Slime to the Tenth Power

When I was in my late teens, just after high school, I found myself living in the small town where I'd been born, but from which I'd not been (except for brief visits) since the age of seven. The place is Brunswick, Georgia and it's a pretty horrible spot. I suppose some people must like it there, for it has a permanent population of several thousand. And I reckon other folk just stay out of some kind of ignorant loyalty for a familiar place. At the age of seventeen I found myself there, and I loathed it. Of course I could have just walked away from it, but I didn't. I didn't have the necessary forethought to hit the road. Alas.

In those days of loneliness and pining for the mountains of southern Appalachia where I'd spent the previous four years, I discovered that I could drown my loneliness and misery in feature films. Keep in mind that this was in the days before affordable VCR machines, and the DVD format was decades away. So if you wanted to see a movie you had to keep an eye on the TV Guide and wait for something good to see and set your schedule, or else you went to the cinema.

Me, I went to the movies. A lot. In those days Brunswick had a grand total of five screens, as I recall. And that's counting the Sunset Drive-In, which was, the last time I checked, an overgrown lot of weeds and trees. But, with no friends and a lot of pure fucking depression to drown, I would hit the movies several times per week. I'd go to every theater in town until I'd seen everything. For me, misery was a popular film that would lock in a screen for weeks at a time, thus depriving me of seeing something new.

It was during this time that I found that I loved the small movies. I enjoyed films made on low budgets; or movies that the masses seemed to dislike. I found that I really liked to watch the kind of movie that most people avoided. During these days I developed an admiration for actors and directors and writers who were not as well known, or who were ignored or overlooked. I liked guys like Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton. I'd rather watch a film that never made a dime than a blockbuster that made jillions for its producers.

The underdogs were the ones for me.

One movie that made an absolutely huge impression on me was STRAIGHT TIME. It was a Dustin Hoffman movie, which should have meant that it would have made a lot of money. But it came and it went and no one seemed to even notice that it had ever existed. I noticed it. It was one of the four films I saw the week it appeared. The week after it hit Brunswick it was gone. They'd replaced it with something else--something I'm sure I saw, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

But STRAIGHT TIME I could tell you about. I liked everything about it. Even as I watched it I felt my mind tilting a bit. Dustin Hoffman as a career criminal. And not even a mobster. No, here was this great actor portraying a nothing hood who robbed at gunpoint, who broke and entered, who smashed and grabbed, who snatched purses. He was a loser with a capital L. It was amazing. I believed for two hours that Dustin Hoffman was a loser criminal searching for his big score.

And the cast who rode along during the movie: a cast made in 70s-movie Heaven. Harry Dean Stanton, yes. Gary Busey. Kathy Bates. And I'll never, ever forget Theresa Russell as she made her first appearance in the film. I'd never seen a more shapely ass, and I'll never forget that scene.

But the greatest performance in the film was by M. Emmett Walsh. For some reason, Emmett Walsh has a tremendous talent for portraying bastards. And I'm not talking about just minor-league assholes, but the full on twelve-gauge sort. And of all of the assholes he has ever played he portrayed the slimiest of all as Earl Frank, Max Dembo's (Hoffman's) parole officer. I'd never met a parole officer (still haven't), but after seeing Walsh's portrayal of Frank, I wanted to see them all burn in Hell. At the earliest opportunity.

So I dedicate this bit of my blog to M. Emmett Walsh, one of the most unforgettable actors of my youth in the single best role I've ever seen out of him.

This is from Blade Runner and not STRAIGHT TIME, but it's the only good photo of Walsh as a slimy bastard that I could locate.

M. Emmett Walsh as Earl Frank. Slime never looked so nasty.

An ass-kicking and humiliation has NEVER been more deserved.

STRANGER THAN FICTION

For reasons of my own, I pay more attention to the films that I watch than I did in times past. I always look for the flaws in them, trying to reason out just why a movie pissed me off. And that's because almost every movie I see does piss me off. I expect something to which I've devoted at least two hours of my life to be a pleasant experience. Not to mention the effort involved in seeking the film out, and the money in the form of labor expended to earn the funds with which I paid to see the film in the first place.

I expect a movie to be good, and not to be a complete waste of my time and sweat.

Generally, though, the movies that I watch are not very good. Most of them, to use a term I often utilize in the company of friends, totally suck ass.

However, Carole and I were in one or another shop recently. (There aren't as many stores as there once were, but still a good many, so I've forgotten which one.) I noticed a big display of films that were selling for bargain prices, and one caught my eye. It was a Will Ferrell movie called STRANGER THAN FICTION. I knew only a very little about it, from a couple of the film's movie trailers. I knew that it starred Will Ferrell, who I quite like, even if most of his movies are silly tripe; and I knew that the plot involved a man whose life is being "written" by an author who plans to kill him off, and that he can hear her narrating his life and eventual death.

It's a very silly plot. Very silly. But for some reason it appealed to me, so I tossed it in with the other stuff we were buying and ended up purchasing it for $3.00. That's not a lot of money, even for a laborer like me. I only had to work for a few minutes to earn the pay to nab that DVD. So I wasn't out a ton of sweat equity.

Then, I went about viewing the film. I waited until a lazy day in the midst of a fortunate three-day weekend. That made the viewing all the more relaxing. And I liked the movie. I liked it quite a lot. The plot was, of course, silly. But that's okay. I'm always willing to suspend a certain amount of disbelief when viewing a fantasy or moral fable. All that I ask is that the rest of the tale continue to follow that certain silly lack-of-logic throughout. I cannot abide a cheating plot. And, pleasantly, I found that this movie, once having established its silly and bizarre fantasy, followed it jot by jot to a sweet and tearful ending.

I liked that. I liked that it was packed with a humanity and sweetness one is likely never to witness in this world. That's what I paid for, in a way. And all along the viewing I kept being surprised by so many things. The dialogue was funny and true and grim and realistic. The players were fine--there were actors I hadn't expected to see and those whose work I have enjoyed in earlier performances (Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gyllenall, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson).

More than that, though, I found it to be a writer's movie. All along that thought kept appearing. This is the perfect writer's film. The plot was contrived, as all plots are, even the best and most mundane of them. There's a consciousness driving everything, nothing at all as in real life. The visual effects were so clever--again a contrivance that was witty without being too intrusive (or too funny for complaint when it otherwise would have been too intrusive). As a writer I found the whole experience to be quite more fun than anything I've seen in a very long time. It was, in almost all ways, a perfect movie for a writer to see.

Three years late, I know. But here's to a really wonderful movie.

STRANGER THAN FICTION.

Damn. How about that?

(Oh, yeah. It was written by some brilliant fucker named Zach Helm.)