ALPHABET CITY (US - 1984) Directed by Amos Poe. Written by Gregory K. Heller, Amos Poe and Robert Seidman. Cast: Vincent Spano, Michael Winslow, Kate Vernon, Jami Gertz, Zohra Lampert, Ray Serra, Kenny Marino, Daniel Jordano, Tom Mardirosian, Tom Wright, Clifton Powell, Martine Malle, Harry Madsen, Alex Stevens, Christina Marie Denihan. (R, 85 mins) One of the more mainstream offerings in the short-lived "No Wave Cinema" movement that began in the Lower East Side and the East Village in the late '70s, ALPHABET CITY didn't really make a dent outside of NYC when Atlantic released it in theaters over the spring and summer of 1984, but its location shooting in parts of the city that no longer exist make it a vital snapshot of a bygone era. That's the primary reason for its current rebirth as a cult movie, and its standing as the inaugural Blu-ray release of the new Vinegar Syndrome offshoot Fun City Editions, because physical media is dead. Having first received attention in the scene with the 1976 punk chronicle THE BLANK GENERATION, ALPHABET CITY director/co-writer Amos Poe was one of the key figures in No Wave, along with Beth B (VORTEX), Susan Seidelman (SMITHEREENS), Lizzie Borden (BORN IN FLAMES), Eric Mitchell (UNDERGROUND U.S.A.), and Kathryn Bigelow (THE LOVELESS). Seidelman and Bigelow went on to successful mainstream careers, while filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo and actors such as Willem Dafoe, Viggo Mortensen, Steve Buscemi, and Vincent Gallo also had connections to No Wave in their early days.
The most famous film associated with the No Wave Cinema is arguably Slava Tsukerman's 1983 cult classic LIQUID SKY, but by the time ALPHABET CITY came out, the movement was winding down and its major players were either gravitating toward art and music or, in the case of Seidelman with DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN, opting to play the Hollywood game. With ALPHABET CITY, Poe has one foot in the mainstream and the other in the East Village, and the end result has the gritty immediacy of early Abel Ferrara while perhaps somewhat lacking when it comes to a momentum-driven narrative, which is at odds with the urgency of its antihero's predicament. On the cusp of becoming a Next Big Thing after RUMBLE FISH and BABY, IT'S YOU, Vincent Spano stars as Johnny, a successful young drug dealer given control of his Alphabet City neighborhood by powerful crime boss Gino (Ray Serra). Only just out of his teens but wielding much respect and power, Johnny has it made, driving a flashy Firebird (personalized license plate: "CHUNGA"), and living in a spacious loft with his artist fiancee Angie (Kate Vernon) and their infant daughter. But he's secretly been plotting a way out, and that time comes when Gino orders him to torch a dilapidated tenement to clear the way for some lucrative real-estate deals. It happens to be the tenement where he grew up and where his mother (Zohra Lampert) and would-be high-class call girl sister Sophia (Jami Gertz) still live. He can't talk them into leaving, so he spends the night cruising around the neighborhood tying up all loose business ends before taking his cash, his car, and Angie and the baby and disappearing. But Gino has eyes and ears all over the East Village and making a clean getaway won't be easy.
Essentially a "survive the night" scenario, ALPHABET CITY is curiously meandering once the plot is set in motion. Poe doesn't really establish much in the way of suspense, but where the film excels in the way it nails the sights and sounds of the East Village in 1984. It's a highly-stylized look with an unmistakable music video aesthetic--one almost has to think that the GOOD TIME and UNCUT GEMS directing team of the Safdie Brothers are fans--with rain-slicked streets, neon, garish lighting and colorgasms out of a Mario Bava film, shadows, tunnels, and Dutch angles inspired by THE THIRD MAN, and much of the action taking place in some dangerously seedy parts of Alphabet City. One standout is a long sequence in a vacant, bombed-out tenement that's been turned into a drug den overseen by Johnny and his right-hand man Lippy (POLICE ACADEMY's Michael Winslow) who, unlike the all-business Johnny, has spent too much time getting high on their own supply. Poe shot the film with a small crew over 24 nights (Spano is interviewed on the Blu-ray, and mentions lunch was at 2:00 am), and it vividly captures the time and the place, whether it's the fashions, the soundtrack by Nile Rodgers, some guys breakdancing outside of a nightclub, or even a Menudo bumper sticker plastered on a wall (Paul Morrissey's 1985 film MIXED BLOOD, another crime thriller set and shot in and around Alphabet City, would prominently feature a bloody shootout in Menuditis, the official Menudo store).
Poe also captures the mood of the period in real time, showing how the writing was already on the wall with gentrification, or the way that AIDS--not mentioned by name--was wreaking havoc, with Johnny admonishing Sophia to find another line of work because "too many girls are getting sick." Never mind that his own shooting gallery is filled with hopeless addicts and shared needles, with one well-dressed guy forced to show his track marks at the entrance to prove he isn't a narc. To that end, ALPHABET CITY, for all its narrative wishy-washiness and genre cliches (of course, his embittered mother knows what he does for a living and refuses any of his "dirty money"), remains a fascinating time capsule. Poe went on to a brief career directing music videos, most notably Animotion's "Obsession," Run-D.M.C.'s "You Talk Too Much," and Anthrax's "Madhouse." An odd outlier in his filmography came when he scripted the 1988 family drama ROCKET GIBRALTAR, starring Burt Lancaster in one of his last films and Macaulay Culkin in his first. Poe also gave Philip Seymour Hoffman his first movie role in his 1992 indie TRIPLE BOGEY ON A PAR FIVE HOLE. Other mainstream efforts include the 1995 Showtime sci-fi thriller DEAD WEEKEND and 1998's FROGS FOR SNAKES, but the now-71-year-old Poe's post-No Wave work has largely concentrated on documentaries and short films.
ALPHABET CITY opening in Toledo, OH on a busy 6/22/1984
1984's THE KILLING FIELDS and 1986's THE MISSION earned Roland Joffe a lifetime pass to the Respected Filmmakers Club, but his career's been in a near-constant state of freefall for the better part of 25 years. His last good movie was 1998's underrated modern noir GOODBYE LOVER, and in the years since, he crashed and burned with 2007's unwatchable CAPTIVITY, a repugnant SAW ripoff made at the height of the torture porn craze that has to go down in the annals of cinema as one of the most shocking and depressing downfalls for a once-revered filmmaker. Joffe's subsequent films range from forgettable at best to embarrassing at worst (who knows how he got roped into directing the t.A.T.u.-inspired Mischa Barton vehicle YOU AND I, which went straight to DVD in 2012 after three years on the shelf?), but THE FORGIVEN almost qualifies as a return to form. It's ponderous and slow-moving, and has to dumb it down for the audience (opening with a caption that defines "apartheid"), but it's also sincere, well-acted, and get better as it goes on. Set in 1996 in post-apartheid South Africa under President Nelson Mandela, THE FORGIVEN centers on Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Forest Whitaker) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a restorative justice body whose goal is to grant amnesty for those guilty of human rights violations, all in the hopes of the country coming together to put its past behind. Tutu is assessing the amnesty candidacy of Piet Blomfeld (Eric Bana), an ex-death squad member in a maximum security Cape Town prison. Blomfeld doesn't seem interested in clearing his conscience--he taunts the Archbishop with the kaffir slur and enthusiastically recounts his most vile crimes against black South Africans--but Tutu senses something in him when it comes to a court case involving two murdered teenagers that connects Blomfeld with two other death squad cohorts--Francois Schmidt (Jeff Gum) and Hansi Coetzee (Morne Visser)--who are now guards in the very prison housing him.
Based on the Michael Ashton play The Archbishop and the Antichrist, THE FORGIVEN was scripted by Ashton and Joffe and expands on the play by adding a subplot involving a 17-year-old black inmate (Nandiphile Mbeshu) forced into the attempted murder of Blomfeld to establish his cred on the inside only to be taken under his target's wing. Blomfeld's demonstration of a capacity to forgive and his AMERICAN HISTORY X/Come-to-Jesus moment where he realizes the error of his ways never quite come off as believable, despite Joffe's ham-fisted attempts to hammer it home by providing the loathsome, rage-filled racist with a tragic backstory to excuse the monster he's been for his entire adult life. But Bana is good, as is Whitaker, despite being forced to act around an almost comically large prosthetic nose that makes him look less like Desmond Tutu and more like Squidward from SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS. The long scenes between Tutu and Blomfeld (a fictional composite) constituted Ashton's play and here, with Blomfeld's unapologetic and horrifically detailed descriptions of his misdeeds, almost makes these sequences play like a post-apartheid EXORCIST III with back and forth monologues by the two stars. The climactic courtroom showdown between an on-trial Coetzee and the grieving mother (Thandi Makhubele) of two teenagers brutally slaughtered by Blomfeld while Coetzee and Schmidt looked on is powerful and unexpectedly moving. THE FORGIVEN is a mixed bag--it's too slow and meandering and the story arc for Blomfeld smacks of plot convenience--but it has its moments, especially once you can get around Whitaker's cartoonishly fake nose and focus on his performance. It's not enough to say the 72-year-old Joffe is back per se, but THE FORGIVEN shows that there might be some signs of life. (R, 120 mins)
BENT (Spain/US - 2018)
After winning an Oscar for co-writing CRASH with Paul Haggis, Bobby Moresco made the little-seen crime drama 10TH AND WOLF and moved on to TV, creating the acclaimed but short-lived series THE BLACK DONNELLYS. He wrote and directed the straight-to-VOD BENT, his first feature film in over a decade, and it's a thoroughly generic and utterly forgettable present-day noir-inspired cop thriller. Disgraced ex-cop Danny Gallagher (Karl Urban) has just been paroled after serving three years for the killing of an undercover officer during a botched drug bust set up by his broke, gambling-addicted partner Charlie (Vincent Spano). They were supposed to nail scumbag businessman Driscoll (John Finn), but Charlie ended up getting killed, Gallagher took two bullets, and both Charlie's and Gallagher's names were dragged through the gutter after Driscoll framed them as corrupt, or "bent" cops on the take. Once he's out, Gallagher makes like an unlicensed and uncharismatic Philip Marlowe, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery that may involve the car bomb death of the wife of a Driscoll associate, as well as shady and untrustworthy femme fatale government agent Rebecca (a miscast Sofia Vergara), who's been ordered to keep Gallagher from digging any further, an assignment that inevitably involves showing up unannounced at his ramshackle pier house and immediately disrobing and stepping into the steaming shower with him.
Based on a series of Gallagher novels by J.P. O'Donnell, BENT is hopelessly muddled (there's even a red herring about "Arab terrorists" being involved), with an uncharacteristically dull Urban on what seems to be one of the least urgent quests for vengeance you'll ever see. BENT is filled with would-be hard-boiled dialogue that rarely works, mainly because it's delivered in such a bland fashion. It's the kind of movie that has a climactic showdown and shootout at a shipyard. It's the kind of movie where the bad guy delivers a long-winded, Christopher Walken-esque speech ("You know, in Alaska, they smoke this fish on the beach...") while intimidatingly slicing salmon with a huge knife. It's the kind of movie where you know a prominently-billed name actor has to have more to do with what's going on since he's barely in it until the last 15 minutes. Also with Andy Garcia as Gallagher's retired, fatherly cop mentor who pops up periodically to tell him to let the past go and get out of town, BENT doesn't even muster the energy to be a harmless time-killer on a slow night. Nobody seems really invested in it, and New Orleans is rather unconvincingly played by Rome, of all places. At least everyone got a nice Italian vacation out of it. (R, 96 mins)
