OVP: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Film: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Stars: Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Isabelle Huppert, Joseph Cotten, Jeff Bridges, Terry O'Quinn

Director: Michael Cimino

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction...though at the 1981 Oscars, not 1980)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Kris Kristofferson: click here to learn more about Mr. Kristofferson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

While we didn't start this season with John Wayne (I wanted to pick a month with five Saturday's for Wayne given how important he is to the western genre), I made a point of covering The Big Trail this year, which was not the first Hollywood western, but it was the first one to be playing in the field of "epic tale of good-vs-evil" that would be a hallmark of the genre for the next fifty years.  Even after the collapse of the studio system, the western survived well into the 1970's, in some cases because people like Wayne continued to be profitable even as other Golden Age actors fell.  But in the same way that The Big Trail was a landmark for the western but not the first, Heaven's Gate was not the epitaph of the western...but it did mark the end of it as a major, consistent presence in Hollywood.  Michael Cimino's follow-up to his acclaimed (and commercially successful) war film The Deer Hunter was a gargantuan bomb, one of several that would happen throughout the 1980's, and would become synonymous with flops, to the point that when Kevin Costner's expensive failure Waterworld came out, it was nicknamed by the press "Kevin's Gate."  Unlike Waterworld, though (which actually made a lot of money, just not enough to recoup its budget), Heaven's Gate has a weird second life in the decades since, hailed by many as a masterpiece, in some ways akin to what Cimino achieved with The Deer Hunter, and I have spent much of this year looking forward to it, though a little concerned by the 219-minute run time (not a typo-this film approaches Gone with the Wind-levels of patience).  I was curious what the "last" Hollywood western would have in store for me.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is an epic tale focusing on the real-life Johnson County War that took place in the 1890's in Wyoming.  Despite a gigantic, long story, you can actually summarize it pretty quickly.  We have at its core Averill (Kristofferson), who starts the film a promising young man at school, but in a flash forward we understand he's now a grizzled marshall, someone who has seen too much of the world, and is employed in Johnson County, which is seeing a battle between the cattle barons of the region and the burgeoning immigrant population trying to find a hold in the West.  The barons are angry about the immigrants, and want to pin a series of cattle thefts on them, and quickly decide to put bounties on the heads of 125 different immigrants in the area, in hopes of killing them and driving the remainder out.  The rest of the film centers around this conflict, and eventually involves a wide array of figures, including a bordello madam named Ella (Huppert), who is caught in a love triangle with Averill and a hired hand for the cattlemen named Champion (Walken), before culminating in almost everyone involved dying...but the immigrants likely being able to carry on in their homes.  Averill survives in the end, living on a yacht in a proper life that feels unfulfilling...a sign that he left his spirit in the West, never to be reclaimed.

Heaven's Gate became a flop for a couple of reasons.  First, the production is the stuff of legend, with Cimino allegedly having something of a God Complex (it was the 1970's, and we were entering the saturation point of auteur theory between this and Apocalypse Now!'s sprawling location shooting).  He went over budget, and months over deadline.  According to legend, one of the films stars (John Hurt) was able to shoot his Oscar-nominated turn in The Elephant Man during production of Heaven's Gate, it took so long to make.  Cimino would tear down sets for no reason, and the film basically ruined his career two years after being crowned the toast of Hollywood at the Academy Awards.  The film also destroyed United Artists, and caused it to be sold to MGM in 1981 during the tumultuous Kirk Kerkorian years for the studio.  The movie's budget basically made anything short of a Star Wars-style payday to be a flop, and on a $44 million budget, it barely cracked $3 million at the box office (a loss of $74 million when adjusted for inflation).

It's easy to see why the public didn't like the movie.  It's long, and while I saw the longer director's cut, it also doesn't need to be if you solely focus on plot.  There's not a lot here.  The tropes of a western (good vs. evil, the little guy being overtaken by a powerful government, a love triangle between a sex worker and two lawmen with different ethos) are all there, but in the 1950's you could get that done in 100 minutes...and Heaven's Gate does.  In the remaining 2 hours, you largely just see a really beautiful reconstruction of the West.  No extra plot, just pretty pictures.

There's a trend in recent years to only focus on the plot, to the point where many people who are against sex scenes in movies use "is it relevant to the plot?" to argue against certain scenes in movie (we saw that earlier this year with Oppenheimer).  But Heaven's Gate is a solid explanation as to why you shouldn't do that.  Because Heaven's Gate is a good movie almost entirely because of how it looks.  Film is a visual medium first-and-foremost, and Cimino definitely gets good use out of bankrupting a studio.  You see every penny of his work in the production design, costumes, & cinematography, all first-rate and glorious on the screen, with entire towns built from scratch and giving us a lived-in look at the west.  The film's fatal mistake (other than its accounting) is that it casts our star (apologies to Kris Kristofferson, who has had a rough month with me in terms of reviews) incorrectly.  Kristofferson is handsome & genial, but he's not Clint Eastwood or John Wayne-he doesn't have an automatic connection with the audience, and he's too reserved as an actor for us to invest four hours into his character.  It's easy to see years later, when he's now a legend, but Jeff Bridges (who plays a smaller role in the film) would've been perfect for the lead, and Kristofferson would've been a good fit for Bridges' less showy part, but in 1980 that wasn't the star structure that was in place.  Heaven's Gate would change that.  While Bridges would go on to fame, glory, & an Oscar in the decades that followed, Kristofferson would essentially be banished from the A-List after this movie, forced into character parts.  We'll get to one of his most notable ones, and the final western of 2023, in our season finale next week.

OVP: Supporting Actor (2002)

OVP: Best Supporting Actor (2002)

The Nominees Were...

Chris Cooper, Adaptation

Ed Harris, The Hours

Paul Newman, Road to Perdition

John C. Reilly, Chicago

Christopher Walken, Catch Me If You Can

My Thoughts: We are heading into the home stretch of 2002 today with the Best Supporting Actor field and the start of the Big 6.  This field featured five white, middle-to-late aged men, four of whom were/are noted character actors and the fifth being one of the most iconic movie stars of all-time, an actor getting the only supporting nomination of his career.  Don't feel bad for him, though, as Newman would amass ten nominations in his long career so we'll be discussing him for a while in this series...this is also the latest of four nominations for Ed Harris so we're starting our discussion of him as well.  So to kick us off, though, let's look at an actor who got his only nomination (to date) that managed to also snag him a trophy.

Chris Cooper's performance is kind of extraordinary, both because it should be a caricature (it's not even clear at first if it's written intending to be a caricature), and it's so multi-layered.  I loved the way that he indulges celebrity in the character, the idea of being famous being a perverse thrill for all of us, having us be found interesting enough to write an article about or for the public to ask us a series of questions...even the most mundane can find that intoxicating, and he brings that to life.  I will say, though Cage gets the worst of it, some of the meta-focuses in the center cost him slightly (no one does a great job of bringing that to life), but this is easily the longtime screen presence's best work.

John C. Reilly was having a remarkable year in 2002.  It sometimes gets lost in supporting nominations that the nomination is not "just" for that performance, but for their career or the year they've had, but Reilly wasn't just in Chicago, but also in Gangs of New York and The Hours (gaining him the rare distinction of an actor who appeared in three Best Picture nominees in one year), and had been doing bravura work for Paul Thomas Anderson for a while.  But OVP rules clearly state that we only award for the performance at hand, and with Chicago's Amos, that's just okay.  This performance feels a bit one-note, and while "Mr. Cellophane" is a good number (he can sing), it's nowhere near the most memorable in the film.  Amos is meant to be forgotten in the script, and it's hard to imagine him being remembered here had Reilly not had the year he'd had in 2002.

Paul Newman's work in Road to Perdition is inarguably the last great performance of one of the Golden Age's final movie stars (I don't believe in the concept of the "final movie star" because every few years that crown gets handed down, but in terms of Golden Age, Studio System stars...Newman's one of the final ones).  This is bravura stuff-he plays a man who has lived by a unique criminal code that shapes his worldview.  He understands the worthlessness of his son, but the point-of-pride that comes with knowing that he's his son, and there's that great monologue at the end with Tom Hanks where he said "no one here will see heaven" that just chills.  Proof that decades in the spotlight never totally get rid of the thespian within.

Ed Harris's work in The Hours is not for everyone, and there was a time that this performance might have aged in a different direction than me.  Everything about The Hours is hyper-stylized, and Harris might be pitching the most to the rafters of the bunch.  But watching this through the years, I've found that it works better the further you go into the film, particularly when you know his character's fate.  Playing a man who was a noted writer, but had a novel that was ill-received despite high expectations, Harris is a man adrift, knowing that AIDS is going to ensure that his chapter in life is about to be over.  The way he plays off of Streep is marvelous-every sentence feels like it's cutting through the air in the final scene, not just of her Clarissa, but also of everything we've seen before us, the ways we hang onto the best parts of our lives even when they've become antiques in our memories...it's beautiful work.

Our final nomination is Christopher Walken.  Walken is an odd actor when it comes to Oscar because (to date-he's still working regularly at the age of 79), he's only been nominated twice, including his initial win for The Deer Hunter.  His work here is a slightly odd fit, as he's not a big part of this movie, and it's hard not to notice it feels like an "old age" citation even though he wasn't even sixty when this was released.  But he does provide a sentimental heart to the film, one that DiCaprio infuses in the later scenes, sort of projecting on what you know is coming, and he's winning even if he's not lifting any major acting muscles here.  Sometimes adding a pleasant note to the film is what you're supposed to do as an actor.  I don't know if that's Oscar-worthy, but it's important to make your movie work.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes gave their statue to Chris Cooper atop Harris, Newman, Reilly, and Dennis Quaid (Far from Heaven), while BAFTA favored Walken against Cooper, Harris, Newman, and Alfred Molina (Frida).  SAG also picked Walken, with Cooper, Harris, Molina, & Quaid the nominees.  This puts you in a quandary when it comes to who was in sixth place, as Molina & Quaid strike very similar profiles.  Both were nominated for two precursors, both were in Best Actress-cited films that did well in the tech categories, and both were trying to get what might've been their only real shot at a nomination (both still work today, but neither have been nominated for an Oscar yet).  The Weinstein factor probably means I should pick Molina, but I'm going to guess it was Quaid, mostly because Quaid was also getting good notices for The Rookie in 2002, which was a surprise hit for Disney that spring and marked a proper comeback arch for the star who'd just been through a very messy public divorce.

Performances I Would Have Nominated: I don't entirely know how to categorize Andy Serkis, and I'm never entirely sure if voiceover performances are deemed eligible by the Academy.  But what he does here is remarkable-we have been quoting and mirroring Gollum for a reason, and his work here basically became the prototype for how motion-capture performances were done in the decades to come.  That deserved some sort of prize.

Oscar’s Choice: Walken & Cooper were in a close race, and Walken definitely was closing well in 2002, but Cooper ultimately picked up the trophy in the "Battle of the Chris's."

My Choice: I'm going to go with Paul Newman, who is giving some of the best work of his career here, and does a good job of trading on his movie star persona while also just giving great acting.  Ed Harris (silver) and Chris Cooper (bronze) would've made worthy winners, and picking between them would've been so hard that I'm glad Newman is my easy out here.  Walken and then Reilly bring up the back.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Do you side with Oscar's choice of Mr. Cooper, or do you want to join me celebrating Paul Newman?  Why do you think actors like Christopher Walken go such long stints without Oscar remembering that they're a fan?  And who was in sixth place-Molina or Quaid?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!

Also in 2002: Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2002

Past Best Supporting Actor Contests: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

OVP: The Jungle Book (2016)

Film: The Jungle Book (2016)
Stars: Neel Sethi, Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong'o, Scarlett Johansson, Giancarlo Esposito, Christopher Walken
Director: Jon Favreau
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Visual Effects*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Disney is not shy in recent years about restarting its animated properties and bringing them to life as real-life movies, having us rediscover our beloved childhood classics (and yet they can continue to reinvest in stuffed animals and toys from the animated films that are now popular).  All-in-all, it's a lucrative racket, one that, if you're a parent, you've probably already been suckered into at this point.  That doesn't, however, mean that the end product is any good.  Indeed, one of the things I've noticed with these live-action Disney films is that they are deeply hit-or-miss.  They all look good initially (OMG-how do you think they'll handle X scene...it's happening!), but at the end of the day you can't just rely upon a classic story to carry you across the finish line.

(Really-you need a Spoiler Alert on The Jungle Book?) That's what happens in this adaptation of Kipling's classic tales.  The story of Mowgli, the young boy raised by wolves, has been seen by almost all of you (with $1 billion box office, I was clearly behind the curve here), but it felt pretty played out even early on in the film.  It hurts that Kipling's least interesting character is, in fact, the chief protagonist in the film-Mowgli is not interesting, and utterly predictable (gee, I'm going to haphazardly go off into the jungle and hope that Bagheera will save me when I inevitably get caught doing the thing he specifically told me not to do), and Neel Seethi doesn't really add anything exciting or revolutionary to the character.  As a result, we're already saddled with one of the duller protagonists in the Disney canon.

Of course, the point of The Jungle Book is the side characters, but even here we're stuck by some people I wasn't wild about, to be honest.  Some of the casting choices felt uninspired-let's just get this out there, this is a boring movie.  I found it dull.  I think if you'd put the characters of Bagheera, Baloo, and King Louie in front of me and told me to cast them in the most generic way possible, I'd have gone with Ben Kingsley, Bill Murray, and Christopher Walken.  They're all men who have put in terrific performances before and have created iconic movie moments, but if you give them a chance to coast because it's a "kid's movie," they'll take it, and they rely almost entirely upon the earlier Disney film, rarely adding much to the live-action aspect of the film.  Idris Elba is better, though the only person that I think is truly adding something special to this film is Scarlett Johansson, who makes Kaa sexy and dangerous, going in a different direction from the animated feature and it pays off-the Kaa scene is easily the best of the movie.

The film will surely be nominated for its special effects, but even here I quibble.  You may say "it's better on the big screen" but everything's better on a big screen, and I thought that the lighting in the film was so poorly done (the cinematography was difficult to focus upon, as the shadows were unnatural), that it took away from the special effects.  Yes, I'm not blind so there are moments of wow (King Louie in particular stands out to me), but watching essentially an animated movie, it frequently felt odd compared to the rest of the picture-you could tell you were watching a visual effect, which is never the point, and then I felt somewhat cheated because all of that green-screen started to grate after a while, taking away the few special moments that came out of the picture.

So all-in-all, I was not impressed here-I wanted to like it (the reviews were solid, and with that box office I wouldn't totally discount a sequel), but I didn't.  This is a dud, and our classic film moments deserve to be better reimagined than this.  Hopefully Beauty and the Beast can find a way to overcome these obstacles next year.  In the meantime, agree or disagree in the comments-don't pretend you haven't seen this yet.

OVP: Click (2006)

Film: Click (2006)
Stars: Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale, Christopher Walken, David Hasselhoff, Henry Winkler, Julie Kavner
Director: Frank Coraci
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Makeup)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Growing up as a teenager toward the end of the 1990's, Adam Sandler was as inevitable as having a favorite Backstreet Boy and a Beanie Babies retirement plan.  Seriously-Sandler was an enormous movie star starting with this one-two punch of Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison, and continued to be a deeply reliable bankable presence for a decade after that (he's nowhere near that now, but he can still pull in a hit as Pixels brought in a solid profit last year, and is perhaps being more of a pioneer into the future of filmdom with his Netflix contract).  Even those of us who couldn't stand his juvenile and deeply predictable humor couldn't totally avoid him (mostly because all of his films kept coming up during band trip bus rides), but I'd largely avoided almost everything he'd done for a number of years after escaping high school until recently, when the Oscar Viewing Project threw me one of those curveballs that rivaled Norbit in giving a citation to Click.  Yes, an Adam Sandler movie has been nominated for an Academy Award, and no, it wasn't the one directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.  Like Norbit, I stomached up to the bar, and took my painfully terrible medicine.

(Spoilers Ahead) I will say, it has to be noted, that the film is terrible, but nowhere near as bad as what Norbit ended up being (Norbit remains one of the worst films I've ever seen-Click is awful, but it's not going to question whether or not I should stop watching movies awful).  The film follows Mike (Sandler), a loving husband-and-father who is trying to get ahead at work, despite coming into a number of setbacks as his boss John (Hasselhoff) repeatedly uses him and overlooks him for promotions.  Still, he has a loving family and is good at his job, and one day he meets Morty (Walken), who gives him a remote control that will help solve all of his problems-it can fast forward through time, he soon learns, and can pause or rewind and he can relive old memories.  It's the sort of premise you find on The Twilight Zone, and we soon learn that like The Twilight Zone, there's a twist there-soon Mike is fast-forwarding ferociously through his life without any way of stopping himself.  He soon becomes a parody of Scrooge, someone who sees what his life is like if he doesn't start making more time for his family, and he gets a reset late in the film where he learns that family is the most important thing.

It's worth noting, of course, that the film is strange if you just look at it from the outside, particularly considering that Mike doesn't seem that devoted initially to his job, and truly seems more concerned about providing for his family.  I guess as the film goes on it becomes more cartoonish and his relationship with his wife becomes more plausibly strained, but the movie has a number of plot-holes where we see Mike conveniently become a jerk, despite of course having cognition of what is happening to him with the remote.  Time travel movies always have holes in them, but this one in particular the logic wears thin as the movie progresses.

The film itself, though, even if you buy into the plot, is pointless and juvenile.  The comedy bits are broad and are easily seen ahead of time, with us frequently valuing the female characters only for their sexuality (Kate Beckinsale is good, Jennifer Coolidge is bad in this equation, apparently), and none of these actors, even the ones who can, you know, actually act, are doing any heavy-lifting.  Anyone who can't see literally every turn in the film, well, congratulations on finally watching a movie.  And some of the judgments of characters are just mean-spirited.  After all, Sean Astin's Bill is actually a solid guy, arguably better for Mike's family than Mike is, and yet he's treated as a jerk even though he did nothing wrong.  A lot of this film is perched on liking Mike and believing he'd put his family above his career-I didn't really buy either of those two things, which made the film largely pointless.

The film received its Oscar nomination for Makeup, and part of that nomination was probably pretty earned.  The film's old age makeup and hairstyling is actually solid.  Particularly on Sandler, the old age makeup is believable and quite convincing.  Unfortunately, the film also has a series of fat suit makeup that is, well, terrible and only used for comic effect that has to lose the film mad points in terms of an actual Oscar nomination, so like Norbit I have to question whether or not it deserved the Oscar nod even if occasionally the effects worked.

Those are my thoughts on this pointless, dull film, and one of several in the past couple of weeks that I was a bit shocked to find I truly detested.  Any Sandler fans out there want to vouch for it, or at least its Oscar nod?  Anyone else have a moment of "is that Jonah Hill?" with the future Oscar-nominee's surprise early role?  And where do you think Sandler's career goes from here?  Share your thoughts below!

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Film: Seven Psychopaths (2012)
Stars: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Abbie Cornish, Tom Waits
Director: Martin McDonagh
Oscar History: None
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

For those who missed it four years ago, In Bruges was a comic gem of the highest order-one of those films you laugh the entire way through, and suddenly realize you're watching every single year, even if it didn't make your Top 5 for the year.  Martin McDonagh, who wrote and directed both films, clearly has seen the films of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, but his films are a bit more retrospective, more character-piece than style exhibition.  Seven Psychopaths is a sometimes slightly confusing meta-adventure, but it will have you constantly proclaiming "ohhhhh!" and laughing, sometimes at wonderfully inappropriate times.

The film tells the tale of a talented writer struggling with writer's block and alcoholism (Farrell, playing a character named Marty, and one has to wonder how many similarities McDonagh included about himself here).  Farrell, an actor who showed immense range in In Bruges and Tigerland, despite his otherwise checkered filmography, plays the role rather well-Farrell is great at comedy, and is a fabulous straight man in the movie.  The slowly turning salt-and-pepper hair and the leaner frame for Farrell works for one of the sexiest men in filmdom, and while he's not quite at the (in my opinion, Oscar-worthy) level he was in In Bruges, this is easily the best thing he's done since that film.  Farrell is surrounded by a constantly peeved girlfriend (Cornish, in a thankless role) and his loser best friend Billy (Rockwell, who gets a lot of legroom here and fits right into McDonagh's world).  Billy, along with his friend Han (Walken), are petty dog-kidnappers (kidnapping dogs and then collecting the reward money) and they eventually kidnap Charlie's (Harrelson) dog, whom he is unnaturally attached to and is willing to murder his way back toward.

The film counts down a number of psychopaths, and at this point I should include the spoiler alert, as it's worth noting that the seven psychopaths slowly come together from their disconnected beginnings.  I'm not going to count down all of them, though I will say that the first one, the Jack of Diamonds killer, gets one of the most fascinating introductions of the seven when, in the opening scenes, we're treated to a Boardwalk Empire reunion with Michael Pitt and Michael Stuhlberg, seemingly too big of character actors to get iced so soon into the film, both getting shot in the heads by a killer to be revealed later.  The film has a lot of fun with cameos throughout the movie-later in the film, we're given some wonderfully cast work by an hilarious Gabourey Sidibe (can someone write her another script as good as Precious, pretty please?) and some silent glares from veteran character actor Harry Dean Stanton.

The movie continues on, giving us plenty of backstory on the characters, and a lot of the story is told by a meandering narrative, as the movie is both the actual story and the story that Farrell is writing in his head.  Several of the psychopaths (well, in the end we learn, one of the psychopaths) are fictional, and so we see their backstories and it is a confusing meta-game of whether the characters are leading their own destinies through the script or the script is leading them to their next plot point.  When Farrell's Marty says that they are just going to stay in the desert and talk in the movie he's writing, the three main characters stay in the desert until someone decides otherwise.

The acting is top notch across the board (though the comment about Marty not writing strong parts for women is true of McDonagh himself, Linda Bright Clay's great final scene being the exception).  Farrell, Harrelson (good, but not the brilliance that Ralph Fiennes reached in McDonagh's other film), and Rockwell (whom I'm not always a fan of) all toe the fine line between realistic and crazy so well that you never feel like any of them are chewing the scenery.  The best performances, though, belong to Waits and Walken.  Neither actor is particularly averse to playing a nut job, but both give a great sincerity to their characters and show a worn quality that I admired.  Neither actor is a young man, and their characters have lived long enough to not be off-put by their own idiosyncrasies and personal tics.  Make sure and stick around for after the credits to see one of these two men get some fun last jokes.

All-in-all, I'm a fan, and recommending it to anyone who can still catch it before it leaves theaters.  I'd say it plays just as well on DVD, which it does, but going to a theater would help improve the box office and we all want more movies like this, so shell out the $10 and hit the local AMC.  And for those of you who saw it-what'd you think?  Who was your favorite psychopath?  Are you also a fan of Colin Farrell's new hair?  And what do you hope McDonagh does next?