him being charged.”

How?

She secreted Rusty’s semen and put it in the dead woman!

Jiminey Christmas! That’ll teach him.

[Side note – how depressing – Rusty and wife are clearly past child-bearing age and what, they’re still using condoms? I mean, I supposed she could have saved it another way, but that seems even more diabolically comical].

Thankfully, for Rusty, Stern is a capable defense attorney, the coroner misplaced the semen sample, a mug with Rusty’s prints found at the scene was disappeared by his investigator pal and even better, Scacchi also slept with the judge (Paul Winfield), for whom she was soliciting bribes.

Case Dismissed.

Maybe one of the dumbest whodunnits ever, the flick came on the heels of Fatal Attraction, the lesson of both being, “Don’t cheat on your wife. Seriously. Don’t.”

Still, it was plenty entertaining as long as you didn’t think too much about it.

Or perhaps think about it at all.

They just released a remake of this on Apple with Jake Gyllenhaal playing the role of Ford. We tuned in for the first episode, which was not good. Gyllenhaal is too young, too emotional, and borderline oafish, and the set-up is wearyingly predictable. Plus, the key to Scott Turow’s novel and the first picture is that Rusty is kind of ordinary schlub entranced by a sexpot. Jake Gyllenhaal is no ordinary schlub and can’t play one. Worse, Gyllenhaal’s Rusty is so into the Scacchi character, even post-mortem, he’s in therapy. Which we get to see. Which sucks.

If it is any consolation, apparently, they have taken care of any import of slut-shaming the Scaachi character. Which is kind of dumb, because Scaachi wasn’t slut-shamed in the original. Rather, she was just breezily promiscuous, manipulative, ambitious, and corrupt. Per Vanity Fair, now, she “cares” for Rusty – blech – a fact I don’t have the time or inclination to confirm.

Dune: Part Two – 4.75 stars

June 5, 2024
2024, 4 stars, Sci-Fi
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iPhones to films are what mustard is to ice cream.  In the theater, they are pernicious, and I yearn for the day when those who are on their devices during a picture are summarily placed in stocks in front the multiplex where they can be freely pelted with Milk Duds and Cherry Icees.

At home, the impact is no better, but at least you’re only draining your own brain.

That said … the iPhone test is real, and it is reliable.

If you are watching a movie, and you feel the urge to check your texts, a sports score, or social media, or Bumble, you should resist that urge.

But the existence of the urge is telling you something valid.

Well, more than one thing.  Primarily, it is telling you that your attention span has so deteriorated that you lack the capacity to engage singularly with art.  You might think you’re a keen multitasker, or that your capabilities to receive the flow of information from many sources simultaneously makes you special. But you’re wrong.  You’re just mentally degraded, and it will only get worse, until the apocalyptic end, when we are caught flat-footed by Skynet because we are gobbling increasingly dumber morsels of bite-sized shit that has been pre-packaged, pre-engineered, and pre-spiced to scratch the itch Zuckerberg identified and aggravated so we could keep coming back to his mental Calamine.

Speaking of spice, I liked Dune plenty, though it was too dark, too grey and a bit anticlimactic. While it was one of the first movies I saw in the theater post-COVID, I didn’t review it, but I dug it.

Dune: Part Two has hit HBO Max and it is long.  So long, I needed two nights, because I get sleepy.  But I was drawn in and eventually, riveted, and now find myself yearning for the next installment.

Denis Villeneuve has created an epic, grand, sweeping yarn with a lot of truly fine actors, and the world created is adult, forbidding, and intriguing.  A full recap is unnecessary, but there is a Game of Thrones quality, with Great Houses vying for a facsimile of oil (spice) as well as the emperorship and control. There is also sinister magic, geopolitics, religious fanaticism, hand-to-hand fighting, big ass sandworms, and a love that dare not speak thy name (Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet).

Full disclosure: we paused the movie because at my advanced age, I have to pee more than I’d like.  And I did a quick rinse of the dishes because I hate when the food sticks.

But I don’t think I thought about looking at my phone.

One nit – Christopher Walken is now such a caricature, he just doesn’t work outside of quirky, comedic roles.  As an emperor, he shambles in (actually, kind of phones it in), and distracts.