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Posted: |
May 6, 2009 - 4:00 PM
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By: |
Thor
(Member)
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I went into this early and largely forgotten Jonathan Demme effort expecting cheesy 80's comedy. However, I was pleasantly surprised. It ain't half bad!
Of course, the premise is a bit unbelievable. Straightfaced Jeff Daniels gets tangled up in "wild" femme fatale Melanie Griffith with spooky ex-boyfriend Ray Liotta lurking in the shadows. But it works.
I liked the tone of the film. Part drama, part thriller and with heavy doses of subtle, sophisticated humour. An intelligent piece of mainstream 80's cinema.
Daniels did a fine job at his usual naïve, straight character and Griffith her usual sexy style, but it's really Ray Liotta who steals the show. Except maybe De Niro and Nicholson, few actors manage the eerie, faux-sympathetic bad guy that he does, with lots of bottled-up anger that just lies there beneath the surface, waiting to break out. Some of the scenes where they drive around reminded me of the tense driving around scenes in BLUE VELVET.
But the music was the real reason for watching this, namely the alleged appearance of Oingo Boingo's "Not My Slave". Unfortunately, I couldn't find it. It must have slipped by me, as low-mixed source music on a radio or something. But it is there...somewhere.
However, I did notice the brilliant use of another one of my favourite artists, Jean Michel Jarre's "Ethnicolor" in the finale. Moody stuff, extremely appropriate for the scene in question. This track is, in fact, pulled from his ZOOLOOK album that he did with Laurie Anderson. And Anderson is also co-composer in this film. Anderson, of course, did humming female vocals long before Lisa Gerrard turned this into a film score staple and it really works well here.
Same goes for John Cale's material, a funky, atmospheric soft rock-thing. There were several other nice 80's songs as well (New Order, Fine Young Cannibals, UB40 etc.), so this is definitely a soundtrack worth picking up.
Has anyone else seen this?
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This film was one of my very favorites back then. And I loved the album. Not My Slave instantly became one of my favorite songs and served as my introduction to Boingo. And I still have a hard time trusting any Ray Liotta character. I always see a creepy side waiting to burst out at any moment as his character does here, the first time I ever saw him. Similarly, I can never take Bill Pullman seriously -- the first time I saw him was as an idiot in Ruthless People (his line "Crockett and Tubbs -- they're floating!" still breaks me up when I think about it) and so when he appears as, say, the president in Independence Day, I just couldn't buy it. I always saw an undercurrent of idiocy beneath him. I don't know why I can't get past my initial impressions of these two actors.
Have you seen After Hours, which I always think of as a sort of flip side of a similar theme?
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The 1961 film called SOMETHING WILD (with a score by Aaron Copland) is playing on TCM right now.
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AND, it has a score by Aaron Copland, in his 12 tone period. Can't get much wilder than that!
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