'SOMETHING WILD'......REMEMBERING RAY LIOTTA....

 Something Wild (1986)    Probably every young struggling actor dreams to getting the equivalent of Ray Liotta's breakthrough, take-no-prisoners role in this movie.....

               .......to suddenly appear in the second half of what starts out as a cute quirky romantic comedy and then literally seize the movie by its throat, shove it into a blender, and by sheer force of performance turn the movie into something nobody saw coming.

                  In essence, hijacking the film and driving it 90 miles a hour in a completely different direction, rendering the storyline schizophrenic to the max.

                  Though made in 1986, "Something Wild" looked more like something that came out of the 1970's....... when the clueless movie studios would willingly greenlight oddball projects in their desperate attempts to figure out anything that might appeal to an audience they'd lost touch with.

                  In this day and age of bloated franchises, the chances of anyone ever again making a movie like this again fall somewhere between zero and you-gotta-be-shittin'-me. 

                   Credit director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye with taking a shopworn genre, standing it on its head and turning it inside out and backwards.

                  The genre we speak of goes back as far as the 1938 Howard Hawk screwball classic "Bringing Up Baby".....

                   You know the drill. An introverted stuffed shirt encounters a bubbly, devil-may-care Manic Pixie Dreamgirl who proceeds to turn his well ordered life into constant chaos in a series of madcap misadventures.  Laughs ensue.

                   In 'Something Wild', it's a button downed  yuppie (Jeff Daniels) who's taken on the thrill ride of his life by a blowsy, hot-to-trot babe (Melanie Griffith) who especially loves dine-and-dash scams perpetrated on restaurants and coffee shops. 

                    So adorable. So cute. So fluffy.

                   That is until Manic Pixie's violent, borderline psychotic ex-convict, ex-husband shows up.....played by young Ray Liotta. 

                    Not only does Liotta take control of the movie and the remainder of its storyline (a hairpin turn from romcom to thriller), he creates his very own signature role that he'd return to over and over again.......the tightly wound but still genial madman, wearing a thin veneer of affability that barely conceals his penchant for explosive rage. Only his maniacal laugh gives him away.....that sudden eruption of contagious guffaws likely to happen at any inappropriate moment. 

                    Ladies and gentlemen.......that's how a star was born. And so well sustained through the ensuing decades.

                     And regardless of whether he repeated his now patented Mr. Crazy role or took on all new more wide ranging acting challenges, we couldn't take our eyes off him.

                    That's why his passing, at only age 67 came as such a blow to both audiences and the cinema community. Because all of us felt he was the kind of actor who promised that still greater work lay ahead of him.  

                    R.I.P. Ray Liotta......you took us by storm with your very first film role, turning "Something Wild" into a 4 star (****) experience......and more than proved that as striking as that performance was, the best was yet to come. 

                  

FAREWELL MRS. PEEL AND MRS. JAMES BOND.....R.I.P. DAME DIANA RIGG

 Dame Diana Rigg - 1938-2020     

                 To paraphrase the opening song in "South Pacific".....there was nothing like a Dame.

                 She was Mrs. Peel, the karate-chopping, judo-hurling, jumpsuited goddess of our high school dreams in "The Avengers"

                  She was the Contessa Tracy di Vincenzo in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service, so alluring and extraordinary, she became the one and only woman who make James Bond embrace monogamy and marry her.

                   Essentially she was the first empowered woman superhero of the mid 20th century........stunningly beautiful and supremely gifted as an actress.

                    So many memorable roles followed.....on stage, in films and TV.......a lifetime of a legendary career in everything from "The Great Muppet Caper" to "Game Of Thrones"

                      A unique talent who in her youth re-defined what it meant to be "the girl" in action-adventure projects......her fierce intelligence served to make her a thousand times more desirable than any mere babe-of-the-week. 

                  And as her career progressed, she quickly established herself as pure royalty in the field of acting.......(and eventually awarded the title that went with it)

                   Rest in piece, Dame Diana.......from a lifelong admirer.....and big, big fanboy.

'LADY IN CEMENT'.......A MOVIE THAT'S LESS THAN FRANK WITH US......

Lady In Cement (1968)  Nothing but sour memories come to mind with one......and not just because it's a weary, lazy, exhausted followup to Frank Sinatra's 1967 Miami Beach private eye romp "Tony Rome".........

            We spent our college Christmas holiday break working along side our Dad at his Hi-Fi electronics store.....(we still sold 8 track tapes......Google 'em if you have no idea what we're talking about....)

             After our mild, uneventful adolescence, Dad and I had finally hit a brief patch of time when we couldn't stand each other, when every minute together seemed to end in a nasty petty argument. 

             Generation gap strife? Political divide? None of the above.......it just seemed like we rubbed each other the wrong way, in every possible way.......more like the kind of fights you'd see between two brothers rather than a father and son.....

             And so after a long day at the downtown Philadelphia store, we took in one of the many movies that opened Christmas week, "Lady In Cement".......a perfect father-son movie night.

              Except that we kept up the peeved snapping squabbles (over what I can't even remember) right up to arriving in the theater lobby. At one point, one or the other of us threatened to walk out of the theater and catch the Market Street street train to go home.......

              We can't say watching this film together made things any better. Sinatra wandered through the movie, barely staying awake. Raquel Welch, in her prime, showed up for the camera to linger over her spectacular superstructure.   Assorted shootings and murders occur, poorly staged and never really explained in any detail. You could smell the disinterest coming from Sinatra and rest of the cast......

               With two startling exceptions......a funny turn by "Bonanza"s Dan Blocker as a mountainous thug who periodically shows up to pound people senseless and toss Sinatra around as if he were a naughty toddler......and young Lainie Kazan, long before her days of playing hefty Jewish mothers, as a cheerfully seductive Go Go dancer. Her brief scene with Sinatra, dripping with sexual innuendo, dwarfs any similar posing by Raquel Welch, who in comparison, comes off like a slightly animated inflatable woman......

               The good news.......that bad time between the BQ and Dad quickly passed......we spent the rest of our days together as a loving, supportive father-son duo. The bad news.....49 years later, "Lady In Cement" still stinks on ice. And we're officially done ever returning to it. 1 star (*)    And Dad....if there's an afterlife and you check in on this blog.....love you.