Blog O’ Leaps

YOU KILL ME (2007)

This unusual – and as far as I’m aware, largely ignored – skewed variant on a crime-based movie, has no shortage of comparison points with the TV series The Sopranos. You Kill Me is more reflective, and less operatically pitched than The Sopranos, but like that series, it’s inherently ‘hi-concept’, but not so focussed on that that it fails to sketch in intriguing characterisations, nor to include some memorably off-kilter whimsical humour.

In The Sopranos the ‘hi-concept’ part the show was sold on was that an organised crime guy could also be the other type of family guy, with all the usual problems anyone might face, leading him to enter therapy with a psychologist.

In You Kill Me, Ben Kingsley plays Frank Falenczyk, a hitman for a Polish mob group of dwindling influence in his home town of Buffalo, NY, who, due to his extreme and regular abuse of alcohol, botches one job too many, and is sent by his uncle (Philip Baker Hall), the Polish mob’s leader, to dry out in San Francisco, under the supervision of a contact (Bill Pullman). The latter, who gives every impression of being a complete douche-bag, arranges regular work for Falenczyk, which turns out to be in the business, or ‘backstage’, area of a funeral home, and arranges for him to attend AA meetings.

Frank is the kind of closed-in guy who is about as likely to “open up and share” as the average school headmaster of the 1960s and 70s, so the AA meetings where everyone pours their guts out pretty much drive him nuts in the early going. Also this not drinking business has little immediate appeal for him.

However, he turns out to have something of a knack for his new work, dealing with another side of the death process than he’s used to, and in the course of his new duties meets a woman he’s interested in, Laurel Pearson (Tea Leoni) – the step-daughter of one of his ‘dear departed’ clients.

It’s when he starts to share a few more details (well, actually pretty much all of them) of what exactly he does for a living with her, and his AA sponsor (Luke Wilson), that the muted black humour of You Kill Me begins to take on a particularly surreal edge.

Director John Dahl (probably best known for the Matt Damon poker movie Rounders, but also somewhat known for his breakthrough picture Red Rock West) lays himself out a curious tightrope to tread here. As played by Kingsley, who is tremendous, the Frank Falenczyk character is realistic and likable, which is a tough sell for a professional killer. The main characters in the movie want him to succeed in defeating his alcoholism and regaining control of his personal and professional life. To an extent, the audience is also encouraged to want him to succeed in these areas. However, there’s that little business of him killing people.

The line Dahl has to walk is to get the viewer on-side, at least to some extent, with Frank and Laurel, while also acknowledging the bizarre and unpalatable (at least) qualities of what exactly his real line of work is.

Actually, within the seamless little world of small triumphs, failures and ironies comprising You Kill Me, he does about as good a job of reconciling this both dramatically, and for comic value, as possible. With a good whack of suspension of disbelief and a temporary suspension of ‘real world’ moral judgement, most viewers ought to be able to get there.

It’s a movie gifted with very solid support performances. Tea Leoni in the co-lead shows a great ability to create a sympathetic character from one not particularly overburdened with likeable traits. Her Laurel is dark-humoured, somewhat abrasive, and has clearly seen a certain amount of damage from previous relationships and life in general. (There’s a vague similarity to the character played by Lisa Kudrow, in her jaw-droppingly strong performance in The Opposite of Sex, but the Leoni character here isn’t quite THAT damaged, and You Kill Me isn’t emotionally quite as jagged.)

Dennis Farina is perfectly cast to exploit his inherent qualities on screen, in terms of affably loathsome smarminess, as the leader of Buffalo’s Irish crime family, which is intent on squeezing the last atoms of life out of the Polish mob’s influence. He might not look outstandingly Irish, but in a movie where Ben Kingsley is playing a Polish-American, presumably one makes certain allowances.

Pullman really gives his loudmouth real estate-broker/arsehole character a stink that lingers in what probably should have been a minor role in terms of screen-time, but resonates a bit beyond any per-line basis; and Luke Wilson has just the right combination of likeability, confusion and being just a bit ‘off’ as the AA sponsor. As usual he’s more engaging and more amusing than his brother Owen ever quite seems to manage.

You Kill Me is probably, on any further, deeper reflection, a slight movie, but it’s also about as engaging, flavoursome, and endearingly odd as one of those gets. Pretty much everything about it is well done, right down to Winnipeg, Manitoba doubling for the US in location shooting, and, perhaps most of all, the virtually unheard of running-time of 92 minutes for a modern movie, when that’s the length it actually needed to be.

About the only major thing I can fault it on is the title. It sounds like they were thinking of some caper-crime type Vegas wiseguy comedy movie with Danny DeVito and Bette Midler from a couple of decades ago. Apart from the word ‘Kill’ it conveys little of the content of this movie, and precisely nothing of the tone. Had they called it The Rootin’-Tootin’ Boozin’ Shootin’ Movie, they could have hardly have done it any less of a favour.

(8.5 out of 11, on the industry-standard MPHOAH scale)

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About two years ago, I posted this elsewhere on the site.

Now someone famous is remaking this movie in the typical dynamic go-getting approach of the day, i.e. unnecessarily, so before they make a royal corn beef hash of it, I thought I’d remind you of the original.

Harvey with Jimmy Stewart used to be held as a quiet favourite by hardcore olde-Hollywood movie fans, and over time, possibly for reasons of political correctness to do with part of the subject matter and possibly by the sheer general attrition of attention that affects the status of some older movies, because everyone’s keeping up with the ‘latest and greatest’ - we could call it plain critical ignorance for short - has become the even quieter favourite of somewhat fewer fans.

So, after they’ve pretty much inevitably gone right ahead and ruined it in remake, take the time out to try and catch the unspoiled original.

HARVEY (1950)

Now almost forgotten, this used to be on TV enough that it was considered something of a family classic.

The reason it doesn’t get a run much now is probably partly because it’s black and white, but mostly because the hero is an alcoholic, and that’s pretty much presented as a positive thing. Just imagine trying to pitch that one to a studio today. Yep, folks, we got us a loveable kid-friendly picture for the whole family about a guy who drinks in every scene in the movie and has an imaginary buddy who’s a white rabbit over six foot tall. You’d probably land in the nuthouse on the first bounce.

Anyway, it’s a shame, because this is one of those rare mold-denying timeless Hollywood studio pictures that effortlessly maintains a blithe tone of unforced farce. It captures a kind of idealized small-town life and makes its little points about the interesting and different ways people have their heads bent by everyday life, without the slightest strain or pain on the part of either movie or audience. (In a way it’s kind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest territory thematically, but makes the same points doing a lot less overt hard work.)

Jimmy Stewart is at his most absent-mindedly likeable as Elwood P. Dowd who apparently has blithering piles of money and lives in a huge house, but doesn’t care about any of that, he just likes to go out drinking in low-life bars where he cheers everyone up with his generosity, unfailingly gentle, accepting manner, and also confuses them with his invisible giant rabbit buddy, Harvey.

His sister is a little more concerned, mainly because Dowd’s harmless eccentricity interferes with her plans to marry off her social-climbing hatchet-faced daughter, due to everyone figuring he’s mad. Also she’s starting to see the rabbit as well, which is bothering her.

Naturally, she tries to have Elwood committed, and naturally this works out a lot easier and better on paper than it does in real life, since the staff at the fairly demented local insane asylum wrongly assumes that she’s the jittery lunatic and that Dowd is just a regular happy guy, which on the surface of things is admittedly an easy mistake to make.

The story unfolds in a leisurely amiable series of confusions, and in general Harvey kind of feels like Arsenic and Old Lace (right down to one of the same cast members, Josephine Hull, who won an Oscar in this as the sister) only with a lot less pushing and running around. Stewart probably never had a better vehicle for his most familiar screen persona than this picture. The on-screen explanation for how his character became that way comes late in the piece, and is the perfect rationale. Everything that’s done here is done well. If you’re not familiar with Harvey, or haven’t seen it in years, make the effort to catch it. It’s a real one-off.

(10 out of 11, on the MPHOAH scale)

Wrote an email to a friend, and realised in the glowing AfterMASH of composing it, that the subjects covered were of general-enough interest to form the basis for a fire-up restart for this long dormant/just about healed over webslight. So I tidied it up a little, and hyar she blows. (Possibly quite literally.)

So all due thanks for completely inadvertent inspiration to my semi-anonymous pal Buddy Dennis, and to the upcoming Hulk Hogan tour that provided the unlikely stimulus for the lively email exchange. (And which, out of clemency, is not mentioned below at all.)

THE ACKNOWLEDGED WORLD CENTRE OF PURE SHOWBIZ GOLD

If you love a good Aussie showbiz disaster, please avail yourself of Channel Ten’s The Spearman Experiment before they yank it off television, which going by the first show I saw, could be within the proverbial New York minute.

It’s Nine’s 20-to-1 show (a programme I’ve always felt was innovatively named after the viewer’s likely odds of getting any entertainment out of the show) except the young, swingin’, bopster hepcat version, in theory, which actually translates to nostalgia stuff aimed at people watching television in the 1980s, so Ten’s idea of cutting-edge young people’s TV is actually aimed at 40 year olds.

The show I saw was about the “great Australian TV comedy characters”, and I’m now convinced that the real greatest Australian TV comedy characters would include Jim Waley, Laurie Oakes and Tony Barber in the wake of the ones they came up with, such as Kylie Mole, two of the scintillating comic characterisations by the ever-hilarious Glenn Whatsisface who used to be on The Panel, and anyone else who ever was in a comedy show on Channel Ten.

Just to pull the shroud over the deceased, they had “celebrities” talking with their great comedic knowledge about the ‘great comedy characters’, in a manner that suggested they’d just been brained with a baseball bat prior to taping, and most of them were “television personalities” I’d never previously seen or heard of. I’d guess they were from the Witness Protection Program channel.

The finishing hold was provided by the hosting of Magda Szubanski, and I can honestly say without any hyperbole that this was the single coldest, unfriendliest job of hosting anything on TV I’d seen, perhaps since Bryant Gumble was at the height of being tired with his co-host/weather presenter combo on NBC’s Today show, or anything Daryl Somers has done in the last 20 years, minus the smarm. I don’t know whether she was trying for being ‘cool’ or ‘dry’, or some other aspect of personality that a deodorant might have, but it seemed like one of the greatest examples in television history of a host clearly conveying to an audience that she’d rather be lying in a puddle of cold mud than hosting the show she was presenting.

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ROCKETING TO THE POORHOUSE

This business of music promoters (and in some cases I mean alleged music promoters, as there’s no apparent promotion involved) bringing out music acts to Australia that have a specialist appeal - i.e. not mainstream, but there’s probably a cult audience there if you can tap into it - and then murdering any chance of success by not doing anything other than hanging the shingle of the act’s name out there, and assuming this will draw an audience without any other advertising, explanation or promotion, has gone from being a definite trend a few years back to a confirmed epidemic. They book the dates, they buy the plane tickets, they book the hotel rooms, and then they sit back with a stupid smirk on their faces and assume the deal is done, and fans will flock in.

Recently I went to see the LA pop singer-songwriter Aimee Mann at the Palais. (Explanations would take up valuable time, but I’m a fan of her stuff.) She should have a solid little cult following here (did the soundtrack for a movie called Magnolia which a lot of the alternative types seem to know her from, and she was in the band Til Tuesday in the 80s) but the show pulled about 50% capacity, maybe 1000 people being generous. She’s never been out here before. The reaction when I mentioned going to the show to a fellow fan a few days later was, and this is close enough to verbatim: “Really? Aimee Mann? When is she playing?” I’m guessing the message didn’t quite get out to the people who knew her stuff, or to other folks who would have liked her music but weren’t aware who she was or what she played.

When the 70s heavy metal band Budgie came out here a couple of years ago, there was no advertising to speak of, and nobody explained to the kids that, wait a minute, these guys were contemporaries of Zeppelin and Sabbath, were covered a couple of times by Metallica, and were the roots of the metal we’ve had since. They drew about 200 people at the Forum. Now someone, who I’m imagining needs a major tax loss on the books for the current financial year, is touring them again! I’ll bet you anything that the level of publicity will guarantee another venue mostly filled with dry ice, tumbleweeds and cicadas. Those poor guys will be going back to Wales and telling everyone that Australia must have a population of around 2000 people, and that you see more koalas than human beings there.

Even when the Dictators came out here a fair while back - and that was a band that was a super-easy sell, being the pre-Ramones roots of punk rock, and contemporaries of the New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers, KISS etc - nobody remembered to do the sell, and with a stacked support card, they still didn’t do much better than about 60% fill the Corner Hotel, and the show at The Tote was fairly packed, but if a quarter of my brother-in-law’s family members turned up, the Tote would be chockers. Had they been sold properly and advertised adequately, I think they could have done a Forum show at least, and maybe a Palace (Metro) or Billboard sized venue. (And the bizarre thing was, when Whitesnake came out last time, which was only a few weeks prior to WASP from memory, and it was apparently promoted on the basis that it was some sort of official state secret, they (a) put them in the Palace/Metro, when I think that properly promoted, that’s at least a Festival Hall/Vodaphone gig, and (b) thanks to the hardcores, it was apparently chockers anyway.)

It’s amazing how often people miss the boat on this stuff. I think touring bands here is like the old tablecloth trick of movie and stage magic fame – where a guy tries and whips the cloth off the table in one snappy motion, leaving all plates, cutlery and glassware atop it undisturbed. Basically there’s a lot of drunk people who think they can do this, and none of them realise they have no idea whatsoever until we’re all knee-high in food scraps and crockery fragments and drenched in leftover wine.

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BASE PLUG FOR CURRENT MOVIE

Regarding this latter sentiment, and for a bunch of other reasons, you should make an effort if you can to catch the movie Anvil - The Story of Anvilwhile it’s still in the cinemas. This is being promoted as a real life equivalent to This is Spinal Tap, which in some ways isn’t a bad description. These guys are a real-life Canadian metal band, who had influential albums out in the early-mid 1980s, but while virtually everyone else they played with went on to become multi-million sellers, nothing ever happened for them. There are still two original members, now in their 50s, still touring around as Anvil, with a couple of younger guys. The movie, in part, follows them on possibly the worst-organised European tour since Germany’s tour of Stalingrad in WWII. You have just got to see the wacko woman booker who promotes this tour in action. She’s incoherent in any language she encounters - actually I couldn’t even work out what her first language might be, other than it’s definitely not English - and screws up every single date, venue, and train/plane transfer, one after another. It’s so well organised that at one venue the club manager attempts to pay them in bowls of goulash. I’m not making this up.

The movie is actually kind of a feel-good movie because the two main guys are so likeable. Also (and this point is made by various of their contemporaries, including Slash and Lemmy) they’re actually a pretty damn good metal band. In some ways it’s a lot like the movie The Wrestler because the main guys are working Joe-jobs throughout the week to feed their families, and then keeping the dream alive working crappy clubs on the weekends. However, it’s more feel-good than that (well, almost anything bar The Spearman Experiment is) because the band is good, and by the end, they kind of start to finally get a break, and play a big show in Japan. (And the movie has kind of given them a career, I gather.)

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