"Lake Placid" - 1999
Dir. by Steve Miner - 1 hr. 22 min.
Theatrical Trailer
by Clayton Hollifield
"Lake Placid" is not a good movie. It's not even a good bad movie. It's schlock, padded out by Betty White and Oliver Platt being their awesome selves in the time they have to do so, and there's also a thirty-foot crocodile that bites the heads off of things. Is that enough to carry an eighty-minute film?
In a lake in rural Maine, Sheriff Keough (Brendan Gleeson) and some monosyllabic Fish & Game officer are out on a lake, investigating a disturbance. The officer gets chomped in half (and is shown as half a man), which brings in all the weirdos to investigate. This includes Jack Wells (another Fish & Game representative, played by Bill Pullman), Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda, playing a paleontologist), and Hector Cyr (Platt, playing a wealthy mythology professor obsessed with crocodiles). And together, they must track down this oversized croc.
On a first viewing, the important things to take away are that Oliver Platt is rad in a bottle, no matter how awful the material he has to work with is, and that this is the film where people started to realize that Betty White was still really, really funny. She had been largely doing TV shows for duration of the 90s, and her foul-mouthed turn here was a genuine shock, considering that she'd more recently been known for playing a good-natured ditz on "Golden Girls." Other things to note: people once considered Bridget Fonda a movie star, Bill Pullman can be very forgettable, and that it's kind of fun to watch a giant crocodile eat cows, bears, and chomp the head off of a police officer cleanly.
Unfortunately, I had seen this movie before, and it definitely doesn't hold up to a second viewing. Fonda is super-annoying, Pullman's aw shucks routine is slightly less annoying. And schlock only works when it's not ironic (or you have a director with both ungodly skills and a real affinity for this sort of material, like Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino, who can elevate cheesy material into something more substantial). Once you get past Platt's and White's performances, it's apparent "Lake Placid" was assembled and constructed entirely on auto-pilot.
But at least it's short, so "Lake Placid" has that going for it.
"Diggstown" - 1992
Dir. by Michael Ritchie - 1 hr. 38 min.
Official Trailer
by Clayton Hollifield
"Diggstown" is one of only two movies I've ever been to where the audience spontaneously applauded at the end of the film (the other being "Karate Kid"). It wasn't a special screening, it was just a random showing in a suburban multiplex way back when. It's not that this is an Oscar candidate, but the ending was just so satisfying. But it's been a while, and the question is whether time has been kind to this film.
Gabriel Cane (James Woods) is a conman, and when we're introduced to him, he's helping another inmate escape from a county prison in Georgia. He's about a week away from having served his time, but already has another big con brewing. The target is Diggstown, a boxing-obessed small town (the town being named after a legendary boxer who lives there, Charles Macom Diggs), and more specifically, the man who runs the town, John Gillon (Bruce Dern). Gabriel's partner, Fitz (Oliver Platt), sets the hook by hustling the locals and agreeing to a bet that seems undo-able: one boxer defeating ten men in one day.
"Diggstown" straddles an interesting line: it's half swindle, half sports movie. Most sports movies are obsessed with underdogs fighting against long odds, and if the idea of fixing contests ever comes up, it's viewed in almost taboo terms. The one thing that sports fans will not abide is the notion that what they're watching is anything but a fair contest. Here, fight fixing (albeit not on a huge, televised stage) is acknowledged, expected, and not entirely condemned. What this plot hinges on is not whether or not Honey Roy Palmer (Louis Gossett, Jr.) can defeat ten Diggstown men, but whether or not John Gillon or Gabriel Cane is better at fixing fights. This is all upfront in the story, and we're being asked to root for someone who undermines the spirit of competition.
This dynamic works for a number of reasons. First, James Woods does a good job of mixing his blatant manipulations with oily charm. Also, his character is portrayed as having some sort of morals - a point of contention between Cane and Palmer is that Cane threw in the towel in a previous cash boxing match. Furthermore, there's a early scene in the prison between Cane and Wolf (Randall "Tex" Cobb) that hammers home that Cane is an ethical employer; even though Wolf is in the prison infirmary due to losing a prison fight which serves as a cover for the aforementioned prisoner escape organized by Cane, he's still grateful for the opportunity to make some real money, an opportunity no one else had afforded him. Successfully juxtaposed against Woods' character is Bruce Dern's. Dern's John Gillon is a monster parading as a southern gentleman; he swindled the entire town out of their possessions by fixing Diggs' last fight (that's a story on its own), and will stop at literally nothing in order to keep it. There's nothing likable about Gillon, which is both great acting and necessary in order to get an audience behind someone who is also a criminal.
Once "Diggstown" turns into a sports film (all ten fights are represented in the film), both Cane and Gillon keep upping the odds, until everything's on the line. Director Michael Ritchie doesn't offer much in the way of visual flair (this could pass for a TV movie if you didn't know better); you won't find much in the way of excessive editing, special effects, or abuse of slow-motion here. But he does pay attention to details. There are at least a couple of things that seem like odd things to focus on early in the film, if you think about it at all, but end up playing into finish. The one that's not a massive spoiler, and might come off as a minor plot point, is over Gabriel Cane's not wearing any socks. It shows that Cane is willing to get the details right in order to play a character that Gillon and company would despise and instinctively underestimate - it's a douchey big-city high-roller thing, and would make Cane an irresistible target to small-town Gillon. In a later scene, right before someone knocks at the door, Cane is shown tending to the blisters he has on his feet, since he normally does wear socks. It's so minor, Cane could have been doing literally anything in his room, but the details add up over the course of the movie.
And that ending. I'm not going to ruin it, but like the detail about Cane's socks, the big developments at the end are call-backs to things that have already been established in the film. There's no magic development that falls out of thin air - thinking back, you can see exactly where the twists have come from. It's rock-solid storytelling, and takes "Diggstown" to a decent film with a bunch of actors who would go on to bigger things (both Heather Graham and Jim Caviezel have roles, too) into a pretty darned good movie. Sure, when you see the boxers with their shirts off, you're going to be very aware that this is a film from a different era, and visually it's nothing special, but a truly good ending is something to value and appreciate.
"The Ice Harvest" - 2005
Dir. by Harold Ramis - 1 hr. 32 min.
Official Trailer
by Clayton Hollifield
I'm not much of a Christmas person, generally speaking. And I especially dislike Christmas movies. I've never seen "Miracle on 34th Street" or "It's a Wonderful Life," and Tim Allen's propensity for Christmas-themed movies means that I haven't seen anything he's done since "Galaxy Quest." And usually, at this time of year, literally everything goes green, red, and garnished. The last thing on Earth I want to do is further indulge the season by watching Christmas-related programming of any kind.
It's not entirely fair to peg "The Ice Harvest" as a Christmas movie. What this movie actually is is a neo-noir film (and a pretty sharp one, at that) that happens to be set on Christmas Eve. It's not inconsequential to the plot; pretty much all of the characters here are in a general state of irritation just to be existing in their lives, and the idea that they should all suddenly be jolly and thankful once a year for no good reason is another straw on the camel's back. I can relate to that. But what this is not is a movie filled with all the trite tropes of Christmas movies, or really even a feel-good movie. It's a crime movie that takes place on Christmas, which effectively juxtaposes the general unhappiness of criminal enterprise with the ideal of a happy Christmas.
Mob lawyer Charlie Arglist (John Cusack), with the help of local pornographer Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton), decide to actually go through with ripping off local mob boss Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid), to the tune of a little over two million dollars. They do this on Christmas Eve, presumably to delay Guerrard's discovery of the theft, giving them time to get away. Unfortunately, the weather in Wichita is frightful, and they are going to have to wait until the next morning to leave town. This leaves both men in the position of having to fulfill their duties and not tip anyone off that something's going on. This leans more heavily on Arglist, who makes the rounds at local peeler bars that Guerrard controls. One of the owners, Renata (Connie Nielson), figures out what's going on by Arglist's uncharacteristic behavior, and tries to take advantage of his long-standing crush on her to find a way out of Wichita. Before long though, Roy Gelles (Mike Starr) is onto the scheme.
While the crime plot is pretty straight-forward (stay out of harm's way and play it cool until Charlie and Vic can get away safely), the smaller stories are very interesting. Arglist, and his friend (possibly his only friend - he comes across as a very lightly-reformed not-entirely-pleasant guy to be around) Pete (Oliver Platt, an absolute riot here) are both mired, and trapped by the circumstances of their lives. Charlie's ex is Pete's current wife, and there are a lot of tensions between all of the characters. Charlie and Pete also both drink nearly constantly, with vastly different results. Charlie is subdued, the crime story-line means that he's largely playing out his string, seeing a lot of people for the last time one way or another. Pete's a mess, a social disaster, pushing buttons with glee and ferocity for as long as he can stand upright. Charlie offers advice, but lets Pete get into trouble, and then helps dust him off once whatever is going to happen has happened.
There's a sequence in this film that's a glimpse into an entirely different type of film, had anyone cared to take this material in a different direction. Charlie takes Pete to his family's holiday dinner, both soused. Pete is loud and delights it in, while his wife and her parents smirk through it with a sort of stiff-upper-lip condescension. Charlie's children are there; the young daughter just misses her father, the teenage boy is all fury and takes everything the worst possible way. It's a great scene, a ton of information packed into just a few minutes of film. But what makes it great is the little bit that immediately precedes Charlie and Pete's arrival at the dinner. Standing outside on the sidewalk, looking at the happy family (happy possibly because of Pete's absence), Pete admits to Charlie that there was some overlap between their respective relationships with the mother of Charlie's question. Pete invites Charlie to take a swing at him, but instead of doing that, he lowers the boom. Pete asks why he isn't angry, Charlie responds (in the way that only John Cusack can), "Actually, it makes me curious. It makes me wonder who she's fucking now."
It's not necessarily said with malicious intent - it's both a forgiveness and a freeing of Pete. He's in a miserable marriage with no way out, but the awareness that he's in the same boat that Charlie had been in forges a further bond between the two. Also, it's the setting of the fuse for Pete to finally unload on everyone once inside, which is also one of the primary joys of watching Oliver Platt in just about anything he's ever done. I don't know how to factor this into a review of "The Ice Harvest," but watching Platt drunkenly shake a turkey leg at people in an accusatory manner has to be worth something.
The pacing of this movie is unusual, also. It's a ninety-minute movie, so it's not what you'd call long by any means. And the pressure definitely gets to Arglist's character (there are a number of fantastic shots of Cusack looking progressively more disheveled as the movie goes on), but it definitely doesn't feel like things are happening very quickly. That's not to suggest that there's a lack of content, or that the side-plots aren't fulfilling on their own, but "The Ice Harvest" lacks the sort of narrow-minded focus that a lot of noir-ish films have. I suspect that's because there's no time devoted to the actual commission of the theft; it's all aftermath. This movie feels a lot longer than it actually is, which is often a kiss of death, but here I didn't mind it.
I don't want to get into hyperbole, and suggest that this is a must-see movie. But I will say that it's the only good film director Harold Ramis has made since "Groundhog Day." And "The Ice Harvest" isn't as good as that film, but it does have healthy doses of the same kind of dark emotional states that lend some heft to the funnier material. It's a quality movie that I've seen a handful of times now, and not just when I'm trying to find an anti-Christmas Christmas movie.
