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Billy Jack: Tom Laughlin & Delores Taylor (from L.A. Weekly)

 

“Listen, children, to a story that was written long ago ... ” So begins “One Tin Soldier” the relentlessly catchy theme song to Billy Jack, the 1971 cult film classic about a karate-chopping half-white/half-Indian ex–Green Beretwho tends to “go berserk” when he sees Native Americans being abused by redneck whites.

The creation of Billy Jack, the character Tom Laughlinportrayed in four films (all of which he co-wrote and directed), can be traced to the mid-1950s, when the football jock/aspiring filmmaker was dating a University of South Dakotaart major named Delores Taylor, who would eventually become his wife, co-writer and co-star. As the couple prepares to bring a restored print of Billy Jack to this year’s Los AngelesFilm Festival, the 78-year-old Laughlin credits Taylor for inspiring the character that shaped so much of his life.

“Dody is from a small town called Winner, South Dakota,” he explains, speaking by phone from the couple’s Ventura County home. “She was a pale platinum blonde at the time and she had lived around Native Americans all her life. They would always come over and ask if ‘Little Yellowhead’ could come out to play. So when I met her, she was deeply passionate about Indian rights. She was on a mission.

“One time when I was there courting her, she and I drove through a section of town with all these rundown shacks and abandoned cars covered with cardboard and carpet that people were living in,” Laughlin recalls. “‘What the hell is that?’ I asked, and she said, ‘That’s where the Indians live.’ And I couldn’t believe it. I was so incensed.”

Soon after, Laughlin was in Winner’s one and only bar when he heard some locals laughingly describe how they sometimes followed home the area’s Native Americans, most of whom were members of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, after they’d come into town for supplies. More than once, these men had stopped the Natives, who were traveling on foot, and dumped a bag of flour over their heads, taunting, “Hey, now you can go back to town and shop in the white man’s store.” Laughlin, clearly still furious a half-century later, takes a deep breath. “Those guys were laughing, so proud of themselves, and I wanted to throw them through the window. I couldn’t do that, but Billy Jack could, so I went back to the motel and wrote the ice cream parlor scene.”

In the scene, which remains potent today, Billy Jack enters an ice cream parlor just after the town bully — a rich man’s spoiled son — has poured flour over the heads of three kids from the Freedom School, a haven for Native-American children and run by Billy Jack’s great love, Jean. Taylor, who had never acted before, took the role of Jean with three days’ notice — “I tricked her into it,” Laughlin notes, laughing.

“I was terrified,” the soft-spoken Taylor admits. She is a woman of few words — “the introvert’s introvert,” her husband declares — but onscreen that reserve gave Jean great power, never more so than in a wrenching monologue she gives after being raped.

In her November 1971 New Yorker review of the film, critic Pauline Kaelwrote that she “can’t remember another movie in which the rape victim explained what the invasion of her body meant to her or how profound the insult and humiliation were.”

“Dody improvised that speech,” Laughlin says proudly. “We went up to a mountaintop lake and I just put a long lens on her and then stepped back. I got out of her way. She did it all. It was stupefying.”

Taylor brushes aside all praise. “I can’t explain it,” she says. “Something just took over.”

Asked why she never acted in films other than those she made with Laughlin, Taylor makes it clear that she never gave a big-screen career a second thought. ”Acting wasn’t something I was expecting, or dreaming of,” she says. “It’s just that I got hooked up with this guy, who had these big dreams. He was so driven, so talented.”

Then Laughlin gets in the last word, saying, with obvious delight, “As you can see, after 54 years, I still have her conned.”

--Chuck Wilson

Billy Jack screens at the Billy Wilder Theater on Sunday, June 21 at 6 p.m.

review: DEAD SNOW (from Village Voice)

DEAD SNOW

Dude, that’s not a regular zombie biting your neck, it’s a Nazi zombie! Which means that these flesh eaters are better dressed than your typical George Romero undead, and a lot more relentless. The unlucky travelers crossing paths with these swine are a modern day group of medical students vacationing in the Norwegian Alps. A local tells them that during WWII a platoon of German soldiers were driven by the nearby townspeople into the mountains, never to be seen again. “There’s an evil presence here,” he warns, but of course the arrogant youths don’t listen. For more than half of this 90-minute film, director Tommy Wirkola plays things pretty straight—a mistake perhaps, since the first half is pretty boring—but once the Nazi zombies start arriving en masse, in the broad light of day, he abruptly shifts to an Evil Dead style zaniness, including the sight of a potential victim hanging off the side of a mountain while using a zombie’s entrails as rope. Let’s call this the gooiest movie of the year (so far). (Chuck Wilson)

review: Street Dreams (from LA Weekly)

STREET DREAMS

The love child of skateboarding champ and reality star Rob Dyrdek (of MTV’s Rob & Big), Street Dreams is set in Chicago, where Derek (Paul Rodriguez), a 17-year-old Mexican-American, dreams of making it to the pro skateboarding circuit. Derek’s parents don’t approve, but his four best buddies believe in him although Troy (played by Dyrdek), the group’s unofficial leader, is growing increasingly jealous. On the road to an amateur contest in Tampa, where Derek and Troy will face off, first-time director Chris Zamoscianyk nicely captures the boozy, profane silliness of teenage boys on the loose, while drawing believable performances from a cast comprised largely of non-actors  (including the charismatic Rodriquez, who’s known in pro skating circles as P-Rod). What regrettably eludes the director is the mad beauty of boys speeding pell-mell down city streets, as well as the potential poetry in their airborne spins off curbs and handrails. Street Dreams is enjoyable enough, but it’s a shame that Zamoscianyk and Dyrdek (who also co-wrote the script) fail to suggest that some boarders — millions of them, no doubt — skate not for sponsored glory, but for the solace they find in an activity that allows them to conquer, however fleetingly, this rock hard world. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: "Newcastle"

NEWCASTLE

Hunky young men and their tan-lined butts fill the screen in this slightly overlong but visually striking (and not just for the butts) surfing drama from first time writer-director Dan Castle. After Jesse (Lachlan Buchanan), the rising surf star of the titular New South Wales beach town, screws up his chances to compete in a big tournament, he and his younger teen brother, Fergus (Xavier Samuel), head to a remote beach with their buddies and a couple of girls. These young characters and their problems would fit right in on one of those CW Network teen soaps, but Castle and his cast aren’t afraid to explore tough topics, including the awkwardness of sex (frankly staged) and the open homosexuality of Fergus. While it takes Castle too long to get Jesse and his crew to their private beach, their day of surfing leads to a long sequence that culminates in a rather riveting series of mishaps (the precision editing is by Rodrigo Balart). Teen angst aside, the aquatic photography, above and below the waterline, by cinematographer Richard Michalak and an ace camera crew, is so exquisite that it made this viewer wish, momentarily at least, that he was still young enough to not be afraid of risking the big wave. (Chuck Wilson)

BEA ARTHUR 1922-2009

Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles--"Cabaret" (1999)

Review: THE NEW TWENTY

THE NEW TWENTY

In his sleek and accomplished debut film, writer-director Chris Mason Johnson tracks the lives and loves of a cadre of 29-year-old Manhattan college friends who betray themselves and each other by abusing the Big Three—sex, money, and drugs. At the center is Andrew (Ryan Locke), a lean, blond alpha-dog investment banker whose beautiful Asian fiancée (Nicole Bilderback) may be his match in the world of business. Among those circling this golden couple are Ben (Colin Fickes), who's gay, overweight, and addicted to online sex sites (there's a great moment when a trick comes over to Ben's apartment and the two men reject each other on sight), as well as the drug-addicted Felix (Thomas Sadoski) and commitment-phobic Tony (Andrew Wei Lin). We have been here many times before (see 1966's The Group), but Johnson and co-writer Ishmael Chawla have a light touch that keeps things from turning overly melodramatic. (No vases get thrown.) Supported by veteran New York actors such as Terry Serpico and Bill Sage, the strong ensemble of young actors create fully defined personas, thanks in large part to their director's willingness to linger after a dramatic peak and observe the characters in private, take-a-breath moments. He's got something, this guy, and although I'm surely overpraising The New Twenty, I'd hate to see a movie this ethnically and sexually diverse fade away on today's dead-end gay release circuit. After all, for better or worse, every generation deserves its own St. Elmo's Fire. (Chuck Wilson)

review: EVERLASTING MOMENTS (opening this week)

Despite its Hallmark title, Everlasting Moments is a deeply involving family drama that marks a late-career triumph for 77-year-old Swedish director Jan Troell, whose two-part 1971-72 epic, The Emigrants and The New Land, was internationally beloved. As with those masterpieces (which are thrilling beyond measure), Troell is once again delineating the complexities of marriage, in this case that of Maria (Maria Heiskanen) and Sigfrid Larsson (Mikael Persbrandt) who wed in 1907 and soon have a houseful of children. A dockworker, alcoholic, and womanizer, Sigfrid leaves the worries of familial responsibility to Maria, who one day goes to hock an old camera that she won in a contest and never used. Encouraged by an obviously smitten camera shop owner (Jesper Christensen), Maria begins taking and later developing her own photographs, a process that is forever miraculous to her. Despite an obvious “gift for seeing”, this mother and beleaguered wife often sets aside her camera, but gradually, over the course of ten years, she finds a way to balance her art with her life, a feat, Troell suggests, that is as miraculous as the capturing of image to film. Despite some schematic plotting, Everlasting Moments is the work of a master, one who draws from Heiskanen, Persbrandt and Christensen performances that are marvelously subtle, in which the truth of a given character lies not in what is being said aloud but in what is being held within — as with one of Maria’s portraits, it’s all in the eyes. (Chuck Wilson)

John Updike: from "Falling Asleep Up North" (1991)

“Falling asleep has never struck me as a very natural thing to do. There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that in-between area, when the grip of consciousness is slipping but has not quite let go and curious mutated thoughts pass as normal cogitation unless snapped into clear light by a creaking door, or one’s bed partner shifting position on the remarkably noisy sheets. The little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede dreams’ uninhibited butterflies are disastrously exposed to a light they cannot survive, and one must begin again, relaxing the mind into unraveling. Consciousness of the process balks it; the brain, watching itself, will not close its thousand eyes. The brain, circling in the cell of wakefulness, panics at the poverty of its domain—these worn-out obsessions, these threadbare word games, these pointless grievances, these picayune plans for tomorrow which loom, hours from execution, as unbearably momentous. Life itself, that agitation of electrified molecules, becomes a captivity, a hellish endless churning, in which one is as alone as Satan, twisting and turning and boring a conical hole in the darkness, while on every side the wide world gently, blessedly snores.” (John Updike)

 

Two Minute Oscars

 from INTERVIEW magazine online

by Sheila Benson & Chuck Wilson

Interview began awarding our own Oscars for greatness in extremely small packages in 1981, because if we didn't, who would? And although Steve Buscemi, Delroy Lindo and Brooke Smith were among that first crop of "unknowns," the idea wasn't to scout Stars of Tomorrow.  It was to celebrate actors who deliver a fully rounded character with the fewest strokes, to recognize the uphill years behind such indelible bursts of energy—and to give a shout-out to tenacity and to keeping on keeping on (hullo there, Margo Martindale! howdy Gene Jones!).

Since 1981, we have had years when directors and, more crucially, writers (although not the Coen brothers, and certainly not Mike Leigh), did away with deftly written small parts in favor of The Girl, The Guy and Her Girlfriend. Not today: filmmakers have suddenly rediscovered the ensemble and the power of filigree, and in 2008, ten of the niftiest of these were:

1. Katrina Fernandez as the fiery Flamenco teacher from Seville in Happy-Go-Lucky, who attempts to ignite gypsy passion in an after-work class of 40-ish, amiable, willing English puddings.  With her back arched, her red heels drumming dangerously, her syntax a wonder of its own, she's a figure of implacable dignity, until thoughts of her private life blindside her and she's wracked with the pent-up fury of a woman betrayed. Her shift from devastating comedy to sheer devastation is jaw-dropping. Hola! Fernandez, a thoroughly English actress, who learned Flamenco at the same time she evolved her singular accent and her ferocious assault on all things British.

2. Jennifer Coolidge in Soul Men as Rosalee, a San Antonio gal who gives Bernie Mac the surprise of his life when he picks her up and brings her back to his hotel room. Coolidge, ever fearless, ever joyous, throws Mac down on the bed, shimmies her blissfully prodigious bosom in his face and then offers him a glimpse of private paradise—a sight that prompts the late, great Mac to utter a line too raunchy to repeat and too funny to miss.

3. Bob L. Harris uses the law, not a six-shooter, to cut a murderous cattle baron (Jeremy Irons) down to size in Appaloosa. As a traveling circuit court judge, Harris, with his white hair, beard, and barely concealed impatience for two-faced power brokers, appears to be channeling the late Robert Altman. If it strikes you that Harris has scored Appaloosa's funniest line—a bit of business about "bees in the honey"—credit the film's director and star, Ed Harris, who is smart enough to give his daddy the last word.

4. Deborah Harry doesn't appear until the final moments of Elegy, but we've had plenty of time to wonder about her, especially as marriage seems to have brought only crumbs from her husband Dennis Hopper. He's a Pulitzer-prize poet, who, when he's not writing, is busy as the "earthly confessor" of his best friend and celebrated academic (Ben Kingsley), regarding his complicated love life (Penelope Cruz.) Elegy's subtext is the imminence of death, but when it comes suddenly, Harry's wry, mature delivery of the moment's pivotal line reveals how deep her character's knowledge has been—and how canny director Isabel Coixet was to choose an actress with her own depths to draw on.

5. Greta Scacchi, Italian born herself, brings warmth and worldliness to the role of Cara, the Italian mistress of the aging Englishman, Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), who long ago fled the stately manor that haunts Brideshead Revisited. A woman who sees all, Cara uses a beachside picnic to advise the social-climbing Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) to "tread lightly" with the heart of Marchmain's son Sebastian (Ben Whishaw), whose intense affection for Charles is, Cara suspects, more than "just a phase." As Charles runs off to romp in the surf with Sebastian and his sister, Scacchi shifts, in the blink of an eye, from a look of optimism to one haunted by knowledge of how such stories tend to play out.

6. Stacey Keach as the Reverend Earle in W, gives a born-again, yet still uncertain George W. Bush a lesson in the glories of political power and godliness which, Keach unwinkingly manages to suggest, are two sides of the same coin (in Texas, at least).   It might just be this unwieldy film's best-written scene, not least for the Reverend's irony-free warning to the newly sober future president that, "The Christian life is not a constant high."

7.  Andre Blake in Rachel Getting Married seems almost lit from within as he does the hair of Kym (Anne Hathaway) his former rehab-mate, the day before her sister's wedding.  Facing his methadone muse, as though reciting the Lives of the Saints, he reminds Kym of each of the acts of courage she'd confided to her not-very-secret diary: pulling her sister Rachel through bulimia, overcoming assault by a beloved uncle.  It was her strength, he swears, that led him to utterly change his life. Unfortunately, getting swept up in "their" story makes him oblivious to Kym's dawning horror; she'd made up every lurid detail, and the "bulimic" bride-to-be is just two chairs away.  In the family fracas that follows, only the stylist remains unscathed, still deluded, still blissfully innocent.

8. Stanley Townsend's nightmarish Tramp in Happy-Go-Lucky marks the only time we've used two actors from the same movie, yet we couldn't omit the depths of Townsend's compassionate, detailed portrait of this universally tragic figure.  Clearly living in at least three worlds at once, the Tramp exists to test Poppy's conviction, not that all people are good, but that they all deserve to be listened to. There are moments when she and we are equally afraid that this hulking, bearish man, driven mad by we don't know what, will swipe at her with one huge hand and leave her crumpled among these ruined buildings.  Or worse.  Yet, when he presses a question to her in his made-up gibberish, and she agrees with him, quietly, eye-to-eye, he subsides.  He wants only connection, and after he shambles off, Poppy totters away, aware of how narrowly her ideals have beaten the odds, this time.


9. Elias Koteas has a delicate, sorrowful dignity as Mr. Cake, the blind Clockmaker who starts everything (backward) in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Mr. Cake keeps to his work of building a huge clock for installation at a vast New Orleans train station even while his son goes off to World War I. Clambering around its works, adjusting only by touch, Mr. Cake makes a fateful adjustment when that only son is killed, a moment Koteas hits like a plangent grace note.  At the ceremonial unveiling, Cake's whole being seems steeped in mourning as he reveals the secret to his clock's backwardness: "So that perhaps the boys lost in the war might come home again" through his recaptured hours. In Koteas' hands the film's semi-magical beauty and gentle rumination are perfectly sustained, even to his fairytale exit, rowing out on a cerulean sea.

10. Lena Olin is The Reader's steely unforgiving voice, she speaks for those who were in "the camps," Auschwitz et al.  At the film's coda, Ralph Fiennes seeks out this survivor in New York, to present her with a death bequest from a former guard on the Woman's block that housed her and her mother. Now obviously living well, Olin is ramrod stiff and withering: she will not participate even marginally in such expiation, not for Fiennes, never for a Nazi. "Go to the theatre, if you want catharsis," she suggests.  She unbends just one millimeter at the sight of the guard's  battered little tin box; that she will keep, that everyday link to her past—and her mother's.  In a film whose messages about guilt are, to put it politely, murky, Olin's centering clarity comes like a clearing of the skies.

 

Find This Article:  http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/two-minute-oscars/

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