Shards from the Fractured Mirror: Entropy, Forever, King Kong (2005), Mistress and Terror Firmer — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

For the last eight months or so much of my time and energy has been devoted to working on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the movie business. I’ve posted much longer versions of some of the pieces that I’ve written for the book on this website but the vast majority I only shared with people who pre-ordered the book through Kickstarter and Backerkit or who donate to this site’s Patreon page.

I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done on the book, as well as the kooky assortment of movies I’ve covered so I figured that every month I would share a handful of pieces I’ve written for The Fractured Mirror with y’all. I’ve written up 206 movies so far and will cover 300 or 350 in total so I am very open to recommendations on movies to write about.

In conclusion, please donate to my site’s Patreon page. I desperately need the income and I’d love to share these new pieces with as many people as possible.

Entropy (1999)

Writer-director Phil Joanou, a hotshot music video director best known for his work with U2, most notably the notoriously pretentious documentary Rattle and Hum, aimed squarely for the Phil Joanou demographic with his 1999 show biz drama Entropy. It’s about the travails of a hotshot music video director best known for his work with U2. Entropy may be a navel-gazing exercise in artsy self-absorption but to give Joanou credit, it should be resonate with anyone who has ever found themselves juggling a passionate sexual affair with a French model, shooting a thirty million dollar motion picture as a first time filmmaker and being friends with rock star Bono.

That’s the alternately enviable and unenviable predicament of Jake Walsh (Stephen Dorff), an ambitious young auteur who gets the opportunity of a lifetime to direct a big studio picture starring married couple Kevin (Jon Tenney) and Claire (Lauren Holly). The driven storyteller is hopelessly distracted, however, by a melodramatic fling with mysterious beauty Stella (Judith Godrèche). Jake’s obsession with the enigmatic European plays havoc with his personal and professional life. He soon finds himself pounding back Rolling Rock at an unhealthy rate and taking foolish chances with his career for the sake of his all-important integrity and creative vision. Thankfully Jake has his close personal friend and mentor Bono, who has a stiff and sizable role as himself, to guide him.

If you don’t want audiences to hate a lead character or find him insufferable, the last actor you’d want to cast is Stephen Dorff, who spends much of the film smugly addressing the audience directly while smoking and drinking modestly priced domestic beer. Entropy dares audiences to hate its lead character by making him a self-obsessed faux-artiste played by a uniquely unlikable, unsympathetic actor, then asks audiences to root for him to get through his premature midlife crisis. The all too tellingly titled Entropy is the kind of narcissistic nonsense that gives brazenly autobiographical vanity projects a bad name.

Forever (1992)

Cinephiles and historians have long been fascinated by the glamorous, sad lives and dramatic deaths of the legends of the silent screen. The unfathomably awful 1992 Hollywood fantasy Forever goes one step further and speculates wildly on the after-lives of some of the biggest names of early film, including Mary Miles Minter, Mabel Normand, Wallace Reid, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, William Desmond Taylor and Charlie Chaplin. The filmmakers apparently could not get the rights to use Chaplin’s name, however, so the film’s mustachioed, mischievous little tramp inexplicably goes by the moniker Billy Baldwin.

One of the stupidest movies ever made about the film industry, or any other subject, Forever stars a dazzlingly miscast Keith Coogan as hotshot music video director Ted Dickson. The lilliputian twerp is a sexually irresistible dynamo who spends much of the film making the beast with two backs with multiple generations of eccentric beauties.

The unlikely stud’s charmed life of sex, money, rock and roll, success, ghosts and more sex changes forever when he moves into a house formerly owned by silent actor and director William Desmond Taylor, who was fatally shot in the back in 1922 in a murder that has never been solved.

Our hero is already in an intense sexual relationship with his adoring agent Anjelica (Sally Kirkland). But when he meets the ghost of Mary Miles Minter (Sean Young) he falls hopelessly in love and into bed with a sexy apparition who proves that in this film at least, ghosts definitely can do it. The real Minter died at 82 in 1984 but the version found here never ages beyond twenty. She is preserved forever at the height of her beauty.

Mary is joined by some of the biggest names of the early twenties in costume shop ensembles in uniformly dire performances that never rise to the level of glib impersonation. Nostalgia for the heyday of silent cinema has never been so cringe-inducing. As a vehicle for the erotic charms of the frequently naked and thrusting Keith Coogan, Forever is laughable. As a meditation on cinematic immortality it is uniquely idiotic as well as mesmerizing in its surreal ineptitude.

Taylor is played by The Stunt Man’s Steve Railsback, incidentally. That gives him the curious distinction of having starred in one of the very best films ever made about the movie business as well as one of the very worst.

King Kong (2005) FM

It takes chutzpah as well as ambition to remake one of the greatest and most beloved films of all time at nearly twice the length. But after triumphing with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson could be forgiven for thinking that he was capable of the impossible. You can’t improve upon the perfection of the 1933 classic even with a three hour and seven minute runtime but that does not keep Jackson from trying with shocking success.

Jackson and his gifted collaborators seemingly had all of the money and resources in the world at their disposal when they chose to remake the classic tale of a movie production gone seriously awry.

Jack Black stars as mischievous movie-maker Carl Denham, an ethically challenged rapscallion who begins the film in a dilly of a pickle. Money men and name actresses don’t want to work with him for reasons that quickly became apparent. So he takes the concept of a runaway production to new heights and lows by setting sail for the mysterious and unknown Skull Island alongside tweedy playwright turned screenwriter Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody, the perfect combination of brains and brawn), charming ingenue Ann Darrow (Mulholland Drive’s Naomi Watts, in another unforgettable performance as an actress) and vain leading man Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler).

On Skull Island the overwhelmed filmmakers encounter an abundance of dinosaurs and a twenty-five foot ape played by Andy Serkis in a motion-capture performance every bit as masterful as his rightly acclaimed turn as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. King Kong solidifies Serkis’ standing as the Olivier of motion capture, a uniquely gifted thespian skilled at making non-human characters achingly human. Like the title character in the 1933 original, Kong is at once all animal and oddly relatable. Like the film itself, it is a performance at once absolutely epic and endearingly intimate, even quiet at times.

Jackson’s King Kong represents an apex for computer generated imagery the same way that Cooper’s original stands proud as a high water mark for stop motion animation. CGI may be a lesser, degraded and cheaper form of animation than stop-motion but Jackson finds the poetry in ones and zeroes and computer code. Jackson’s remake has better and more CGI than any film before or since.

In Jackson’s capable hands, CGI is less a pox upon contemporary filmmaking than a marvelous tool for storytelling whose possibilities had never been fully realized. Is King Kong as good as the 1933 version? Of course not. Nothing is. But Jackson’s wildly entertaining, poignant and sincere remake is in the same league as the original, and that represents an incredible achievement.

Mistress (1992) (FM)

Robert De Niro produced and acted in the masterful 1992 black comedy Mistress back when that meant something, when the actor’s name was synonymous with quality and prestige rather than mercenary desperation.

The Taxi Driver star is only one of a quartet of Academy Award winners in Mistress’ stacked cast. Martin Landau is hilarious and heartbreaking as Jack Roth, a has been schlemiel of a producer angling for a comeback while Ernest Borgnine and Christopher Walken pop up in small but memorable cameos.

The quartet of Oscar favorites are joined by Eli Wallach, Danny Aiello, Laurie Metcalf, Jean Smart, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Jace Alexander. But the lead role of Marvin Landesman, a pretentious arthouse auteur who is faced with an opportunity to realize his creative dreams at a steep cost to his soul belongs to Robert Wuhl.

Mistress is full of welcome surprises, not the least of which is a fine lead dramatic performance by the funnyman behind Arli$$ that finds the chuckle merchant creating a character with real depth and holding his own against heavyweight thespians.

In Mistress, a clever comedy of creative and spiritual corruption, Wuhl’s sad sack protagonist gets a call out of the blue from Landau’s tragicomic would-be player. The batty show business survivor thinks that he’ll be able to get an ancient, depressing, suicide-themed script of Marvin’s made under the condition that he find a role for Peggy (Tuesday Knight), the talentless and much younger girlfriend of brusque potential backer George (Wallach).

The desperate producer lines up two more potential investors in Evan Wright (De Niro), a sleek shark of a businessman who is cocky and sharp in business but vulnerable in his love life, and the sad-eyed Carmine (Danny Aiello).

Evan and Carmine inconveniently have a girlfriend in common in Beverly (Ralph), a cold-blooded, sharp-witted and utterly ruthless opportunist and ambitious actress who knows exactly what she’s worth and how to get the most out of life.

The broad outlines and themes of Mistress are familiar but it possesses a glorious specificity and sense of nuance that sets it apart from lesser explorations of the eternal battle of art and commerce.

These are not the usual show-business cliches but rather real, flesh and blood people with agency and agendas. Mistress transcends formula to deliver a bleakly funny, sad look at the complicated and fraught business of trying to make a grand statement through art when the universe is seemingly conspiring against you.

Terror Firmer (1999)

Troma head carny Lloyd Kaufman took a long, admiring look in the mirror and decided to make, in the 1999 gross out show-business comedy Terror Firmer, a blood-splattered, viscera-drenched provocation based very loosely on his 1998 memoir All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned From the Toxic Avenger. The cult guide to independent moviemaking was ghost written by an ambitious Kaufman protege at the beginning of a career that would catapult him far beyond the vomit, piss and shit-stained walls of Troma and into the highest corridors of mainstream power: James Gunn.

Co-writer, director and producer Kaufman does quadruple duty in front of the camera as Larry Benjamin, a cheerfully oblivious veteran filmmaker who does not let blindness or a complete lack of talent or aptitude keep him from making the kinds of movies that have made Kaufman rich and infamous.

The Mr. Magoo of independent film works for Troma cranking out all-out assaults on propriety lousy with gratuitous nudity, mindless violence and gore as imaginative as it is is inexpensive.

Then crew-members for the latest Troma production start turning up dead, victims of a mysterious serial killer with an apparent vendetta against the filmmakers.

Making Terror Firmer a Troma movie about the making of a Troma movie affords the synergistic moviemakers an opportunity to relentlessly flog their back catalog, particularly the Toxic Avenger series, in an endless series of meta gags.

Terror Firmer is punk as fuck. It’s loud, cheap, vulgar, horny, profane and shameless, a symphony of scatology as well as a massive gob of spit in the face to Hollywood that gets surprisingly far on energy and attitude alone.

Wildly uneven but sometimes inspired, Terror Firmer hits a brick wall as it lurches violently to a close. Terror Firmer’s gender and sexual politics are ugly even by the exceedingly lenient standards of the time. It seems intent on out-doing Silence of the Lambs, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and The Crying Game for sheer offensiveness. It succeeds to its eternal demerit.

Terror Firmer is pretty much Troma: The Movie. Depending on your attitude about the wildly divisive schlock merchant that’s either high praise or harsh criticism. Terror Firmer represents Troma at its most Tromatic, to the point that it seems intent on testing the patience of even its most indulgent fans.

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