You gotta hand it to Joe Eszterhas… in a town where the screenwriter is routinely screwed, he did his fair share of screwing, literally and figuratively. At his best, Eszterhas had his finger on the pulse of the filmgoing public with Flashdance, Jagged Edge, and Basic Instinct - at his worst, he put forth inconceivably awful films such as Showgirls, which nearly destroyed the careers of everyone involved, and Burn Hollywood Burn.
But don’t be deceived - this book isn’t just a Hollywood tell-all. Eszterhas’ childhood as an immigrant, his experiences in love, and his conflicts with his father are all more than worthy of a serious autobiography. Late in life, his father was accused of writing anti-Semetic literature before coming to America, and much to his horror, Eszterhas discovered that this was true. In a genuine case of life imitating art, Eszterhas had recently completed work on a film called Music Box, in which Jessica Lange’s character learns that her father committed… yes… war crimes. These passages, and the passages dealing with the ugly dissolution of his marriage, are absolutely gripping.
The best thing one can say about the book is that it seems to be honest. Eszterhas spares no one, including himself. I’m sure he left plenty of things out, but what he does say feels truthful. And the book’s final passages, in which Eszterhas is stricken with throat cancer and leaves California, are simply riveting. He speaks clearly and honestly about his fear of dying, and the difficulty of giving up cigarettes, alcohol, and bad food after a lifetime of consuming them all to excess. Eventually, Eszterhas beat the cancer, but not before losing the majority of his voice box.
And of course, the Hollywood anecdotes are tremendous fun to read. The man worked with Paul Verhoven, Norman Jewison, William Freidkin, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone… the list goes on. As expected, his stories about the production of Showgirls are particularly hilarious.
Yes, the book is big and unwieldy. It rambles and digresses. Some chapters amount to only a few sentences, while others go on at great length. The narrative is fractured, and jumps around a lot. But if you’re an aspiring screenwriter, or hope to work in Hollywood… this book is essential reading
This book is not for everyone. It’s long, it rambles, and it digresses - but it’s rarely boring, and it’s always honest, sometimes painfully so. 
It’s simply amazing to think that this man, who had little potential and no resources, rose up by sheer force of will to become one of the greatest directors we’ve ever had in both theatre and film. When you read a play by Miller, Odets, or Williams that was initially directed by Kazan, the descriptive passages and stage direction are based on Kazan’s staging of the play. So in an odd way, Kazan was a silent contributor to the final versions of these classic plays.
Unbelievably, Hondo was originally filmed in 3-D. It seems The Duke wanted to cash in on the 3-D craze, which was at its peak in 1953. Unfortunately, by the time the film was released, the craze had died down, and flat prints of the film were distributed after a mere 1-week run in the 3-D format.
The performance of Michael Pate as the Indian chief Vittorio should also be mentioned. He’s also a harsh, embittered man who has lost all of his sons, yet when he encounters Geraldine Page’s character and her son, he not only spares their lives, but becomes attached to the boy, passing on tidbits of wisdom he might have taught his own children. For a character who is supposedly the heavy, Vittorio is extremely sympathetic and complex. Even Hondo, who is half Indian, laments that the Indian way of life is doomed.
Finally - a plot! Sort of…
Well, Burroughs doesn’t do that. When he conjures up an idea like Tarzan teaching a tribe of apes how to paddle a boat, he just runs with it and never looks back. This’ll sound arrogant since Burroughs is a literary legend and I’m an unpublished writer blogging for free, but his writing reminds me of the stuff I used to do as a teenager - colorful, imaginative, bursting with energy, and incredibly stupid sometimes. 
The Paul Newman festival continues. This time, our offering is an odd little film with a mountain of talent attached - Newman, Lee Marvin, director Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke), writer Terrence Malick (who went on to direct Badlands a year later) cinematographer László Kovács and esteemed composer Alex North. 
Lee Marvin is clearly having fun with this role, and it showcases his oft-neglected gift for comedy, but Paul Newman is sorely miscast. Swap Newman out with, say, Steve McQueen - who would have been more believable as a dim-witted loser (no offense, Steve) - and the film might have worked. But it’s almost impossible to believe that this slim, handsome, blue-eyed cowboy who looks like Hud ten years down the road is such a dope. Perfect example - there’s a scene where Newman is convinced that a beautiful girl will reject him, and Marvin, one of the world’s most gloriously ugly men, tries to bolster his confidence! It’s like watching Lance Henriksen encourage Brad Pitt to ask a girl out on a date. 
And lest it seem like I’m heaping all the blame on Newman, director Stuart Rosenberg clearly didn’t have a grip on the material. Not only does the movie lag in several places, it speeds past crucial moments, then ends so abruptly it feels like they all just decided to give up and stop shooting in the middle of the final scene. 
I’m a fan of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One, which is partly based on his experiences as a foot soldier in WWII. It’s smart, cynical, funny, weird, sad - I can’t think of another war film quite like it. So when his Korean War drama The Steel Helmet arrived on my doorstep, I was hoping for something in a similar vein - and Mr. Fuller did not disappoint.
Both are veterans of a previous war - Zack served in WWII, and “The Sergeant” served in WWI. Both are cold, brutal men who dispense their bitter wisdom to a group of young, inexperienced foot soldiers. Both seem impervious to the horrors of war, but are ultimately stripped of their armor by the one sight they cannot ignore - the death of an innocent child. All throughout The Steel Helmet I was pleased to see Fuller tinkering with ideas that would ultimately come to fruition in The Big Red One.
Not that the film feels like a rough draft - quite the contrary. It rises above its paltry budget (it was supposedly shot in ten days) through the quality of Fuller’s writing, direction, and the commitment of his actors. From the opening scene, the movie grabs you. We meet Zack as he’s struggling to climb a cliff, his hands tied behind him with his shoelaces and a bullet in his leg. His entire squad has been executed by the North Koreans, and he’s on the run. Zack is rescued by a young South Korean boy whom he nicknames Short Round, a name you Indiana Jones fans out there might recognize. When Zack and Short Round meet up with a lost army patrol, Zack agrees to lead them to their destination in exchange for a box of cigars. The patrol establishes an outpost in an abandoned Buddhist temple, which is where the bulk of the film takes place. 
Gene Evans eventually settled into a career on television, but he certainly had the chops to be a leading man in films - he commands every scene he’s in. And while the film is undeniably a piece of propaganda (it was shot and released during the Korean Conflict), Fuller was smart enough to make it more complex than that. When a POW attempts to talk Cpl. Thompson (Richard Edwards) into letting him go, he reminds Thompson that when his tour of duty is over, he’ll be relegated to sitting at the back of the bus again in the states. Likewise, when the same POW attempts to talk Sgt. Tanaka (Richard Loo) into letting him go, he mentions the internment of Japanese citizens in World War II and questions why Tanaka would fight for such a country. Even though both men heroically ignore these statements, Fuller was actually accused of treason and investigated by the McCarthy committee for giving the Communists a viable argument!
Post script: Zack nicknames the boy Short Round because he initially refuses to let the boy follow him, and explains that a “short round” is a bullet that does not reach its intended target. 
One of the few benefits to my otherwise lamentable location in Los Angeles is that I could literally throw a rock out my window and hit The Nuart movie theatre, which plays first-run art house films, revivals and midnight movies. 
Which leads me to my review of Vivre Sa Vie. The film follows a young woman named Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Anna Karina) as she descends into the world of prostitution. When we first meet her, she is apparently divorced, apparently has a child - but we never see this child, and her ex-husband quickly drops out of the picture. Nana is completely alone in the world, and when she can’t make ends meet she falls into prostitution in a way that’s so casual it’s shocking - a man propositions her as she’s walking down the street, and without any thought or hesitation she says yes. 
About halfway through the film, I realized that Godard was doing a light remake of Pandora’s Box, all the way down to giving Anna Karina the same haircut as Louise Brooks. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. He’s not spoofing the film, and he isn’t legitimately attempting to update it either. It simply seems like a Quentin Tarantino-esque film reference that Godard can congratulate himself for being knowledgeable enough to make, and that critics can congratulate themselves for noticing. It’s actually a brilliant bit of intellectual masturbation - thus can critics be cleverly manipulated into giving good reviews. 
The only humanity to be found in the film is due solely to Anna Karina’s performance. She charts the character’s fall from a poor, ordinary girl to a world-weary prostitute perfectly. When we first meet Nana, she hopes to become a model or an actress. Later, we see how turning a trick serves as a crude substitute for her old unfulfilled dreams. When she seduces a man, she’s giving a performance - and when she succeeds, it bolsters her self-esteem. She craves the attention. 
Everyone’s favorite vine-swinging ape-man is back in his second adventure. This time around he battles Russian spies, Arab ivory merchants, degenerate descendants of Atlantis and (of course) a few lions and tigers. He also fends off the affections of a beautiful Russian countess, the daughter of an Arab sheik and a high priestess of Atlantis, all the while pining away for his beloved Jane Porter. 
To give Burroughs credit, he maintains one plot thread - the animosity between Tarzan and Rokoff - as he shifts from what is essentially a spy thriller to a jungle adventure. But the shift is so abrupt it feels as if Burroughs’ imagination ran dry and he decided, “What this book needs a lost city, a decaying civilization and a lost treasure!”
Good Lord - what a complete and total piece of shit this film is!
But I could forgive the film if it was merely lurid, incompetent and boring. Lots of films have that distinction. What I can’t forgive is the complete bastardization of a beloved American icon. Adding insult to injury, Tarzan isn’t even the main character! 
After reading the novel, I naturally became curious to revisit what is generally considered the most faithful adaptation of Tarzan to the silver screen. A few days later, a red Netflix envelope arrived in my mailbox containing a DVD of Greystoke. 
Tarzan (Christopher Lambert) finds D’Arnot and heals his injuries. When D’Arnot realizes that Tarzan is the heir of Greystoke, he brings him back to civilization to meet his only surviving relative - The Earl Of Greystoke (Ralph Richardson). 
On the plus side, Ralph Richardson - in his final film role - is simply terrific as The Earl Of Greystoke. His scenes with Lambert are unexpectedly touching - he slips in and out of senility, sometimes confusing his grandson with his long-dead son. Other times, he’s desperate to impart his wisdom and a sense of family to his confused heir in what little time he has left. It’s a lovely, nuanced performance, and if he doesn’t bring a tear to your eye at least once, you are not human. 
Add the lovely Jane Porter (Andie McDowell) into the mix, and Tarzan becomes royally confused. He longs to be civilized, to belong, but he’s still half-wild and cannot suppress that part of his personality. In this respect, the filmmakers got the character absolutely right. Christopher Lambert, in his first film role, does a fine job, although he doesn’t quite have the physical presence the character requires - but I’m willing to bet that was by design. Instead of a bodybuilder, the filmmakers probably wanted someone lean and well-defined, which is much more believable.
And technically, the film is faultless. Beautiful cinematography by John Alcott, fantastic matte paintings by the famed Albert Whitlock, a stellar score by John Scott, and damn near convincing ape suits courtesy of Rick Baker. Director Hugh Hudson may have let me down in the adventure department, but this is certainly what a Tarzan film should look like.