Streets Of Fire (1984)

Screened at Luna Cinemas Leederville as part of the Trash Classics season programmed by VHS Tracking.

My brother attended the Streets Of Fire (1984) screening because of its trailer: “If the movie is anything like that, it’ll be great!” After the movie, my brother said, “It was good, but it’s like these old movies always run out of budget…“ Referring to Michael Pare as the hero Tom Cody, “And the guy doing the John Wayne impression, it’s like we get it…” For a movie to truly be a cult movie, I think it needs to be imperfect. That there needs to be something missing or something wrong with it. If it had all the elements, and if it was perfect, then it would’ve been a hit, right? Before and after Streets Of Fire, I spoke to people who had seen it at a very young age and thought it was great. A perfect movie. Maybe it’s all about when you see it.

Director Walter Hill was going for a comic book movie, one that would be aimed at teenagers and seemed to be borne from Hill’s own obsessions as a teenager in the 1950s. If you’re at that 1980s comic book age and there’s this Star Wars type adventure but completely separate from science-fiction or mediaeval fantasy, “another time, another place”, mashing up different genres from classic western to neo-noir and finally motorcycle gang movies. Streets Of Fire is at its greatest in the opening sequence which hits the ground running with a hard-charging Ellen Aim and the Attackers concert sequence set to ‘Nowhere Fast,’ matching the bombast of songwriter Jim Steinman’s overblown “rock n roll dreams come true” iconography. Right up to the end of the credits, after Cody’s introduction slapping down a gang of teenage hoods. The lighting of neon scenes and wet streets in the night, and the splash panel scene transitions.

The second act is where the film eases off the pedal and slows down. There is a stop and start pace as the characters switch cars and journey back home after Ellen’s rescue from the Bombers motorcycle hideout. The main engine the movie runs on are our heroes making fun of Rick Moranis’ character, a stand-in the capitalistic producer figure and also a total nerd. Then again, I am a sucker for nocturnal odysseys, and when the motley crew of heroes has to bolt from the shadows of the street to an elevated train platform for salvation, echoing a similar scene in Hill’s The Warriors, I was in heaven!

I keep wondering if the film would’ve been better or more complete with another action sequence included, or a more charismatic star in the lead role of Tom Cody. I like Michael Pare, but he and the character lose their shine around the midway point, the stoic drifter begins to feel like a complete jerk, cold-cocking his sweetheart to keep her out of danger and not even apologising for it afterwards! All the characters are archetypes, and the dialogue is a tough front. There’s no depth to the dialogue or the character relationships. The only depth comes in, alongside listening to the soundtrack songs over and over again, in the closing ballad, ‘Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young,’ another Steinman composition, a finale that provides the sweeping romantic feeling that may not be present between the separated lovers.

The cinema audience was a great crowd, particularly the boisterous applause for whenever Willem Dafoe showed up as Raven, the vinyl leather clad biker villain, providing flair with every saunter and every sneer.

eXistenZ (1999)

Continuing the cyber-punk run I’m on by firing up a rewatch of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), which is up there with Dark City with cult movies overshadowed by The Matrix’s box office success. Pre-millennium video-game inspired noirish narratives about the nature of reality and its confusion with fiction; the type with strong fans who will tell you, “Forget that Neo crap, this is the real mind-fuck”. It’s also Cronenberg’s momentary return to the body-horror sci-fi genre fare after the controversy of Crash. A video game designer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) holds a preview of their new immersive game eXistenZ in a church with a small audience. When an assassination attempt is thwarted by a security guard (Jude Law), they go on the run, avoiding a shadowy anti-game terrorist organisation while needing to play the game to discover if it has been infected or disrupted; the game engines are embryos that look like alien organs with squid tentacles for cords; As if Apple went with HR Gieger for aesthetic design for product output. The game engines might look like rubber props but the old school effects ensure that everything is tactile; there’s minimal CGI which means that the film is really only dated by late-1990s hair and fashion choices. The body horror is goofy and giddy, and still has a gnarly impact, particularly the navigation about the game port holes – all the lubrication, insertion. It’s very Cronenberg – gross, sensual, abject, eroticised. At times, I appreciate Cronenberg more as a filmmaker than am ever caught up emotionally by his movies – there’s often a feeling of remove or distance. Yet eXistenZ was a blast to revisit, particularly the smooth plasticine youth of Law (already looks like he’s the robot gigolo from A.I.) and the underrated greatness of Leigh, just able to be cool, sexy and darkly sardonic, seemingly effortlessly. As much as it flirts with deep concepts of reality and storytelling, using ‘games’ as a way of commenting on itself as a narrative film, it’s also just wacky fun. That, and it sidesteps cityscape vistas and VR CGI for something more intimate and approachable, more invested in physical expressiveness and bodily orifices. Darkly moody score by Howard Shore and great supporting cast by regulars of fucked-up movies like Willem Dafoe and Ian Holm as well as a few Canadian Film Industry supporting players (Don McKellar, Sarah Polley). Available to stream on Tubi in Australia. Recommended.

4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011)

Continuing to complete director Abel Ferrara’s filmography, I rented from iTunes his movie 4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011), one of his several collaborations with actor Willem Dafoe, after Go Go Tales and before Pasolini. Here, its a low budget version of the apocalypse set in one apartment with a couple – an actor (Dafoe) and a painter (Shanyn Leigh) – as we’re told environmental catastrophe (“Al Gore was right”) will end everything at 4:44am. While exploring the internal struggle with impending death and how one should conduct oneself morally, as the couple make love, dance and fight, the movie is quite prescient about human interaction in the Covid era; people use Skype and their laptops to connect with families and friends, and human connection is mediated through digital screens. The sound design communicates the noise of the world through the overlapping dialogue, TV and laptop sounds, all of which can be quite chaotic. The apocalypse becomes a grainy YouTube found footage spiral. This movie feels of a piece with Ferrara’s other spiritual movies like Mary and Siberia; there tends to be a similar form of great scenes intermingled with bad or pretentious moments because of his loose, artistic approach. Dafoe, as always, goes to the mat for his collaborator and friend, and keeps you invested while rolling with the overheated theatrics. The most compelling parts are him witnessing a random person’s suicide and later, his struggle with sobriety (a personal theme for the director). Unfortunately, Leigh (Ferrara’s girlfriend at the time) is not as strong a performer as Dafoe, which is hard for what is supposed to be a two hander drama. I wish Natasha Lyonne had a bigger part or the co-lead, appearing with Paul Hipp in a scene where Dafoe visits old friends from his drug days; she and Dafoe yelling at each other would have been better. Rented on iTunes. Recommended, mainly for Ferrara fans. So far, Go Go Tales is my favoutite of the Dafoe-Ferrara collaborations and in terms of Ferrara’s more spiritual (almost Buddhist), late-career turns, Siberia would be my recommendation as it’s so far out, man, a full-blown art movie epic.

Siberia (2020)

I’ve recently been following up the work of director Abel Ferrara and catching up on the films I haven’t seen (Mary, Driller Killer, Welcome To New York, Fear City). When Revelation Film Festival announced its online festival, COUCHED, which ran during July this year, and that one of its selected films was Siberia (2020), one of two recent collaborations between Ferrara and actor Willem Dafoe (the other being Tommaso), I was very keen. I bought a mini pass to Couched and settled in to watch Siberia on an iPad. It starts off following a barman (Dafoe) working in an isolated shack in the snowy mountains of Siberia. Then it starts to slowly turn surreal and follow dream logic, expanding into a trek across the globe to search for… the soul or something? Look, this is an Art film with a capital A. Ferrara and Dafoe really go for it, jumping off into the abyss to find their own Tree Of Life or spiritual 2001. You will either think it’s a pile of wank or give it the benefit of contemplation. I was kind of fascinated by it as much as I was scratching my head; Ferrara keeps the exploration to a 92 minute run time and every ten minutes it throws you for a loop with another strange image or moment (Dafoe attacked by a bear, Dafoe confronting his father played by Dafoe naturally, Dafoe having sex with multiple women, Dafoe dancing to ‘Dream Lover’ by Bobby Darin). Recommended (if you can take the trip).

Light Sleeper (1992)

Is the definition of an auteur just making the same movie over and over again? To follow the recurring symbols and themes across the decades and to see someone keep returning to their obsessions. For director-writer Paul Schrader, he’s returned to a certain archetype – the ‘God’s Lonely Man’ – from his script to Taxi Driver and then reprised with variations in everything from American Gigolo to his recent First Reformed. (The early 2000s iteration, The Walker, with Woody Harrelson is an underrated drama.) To watch his 90s version with Light Sleeper (1992) was interesting to me – a film I’d often heard about it but had never seen. Picking it up on Blu-Ray, it both served some of my expectations and then also surprised me a bit. Following an upscale white drug dealer played by Willem Dafoe, who is driven around New York while dropping off cocaine and more to regular clients, I expected it to be a neo noir crime flick, which it does become, but only in the last twenty minutes. For most of its running length, it’s a character study of somebody in a mid-life crisis. Dafoe’s boss, Susan Sarandon is planning to go legit and move into cosmetics (a drug dealer character that seems initially unlikely but then is one of the more intriguing constructions in a male dominated genre). Then he also bumps into an old flame from his days as an addict, Dana Delaney, and has to reconcile with his past where he harmed those closet to him. It’s set in New York during a garbage strike and shuffles between Dafoe sleepless in his apartment, writing in his diary expressed in voice over narration, and Dafoe in a stylish 90s scarf, swanning about his rounds with users and connects (which includes David Spade and Sam Rockwell in bit parts) and even a psychic therapist (played by Schrader’s wife, Mary Beth Hurt) that the film takes seriously. I did enjoy its rhythms and Dafoe is great in the lead, soulful and sad. I found the ending and the heaping of Schraderisms (complete with homages to Bresson’s Pickpocket once again) a bit rushed. Michael Been’s ‘song cycle’ score with the pseudo Springsteen blues rock I could take or leave. Recommended.