Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)

Dir. Spike Lee

Written by Spike Lee & Bill Gunn

Starring Stephen Tyrone Williams, Zaraah Abrahams, Elvis Nolasco, Felicia Pearsons

So, it turns out Spike Lee’s contribution to our current cultural movement of pushing the media ever further into an all-vampire-all-the-time format is pretty weird. I mean, it’s even weirder than the phrase “Spike Lee is making a vampire love story” would suggest, and frankly I’m not sure that sentence even makes sense. If I just read that phrase and I hadn’t seen the finished product for myself, I would assume there was a translation error or something before I would believe it was a real thing. But nonetheless, I can assure you, it is real. I have seen it. And it’s a weird one.

When last we checked in on the ongoing and baffling trend of indie auteur darlings making inexplicable vampire films for no discernable reason, it was Jim Jarmusch’s ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE which was flummoxing us. That one was almost wholly an exercise in dreamy atmosphere -- probably a little too dreamy, in fact; at times it’s nearly comatose. So I was counting on Lee to address the balance by making a different kind of vampire film. Lee comes with his own set of problems, but the one thing he’s never been accused of is understating anything. So even once you’ve managed to accept the idea that he’s making a vampire film, there’s at least one more shocking surprise in store for you: DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS is, if anything, even more slow, quiet, and dreamy than ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE. What the fuck is happening to the world!?

Now I gotta be honest with you. I have a superpower. It’s not super strength or telekinesis or something useful like that. I’m more like one of those poor sad mutants you see in the background who have an extra eye that can see microwaves, or they lay eggs, or they’re just real ugly. The kind that never get invited to join the X-Men, and when they ask there’s a real awkward moment where Wolverine or somebody has to unconvincingly tell them they’re all full up at the moment but if you’ll just leave your resume dot dot dot. In my case, my superpower is that I’m incapable of not enjoying a Spike Lee movie. I’ve seen, I believe, every one of his theatrically released films except HE GOT GAME and SHE HATE ME, and liked all of them and loved most, even the ones that most people hated. From wildly unwieldy recent fare like MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA to wildly uneven masterworks like RED HOOK SUMMER to wildly provocative button-pushers like BAMBOOZLED to wildly ingratiating crowd-pleasers like MALCOLM X to even the wildly unnecessary OLDBOY REMAKE… they’re all fierce, wild things of beauty, filled to the brim (and often spilling over the brim) with ideas, love, anger, politics, and raw, ragged humanity.

But DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS isn’t like that. Where Lee is usually passionate and provocative to a fault, here he takes the exact opposite approach: JESUS is languid and vague and cold. It’s a very strange approach that doesn’t really suit his talents very well and results in the first and only Spike Lee movie that I probably dislike more than I like, though of course there are pockets of greatness here as well.

A big part of the problem is that this isn’t really a Spike Lee movie at all. Despite the credits identifying the film as “an Official Spike Lee Joint” (a jab at his previous film, the studio-compromised remake OLDBOY, which carries the more impersonal “A Spike Lee Film”), there’s a ghost haunting the entire production, one Lee seems beholden to to the film’s detriment. That ghost is the 1973 avant-garde horror(?)/art film GANJA AND HESS, and its writer/director/co-star Bill Gunn. DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS is not billed as a remake, but in fact it’s in many cases a direct scene-for-scene, shot-for-shot copy of its predecessor, to such an extent that Lee gives co-writer credit to Gunn (who died in 1989).

That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. GANJA AND HESS is a pretty amazing movie; a talky, philosophical, sexy, mysterious and engrossing acid trip through some bizarre funhouse mirror of Black American anxieties in the early 70’s. And DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS clearly understands and aspires to those superlatives as well; it mimics the movements of GANJA AND HESS obsessively, changing a few details but openly and faithfully aping GANJA AND HESS’s unique blend of dreamy philosophy, mysterious plotting, and sexual frankness.

The story, such as it is, is pretty simple: wealthy anthropologist and African art collector Dr. Hess Greene (Stephen Tyrone Williams, primarily a stage actor) is attacked by an unstable assistant (the excellently-named Elvis Nolasco, small parts in CLOCKERS and OLDBOY REMAKE), who stabs him with an ancient African dagger and then kills himself. Greene seems to die, but then mysteriously awakens as an invincible, immortal being who must have human blood in order to live. When the assistant’s estranged ex-wife Ganja (Zaraah Abrahams, British TV shows Waterloo Road and Coronation Street) shows up looking for her husband, she and Greene quickly become lovers and in time she becomes a vampire too. Eventually, however, Greene begins to tire of his new supernatural life.

The story itself isn’t particularly the point, though; Gunn wrote the original with the stated intention of using vampirism as a metaphor for addiction, but the finished product is even stranger and more surreal than that -- it’s a disorienting, mysterious dream. The problem with Lee’s remake here isn’t that the source material isn’t great, or that Lee isn’t great. The problem is that they’re both great for entirely different reasons with staggeringly little in common save their interest in race, which is somehow both a completely central and maddeningly inconsequential point of reference. Race is obviously enormously important to the film and its whole perspective, and yet it’s in subtle, slippery ways which don’t exactly add up to a coherent point. What does GANJA AND HESS have to say about the African-American experience? I don’t know, exactly… and the problem is I don’t think Lee really knows, either. Lee obviously knows the movie is great, but I suspect his slavish devotion to the inexplicable narrative rhythms of the original are the result an attempt to backward-engineer a intricately complicated device which he does not fully understand.

That’s a problem for an artist as strong as Lee is, because it means he’s unusually restrained here. He seems fearful that if he adds too much of himself, he’ll alter the delicate chemical alchemy that make the movie great to begin with -- and he’s right. But he’s also incapable of exactly recreating the original work --let alone the context-- in a way that recaptures its original potency. His attempt to rebuild a piece of art which he doesn’t entirely understand --and maybe doesn’t even have a concrete explanation-- piece by piece ends up feeling alienating and disingenuous. It’s like George Carlin once said about playing the blues: “its not enough to know which notes to play, you gotta know why they need to be played.”

The result is a wildly schizophrenic film which boasts numerous strong sequences but just as many that are absolutely stultifying, a word which I would never have guessed could be fairly associated with a Spike Lee film. Many of Lee’s films have an overload of ideas which don’t necessarily hang together --a problem for a lot of critics, but never for me-- but here Gunn’s original work and Lee’s new additions openly negate each other. Mixing Gunn’s stagey, wandering soliloquies with Lee’s own ear for modern patois results in jarring shifts that sound like they’re coming not just from different movies but different planets. Lee, ever the literalist, also can’t resist trying to explain a bit more about what’s going on here than Gunn ever attempted --in the movie’s worst scene, the protagonist explains he’s a vampire, a word which I don’t believe is ever actually uttered in the original-- but making parts of the plot lightly more concrete just emphasizes how nonsensical the rest of it is. Gunn couches his ambiguity in drug-tinged 70’s hallucinatory cinema; Lee steadfastly keeps things concrete and grounded in at least some kind of realism, which just makes the movie’s inherent strangeness feel like a mistake rather than a central feature. You get the sense that Lee is trying and failing to communicate a story here, whereas his 70’s counterpart never had any intention of doing so to begin with. Attempts at modernization like a brief sequences that references AIDS and a lesbian gender switch near the end find Lee feeling a bit more in his element, but they also seem maddenly isolated from the rest of the movie.

The performances, too, suffer in comparison to the original. Stephen Tyrone Williams is perfectly serviceable as the opaque, isolated Greene, but the actor seems uncertain and a bit timid in the role. He’s got a genuine charm  --immediately evident on the few occasions he gets to smile-- but the role clearly doesn’t play to his strengths. Original star Duane Jones (known for his only other major film, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) had a fierce, imperious take on the role which made him magnetic and compelling despite his elusive character. Williams simply feels reserved and a little bored. Zaraah Abrahams, as Ganja, fares better with a more active and relatable character, but doesn’t come close to Marlene Clark’s effortless portrait of gilded toughness. Clark is just naturally commanding; Abrahams feels a little more needy and demanding, even a little bitchy (her suffocatingly posh British accent doesn’t help matters; not that it’s her fault, but that voice is the quintessential embodiment of vapid English upper-crusty spoiled brats). Nothing about her feels steely or damaged the way Clark originally did, though her performance is sympathetic enough to effectively command our attention, and as the movie rolls onward she seems to find enough confidence in the role it make it her own. Really, though, the person best served here is Rami Malek, as Greene’s amusingly resentful butler. Even with very few lines, he’s allowed to instill his character with a lot more personality than either Williams or Abrahams are, which makes him instinctively more appealing to both Lee and the audience.

Oh by the way, Snoop from The Wire is in here.

Watching Malek, it’s easy to remember what a great filmmaker Lee can be, but it’s also obvious why his strengths are ill-suited to this particular adaptation. Lee thrives on colorful, larger-than-life characters, rich humanism, and provocative social experiments -- all things which are fundamentally the opposite of GANJA AND HESS’s icy, surreal, fractured intellectualism. Plenty of Lee’s personality sneaks in around the margins, but he’s so beholden to the spirit of the original that the real meat of the story seems to be actively working in opposition to his best instincts. And when he applies some of his trademarks --earthy, lurid realism, long dialogue takes, sly humor-- to Gunn’s material, it’s sometimes a flat-out disaster, as the painfully amateurish scene where Hess explains his vampirism demonstrates. Even so, as the movie gradually winds towards its climax (and in doing so, generates some fitful stirrings of intelligible drama) the beautiful photography alone is ample reminder that Lee is a talent to reckon with. He may not always make the best choices (the aggressive, sometimes seemingly deliberately out-of-sync musical selections here, for example*) but he’ll never be uninteresting. An extended long-take seduction sequence --which starts off a bit awkward but gradually builds a real sexual and dread-inducing power-- is a stunner. A lengthy musical sequence near the end --strikingly similar to his previous RED HOOK SUMMER, but also a fairly direct lift from GANJA AND HESS-- is mesmerizing, and finally engrossing and mysterious in exactly the same way its progenitor was. And as the movie reaches its final destination, Lee finally seems to find his footing and lets the movie’s enigmatic symbolism speak for itself, creating some genuinely haunting --if still totally inscrutable-- images.

With all its contradictions, dead-ends, and surreal plotting, this was already going to be a film for a very select audience, and having seen it I can understand why even a lot of that audience was put off by it. Frankly I’m not even sure what the point of making this film was; Lee, like Gunn before him, still seems to suggest that the film is in some way about addiction; it seems like it should be, but the final product suggests nothing of the sort, as neither vampiric character seems especially bothered or really even interested in their so-called addiction and are really too opaque for us to really understand what they’re thinking in the first place. Certainly there are other intriguing elements here --the film’s curious Christian imagery juxtaposed with its explicitly African curse, the isolating effects of Greene’s wealth, the contrast of vampiric death and rebirth-- but nothing resolves into anything resembling a specific point. This, then, is ultimately a film not to be parsed for meaning but to simply experience. If that experience is a somewhat less fulfilling one than the original (perhaps always destined to be the case when remaking movies so strongly of their time in a vastly different era), well, at least it’s still a unique one. I’m glad to live in a world where “Spike Lee’s Vampire Film” is a real thing that exists, but I hope the next movie he makes has a little more of himself in it,** especially after two remakes in a row. Remembering the greatness of the past is important, but let’s not let it take over our future, OK Spike? Ancient African daggers are not the only thing that can turn us into bloodless vampires -- overly respectful tributes to the cinema of the past can do it too.

That having been said, if you could drop a vampire or two into your upcoming CHIRAQ, I ain’t gonna complain. Or get a wolf man in there or something. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

*Culled from over 800 unsigned artists who submitted music to him specifically for the movie

**Speaking of which, why the hell is he not playing the part of the unhinged assistant, which was played by Gunn himself in the original film??

From Dusk Til Dawn 3: the Hangman's Daughter

From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter (1999)

Dir: P.J. Pesce

Written by Alvaro Rodriguez

Starring Michael Parks, Temuera Morrison, Marco Leonardi, Sonia Braga, Danny Trejo

A couple years back I watched the DTV sequel to the Robert Rodriguez bait-and-switch vampire classic FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, which starred Robert Patrick and, I thought, was slightly elevated above the usual late 90’s DTV-sequel dreck through the hyperactive camerawork of director Scott Spiegel and the surprising effectiveness of it’s cast. I meant to watch the third sequel the next day and do a two-parter, but I guess something came up and then two years passed. It probably wasn’t worth the long wait, or watching at all, but hey, I did it, and now you get to read about it.

FDtD 2: TEXAS BLOOD MONEY seemed to be set in modern times, probably a sequel to the original film since there seem to be way less vampires around. HANGMAN’S DAUGHTER, on the other hand, jumped on the then-current bandwagon of unnecessary and inferior prequels, setting the story in 1913. Just as the same year’s STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE correctly postulated that audiences were desperate to know what Darth Vader was like when he was a dopey little kid, HANGMAN’S DAUGHTER revolves around explaining how a young version of Salma Hayek’s “Santanico Pandemonium” character got to be a performer at the bar, because who among us hadn’t felt a little unsatisfied without specifically having that question answered? What can I say, 1999 was a weird time.

"We're wanted men. I have the death sentence on 12 systems.""I'll be careful." "You'll be dead!" 

What makes the story mildly worth watching is that in an effort to tell a story no one could possibly be interested in (in fact, I had forgotten the character’s name and hence missed the point of the big reveal) they actually create some filler which is kind of clever. You see, the story’s central protagonist is FROM DUSK TILL DAWN veteran Michael Parks, playing one of literary history’s most interesting and enigmatic characters, Devil’s Dictionary and Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge author Ambrose Bierce. In fact, the film’s subtitle comes from one of his stories. This is a stroke of brilliance because Bierce did indeed disappear mysteriously in Mexico, and for all we know it could have been cuz of vampires. These things happen, you know. Heck, it certainly would have been a fitting end for the guy. So you’ve got this great character actor playing a great character (Bierce’s acerbic, misanthropic wit is the stuff of legend) whose fictional depiction dovetails nicely into a real life mystery and subtly incorporates a bunch of fun details from Bierce’s real life and literary output. I mean, that’s just too damn good a setup to ruin, right?

Well, that’s what I said about THE RAVEN, and we all remember how that turned out. I’m sorry to report that director P. J. Pesce and writer Alvaro Rodriguez (who I’m sure got the job because he was the most talented person to apply and never even mentioned he was related to the producer) manage to fuck this up pretty convincingly, and they do it exactly the same way THE RAVEN did: by making the most interesting things completely unimportant. Although Parks is the ostensible star, he has nothing whatsoever to do here, spending most scenes petulant or drunk in the background, and never turning out to be important to the plot in any meaningful way. The fact that he’s playing Bierce is never relevant to anything, nor does the script capture anything interesting about Bierce’s personality or draw anything meaningful from his work or life. He’s just a minor character in a vampire story, except that he happens to be Ambrose Bierce. One character (the embarrassing, lisping Stepin Fetchit stereotype played by Orlando Bloom Jones) does summarize his story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and it seems for a while like the plot might reference that story’s famous twist, but nope, turns out not to have any bearing on anything.

Parks displays the maximum amount of enthusiasm anyone could have towards this role.

To make certain that at no time does Bierce turn out to have any effect on the plot, Pesce and Rodriguez make sure to overstuff the cast with pointless, unlikable and uninteresting characters who are constantly competing for screen time and junking up the film with their worthless and abbreviated narrative arcs. I mean, you got this annoying religious couple (Lennie Loften and Rebecca Gayheart), you got this bandito Johnny Madrid (Marco Leonardi, teenage Sal from CINEMA PARADISO!) who escaped the noose with the help of the title character (Ara Celi), plus you got her father the hangman (a weirdly cast Temuera Morrison, I guess playing a Mexican?), a wannabe female bandit (Jordana Spiro), the what-the-fuck-were-they-thinking traveling salesman played by Jones, a bunch of soldiers, two members of Madrid’s bandit gang, and a whole bar full of vampire hookers. All seem to be under the mistaken impression that the script is about them (except Danny Trejo’s series trademark bartender character, who appears in a scene or two and then is replaced by a noticeably taller, skinnier body double in vampire makeup) and none of them go anywhere. You’d assume they were there as cannon fodder, except they’re all dispatched so offhandedly that you wonder why the movie would waste it’s time introducing them at all.

Listen up camera guy, that filter you're using had better not turn me into an orange Oompa-Loompa.

And waste time it does. It turns out only Madrid and girlfriend have any impact on the narrative at all, but the movie spends so much time introducing new characters and giving them them rudimentary arcs that it doesn’t even get around to the first vampire until about an hour in, with only 30 minutes left for the obligatory bloodbath. Once the blood starts spurting things get a little more tolerable, but there’s still not much to get excited about since it’s just an obviously smaller, cheaper, uglier restaging of the original. No good gimmicks, nothing too memorable, except for one awkward, badly staged but nonetheless amicably unexpected tango dance sequence which occurs out of the blue during the climatic bloodbath. It doesn’t really work (nor do the two dancers look like they had much time to rehearse), but at least it’s different, so you gotta like that. Otherwise, the only distinguishing thing about this vampiric slaughter is that it has a decidedly Aztec flavor to the proceedings. Head villainess Sonia Braga (KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN) plays “Quixtla” which obviously is at least meant to sound like a Nahuatl name, and she favors a feathered coat and other iconography that casually reads as Aztec-inspired. Seen in this light, the film’s final shot (which mirrors the final shot of the original -- with the reveal of a huge temple in the back of the bar, only here it’s adorned with piles of covered wagons instead of cars, haha--) has a distinctively precolumbian design, too. What Aztecs have to do with Vampires, I do not know, but it’s different, it gives a little bit of color. I like it. Oh, and there’s a tiny post-credit stinger that doesn’t exactly make sense but is still enjoyable, in that it finally gives Michael Parks something to do.  

Other than that little bit of weirdness, though, there’s just not much here to hold your interest. P. J. Pesce doesn’t have Scott Spiegel’s fetish for the wacky camera angles which saved Part II from being utterly unwatchable, and while Michael Parks, Marco Leonardi and Temuera Morrison are an acceptable substitute for Robert Patrick, Muse Watson and Raymond Cruz, they are all completely underused (I didn’t even notice Temuera Morrison was riding along with the soldiers until maybe 20 minutes from the end) and simply don’t add much value to this already value-deprived vampiric hustle. What little welcome gore there is at the end isn’t voluminous or imaginative enough to make up for the listless first ¾, and when I add in the fact that most of the film is shot through eyeball-punishing colored filters… well, that’s an experience that only Ritchie Gecko could wish on anyone. Oddly, this sequel actually seems to be better liked than part 2 throughout most of the internet, but don’t believe the hype. Part 2 scared people by being slightly different from the original; this one got them back by being exactly what you might expect. But why anyone would prefer a smaller, cheaper, uglier, duller copy of something they already like is beyond me. And unfortunately, since both Part 2 and 3 were released at the same time as sort of an early test for the idea of DTV sequels, the relative success of this one seems to have helped put us on the cursed path of terrible retread sequels which still haunts genre franchises to this day. One of many examples as to why Ambrose Bierce’s outlook on humanity is as relevant today as ever.

Oh yeah, I forgot this was in there. I like this part, obviously. Maybe mankind isn't so bad after all.

Nights of Cabiria

Nights of Cabiria (1957)

Dir. Frederico Fellini

Starring Guilietta Masina, Francois Perier, Franca Marzi, Amedeo Nazzari

Kids, I got something to tell you. Something you’re not going to like. I’m not proud of it, but I can’t deny who I am. I know you hold me in high esteem, and if you wish to avoid having your illusions shattered and watching as your heroes crumble before your eyes, I suggest you turn back now and never think of this again. But here goes. I don’t really like the films of Frederico Fellini.

I’m sorry.

I mean, it’s a little complicated. I obviously recognize his mastery of the craft, and I applaud his bold commitment to his own unique vision. But I can never really get all that invested in the content, especially his later films, which are richly articulated examinations into the subconscious of an individual who is worried about a lot of stuff that just doesn’t mean much to me. It’s a personal thing. Fellini is just so fixated on his hang ups about sex, relationships, and religion, and it all seems a little needless to me. I got plenty of my own issues, but those three things I feel like I got a good handle on. I feel like I could clear up his problems pretty easily just by pointing out that A) There is no God, B) Sex is awesome and you should have as much of it as you can as long as you don’t hurt anyone, and C) Just be yourself and try to have fun with the people in your life.

There, see? Issues resolved. Now you can make a film as gorgeous as 8 ½ about something which is actually interesting, like a coven of lesbian vampires fighting a robot. Maybe in space. Although Italy would be ok, too, I don’t think I’ve seen one of those set in Italy (I bet one exists, though.)

Anyway, Fellini’s films are always a visual treat, but as they get more abstract later in his career there’s not a lot of narrative of character center to hold onto and if you don’t really get into his central themes they’re a bit of a commotion about nothing.

So, having flippantly dismissed the acknowledged masterpieces of one of cinema’s towering geniuses, I have to say that I sort of loved NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, which may be the first Fellini film I’ve seen which combines his surreal eye with the warmth of character from his neorealist period. It’s pretty much an amazing, mesmerizing, heartbreaking, sumptuous, overwhelming, immersive, inspiring cinematic experience which might or might not remind me or someone else why they fell in love with cinema in the first place.

NIGHTS OF CABIRIA is the story the titular Cabiria (Guilietta Masina, who by a remarkable coincidence is also married to Fellini) who works as a prostitute in one of Rome’s seedier districts. Actually its hardly a story, in the conventional sense – more like a series of vignettes as we follow Cabiria through her encounters with various people in her life (though interestingly, none of them are clients). Some encounters are comic, some are heartbreaking, some banal, and not all even entirely revolve around Cabiria. Fellini takes advantage of the freedom his anti-narrative allows by allowing his focus to drift a little, and is rewarded with rich visual haikus full of earthy detail. It’s not just that his compositions are effortlessly gorgeous; it’s that they carefully mine each image and face for hints of its soul. At this moment in career, with one foot in neorealism and the other in surrealism, Fellini manages to be both penetrating and poetic, carefully allowing the truths to reveal themselves but not yet smothering the world with his own personality. Even without its central character, Fellini’s keen eye creates a deeply felt portrait of a time and place.

With its central character, though, it’s a classic. Guilietta Masina, who starred in several other Fellini films early in his career (notably LA STRADA and THE WHITE SHIEK, where she has a brief appearance as Cabiria) creates one of cinema’s most unique and complex female characters, bar none. Her Cabiria is a raging maelstrom of contradictions: she’s both naïve and world-weary, tragic but inspiring, brave but terrified, sexual but timid, clever but foolhardy. She’s been hurt a lot, and struggles to keep herself closed off enough to protect herself even as she can’t quite give up hope that things could somehow be different. There’s a winning cheerfulness to the character, but there’s a profound sadness dancing just beneath the surface. She seems frustratingly naïve and even abrasive sometimes, but then there’s a certain careful tentativeness to her which suggests that maybe it’s a survival mechanism. But she’s more than complex. Rarely does a character seem so exhilaratingly alive on screen, so deeply and thrillingly engaged with the world. When she thinks no one is looking, she does this little dance which –aside from being beyond adorable – speaks more than dialogue ever could to the infectious enthusiasm which makes the character so endearing even in the face of her flaws and tragedies.

And she’s funny. Really, really funny. Her body language and expressions are hilarious and sometimes fairly broad, but they make perfect sense for the character. If she has a comparable cinematic peer, it can only be Chaplin’s tramp character, another perfect embodiment of comedy and pathos expressed with a similar physicality. It’s almost a shame NIGHTS OF CABIRIA has more than comedy on its mind, because there’s a comedic genius in the performance which I think gets undervalued in the face of the film’s more tragic themes. (Actually I just looked her up and apparently she’s “often” called the “female Chaplin,” so I guess I’m not the only one who thinks so. Damn, I was kinda feeling proud of that one.)

Anyway, going into more detail about the film and its events doesn’t seem all that necessary. It’s not exactly a film that has a lot of stuff to discuss; it’s a film to experience, and one which has an uncommonly deep connection to the human condition, even if it doesn’t have a lot of big right-brained ideas to write essays about. Fellini’s mastery of his craft speaks for itself, but it’s Masina who really makes this one a classic with their fiercely funny portrayal. That’s a pretty potent combination of director and actor right there, and the results are really something special. No offense to Martin Lawrence and Michael Bay intended.

I’m thinking that I may have underestimated this Fellini guy. He just may have what it takes after all, he might be one of those talents to watch that they talk about, I don’t know, we’ll have to see. Bring on JULIET OF THE SPIRITS!

PS: I should also point out that another important person here was Dino De Laurentiis, who put his own money up for this film after no one else would finance a film about prostitutes. As a major fan of his work and his granddaughter, I would like to say that a career that includes Fellini, EVIL DEAD, David Lynch, BARBERELLA, David Cronenberg, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, Igmar Bergman, and the whale-centric JAWS rip-off ORCA is a career worth honoring with excessive drinking.