Diabolical Danger

There is something special while watching an excellent drama and realizing, perhaps before, or maybe only after the credits role, that a director known almost exclusively for comedy has deftly made the genre switch. Think Jerry Zucker (from Airplane! and writing/producing The Naked Gun franchise to Ghost), Jay Roach (the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises to Trumbo), or Adam McKay (Anchorman and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby to The Big Short and this year’s Vice). . . and the newest member to enter this club: Peter Farrelly – making the jump from Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary to 2018's Academy Award Best Picture nominee, Green Book. A tale near and dear to its writer, Nick Vallelonga (it is also co-written by Brian Hayes Currie and Peter Farrelly), Nick is the son of the film’s main character, Tony ‘Lip’ Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen). Set in the early 1960s, Tony is an Italian American New Yorker, working as a ‘public relations’ expert for The Copacabana (i.e. a rough and tumble bouncer) – a pudgy bull-shitter who acts first and asks questions later.

Yearning for some 90s action? Are you missing the era of over the top, easy to watch explosive entertainment? Well, you cannot get more 90s than The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), written by Shane Black (the scribe behind the Lethal Weapon franchise, and, more recently, The Nice Guys) and directed by Renny Harlin (of Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger fame). Following a cryptic enigma in the form of Geena Davis (Harlin’s then wife), the actress plays Sam Caine (work the anagram out), an amnesiac of eight years. . . a teacher with a cute daughter, Caitlin (Yvonne Zima), and loving husband, Hal (Tom Amandes). Completely unaware of her past, the woman washed ashore two months pregnant. . . everything before this, a puzzling mystery.

A film that gives you an excellent idea of how partying has changed, and not, 1932's Hot Saturday, directed by William A. Seiter, is an American pre-Code motion picture that pushed the moral boundaries of the time, or as the tagline put it, “They called me ‘BAD’_ So I tried to live up to my name!”. Following Ruth Brock (Nancy Carroll) , she is a young bank teller, a working girl and morally-minded flirt – loving daughter of a cigar smoking ne-er-do-well (William Collier Sr.) and a taskmaster of a mother (Jane Darwell). Living in the little locale of Maryville, it is an example of gossipy, small-town America.

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” – Oh, the Places You’ll Go! By Dr. Seuss. A classic tale from the one and only, a positive story often gifted to those who are on their way after graduating. . . but, what happens if you take the wrong path, or as the master word twister so cheekily put it, “You can get so confused that you’ll start in a race down long wiggled roads at a break-neck pace and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space, head, I fear, toward a most useless place. . .”, or, as the title of today’s short film puts it, I Will Crush You and Go to Hell (2016). Co-written and directed by the team of Fabio Soares and Célia Paysan, the twenty-two minute short is actually, in essence, a back door pilot used as a teaser in order to make a feature length film (full warning, no ending as of yet).

What would you do if you knew the end of days was nigh? Maybe you’d relish in your memories of the good old times, or revel in the anarchy going on around you. . . perhaps you’d party the night away, then go out in a blaze of suicidal glory just to spite a foregone conclusion? ? ? These are some of the topics covered in the Canadian understated-apocalyptic Indie dramedy Last Night (1998). Written, directed and starred in by Don McKellar (his first feature film; also the scribe of the fascinating picture The Red Violin), he litters Canada’s largest city, Toronto, with not only trash (and a few remaining stragglers), but also a simple melancholic poignancy, a dry and awkward humour that covers up the anguish that the ‘New Year’s Eve-like countdown to the end’ brings with it. McKellar’s take on the “2000, Seen By” project (which had filmmakers looking at the approaching excitement and fears of the Millennium), had him making the wise choice of depicting 2000 as the end of the world (rather than a current fad that would have it feeling passé almost immediately after the fact).