Category Archives: Kitchen Sink

The Oscar (1966)

WTFFrankie Fane loves the limelight. As played by Fantastic Voyage’s Stephen Boyd in a big, barking dog of a performance, Fane — a mere one letter from “fame,” folks! — is the (self-)center of his own universe at the Academy Awards, where he’s up for his first Oscar as Best Actor, against such stiff competition as Burt Lancaster and Richard Burton. How he got to that big night plays out in feature-length flashback in — what else? — The Oscar.

We watch as Frankie goes from two-bit traveling stripper spieler to accidental actor to hot new thing to box-office poison to (gasp!) pining for a TV pilot before a from-nowhere nomination saves his bacon. Along the way, he uses and abuses everyone in his immediate orbit: the talent scout who discovers him (Eleanor Parker, Eye of the Cat), his agent (comedian Milton Berle, playing it straight), his bump-and-grinder of a girlfriend (a super-sexy Jill St. John, Diamonds Are Forever), his eventual wife (Elke Sommer, The Wrecking Crew) and his best friend and manager, Hymie (crooner Tony Bennett, in his one and only film role not playing himself). Forget The Oscar; the marquee should have read The Asshole.

Thanks to the books The Golden Turkey Awards, The Official Razzie Movie Guide, Bad Movies We Love and their ilk, The Oscar has carried the burden as one of Hollywood’s legendary stinkers since its release, which isn’t playing fair. Oh, the melodrama is overwrought, all right, but I suspect its tarnished rep is more a case of Tinseltown not appreciating the suggestion that all is not golden in the moviemaking biz — especially one with such a nut-kick of an ending!

Immensely entertaining, The Oscar effectively killed the upwardly mobile careers of Boyd and director Russell Rouse, who co-wrote the screenplay with his regular collaborator Clarence Greene (Academy Award winners themselves for Pillow Talk) and some new kid named Harlan Ellison. What’s a revolutionary sci-fi author like him doing in a star-studded pic like this? While not entirely sure, I wonder if he is to blame for Frankie’s lingo-laden hepcat dialogue — to wit:
• “You fat honey-dripper!”
• “I’m up to here with all this bring-down!”
• “You’ve gotta be shuckin’ me!”

More narcissistic viewers might read this cautionary tale as more of an instruction manual, like Valley of the Dolls. While the two don’t reside on the same level of camp, make no mistake: They fucked. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

WTFOn an alternate timeline in an alternate America, a civil war with questionable sides rages on as everyday people try to survive by ignoring it. As the despot president begins to face his last few hours of life, the ubiquitous television network decides to hold a rather sketchy benefit concert for either the victims of the war or the promoter’s sizable debts, whichever comes first.

To play the show, they spring from prison the troubled troubadour of this timeline, Jack Fate. As he surveys the broken country with a wide array of name-brand actors, dropping abstract mantras and humanistic tantras, things continue to fall apart as Fate and his band perform some death-defying tunes in preparation for the last night of America as they seem to know it.

This remarkably prescient travelogue was conceived by (and starring) Bob Dylan, by the way.

One of the most woefully ignored films of the past 20 years, Masked and Anonymous is the dystopic present presented as a bitter song of broken hearts, hard-edged and mean-spirited in a way that refuses to give answers or, even worse, reasons for anything that it presents on screen and in theory.

And while that is usually something that might irritate most people, here, through Dylan and director Larry Charles’ acidic pen, it all seems like it was just two decades too early. With the threat of wars, pestilence, famine and death riding just over our own horizon, we don’t need to know the hows and whys anymore; we just gotta turn on the TV and figure out a way to survive it.

Dylan as Fate is, ironically, the movie’s Everyman; when he says, “I stopped trying to figure things out long ago,” it’s the only way to make sense of the shit that rolls down from on high, both in the film and in our own damnable lives, guaranteed no tomorrows. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

The Assistant (2019)

WTFFresh from a well-deserved Emmy win for the Netflix crime series Ozark, Julia Garner faces arguably more dangerous territory in — and as — The Assistant, set entirely within one workday. As the lowest rung of a Miramax-esque film company in New York City, her Mary stays busy making copies, fielding phone calls, washing dishes, balancing checks and fetching water — glass-bottled, of course. Across the movie’s 87 minutes, we watch her perform so many menial tasks, you may feel like you deserve three hours’ internship credit.

Most of The Assistant is as dull as Mary’s day, until signs of her boss – who’s heard but never seen — become more common. He’s the film’s ersatz Harvey Weinstein, a blustery, berating bully apparently more interested in chasing tail rather than talent. As Mary navigates this toxic environment, culminating in a futile meeting with an HR representative (Matthew Macfadyen, 2010’s Robin Hood), her soul slowly deflates like a balloon days after the party, air seeping from Garner’s perpetually sour pucker. Yet nothing really happens, in terms of story.

Unconventional documentarian Kitty Green makes her narrative debut with The Assistant, yet the pulse of her previous project, Casting JonBenet, cannot be located. Her film may have nailed the #MeToo timing, but is itself something of a quiet slog. In keeping the audience from hearing (except in select occasions) the other end of the movie’s many phone conversations, which constitute a good chunk of dialogue, Green keeps the viewer from engaging with her material. It’s an odd directorial choice — one I respect, although don’t necessarily like.

Make no mistake: The Assistant is not the finely tuned workplace thriller it’s expertly sold to be. Its themes of sexual harassment will attract the curious, only to yield wildly mixed results: cathartic for a few, a horror show to a few more, and baffling to most everyone else. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)

WTFWho, we may ask, was Lon Chaney?

The classic Universal biopic Man of a Thousand Faces starring James Cagney tries most nobly to answer that question, but does so with such a press release-approved veneer of old Hollywood that, instead, it’s far easier to view this entertaining flick as more of a fictionalized take rather than a mildly hard-hitting expose on the life of a horror legend.

What’s most surprising about this movie, I think, is how surprisingly pro-deaf it is; apparently, in the first half of the 20th century, people with lack of hearing abilities were treated like monstrous abominations. When people learn that Chaney’s parents were deaf, they typically offer glareful glances and snarled lips; Chaney’s first wife, Cleva (Dorothy Malone), practically turns into an alcoholic shrew when she meets his parents on Christmas Eve, running from the dinner table screaming.

Still, despite this soundless adversity, Chaney’s path to greatness continues on, going from the halcyon days of vaudeville to the latest invention of moving pictures, working steadily as an extra alongside brutal Asian and Indigenous stereotypes. Using his incredible makeup skills, Chaney’s even able to take their meager roles away in various bit parts. Hollywood!

As Chaney works his way up the ladder of success, Cleva drinks a bottle of acid on stage and their son, the unfortunately named Creighton, is put in foster care. Using this as a catalyst, Chaney goes on to become the biggest star in Tinseltown, unafraid to place himself under tons of makeup and prosthetics, earning himself the nickname of the “man of a thousand faces.”

He soon dies of bronchial lung cancer for his troubles.

Directed with a well-earned heavy hand by Joseph Pevney, Man of a Thousand Faces is, like much of Chaney’s work, most enjoyable when Cagney is behind the wonderfully redesigned makeup himself, allowing the actor to emote behind the various masks. Sadly, much of the film — practically an hour and a half — is instead dedicated to Chaney’s war with his wife, which really kind of reeks of cinematic revenge porn.

But, you know, when I say it out loud, “porno revenger” is a role that I’m sure Chaney could have made his own as well. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Casos de ¡Alarma! 1: SIDA (1986)

WTFThe sensational Mexican newsmagazine ¡Alarma! is legendary for the graphic violence and tremendous sex contained within in its bestselling pages, with images of severed heads and mutilated corpses right on the cover, usually in blazing full color. I’ve got a couple of old copies if you really want to take a look at one.

In 1986, the fotonovela titled Casos de ¡Alarma! made it to the big (well, big in Mexico) screen in a film subtitled SIDA or, as it’s more popularly known in America, AIDS. Of course, it’s a highly melodramatic and deeply pungent story that, even for the time, is hilariously uninformed about the disease. But, I guess if you’re watching a film from the makers of ¡Alarma!, you’re really not looking for integridad periodística.

A moody young man named Rodolfo (Servando Manzetti) comes to a small rural town, with uncomfortable flashbacks to an apparent murder as he looks out the window wistfully on the bus. Seems he’s confused about his sexualidad ever since a kid (who resembled a young John Candy) molested him at boarding school, leading to a life of being taken advantage of by old men and, for the most part, he didn’t really hate it.

However, when he meets atractiva clothes-washer Carolina (Alma Delfina), it energizes the fuerza de vida machista pura inside him, but, consequently, he gives her SIDA. Then, despite the romantic ranchera musical numbers by the mayor’s son, Ausencio (Julio Aldama), to her, he vengefully sexually assaults Carolina and that gives him SIDA, too, which apparently has a gestation period of three months before you die a horrible death on a tractor.

At two hours, the thing is surprisingly filled with dumb comedy, tired gay stereotypes and plenty of punishing filler. Regardless, it’s still very much like the death-obsessed magazine, from a bordello of breast-heaving prostitutas to the bloody gundown of Carolina from an angry padre; this first volume of Casos de ¡Alarma! is remarkably trashy and fully exploitative of the absolute temor surrounding SIDA at the time. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.