Tag: John Travolta

Rapid Response: Face/Off

FaceOffPosterOh, I miss movies like “Face/Off.” We still have “John Wick” and “Kingsman” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” sure, but superheroes and perhaps the dark and gritty brand of Christopher Nolan movies have made the truly ridiculous action movie an endangered species and a thing of the past.

It was a different time, the ’90s. Pokemon may be back, but the superficially stupid and one-dimensional movies that un-ironically shoved explosions in our faces got replaced in favor of more serious fare. “Face/Off” was the most bananas of them all, and you could say that movies like “Face/Off” disappeared because everything was trying to be “Face/Off.” We have hordes of “Die Hard” copycats and directors pretending to be Quentin Tarantino, but people could only dream that their films could be as stylized as John Woo’s, and as insane as his stories.

Much of that success has to do with Nicolas Cage being on the best role of his life. After winning an Oscar for “Leaving Las Vegas,” he chose to follow that up by claiming the action hero belt away from the Stallones and Schwarzeneggers, starring in “The Rock,” “Con Air” and “Face/Off” within a little over a calendar year. All three were major blockbusters.

NicCage

Cage plays Castor Troy, who plants a bomb in the LA Convention Center dressed as a dancing terrorist minister. He waltzes over to a singing choir sporting a devilish grin and sneaks a squeeze of a choir girl’s butt, experiencing ecstasy as he does. “You know, I can eat a peach for hours,” he says with a menacing smile. He wields a pair of gold pistols, he flashes his teeth wildly, whips off his sunglasses to make eye contact with the camera.

And then after getting captured by his FBI rival Sean Archer (John Travolta), who seeks revenge after Troy killed Archer’s son, the two switch faces. I repeat: they exchange ‘effing faces.

“John Wick” and others may be stylish, brutal and simplistic, but 2000s movies lack that high concept absurdity that could make “Face/Off” a classic. It doesn’t matter if the dialogue is atrocious, if the pseudo-science doesn’t make a lick of sense or if the surrounding characters are so thick as to possibly think this plan, of surgically giving Archer Troy’s face so that he can infiltrate a prison and get information out of Troy’s brother, is a good idea.

The concept alone is juicy, but Nic Cage being in the role consequently enhances Travolta’s performance, who starts to channel Cage’s mannerisms, his slick and sleazy attitude and villainous posture. Cage doesn’t precisely act like Travolta, but you recognize that the two of them are both giving performances within performances, and you’d be forgiven for confusing the two, thinking Cage somehow inhabits Travolta and was playing the real Castor Troy all along.

Smaller details emphasize the breadth of Woo’s mastery over the form. Inside the prison, where all the guards are one-dimensional monsters, the prisoners wear magnetic boots that lock them to the floor and track their movements, a detail so silly and outrageous that you remember it even though it has no bearing on the story.

Although you could see why Woo’s style would eventually go out of fashion. When a movie is this populated with people diving through glass windows away from explosions in slow motion at domineering low angles, it can get a little old. It’s when he pitches these set pieces at such a high degree of insanity, like the biggest Mexican standoff at the film’s climax, or when “Over the Rainbow” plays over a bullet-ridden bloodbath that would lay the groundwork for “The Matrix.” And don’t forget the doves!

The style and tone that “Face/Off” portrays has become nothing but cliches and has aged poorly, but the film itself hasn’t aged a day. It’s as fresh, exciting and fun as it was in 1997.

Rapid Response: Saturday Night Fever

It’s not a coincidence that within minutes of watching “Saturday Night Fever” with my family the conversation turned into just when disco died. “It came and went so quickly,” my Dad recalled. “The early adopters were around for a while before it became really cool, but by the time you bought all the ridiculous shirts and all the records, it was already gone.”

Something like “Saturday Night Fever” then belongs to that black hole of movies that, regardless of their quality, became dated as soon as the fad they depicted vanishes completely. Its soundtrack is a collection of all the disco songs that have actually survived (and are tolerable) through the decades, and the fashions and attitudes, be they the big cars, bug hair or big collars, are a relic of a time that today just seems so alien.

And yet the reason above all why “Saturday Night Fever” succeeded and still somewhat succeeds today is in its title sequence. The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” plays as John Travolta struts down the street, and it seems to explain effortlessly that part of the ’70s cool was just the swagger in your step, the swivel of your hips and living moving as if the music was always playing.

Today the film represents the tentpole model for teenage stardom stories in the vein of something like “Flashdance.” A troubled and poor young teenager who happens to be a talented dancer/singer/artist enters a contest to win an arbitrary prize, and along the way they juggle relationships, a distant family that doesn’t understand him/her, an older sibling who is admirable but now seems lost and some sort of tragedy separate from all the montages and performance numbers.

This is precisely the format of “Saturday Night Fever,” but its improved by just the style with which it glamorizes these icons of ’70s culture. Director John Badham loves the low angle shot to show off hair, clothes and bodies during dance scenes and otherwise. The dance numbers are all handled minimally with full-bodied wide shots and long takes to show just how Travolta can really move. It also splashes obscene amounts of color in the frame and gets down and dirty itself in swift tracking shot close-ups as Travolta shimmies about the dance floor.

His moves in the King of the Floor scene are so absurd they must all have a corny name (the punching bag, the hair dryer, the Russian soldier, to make up a few), but I like the scene because disco is one of those rare dance styles, like the classical forms of tap, where the individual is often more impressive than the group, and these numbers feel almost like updates on the Fred Astaire favorites. Travolta makes these moves look simple, elegant and effortless.

It’s also fun in the sense that the dialogue is absurd. There are throw away lines that a modern audience must gawk at in their extreme racism, sexism and vulgarity. “Women have to choose to be either a nice girl or a cunt.” “Dream good, jerk off better.” “You make it with some girls, they think you gotta dance with them too.”

Travolta was already famous for his role as Vinnie Barbarino in “Welcome Back Kotter,” and he even had a part in Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” but “Saturday Night Fever” made him a temporary superstar, landing him a dumbfounding Oscar nomination in the process. And it’s shocking, because Tony Manero is absolutely repellent, regardless of how many girls are hypnotically drawn to him. Did the New York guido attitude grow out of the disco ’70s or did the disco ’70s grow out of it? He shows absolute disdain for all of his lady callers, he oafishly eats with his mouth open, he nearly rapes his dance partner, allows another girl to be raped and ultimately watches his friend die in a hammy “Rebel Without a Cause” ending that just plain doesn’t work.

“Saturday Night Fever” belongs to the ages. It is a bad, cliche movie but arguably an essential one in understanding the full scope of American pop culture history.

Rapid Response: Carrie

I’ve been unkind to Brian De Palma before.

But I was quickly informed that my blanket statement about De Palma’s lack of style in regards to “The Untouchables” doesn’t apply to his more well regarded masterpieces like “Carrie” and “Blow-Out.” Surely if I saw those I would be likely to change my mind.

Well no, I’m still wishy-washy about “Carrie,” De Palma’s early cult-horror classic starring Sissy Spacek as an abused teen with the power of telekinesis.

De Palma’s approach strikes me less as homage to genre filmmaking and more as him wallowing in overdone ideas without a distinct style of his own. He accentuates soothing facial features of certain women and teachers with delicate, foggy filter close-ups and wide shots and then amplifies the doom and gloom of religious persecution with ominous low angle shots and intensified soundtrack cues. The screeching violins of the “Psycho” score are incorporated not as a nod to Hitchcock but as a crutch every time Carrie uses her powers. He elicits a monumental performance from Piper Laurie as Carrie’s mom but bludgeons you with her presence due to its screechy, insane, sanctimonious tone, making for a truly delusional depiction of extreme Christianity.

What’s more, his way of building suspense is to just make a movie completely different from the one the movie will end up as. It’s all a manufactured element of surprise, one that’s been deadened and aged over time. He draws out the maudlin splendor and beauty of Carrie being showered with applause as the prom queen endlessly, only for it to transform into an avant-garde psycho-horror movie. It suddenly incorporates split-screen and deafening sound mixing to completely shift the movie’s trajectory, not gradually take you into the moment.

But the bigger problem I think stems from the fact that Carrie has no personality. She is so berated at school and by her mother that we know nothing of her interests, her quirks, her dreams or her desires. We feel only pity for her, and clearly so does the Robert Plant clone who ends up asking her to the dance. He doesn’t love her, but he genuinely has fun and wants her to have a good time, but little else.

He’s the one redeemable character in the film, and the remainder of the time is spent too heavily on the bitchy teenage girls and John Travolta going to parties and working out during gym class. It’s a hateful film right to the end when we read the graffiti label on the site of Carrie’s burial ground. We only care for Carrie because the rest of the characters are so exaggeratedly awful and because the pacing and tone is so melodramatic and maudlin that the movie is capable of surprising us with her range and power.

And yet when she unleashes all hell on her classmates, Carrie at that moment stops being a human whom we can sympathize with and becomes a demon. Her battle with her mother is an unfortunate epilogue.

“Carrie” is not the cult masterpiece I was expecting it to be. It continues to place me in a minority and forces me to take a staunchly contrarian stand on an otherwise respected director, but so be it.