Opened 40 Years Ago: RAGING BULL (11/14/1980)

 

RAGING BULL
(US - 1980)
Directed by Martin Scorsese

RAGING BULL opening in 

Toledo, OH on 2/20/1981

Best Actor and Best Actress Oscar-winners De Niro 

and Sissy Spacek (COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER) 

In Theaters/On VOD: DOG EAT DOG (2016)

DOG EAT DOG
(US/UK - 2016)

Directed by Paul Schrader. Written by Matthew Wilder. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Matthew Cook, Paul Schrader, Omar Dorsey, Louisa Krause, Melissa Bolona, Rey Gallegos, Nicky Whelan, Chelcie Melton, Ali Wasdovich, Louis Anthony Perez, Magi Avila, Robert Maples. (Unrated, 93 mins)

After a pair of misfires with the crowd-funded THE CANYONS and the disowned DYING OF THE LIGHT, Paul Schrader returns with the crime drama DOG EAT DOG. The now-70-year-old Schrader, best known for his numerous collaborations with Martin Scorsese (he wrote TAXI DRIVER and RAGING BULL, among others) and directing his own films like BLUE COLLAR, AMERICAN GIGOLO, and AFFLICTION, is a filmmaker who seems to seek out conflict, with his head-butting with the producers of DYING OF THE LIGHT a virtual replay of his battles over his EXORCIST prequel DOMINION a decade earlier. Still bitter over having DYING OF THE LIGHT taken away from him in post, Schrader had final cut worked into his deal on DOG EAT DOG, and for a while, it's his most inspired work in years. Working from a novel by ex-con Edward Bunker (who co-wrote RUNAWAY TRAIN and played Mr. Blue in RESERVOIR DOGS), adapted by Matthew Wilder, Schrader is unapologetically making the movie he wants to make with DOG EAT DOG, jettisoning the faux indie pretensions of THE CANYONS but really showing a lack of discipline and focus at times. It jumps all over the place stylistically, playing with color and black & white, framing shots in odd ways, and displaying a fair degree of surrealism. Its tics and flourishes at times recall Oliver Stone's NATURAL BORN KILLERS, but there's no real reason for it. He's trying to gussy up a talky, character-driven crime story, but in doing so, he undermines his actors. There's some terrific stuff in DOG EAT DOG, but it mostly comes off like a coked-up and frequently grotesque KILLING THEM SOFTLY.

DOG EAT DOG centers on three ex-cons and low-level bottom-feeders in the Cleveland underworld: Troy (Nicolas Cage, reteaming with his DYING OF THE LIGHT director) has ambitions beyond Cleveland, but feels indebted to the deranged Mad Dog (Willem Dafoe, whose numerous teamings with Schrader include LIGHT SLEEPER and AUTO-FOCUS), who once saved him from an attack in the joint. The trio is rounded out by the hulking Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook), who's loyal to Troy but can only take so much of Mad Dog. Bad-tempered junkie Mad Dog has just killed his girlfriend and her teenage daughter and is eager to nab a big score with Troy. They get it from mob middleman and fixer El Greco (Schrader, in some extremely ill-advised and self-indulgent stunt casting) when they're instructed to rob the stash house of one of his rivals, Moon Man (Omar Dorsey). That goes relatively smoothly and they get a nice payday that they immediately piss away on drugs and prostitutes, but Troy is bored with the Cleveland scene and wants something bigger. El Greco calls on them again when an associate, Chepe (Rey Gallegos) wants $4 million owed to him by white collar criminal Mike Brennan (Louis Anthony Perez). When Brennan won't pay up, Chepe proposes kidnapping Brennan's one-year-old son in exchange for a nice percentage of the ransom. Like almost any cinematic One Last Job, this completely goes to shit, thanks mostly to the impulsive, trigger-happy Mad Dog.

Somewhat free-flowing in its structure, DOG EAT DOG isn't paced like a typical film of this sort. Schrader is initially more interested in characters, their interactions, and their quirks, at least until he gets bored with it and completely loses his way. The whole opening act with Moon Man takes an interesting approach in that it lets us get to know the Troy/Mad Dog/Diesel dynamic but is really just an extended vignette that has nothing to do with the main Chepe plot. Likewise with the opening, a ten-minute sequence showing what leads Mad Dog to kill his girlfriend and her teenage daughter (in short, she won't give him her Chevron card after he leaves a porn site up on her laptop). There's some very dark humor throughout, some of it boldly offensive and inappropriate, and almost all of it supplied by Dafoe. He has one ad-libbed line involving the baby, delivered in total seriousness, that's just wrong on every level, and it's great fun watching him lose his shit over things like an Asian prostitute answering a text while giving him a handjob. Some of the humor is practically slapsticky, like El Greco supplying them with the world's least-convincing fake police car. But it's a manic Dafoe who commands all the attention in DOG EAT DOG, making potential throwaway lines come off as laugh-out-loud funny ("Taylor Swift? Who the fuck is that bitch?" asks a just-paroled and out-of-touch with pop culture Mad Dog), so much so that when he makes an abrupt exit, it just puts a spotlight on how little else is here. Even taking Dafoe's foaming-at-the-mouth performance into consideration, Cage is rather subdued here, his character a man out of time who adores old movies, dreams of running off to Nice and fancies himself an old-school 1940s gangster but really comes off like a film noir cosplayer who's really not that interesting. By the time the climax rolls around, Schrader's just making it up as he goes along, with a foggy, garishly lit, dream-like police chase and Cage's Troy suddenly talking and behaving like he's Humphrey Bogart. DOG EAT DOG works best when it's not being gimmicky and filling the screen with smoke & mirrors to hide how little is there. There's no denying it's entertaining to a point, with a permeating weirdness that almost guarantees at least minor cult status. But after about an hour, it just starts to feel like everyone, from Schrader on down, is just goofing off.



Note: in the interest of full disclosure, I was once Facebook friends with DOG EAT DOG screenwriter Matthew Wilder, until he unfriended and blocked me over my dislike of Jean-Luc Godard's FILM SOCIALISME, creating the hashtag #attackfilmsocialismeanddie. I have had no contact with him since. 

In Theaters/On VOD: DYING OF THE LIGHT (2014)

DYING OF THE LIGHT
(US/Bahamas - 2014)

Written and directed by Paul Schrader. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Anton Yelchin, Alexander Karim, Irene Jacob, Ayman Hamdouchi, Claudius Peters, Adetomiwa Edun, Robert G. Slade, Serben Celea, Silas Carson, Arsha Aghdasi. (R, 94 mins)

Evan Lake (Nicolas Cage) is a legend at the CIA headquarters in Langley. He's received virtually every honor the CIA can bestow. One of the most brilliant minds in the history of the agency and a loner who's devoted his entire life to his country, Lake's been saddled with "temporary" desk duty that's now in its sixth year. He's desperate to get back in the field, but his right hand twitches, he drinks too much, and he's been prone to mood swings that are becoming more erratic by the day. He also hasn't been able to let go of a Beirut assignment from 22 years earlier where he was captured and brutally tortured by terrorist Mohammed Banir (Alexander Karim), who repeatedly beat him over the head with an oar and snipped off part his ear before an extraction team swarmed in, took out Banir and his men, and rescued Lake. Lake hasn't shaken the gnawing notion that Banir is still alive, and when he brings it up around the office, it usually provokes eye-rolls and a stern word from the CIA chief to drop it. And the news just got worse for Lake: he's been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, an aggressive brain disease similar to Alzheimer's that provokes difficulty focusing, outbursts, lack of emotional control, and wildly inappropriate overreactions. Respected around the office but stand-offish and cold, Lake's only work friend is young analyst Milton Schultz (Anton Yelchin), who's been doing some investigating in his spare time and gets a hit on a medication that's being smuggled into Bucharest after being prescribed by a Kenya-based doctor (Serben Celea). It's a seldom-used med that treats a rare genetic blood disorder that killed Banir's father and that Banir is known to carry. Knowing Banir has associates in both Mombasa and Bucharest, Schultz presents his findings to Lake, who is more convinced than ever that Banir faked his death and is alive, if not well. When the CIA honchos refuse to hear him out and practically force him to retire when his efforts to conceal his condition fail, Lake has a meltdown that ends up getting him escorted out of the building. With nothing to lose and wanting to nail Banir and prove he was right all along, Lake decides to spend what little time he has left finding Banir and exacting revenge. Lake and Schultz go rogue, heading to Romania where Lake attempts to infiltrate Banir's off-the-grid hiding place by posing as the new hematologist being secretly paid to visit and treat him.

DYING OF THE LIGHT sounds like a standard-issue post-9/11 terrorism thriller, and that's pretty much what it is. But that's not what writer/director Paul Schrader had in mind. Schrader, the oft-embattled '70s auteur whose screenplays include the Martin Scorsese essentials TAXI DRIVER (1976), RAGING BULL (1980), and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988) and whose directorial credits feature BLUE COLLAR (1978), AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980), CAT PEOPLE (1982), and AFFLICTION (1997), had the film taken away from him during post-production, when the producers decided they didn't like the version he assembled, saying it looked nothing like the script he originally presented to them. In October, Schrader, backed by Cage, Yelchin, and co-producer Nicolas Winding Refn (DRIVE), all contractually forbidden to publicly badmouth the film, staged a silent protest on social media that went viral, where they simply wore T-shirts with the contractual clause about not disparaging the movie printed on the front. Schrader said nothing, other than he was locked out of the editing room and the released version of DYING OF THE LIGHT is not his work, while primary producer Grindstone Entertainment and distributor Lionsgate have predictably offered no comment.

Clockwise from top left: Cage, Yelchin, Schrader and Refn display their grievances
with the producers and distributor of DYING OF THE LIGHT

Everything on screen was indeed shot by Schrader, but of course, editing can make a huge difference. Film Comment's Kevin Jagernauth has seen both versions of DYING OF THE LIGHT and says the differences aren't that extensive but that the sense of terror and disorientation in Cage's character has been downplayed in the released cut. In its present form, DYING OF THE LIGHT's biggest sin is its bland, generic execution, looking and playing very much like any random Romania-shot straight-to-DVD actioner. The action is mainly confined to the last 10-15 minutes and feels crammed in, and most of the way, it's a talky drag with performances that never really click. Yelchin is completely miscast, while Cage, sporting a gray version of one of his new Christopher Lee hairpieces, has been given a free pass to Cage it up thanks to the symptoms of his character's illness. He has a few of his patented outbursts, loves to overdo the hand twitch, gets to shout "As-salamu alaykum, asshole!" and absurdly mispronounces "Benghazi" to keep himself amused. There's fleeting hints of a more serious character study with Lake, and Schrader could probably draw a straight line through his past characters like Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER, William Devane's Charles Rane in ROLLING THUNDER (1977), Willem Dafoe's John LeTour in LIGHT SLEEPER (1992), Nick Nolte's Wade Whitehouse in AFFLICTION, plus others, directly to Evan Lake. They're all men who feel lost and alienated from the world and are reinvigorated when they find a purpose--typically revenge of some sort. That sometimes comes across in some of DYING OF THE LIGHT's more introspective moments, but those are few and far between. What's here is as much of a standard B-actioner that Grindstone and the producers could assemble. It could've just as easily been directed by regular Grindstone hack Brian A. Miller (THE OUTSIDER, THE PRINCE) and starred Dominic Purcell.  Refn was attached to direct in the earliest pre-production stages in 2010, along with Harrison Ford as Lake and Channing Tatum as Schultz, but that fell apart when Ford bolted after disagreeing with the ending of Schrader's script, which does stay intact even in this compromised version.

Obviously, the behind-the-scenes discord with DYING OF THE LIGHT is more interesting than anything that's in the movie. Whatever its intentions, it's yet another in a long line of Redbox-ready Nic Cage trifles that seem to come along every couple of months, allowing him to chew the scenery and add to the endless YouTube "Nic Cage Freaks Out!!!" clips.  He's almost a pet doing tricks at this point. Perhaps we'll never know what really went down, but by now, this kind of thing is hardly shocking when it comes to Schrader. Back in 2003, he found himself in a very similar situation when Morgan Creek execs took his EXORCIST prequel away from him when they didn't appreciate the cerebral, spiritual film he made that featured very little in the way of levitation, green vomit, and mothers sucking cocks in Hell. Renny Harlin was hired to reshoot some scenes and beef up the crowd-pleasing horror factor, but his additions became so extensive that Schrader's version was scrapped entirely and completely refilmed by Harlan as the awful EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING (2004) with the same lead actor (the patient and presumably well-compensated Stellan Skarsgard). The story caused such a stir with Hollywood insiders and fans that Schrader's shelved version, retitled DOMINION: PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST, was given a limited release in 2005. It's not always successful, but it's very character-driven and intelligently-written, and it's certainly better than Harlan's remake.

Schrader with his stars during a break in filming

The 68-year-old Schrader has made great films over his long career, but he never seemed to get over the demise of 1970s maverick auteurism in the wake of Michael Cimino's United Artists-bankrupting HEAVEN'S GATE (1980).  Like Terry Gilliam, he appears to enjoy putting himself in situations where he's David taking on the Goliath-like "system." I'm all for giving a filmmaker of Schrader's stature as much wiggle room as he wants. He's earned it, but he's also been in the business long enough to know that a theory-filled religious drama with EXORCIST in the title wasn't going to fly with anyone and that the producers would eventually get their way (was he completely unaware of William Peter Blatty's battles with the same Morgan Creek guys on 1990's THE EXORCIST III?). But even when he works outside the studio system and helms the partially crowd-funded THE CANYONS (2013), the result is a self-indulgent disaster. Did Schrader not see this coming when he got in bed with a bunch of B action producers like Grindstone and the Bahamas-based Tin Res Entertainment and tried to make a serious, meaningful film?  Did he think Refn would have enough clout to get him his way? Do any of these guys have an understanding of the business in which they work?  Schrader is living in a past where all filmmakers have final cut and it's all about art. It would be great if it could be that way, and it was until Cimino ruined it for everyone, but has Schrader heard of GANGS OF NEW YORK, the film that proved even Martin Scorsese doesn't get final cut and has to answer to his backers? Schrader answering to no one gave us THE CANYONS. I got the impression from that film that Schrader was bitter and angry about a lot of things, and maybe he's justified. Like many of his protagonists, Schrader has been left on the fringes and removed from the process after demonstrating an inability to adapt to a changing world. When he made THE CANYONS, he said he was on the cutting edge of a revolution with crowd-funding. Now, here he is, a year later, fighting the same old battles and expecting a different outcome. Maybe Schrader's director's cut of DYING IN THE LIGHT is his masterpiece. I doubt it, but I'd love to see this once-relevant and frequently brilliant filmmaker knock one out of the park again. Schrader deserves better, but at the same time, you have to wonder if he, like Terry Gilliam, brings a lot of this on himself.

In Theaters/On VOD: THE CANYONS (2013)

THE CANYONS
(US - 2013)

Directed by Paul Schrader.  Written by Bret Easton Ellis.  Cast: Lindsay Lohan, James Deen, Nolan Funk, Amanda Brooks, Tenille Houston, Gus Van Sant, Jim Boeven, Victor of Aquitane, Lily Labeau, Thomas Trussell. (Unrated, 99 mins)

Despite the rollercoaster nature of his career, Paul Schrader has cemented his place in film history.  As a screenwriter, he penned such influential Martin Scorsese films as TAXI DRIVER (1976), RAGING BULL (1980), and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988) and directed his own scripts for memorable films like BLUE COLLAR (1978), HARDCORE (1979), AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980), and LIGHT SLEEPER (1992).  While his name is inextricably linked with Scorsese's in the eyes of devout cinephiles (Schrader also wrote Scorsese's 1999 film BRINGING OUT THE DEAD), Schrader generally hasn't enjoyed the accolades and mainstream adoration that his old friend has.  He's had a hard time bouncing back from the EXORCIST prequel debacle of a decade ago that saw producers shelving his film and remaking it from scratch with Renny Harlin (Schrader's version was eventually given a limited release, and go figure, it's much better than Harlin's, but the damage was already done).  Schrader made two small indie films after that:  2007's THE WALKER and 2008's ADAM RESURRECTED, a bizarre, little-seen Holocaust drama headlined by what might be Jeff Goldblum's career-best performance.  30 years ago, Schrader was one of the leading voices in cinema.  Today, at 67, he's reduced to THE CANYONS, a $250,000 indie, funded mostly by Kickstarter contributions, and starring the infamously unemployable Lindsay Lohan.

People in career ruts are often capable of very quietly doing their best work when no one's paying any attention, but that can't be the case here with perpetual tabloid magnet Lohan.  Rather than go about their work, the tumultuous making of THE CANYONS, from behind-the-scenes disagreements between the filmmakers (Less Than Zero and American Psycho novelist Bret Easton Ellis wrote the script) to Lohan's unpredictable behavior, was very publicized and everyone seemed to be waiting anxiously to pile on what was all but guaranteed to be a disaster.  It is a disaster, but not for those reasons.  Lohan is the most competent actor in the film, even if by default.  She stars as Tara, who lives with her boyfriend Christian (insanely prolific porn star James Deen, veteran of anywhere between 1000 and 4000 adult films since 2004, whose most recent credits include ANAL STUDENTS 2, COME INSIDE ME, GANGBANGED 6, and ANAL BUFFET 8), a trust-fund douchebag and all-around sociopath who's working as a B-movie producer to show his father that he's doing something with his time and his generous allowance.  Christian's main concern is manipulating everyone around him, particularly Tara, for whom he frequently arranges anonymous male and female sex partners for threesomes or to just watch.  Tara was once an aspiring actress, but now just shops, drinks, and fucks, and she's been seeing her ex-boyfriend Ryan (Nolan Funk), who's in a relationship with Christian's assistant Gina (Amanda Brooks).  Christian is bankrolling a slasher movie Gina scripted for Ryan to star in, and he starts having suspicions that Tara is involved with someone else, even going so far as to have a hoodie-wearing flunky follow her.  Christian's jealousies still don't prevent him from regularly visiting yoga-instructor/part-time actress/fuck-buddy Cynthia (Tenille Houston), who knows Ryan from a past acting class.  Christian, who's OK with Tara being with other guys if he's there to watch or partake, eventually figures out that Ryan is the guy Tara's seeing and sets out to sabotage his career, first by convincing a gay co-producer (Jim Boeven) to seduce him and then by having a hacker drain his bank account.  Eventually, Christian's crazed jealousy and his lust for power drive him to extreme measures to keep Tara under his thumb.

THE CANYONS is a film filled with loathsome assholes.  Even the one ostensibly "good" character (Ryan) turns out to be a completely repellent creep.  Tara is an opportunistic leech.  She doesn't really love or even like Christian, but goes along with his degrading sexual mind games because it beats working for a living.  When Ryan asks her if she's happy with him, she coldly replies "Who said anything about happy?  He takes care of me."  These characters are vintage Bret Easton Ellis all the way:  vapid, empty, self-loathing, over-privileged, and drowning in ennui.  They fit right in with every other Hollywood Hills stereotype.  But Schrader just blows his opportunity to make whatever statement he was trying to make.  He hates these characters as much as they hate themselves, and the key to Schrader's hate lies in frequent photos of closed-down movie theaters.  They're haunting images that play under the credits and are seen throughout the film.  Is Schrader mourning the death of Hollywood?  Is he making some statement about trust-fund kids and social media attention-whores more concerned with celebrity than talent or art?  It's a valid argument, but Schrader goes about it the wrong way.  There's no shortage of examples of angry Hollywood filmmakers taking vitriolic aim at the movie business.  Billy Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), Blake Edwards' S.O.B. (1981), and Robert Altman's THE PLAYER (1992) are textbook cases.  But Schrader's misguided approach is as subtle as a jackhammer and it doesn't take you long to imagine him grumbling "In my day..." as if self-absorption, all manner of excess, and sucking/fucking your way to the top didn't happen in the 1970s.  Or before.

The biggest problem with THE CANYONS is that the potentially explosive combination of Schrader and Ellis ultimately has nothing substantive to say.  Does Schrader have a point or is he just mad that Scorsese hasn't called him lately?  In what purports to be a eulogy for the ways of cinema past, where old movie theaters are closed and left to rot, where toasts of the town now can't find a job, and where a schadenfreude-driven 24/7 "news" culture and relentless paparazzi live to watch the rich and famous implode, Schrader is railing against Tinseltown sycophants, bottom-feeders, and star-fuckers, but doesn't seem to realize that in doing so, in this fashion, that he becomes part of the problem.  Maybe he thinks he's fighting it from the inside, but in doing a movie bankrolled by a Kickstarter campaign, and hitching himself to a tabloid train wreck like Lohan and making sure everyone knows she's going to be naked and doing three-and-four-ways and starring opposite an active porn actor reeks of the same crass, cynical, exploitative opportunism that he's supposed to be pissed off about.




Director Paul Schrader

And he might've pulled it off if the end result wasn't so amateurish.  Lohan is the most professional actor in the film, and the many long conversations between the characters play like filmed rehearsals.  Lohan tries--and there's one great, fourth-wall-breaking shot during a sex scene where she looks right into the camera in a truly jarring moment (she was reportedly looking at Schrader, who stripped naked to direct the scene in order to make her more comfortable)--but the film only serves as a reminder of her well-documented offscreen problems.  On that note, it's perfect casting, especially since she's 27 and doesn't look a day under 40.  But it's just a missed opportunity with too much facile, ham-fisted messaging, and Schrader just cashes out when he turns the film into a rote "obsessive psycho" thriller and it becomes painfully apparent that he doesn't know how to wrap this up.  There's a few positives:  the shots of the vacant, dilapidated theaters have an eerie quality, but there's a ton of web sites devoted to that sort of thing, and there's an early shot of an upscale, outdoor shopping center where everyone is staring blankly at their smartphones while shopping for nothing in particular that has a stark Antonioni feeling of cold disconnect.  But it's all downhill from there, and even the much-ballyhooed sex scenes aren't that explicit (nor are they erotic, but they aren't supposed to be), so all the hype was really for naught, much like the entire endeavor. There's an almost mid-1970s Jess Franco quality to the crudeness of this project, and on that end, I'm sure THE CANYONS will quickly find passionate defenders.  It's cheap and it doesn't try to make itself look like a bigger movie than it is.  It looks like the kind of movie that's funded by a trust-fund kid and a Kickstarter campaign.  The difference is that, unlike Franco, Schrader doesn't seem happy with what he's doing, and the misery is contagious.