 Hello, welcome to Celluloid Mirror. I'm your hostess, Betty St. Lavaux. On this particular show, we talk about film history, film definitions, and then we talk about movies. Today, I have a few lists, one in which is my particular favorite. And did I bring it today? Yes, I did. And I might have done this a few shows back. So fortunately, all can't stop me. So you're going to have to listen to it again. List is called Why Did The Black Man Have to Die First Again Mommy? And I love this list because years ago, my friend, Sarkisand, who happens to wear glasses, and I do too, watching movies. My friend, Sarkisand, goes, you know how the guy with the glasses always dies first? And we're watching the mummy with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weiss. And sure enough, the deal with the glasses got it first, right? So I did a check. And actually, guys with glasses get first. But black guys get it more often or so. I made up this list, I guess, about six or seven years ago. So we're going to check it out. All right, so the first movie that the black man dies first in is The Skulls. And this is where the dumbass reporter for the College News paper just has to go in because he knows Joshua Jackson is going to get admitted to the skulls, yada, yada, yada. This one also saw a star as Paul Walker. And it's a good beef liquor. The next movie that I happen to notice this phenomenal happening is The Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, and Morgan Freeman. And pardon me for laughing. Number one, Richard Harris, he's in my, I would dig him up club. I would dig them up club, meaning he's so sexy, I would dig him up. Yeah, I would. So he steals the movie by playing this dude called English Bob. So years ago, me, Sister Laura, and I, we're catching the end of The Unforgiven on TV. We don't know what's the end. And we're watching Morgan Freeman pardon me again. Get whipped to death. OK, so we're both instantly offended. We're both affronted. Never want to watch the movie again, so it's years later. And my ex-boyfriend, Peter, goes, you've got to watch The Unforgiven. I'm like, hell no, I'm never going to watch that. But watching it all the way through helped, even though it's, to me, the movie's a bit overrated, but it's actually Richard Harris' character. You don't see enough English Bob. Gene Hackman, of course, who will also place the heavy in Quick and the Dead, he wields the whip and he wields it with finesse. So anyway, that's the second one I checked out. The third movie is Vanishing Point, which is Barry Newman, who played the crooked lawyer in The Limey. Barry Newman was an actor who, for a moment, had a show called Petracelli playing a lawyer on NBC. He placed this guy who's driving this car to beat some record. I kind of forget the plots for a minute. Anyway, Cleveland Little has a big mouth, and I think his buddy is the one who gets it. His bodyguard's guarding him while he's giving a blow-by-blow a can of the race. All right, the next movie is License to Kill. And that's Timothy Dalton. And this is actually one of my favorite Bond movies, even though when I first saw it on the big screen, I was so offended and so shocked, I couldn't believe it. It was the most violent one. It was, I think, his second one. So at any rate, his friend Sharky, who's played by this great character actor, I can't remember his name, gets it, by the bad guys. All right, Robert Dovey plays the bad guy. Robert Dovey, Benetio de Toro, and Anthony Zero play the bad guys to make Sharky get it. So at one point, they're hauling the poor guy up, and Bond happens to see the whole thing. And he's hanging up, and some dude goes, his name really was Sharky, because it's a front for a shark expedition-type company. So he's the first one to get it. Then we've got Gangs of New York. And this rule is the rule of never be the only one. So at one point, towards the end, the big old riot happens, and it's an anti-war protest, I believe, I think, happened real nice in New York City. Anyway, the poor black man gets it. He's part of the gang, but he gets separated by his friends, and they string him up. I was like, good lord, but you know, I mean, that's filmmaking, or I mean, that's sort of easy filmmaking. I'm just saying, OK? So then we have Orphan, where C.C.H. Pounder, and I talked about this movie last week, C.C.H. Pounder. And my quote's here, why did you have to visit? So she's the first one, from what I remember, to get it in Orphan. The little girl gets her. It's like, bad none, bad none. You should have stayed at the Orphanage or whatever. Mind your own business. OK. Next, we've got Green Mile. Michael Clark Duncan. And for some reason, I put here, why you step in. But I think I put it because of the way he was walking to meet his death. I'm thinking that he was the first one to get executed. I wouldn't have put that down, but again, this list is six years old. I typed it up day after my birthday, it looks like. OK, so the next one, it's number eight. We're almost done. It's Apocalypse Snail. And it's the young GI, played by Lawrence Fishburne. Now back then, I think he was Larry Fishburne. He was only, I believe, only something like 14 years old, or 15 when he did this movie. I think he lied and he said he was 17. OK, if not, he was 17 and he lied and he said he was 21. He does an excellent, excellent job. The first time I saw this movie, I happened to own it. I was like, that's Lawrence Fishburne. Now, I would, Larry no more. It's Lawrence Fishburne, OK? So it's the part of the movie where things start to get creepy and awful, all right, for Mr. Martin Sheen there, tracking down Marlon Brando in the jungle acting like a crazy man. OK, next we've got, this is number nine. They live. Now, I'm kind of blowing part of the plot here, but I just got this movie via Kellogg Hubbard Library, Enter Library Loan. So I haven't seen it in a while. But yes, a lot of people get it in the movie, but one of the main characters, he gets it first. OK, I don't really want to blow too much to the movie. It's a great movie, very subversive, Rowdy Rowdy, Piper, and It's My Man, JC there. John Carpenter directed it, OK? And I think he wrote it too. Oh, no, it's based on a short story called 8 o'clock in the morning by an author I can't remember. Last but not least, we have Sudden Impact, which is Clint Eastwood and Saundra Locke, and his friend there, another great character actor who has shown up in Clint movies. I put here, don't go in that room, Oscar, because his friend Oscar gets it while Clint's on vacation. He comes to surprise him and the bad guys, do him in. All right, so I love this list. Much thanks to Paul Mooney, who is a legendary comic writer. He wrote jokes for Richard Pryor and many other famous comedians. He himself is right on another one of my non-quantical husbands. I know he's saying, she could only wish that some preppy black panther shouldn't have enough black movies on her shows to be my non-quantical wife. But I love Mr. Paul Mooney. He totally rocks. Check him out on reruns of Chappelle's Show. OK, so now we're going to go into our three movies today. This volume is called Remember When. Thank you, Mr. David Chase, for kind of helping me out with the title there. Paulie Walnuts, at one point, reminiscing. And Mr. Soprano there goes, remember when is sometimes the lowest common denominator in the conversation. However, when we're reviewing our past or movies that we love, remember when is a key component in what we like and what we don't like. So as our past makes our present, our present is certainly making our future. So the 90s, do you remember when? Remember being in your 20s, your 30s, some of you all in your 40s and 50s. But do you remember the 90s, late 90s, some of the best movies in Hollywood, best in terms of entertainment value came out. And we're going to check out those three. So on with the show. Now, the first one that I would like to discuss is You Turn by Oliver Stone. This one has everybody in it. It's got Bo Hopkins, Susan Hagerty, Brent Briscoe, Liv Tyler, Laurie Metcuff, Nick Nolte, Powers Booth, Sean Penn, Jennifer Lopez, Billy Bob Thornton, Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes, and last but not least, John Boyd. So this is a tour de force. I got to thinking, could it be classified as noir? And they actually classified it as noir. And it's set in the Arizona desert. It's about a four or five time loser. Sean Penn plays a tennis pro who has very bad luck with gambling and I think very bad luck in general. So when I first watched this movie back in the day, it was really a face for the senses. I realized that I was born in the Midwest but I became a Yankee when I was 12. So Midwestern Yankee, but I'm a Westerner by default because we all thought we were going to live out West first, the family, and then we ended up here in Vermont. So the thing is is that Ma still bought the house out in Arizona years ago. So I have dealings for the West and also I go to a college, a university in the West, college called Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona. So I love anything about Arizona. So remember when I remember back when I had no idea I was going to actually have an Arizona ID, which is actually lifetime ID because the politics out there are crazy and also go to college out there. So the big sweeping Pamoranos and Vistas of Arizona presented here will warm the cockles of you wanna be Westerner's heart. I'm just saying, okay? So yeah, it got a scathing review by Vandy Fair and this is not a love triangle type of plot, it's a quadrangle. So as our feckless, luckless Bobby played by, and I think that's his name in the movie, played by Sean Penn, his luck goes from bad to worse as he hits Superior, Arizona. And he becomes involved in a sort of, makes some money by killing somebody's scheme involving Nick Nolte and J. Lo. Unbeknownst to Bobby, everybody in Superior has their own agenda. He has agenda, he just wants to fix that beautiful common gear that he's got and gets the heck out of town, but this is going to prove to be a little bit tricky and it doesn't help that Billy Bob Thornton is the equations, which is a talkative mechanic who doesn't do a dang thing to his car, okay? So the movie might disturb some people, but for others, it was sort of boring because they felt like Mr. Oliver Stone had just pulled out all these bags of tricks that he had done before, but I actually enjoyed the movie quite a bit. I didn't know that I was in for a perverse black comedy, I thought, oh, an interesting thriller and yes, it was quite interesting. So, Bobby as a character would be likable if he stopped blaming other people for the problems that he has, and Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Dane steal the show as a couple of country bumpkins who pester him while he's just trying to get a cup of coffee. You gotta check that out. I think that's one of the funniest thing and the best thing I've ever seen Claire Dane stew is play Joaquin Phoenix as a girlfriend there. Okay, so, yeah, so this has lots of secrets, it's got lots of jump cuts and dissolves concerning the filmmaking, lots of slow-mo, bill slow-mo, flashbacks, yep, slecks with clothes on, I'm gonna say it, and actually J.Lo looks great. This was Jennifer Lopez's finest hour. I actually can't stand calling her J.Lo, but she made some extremely, the movies were really well crafted, the ones that she did back in the 90s. Out of Sight by Stephen Soberg and Angel Eyes with Jim Caviesel, which also had Sonya Braga, which was such a sleeper to me, but it was actually a very interesting tale and for sort of a ho hum, the cop has Psychological Problems Movie, Jennifer Lopez did a great job, so this is one of my favorite roles of her here in U-Turn. She is very sexy and she's lying, almost everything that comes out of her mouth will lie, all right, so part of Remember When is the fact that Nick Nolte and Powers Booth, they're both in this movie and back in the day when I was a kid, okay, in the 70s when there were just three networks and that mysterious UHF thing where you could watch shows like this on, okay? You had Peter Strauss, Robert Urik, Richard Chamberlain, all right, Nick Nolte and Powers Booth, and let's not forget David Jansen, who, if he hadn't died prematurely of a heart attack at 50, would have also become a big name Hollywood motion picture movie star, okay? So these three guys, wherever you saw, one could see the other, all right? There were lots and lots of made for TV movies. Now, there was a golden age of TV that was G.E. Westinghouse, Boris Karloff's show. There was 50s TV shows, which presented actors who would later go on to win Academy Awards, such as Charlton Heston, Eli Wallach, James Coburn, Lee Marvin, et cetera. Actors who were honing their craft, whether they were doing Actors Studio and the other one. I can't remember, sorry, Method Actors Studio and the other one, okay, Stella Adler, all right? They were honing their craft, and then before they got their big break in Hollywood, they were doing television. So in the 50s, there was incredible, incredible talent. Even Mr. William Shatner, okay, everybody was in television. So then there was another era that was just as Starling, and that was the era of 70s TV. That was the era of Mr. James Aubrey, who canceled every single show who had a tree on it, unless it was Gunsmoke, okay? William S. Paley, who ran CBS, loved James Lournes. But that was the only show throughout the 70s that was on the air on CBS that had a tree in it, okay? So under James Aubrey, we had television such as the Reiner's, Carl Reiner and his son Robb and Mr. Norman Lear, so we had comedy. But also in the 70s, you had the movie of the week, which was developed by, I want to say, Aaron Spelling was probably Barry Diller. In the 70s, Mr. Aaron Spelling was it. Charlie's Angels, the Rookies, you name it. He had his hands all over it, okay? And the guys who kind of run Hollywood now or Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, they worked under him. So nowadays, if you are a big name movie star, you can get a job on television. It used to be back of the day, if you had been on television, you could possibly make the transition into movies, but hard telling, not knowing. Not a lot of people made it, all right? So that is part of Remember When. Now let's go to our second movie, which I believe is Tounded Mr. Ripley, all right? So our first movie was made in 97, I think? Pretty sure it was made in 97, 97 or 99. Our second movie was made in 1999. It was directed and written by Anthony Mangella, written by James D. Born and Jack Davenport, and based on a book by Patricia Highsmith of the same name. And a movie was made in 1960 called Plain Soleil, Purple Noon, also based on the book, starring Alain Dillon. Alain Dillon is our famous movie star who once said, no one goes to the movies to watch their plumbers. However, there are a lot of cute plumbers in Vermont, so he had just never been to this particular part of the States, you know? But at any rate, he didn't say that quote. So both versions are awesome, fantastic. It has Matt Damon, the American version. Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Petrol, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kate Blanchett, Philip Baker Hall, I think that's his name. And yeah, so, we lived in Italy for a while when I was a kid. It is really that beautiful, this movie said in Italy. It is really that beautiful. The parts, and of course, Italy is different in the 50s when the book was set, I believe. Then it looked in the 70s when I was there as a child. So it looks very different today and it's still beautiful, but they happen to, where are the notes? They happen to film this movie, partly San Marco Venice. I've got the sites for it. San Marco and a couple of other places because Monge Bello is a fictional place, so this is the plot. Tom Ripley is down and out on his luck. He is mistaken as a classmate of a rich financier's shipbuilder's son. The man sends him to lure his son, played by Jude Law, back to the States so that he can work for his dad plus his mom is sick. So Jude and his, his name's Dickie Greenleaf in the movie and his girlfriend there, Gwyneth Patrell, her name is Marge, are, they take to Tom Ripley and they're friendly with him and he comes over and eats with them and drinks martinis and sooner or later he's enmeshed in his life and he becomes part of them because Tom, you know, he's not what he seems. What I write here is deceitful, hungry, greedy, cynical and a phony, a forger and a liar. However, his friend Dickie Greenleaf is no better. Dickie is a rich playboy and his millionaire status doesn't help him because he's a moral snobby, even though he does like his, he loves his girlfriend, Marge. He's a total bald-faced cat, he's a horrible, he's really a horrible person, violent. So what ensues, because Tom is a grifter and Dickie is a millionaire playboy spoiled snob is a tale that involves murder, suicide, deception, deceit, grifting of the worst order and heartbreak, okay? So the time period that it's set in is the fifties and I think that in terms of being remember when anyone who was a child back in the fifties, anywhere in the world can probably remember a simpler, more calmer life and I think that our director here, Anthony Mugella, who also wrote the screenplay, did a very fine job in translating that time period, translating the fifties to the nineties. This movie is a joy and a feast for the senses. It's really lovely to look at. Ms. Paltrow, she's playing herself, which is great, she's perfectly cast for that. My man there, Philip Seymour Hoffman, steals the show as a brutal preppy named Freddy Miles. We do not see enough of him in the movie. He actually only had about six weeks, I think, to prepare for the part from what I remember reading. I think I read that in GQ Magazine a little bit after the movie came out and I think he thought it was, I think it was one of his favorite roles, but don't quote me on that. Okay, so Mr. Damon is a great villain. He also played a piece of dirt in the, what was that one? The departed, okay? He's really good at villainy because he has like that chunky cheek kind of cuteness, which it's not my type of cute, but playing a villain, it's a good look. Timothy Oliphant has my kind of chiseled beauty, makes me kind of sigh, kind of like that type of jawline, but at any rate, check it out and check out the map of Italy and kind of see where they were all hanging out, all right? Now we are, oh, so, this particular movie, see if I can find it. I wanted to quote the statistics on it because I thought it was interesting how, all right, so put very briefly. Let's go back to U-turn for a second. U-turn was made for $19.9 million and it only grows $6 million. It wasn't very, it wasn't liked by the critics. It was sort of a bomb. I mean, when you only grow $6 million, it's a bomb, okay? So the movie we're talking about right now, and let me see if I've got the statistics for that. It actually had a fairly good showing at the box office, okay. That's, yeah, that's all right. I'll probably find the notes for that one as I'm finishing up our next movie, which is a movie I've done many times on the show. It goes under the heading of New York movies, movies about the devil, movies about Keanu Reeves, okay? And this is the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful devil's advocate, all right? And the reason why I put this movie in here is because, oh, here we go. This particular movie was made for $152 million, no, it was made for $57 million and grossed $152 million worldwide, which meant that it was pretty much hit. The couple critics who didn't like it, Roger Ebert and Kiko Kakutani, they didn't like the movie, but they've never made a movie for $51 million, so I have to disregard what, you know what I'm talking about. It's kind of hard to read the critics' diss a movie and yet they've either never picked up a film camera or have never learned the rudiments and secrets of digital editing, all right? So sorry, so this movie was great. And basically, I put this here because it falls in the 90s, but I've talked about it so often, so we'll just go over the cast. Craig T. Nelson, Charlize Theron, Connie Nielsen, Jeffrey Jones, Al Pacino, of course, Keanu, Deloitte Lindo, Don King, and Roy Jones playing themselves, and Tim Rottuny, Judith Ivory, Tim Rottuny and Judith Ivory, both soap opera veterans of television. Okay, so as we know, Al plays the devil, his name is John Milton in the movie and that's an homage to John Milton's Paradise Lost, which in turn pays homage to Dante Alighieri's Inferno, which is The Legend of Faust. Now, I get that all mixed up sometimes, so I had to go really carefully with that. Now, Brad Pitt was going to play Keanu Reeves' character, Kevin Lomax, but they couldn't find a devil. All right, but I don't think anyone wanted to play against Brad. Brad had just, I think around that time, had played Death and meet Joe Black with Anthony Hopkins, and that movie was, that movie, what a turkey. They should have said that for Thanksgiving. It was so awful. So Brad's not a good bet as a star. He's a good bet as a second banana. So the casting, the casting warms the cockles of me heart, the way everybody just did what they had to do here. So it's based on the book by Andrew Niederman. I really would like to read the book. And Keanu, as a matter of fact, I think hesitated to do this one because he had just made chain reaction with Morgan Freeman, another turkey. That was unwatchable, and it was set in Chicago. It was unwatchable, okay? So I'm glad that he decided to do this one. Okay, so I think that I have basically, here we go. Here's where, I knew that was gonna happen. These are the places where the beautiful talented Mr. Ripley were filmed. Isha and Proceda near Naples, that was Mongebello, and San Remo was, San Remo, near Rome, and San Marco Venice, sorry about that everyone. And it was produced for $40 million, and it made $128 million at the box office. Jude Law broke a rib in the boat scene, okay? All right, so I think that that's it for me today. This was a overly long show, but we had a lot of material to cover. I'd like to thank Gendron Building for its continued support over the years. I'd also thank St. Leveau Consultations and St. Leveau Lemonade Company. St. Leveau Lemonade made the St. Leveau way for taking time out to be here today, as well as my crew here at Orca, and to my mother, Sharon Ardela Warfield, Paris, Oceania Claridge for helping me appreciate and articulate my sensibilities about the silver screen until next time, babies. Stay away from those bad movies. Ciao.