CURRY UP

Just last week The Wife and I watched a favorite of ours, the broadly played, badly underrated 1991 gangster farce Oscar...

It’s an ensemble piece with a huge cast led by Sylvester Stallone, with great turns by Peter Riegert, Ornella Muti, Chazz Palminteri, Harry Shearer, Martin Ferrero, Vincent Spano, William Atherton, Kurtwood Smith, Ken Howard and many others. Vets like Don Ameche, Kirk Douglas and Yvonne DiCarlo are in it, and it’s also one of the very first films of Marisa Tomei.

But probably the biggest reason The Wife and I love it is Tim Curry’s performance. Curry, who left us this week at the age of 80--just a day after the passing of the angelic Dolly Parton--plays the cheery linguist Dr. Thornton Poole, trying to teach Stallone’s gangster “Snaps” Provolone to enunciate properly. Dr. Poole savors each syllable he speaks with lusty relish, turning his pupil’s name—"Pro-vo-LONE-ay” into a joyous feast.

I think it’s Curry’s second-best performance, after Frank in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Or, possibly, it’s Curry’s third-best performance, after his work in 1988’s Pass the Ammo. This way-too-obscure send-up of televangelism, as far as I can tell, has never had an official DVD release. It ought to be more of a cult favorite, at least among Tim Curry geeks. If you fall into that category, seek it out.

Curry plays Ray Porter, who with his wife Darla (the heavenly Annie Potts) presides over a lucrative tele-church station in small-town Arkansas. Darla’s a sincere believer whose religious ecstasy tends to make her shed layers of clothing; Ray’s a priapic lecher and gleeful con man.

The trouble starts when a trio of rednecks (Bill Paxton, Dennis Burkley and Glenn Withrow) stage an armed raid on the station with the crazed idea of getting back the fortune that the grandmother of Paxton’s girlfriend (Linda Kozlowski) donated to Ray and Darla’s ministry. The plan goes awry and the station is surrounded by cops, then by a posse of arms-bearing locals, and then by the Arkansas National Guard. The desperate Paxton and his pals take the whole station hostage and start grandstanding on TV.

If you’re a Curry aficionado and have never experienced his turn as the grinning, honey-drawling mountebank Ray Porter, you really should try to hunt up an old VHS copy of this; you’re in for a treat. But he’s by no means the whole show. As with Oscar, this is an ensemble piece. Annie Potts is both delectable and touching as Darla; Burkley and Withrow are a riot as the good-ol’-boy accomplices and Leland Crooke is endearing as a sympathetic Cajun sheriff trying to resolve the mess without bloodshed.

The supporting cast includes such venerable veterans as Logan Ramsay, Richard Paul and Brian Thompson, but the real standout is Anthony Geary, in a performance that shows what he was capable of when you got him away from soaps, as Stonewall, the ministry’s sell-out hippie TV director, tolerated by the ministry’s management for his technical deftness and his willingness to exploit the visual splendors of Darla. I love the moment when one of the evangelicals indignantly tells Stonewall he doesn’t believe he’s saved, and Geary replies "You don’t?” in a delicately wounded tone.

Pass the Ammo is played very broadly, and it’s not without its detractors--Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide gave it a BOMB rating. But I’ve always found it trenchant without being mean-spirited. The essential decency of characters like Darla, the Sherriff and Stonewall, and even the zest and lovability of the unconscionable Ray, give the movie a generous heart. It could almost be called inspirational.

It also contains a (very) minor historical footnote, in the character of the weakling boy-Governor (Jim Holmes). It’s probably the first-ever movie caricature of the young Bill Clinton, just before people outside the south began to hear of his existence.

Anyway, as my friend Owen would say, Ave, Magister to Curry, and also to the glorious Dolly; The Wife and I just watched her in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Peace and joy eternal to them both.

SHIP HAPPENS

Now playing in the multiplexes:

Mutiny--Since the massive success of Die Hard in 1988, American action pictures have gone through a long phase of "Die Hard in a..." [whatever]. So, Under Siege (1992) with Steven Seagal was Die Hard on a Navy ship. The Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Sudden Death (1995) was Die Hard in a hockey stadium. White House Down (2013) with Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx was Die Hard in the White House.

The format is the same—a skilled action hero, mostly alone though sometimes aided by allies, takes on a gang of repulsive, heavily armed organized mercenaries or terrorists in an enclosed environment, and screws up their efforts to do something nasty. Last weekend brought Mutiny, which could be called Die Hard on a cargo ship.

Our hero this time is Jason Statham as a bodyguard who's framed for the murder of his shipping tycoon boss and friend. Disguised as one of the killers, he sneaks aboard a ship out of Bangkok and out at sea finds it to be a human trafficking boat crewed, to a man, by scummy lethal thugs. Very quickly he starts ruining their day by gruesomely ending their lives.

A newly assigned young Third Officer (Annabelle Wallis), the only crew member not in on the crime, helps Statham in his efforts to save the refugees. The shrewd captain (Adrian Lester) of a nearby U.S. Naval ship is also in his corner.

Directed by Jean-Francois Richet from a script by Lindsay Michel and J. P. Davis, and produced in part by Statham's own production company, Mutiny is a deft, tightly-paced pleasure; one of the better straightforward action flicks I've seen in a while. The trick is that the villains here are so thoroughly odious, and their victims so poignant, that it's extremely satisfying when Statham mutilates them.

Richet also avoids the sort of cartoonish, over-the-top action—heroes being blown to safety by the force of huge explosions, as a friend of mine likes to put it—that has made so many action movies of recent years seem so silly. The fights and feats we see in Mutiny probably aren't that much more realistic than those in, say, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning or Bad Boys: Ride or Die, but Richet handles them with a lower-key tone that makes them more believable, and Statham's quietly warm manner helps with this as well.

Until toward the end, that is. Statham's final clash with main bad guy involves injuries to both men that seem hard to survive, let alone to continue mortal combat with. But the movie doesn't truly tip over into camp until the last line--indeed, the very last word--at which even Mickey Spillane might roll his eyes.

THE ERIE WORLD REJOICES

Travelogue time! Here are a few images from Your Humble Narrator's recent quick trip to his beloved home town of Erie, Pennsylvania and environs. The Wife and The Kid took a pass on this trip; The Kid couldn't get the time away from work, and The Wife couldn't bear to leave Stewie in a kennel. But I flew into Cleveland, where I began to luxuriate in the heavenly weather--by comparison to Phoenix, that is--the moment I stepped out of the terminal.

On the drive from Cleveland to Erie, I stopped off at The White Turkey in Conneaut, Ohio...

...to enjoy a root beer float...

Wish I had built time into my visit to go to Conneaut's Lake Erie Monster Fest, presumably devoted to "South Bay Bessie," sightings of whom supposedly date back to the 1700s...

Once in Erie, I visited with various beloved siblings, nephews, nieces etc...

Erie's famous Mighty Fine Donuts were consumed...

...as were Romolo's Chocolates...

I got to join our friends Lory and Tom to see our beloved Erie Seawolves...

...though not, alas, on an evening when they were in their Erie Moon Mammoths persona. They beat the Akron RubberDucks 3-2, and I got a very weird-looking selfie with Seawolves superfan and curmudgeon-in-residence "Red" Laurie...

I got to hang out at Coney Island Grill and later at Perkins with two of my oldest, dearest friends, Ron Strecker and, for the first time in almost forty years, childhood pal Mike Wenzel...

...as well as Ron's parrot Kiko, now in his forties...

My pal Stan and I took a road trip east to Westfield, New York, to a marvelous used bookstore there called Mumpsimus Books...

Ever heard of a "mumpsimus," by any chance? I certainly had not. Turns out it's a term dating back at least to the Renaissance--Erasmus mentions it--for an error stubbornly persisted in even after it's been corrected; supposedly it originated with a priest who used "mumpsimus" for "sumpsimus" in the Latin mass and continued to do so after the error was pointed out to him. A great word for our time; maybe the U.S. should be renamed "Mumpsimerica."

Then on Sunday came the Moorhead Family Reunion at the Fiddle Inn in Harborcreek, my Dad's beloved home away from home, where I got to hang out with still more beloved family...

...and eat a delicious walleye sandwich...

...while rain poured outside.

It can feel banal to talk about the passage of time, as if you're the first person that ever noticed it. But it really hit me on this trip, everywhere I looked. I kept remembering stuff like the evening in 1975 when I picked up the phone and heard my late brother-in-law, out of breath, telling me about the birth of my nephew, and how strange it was to think that I was now staying in the beautiful home of that same nephew, now fifty years old, and his beautiful wife.

Then back I went to Phoenix, and the appalling heat. I barely got the Romolo's Chocolate home un-melted.

CLAW PATROL

It's a big dino-weekend! This week my pal Darryl and I checked out The End of Oak Street, opening today, and made a new friend at the screening...

You can read my Phoenix Magazine review here, along with my review of Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie...

HARD DAY'S NIGHT

Now playing:

One Night Only--Based only on the title and the poster, audiences may not go in expecting dystopian sci-fi. I didn't. But the premise of this romantic comedy is, quite exactly, The Purge, except with sex instead of violence.

Up front we are told that three years before the movie started, "The Mandate" outlawed premarital sex in America except for a single 12-hour period in summer. There's some amusingly interwoven exposition to explain how this is enforced, and some clever background gags in the signage or on TV, but the plausibility or implications of this liebesverbot aren't the point.

The movie is really about our heroine Allie (Monica Barbaro) and our hero Owen (Callum Turner) getting together and realizing they're meant for each other before the time is up. He's a pizza chef; she's a singer who makes her living with embarrassing jingles for pharmaceutical commercials but can't bring herself to deploy her pipes onstage in front an audience.

Dateless on the big day, they wander the lust-saturated streets of New York, crossing and re-crossing each other's paths while chasing after false leads and suffering wacky humiliations. Directed by Will Gluck of Easy A from a script by Travis Braun, One Night Only starts off excellently, with ingenious set-ups and a nice big ensemble of character players--Maya Hawke, Molly Ringwald and Levar Burton, to name only three--along with some surprise cameos.

The movie gets messier and less assured in its overextended third act, as if Gluck and Braun felt obligated to pile on unnecessary complications. By the end, the night feels way too long. But a movie like this fails or succeeds on the degree to which we like the leads and want to see them find each other. Turner and Barbaro's relationship progresses to the next station of fond, amused familiarity each time they meet, so that even when they're presented with glamorous alternatives, it's believable that they would opt for each other.

Turner is winning in his nice guy role; he has a touch of Channing Tatum's sweetness while giving off a sharper sense of intelligence. But One Night Only truly serves as a showcase for Barbaro, the striking young actress who played Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown. Maintaining her dignity here in a precariously revealing dress, with smiles and quiet chuckles escaping onto her face despite the travails she's facing, she gives us a romantic heroine we can wholeheartedly root for.

SPIN CYCLE

Check out my review of Spider-Man: Brand New Day...

...now in the multiplexes, online at Phoenix Magazine.