A Tuesday Night Out

It all began as a regular weekday night. I was about to watch Claude Chabrol's POULET AU VINAIGRE quietly. I wasn't planning on going out, even though Dan Berkson & James What were in town performing at Salon Daomé. I have been suffering from a weird bronchitis for more than a month, and every time I think it's gone it comes back. I wouldn't want to point any fingers in misleading directions but the fuckin' schizo weather probably doesn't help. I was terribly tired yesterday, and felt pretty bad. I lay down for a nap and couldn't even sleep.



So I got up around 11 to eat some ice cream - good for the throat, bad for the waist - and while I was feasting Mr. Bérêt called me. He felt like going out so I said : "Sure, come on over". He brought his trademark Troïka 60 ounces vodka bottle with him, and got to my place around midnight. We had a drink and took the 24 at 12:30, intending on getting off at the corner of Sherbrooke & St. Laurent and walk up. However, while waiting in front of the Sherbrooke metro station, some drunk jock in a sports car smashed the side of the bus. He then went to park in front of it and got out of his car while we ourselves were getting out of the bus. A crackhead appeared out of nowhere and asked the jock, running to the bus to talk to the driver, if he had 4$ !!

We entered the station. I was dead tired and Mr. Bérêt was drunk, so we chose the wrong direction and none of us noticed. We got out at Berri-UQAM and walked to the opposite tracks. Hugotron appeared in front of us as I was sipping on my Rev. We waited a while but finally were able to get out at Mont-Royal and walk to the Daomé, where there was already a nice bunch of people dancing.

The night went in a flash - the music was good, but I didn't feel like dancing. I chatted and slightly moved my butt, people offered me beer and I sure took my time to drink the bottles, abandonning them when they were piss warm. Mr. Bérêt disappeared, and around 3:15 I noticed that almost everybody was gone. I left too. On the sidewalk, we had drunk conversations, and finally Krystel took me home on her scooter whose motor kept on stalling. The air was freezing, but the ride felt nice.

*

Parties are fun to attend, and sometimes cinema has tried to emulate their euphoria on the big screen. We could almost say it's the case with Walter Hill's 1984 fun-ride STREETS OF FIRE. Subtitled "A Rock n' Roll Fable", its tagline is "Tonight is what it means to be young". The movie could almost be a musical, but it remains a fast-paced, feel good urban adventure in an anachronistic world very much inspired by the 80's "new romanticism".



Ellen Aim (Diane Lane), a singer not unlike Stevie Nicks, is kidnapped while giving a performance in a small seedy town populated by rockabillys and bikers. The local biker gang, the Bombers, led by Willem Dafoe, are the ones responsible for the kidnapping. A mercenary named Tom Cody (Michael Paré), who also happens to be Ellen Aim's ex, is called on to rescue her, and will go on a mission with his newfound lesbian sidekick McCoy (Amy Madigan) and Ellen's manager (Rick Moranis). Fights will burst out, and flames will rise up in the streets.

It came to me as a major surprise that I had never seen this flick before. For various reasons :

1 - I am obsessed with the eighties;
2 - I pretty much adore Willem Dafoe;
3 - I'm a tender rocker;
4 - I love bikers movies.



...and I wasn't disappointed. STREETS OF FIRE is an epic studio movie, a weird mix of rock culture, eighties kitsch, and proposes a glossy image of a typical industrial American city with diners, rock clubs and understanding policemen. The fight scenes are over-the-top, and Michael Paré must have been the coolest anti-hero on the block back in the days; he stands there with his working-class pants, his suspenders and his wife-beater, hair in the wind, cigarette sending smoke in his eyes. It was an era of glorious bar binges, brawls with rockabilly gangs, and the mighty Dafoe is the ultimate un-credible bad guy : he walks around with big guys dressed in leather pants, wears more makeup than his female counterparts, and wears the gayest outfits you've ever seen [in fact, as a side note, since blogs don't allow footnotes, I once went to Mr. Hairdresser's birthday party around 2002, and he had invited a guy he was bangin' at the time. The guy showed up, to everybody's embarassment, dressed in a shiny leather overalls, and nothing else, bare torso & all. I told myself that I had never seen a cheesiest outfit and never would again, but how wrong was I - because Willem wears exactly the same one in pretty much the first half of this movie].

Michael Paré is a bad-ass, yes, but the visuals are also to blame for the movie's over-the-top feel : motorcycles who are shot at litterally EXPLODE; the cars roar all the time; there's a constant animosity between Moranis & Paré, and "never a dull moment". What can I say about the soundtrack that hasn't been said before ? If you don't like classic rock, it could be slightly annoying to you, but in the context of the movie it's quite appropriated. Bands like Fire Inc. and The Blasters offer nice contributions, and the Ry Cooder score does a pretty decent job.



Dafoe was just starting his carreer back then, and appeared as a money-laundering villain the next year in William Friedkin's TO LIVE & DIE IN L.A. Director Walter Hill, after his peak at the beginning of the 80's, made some decent movies, among which figure westerns WILD BILL (1995) and the Kurosawa remake LAST MAN STANDING (1996) with Bruce Willis. Which probably, eventually, lead him to direct an episode of DEADWOOD in 2004, but that's just another story.

*

I recently stumbled upon an excellent web page ("Critical Condition", at http://www.critcononline.com/video_companies_cover_art.htm) detailing numerous VHS distributors of the 80's, and I spent quite a lot of time just browsing the galleries, wasting entire hours just staring at the cover arts of obscure releases. While doing so, I realised that I possessed - and used to possess - quite a large number of these tapes, including Academy Video's ENDPLAY. This one was given to me at the end of the millenium by a fellow trader who used to go by the name Baron Blood, referencing a very entertaining Mario Bava classic. ENDPLAY wasn't that far on my VHS shelves, so I decided to give it a chance and pop it in.



My first disappointment was that it wasn't an American exploitation piece from the 80's about teenage hitchikers getting sliced, as the box suggested. It was an almost monastic Australian thriller from 1976, directed by Tim Burstall. In which a pretty boy named Mark (John Waters - not the one we know) is believed to have disposed of the body of a "blonde nympho" he picked up while driving to visit his brother Robert (George Mallaby, who also appeared in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME in 1977), a crippled in a wheelchair.

Believe me, there's not much going on. Then it slowly hits you. The storyline is told from a viewpoint that leads you to falsely assume some beliefs that may not be entirely true... The novel aspect of the script's construction is only revealed towards the end, making us "get" why we waited until the end to make any judgement. The movie verges on the huis clos, taking place almost entirely in Robert's house. The few scenes happening in the "outside world" are filmed in such a bizarre way that they lend the ensemble a surrealistic feel.

This movie is apparently a classic in Australia, and I can understand why; however, thanks to the false marketing by Academy Video, some of my expectations were not exactly fulfilled. Better luck next time !