In This Latest Round-Up of Pieces I've Written for The Fractured Mirror, I Look Back at Hollywood Boulevard II, Lady Killer, Madness in the Method, The Majestic, The Watermelon Woman and X
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.
Hollywood Boulevard II (1990)
Joe Dante and Allan Arkush’s cult classic 1976 movie world comedy Hollywood Boulevard famously used footage from Roger Corman’s enormous stockpile of lusty, two-fisted exploitation movies to create a uniquely cheap and resourceful comedy that borrowed its production values, as well as all manner of explosions, shoot-outs and chases, from earlier films.
The legendarily inventive low-budget sleeper’s late in the game 1990 follow-up Hollywood Boulevard II similarly steals shamelessly from movies from Executive Producer Corman’s catalog to diminishing returns.
Hollywood Boulevard II was conceived as a mainstream vehicle for accomplished pornographic thespian Ginger Lynn Allen, who plays Candy Chandler, an aspiring actress who comes to Hollywood to make it in the movie business and is scooped up by the schlock merchants of Miracle Pictures.
The frequently unclothed starlet, who is VERY skilled at being naked onscreen, becomes Miracle’s newest star and begins shtupping a handsome screenwriter but a shadow soon falls over her swift professional rise in the form of a series of mysterious deaths afflicting Miracle productions.
Eddie Deezen costars as Walter, a silent flunky on hand mostly to stare at boobs. This includes an extended love scene where graphic sex between the male and female leads is intercut with shots of the troubled funnyman looking on appreciatively while munching popcorn.
Like its predecessor, Hollywood Boulevard II takes aim at low-budget filmmaking and a series of lurid genres, including the Philippines-set women in prison action movie, without hitting its targets anywhere near as often. Hollywood Boulevard II is not without a certain naive, goofy, homemade charm, particularly in terms of its quirky, offbeat soundtrack but it’s ultimately little more than a pale imitation of its predecessor.
Hollywood Boulevard had all the mindless bloodshed and gratuitous nudity you would angrily demand from an exploitation movie from the Roger Corman factory. But it also had wit, laughs, dark comedy, wonderful characters played by perfectly cast cult icons like Dick Miller, Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov and a satirical vision at once affectionate and scathing. Hollywood Boulevard II, in sharp contrast, just has boobs. For anyone other than single-minded onanists, that’s just not enough.
Lady Killer (1933) FM
The genre-hopping 1934 show-business crime comedy-drama thriller Lady Killer typecasts James Cagney as a slick-talking, hot-tempered tough guy with deep connections to the underworld. But he also intriguingly and successfully plays a James Cagney-style movie star famous for playing shady characters who are fast with their mouths and their hands.
Cagney’s Dan Quigley begins the movie a humble usher at a movie theater who gets fired for gambling and other unprofessional behavior. The quick-thinking hustler stumbles into a dangerous role at the center of a high-stakes , big money burglary ring.
When things go sideways and the anti-hero has to split town and lay low he impulsively decides to go to Los Angeles, where he gets into acting, first as an extra with bit roles, including a regrettable redface turn as a Native American chief and then as a proper movie star.
Movie stardom is an awfully peculiar, counter-intuitive profession for someone to choose if they’re trying to stay off the radar of both law enforcement and their deadly criminal associates. Sure enough the unlikely matinee idol’s past comes back to haunt him when the crooks Dan used to run with show up in Hollywood expecting him to help them rob the rich and famous, AKA his new peer group.
Lady Killer puts a clever new spin on the gritty Warner Brothers James Cagney crime movie by fusing it with movie world satire, romance and melodrama. Nothing in its first act suggests that Lady Killer will shift its focus to the motion picture industry, with the exception of Dan’s very loose connection to the business as a movie theater employee. Lady Killer is delightfully unexpected in the way it combines seemingly disparate genres.
Cagney is a powder keg of dynamite as a principled hood who becomes a popular entertainer. The only thing keeping this from being the perfect role and showcase for Cagney’s explosive talents is an understandable absence of song and dance numbers.
The Majestic (2001)
Frank Darabont’s elephantine 2001 flop The Majestic is an embarrassingly earnest, just plain embarrassing tribute to the heroism of our fighting boys in World War II, the principles our great nation was founded upon, the sunny perfection of small towns and the magic of movies and movie palaces that fails to do justice to any of the things it professes to love.
A painfully miscast Jim Carrey leaves a charisma void at the film’s core with a one-dimensional, one-note performance as Peter Appleton, an ambitious young screenwriter in early 1950s Hollywood whose career hits a brick wall in the Red Scare. The fresh-faced scribe attended a politically suspect meeting as a young man to impress a cute girl and ended up on a list with the potential to end his career in its infancy.
The distraught storyteller goes for a drive that ends with him waking up after a car accident in the tiny town of Lawson, California with amnesia. When big-hearted movie theater owner Harry Trimble (Martin Landau) tells Peter that he’s his long-lost son, a war hero who seemingly died in World War II, and seeks his help in re-opening the titular movie palace, Peter assumes that the older man is being honest because he does not know otherwise.
Lawson, California is a patriotic wet dream of small town America as an innocent paradise where everyone knows everyone else and loves their country above all things. It’s so impossibly idyllic that it makes Mayberry look nightmarish and dystopian by comparison.
Inhabiting the role of a profoundly good man eager to give all for what he believes in has a transformative effect on our hero, as does spending time with the nicest, kindest, most All-American people in human history.
When our hero’s true identity is discovered and he’s called upon to testify in front of a cartoonishly evil Congressional committee he responds with a patently phony, irritatingly theatrical display of nobility.
The Majestic comes out cravenly against the Blacklist and House of Un-American Activities Committee and in favor of heroism, sacrifice and the Constitution. It’s cornball wannabe Capra, one hundred and fifty two minutes of maudlin, sentimental drivel that panders relentlessly and shamelessly to the audience’s love of movies and country but deservedly bombed with critics and audiences all the same.
Madness in the Method (2019)
Jason Mewes IS Jason Mewes in Jason Mewes’ Madness in the Method. The master of the View Askewniverse made his directorial debut with an audaciously meta 2019 dark comedy in which he plays a fictionalized version of himself as a proudly sober stoner icon frustrated with being typecast as a goofy dude in lowbrow comedies and also close friends with British tough guy character actor Vinnie Jones.
In a bid to change his image Mewes gets his hands on a mysterious guide to method acting his mentor and best friend Kevin Smith recommends. The new approach works but at a steep cost. The affable goof turns into a wild-eyed maniac who will do anything to get ahead, including homicide.
Mewes suddenly has professional heat. But will that be enough to score him the much sought-after lead role in Clerks costar Brian O’Halloran’s directorial debut, a movie that has serious Oscar buzz before it even begins shooting?
Madness in the Method goes all in on fan service. If you enjoy hearing phrases such as “snoochie boochie” and “I'm not even supposed to be here today” and watching View Askew All-Stars like Mewes, Smith, O’Halloran and Harley Quinn Smith then this oddly winning, strangely engaging vanity project will be pure bliss.
Kevin Smith plays a predictably central role that includes an unexpectedly tense, dramatic fight scene rich in psychodrama and conflict that will thrill folks who want to see Jay and Silent Bob channel the bleary emotional intensity of a John Cassavetes movie. Madness in the Method is a newfangled twist on an oddly ubiquitous cinematic sub-genre: dark comedies about how getting ahead in the movie industry is LITERALLY murder.
Mewes has an appealing, likable presence but Madness in the Method is notable primarily for having the final performance of Stan Lee, who contributes a cameo as himself and, as always, was more than game for whatever nonsense the filmmakers had to throw at him.
The Watermelon Woman (1996) FM
Groundbreaking films don’t get more modest than Cheryl Dunye’s seminal 1996 directorial debut The Watermelon Woman. The charming independent romantic comedy has the distinction of being the first film directed by an out black lesbian. Dunye’s acclaimed movie world comedy follows closely in the footsteps of similarly slight but important independent landmarks like Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle and Rose Troche’s Go Fish, which is referenced within the film itself, in using a tiny budget to tell a deeply personal story about a demographic both under and misrepresented in Hollywood films.
The Watermelon Woman even casts Go Fish’s cowriter and star Guinevere Turner in the central role of Diana, a sexy video store customer from Chicago who falls in love with the film’s protagonist.
In addition to writing and directing, Cheryl Dunye stars as an ambitious young aspiring filmmaker named Cheryl Dunye who works in a video store with her best friend and foil Tamara (Valarie Walker) while directing a video project about a black film actress and singer from the 1930s sometimes credited merely as The Watermelon Woman.
Though the titular icon played roles that could be seen as demeaning and stereotypical our lovable heroine finds beauty, truth and even dignity within her onscreen existence all the same. She wants to know everything about this glamorous, elusive figure and is overjoyed to discover that she was a lesbian as well, and inhabited her world boldly and unapologetically over a half century earlier.
The Watermelon Woman is consequently an empathetic exploration of what it means to love something considered problematic and offensive with your whole body, mind and soul. Onscreen and off, Dunye is intent on carving out a space for black lesbians and lesbians of all colors to be themselves in film and popular culture, without hiding, shame or playing a rigged game. Dunye has created a loving, ultimately deeply moving tribute to black lesbian history without getting lost in nostalgia for an idealized past.
Like her inspirations, Dunye quietly but profoundly changed film just by being herself and telling her story, and the story of her community, simply, honestly and with great humor and insight.
X (2022)
Frightmaster Ti West fulfilled the abundant promise of his 2009 breakthrough film House of the Devil with the 2022 porn world horror hit X. It’s another masterful pastiche rooted in a deep love and understanding of horror history that transcends mere homage because West has a bold, distinctive vision beyond emulating the giants that came before him.
The grisly tale of a low-budget but creatively ambitious pornographic movie in 1979 Texas that runs into uniquely brutal production problems, X stars indie It Girl Mia Goth in a challenging dual role as the film’s equally unforgettable heroine and villain.
Goth plays Maxine, a pornographic actress with an ineffable X quality and excess of offbeat charisma and sexuality. She’s a fearless, uninhibited, coke-sniffing badass all too cognizant of her star quality and the effect she has on men.
The spooky eyed hellcat will be showcasing her talents in an interracial adult motion picture entitled The Farmer’s Daughters alongside smart-mouthed blonde bombshell Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), black stud Jackson (Kid Cudi) and eventually Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), who begins the shoot working on the crew but develops a rapacious sexuality curiosity about performing on camera.
The film is being shot on the farm of eccentric old couple Wayne (Martin Henderson) and Pearl (Goth). The elderly eccentrics at first appear to be merely unwell and unnecessarily antagonistic but as the shoot goes on they prove that age is just a number when it comes to wreaking apocalyptic bloodshed with great fury and enjoyment.
As in House of the Devil, West takes his sweet time establishing an atmosphere of dread and lurking violence. X is rooted in the rich Southern soil of a colorful milieu realized with great affection and meticulous attention to detail.
The cast is universally fine but for sheer visceral impact no one can compete with Goth, who delivers a performance at once otherworldly and grubbily physical. West’s tribute to grimy grind house horror of the 1970s is one goddamn fucked up horror picture in the best sense.
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