Hollywood Suite Critic's Picks: Original-Cin steps up to span the decades in film

On the last Wednesday of every month, as part of a promotional partnership with Hollywood Suite, Original-Cin critics will curate the programming of the service’s ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s channels, choosing three features on each. Here, Jim Slotek discusses his Hollywood Suite selections for May 27.

 By Jim Slotek

There are not enough happy accidents in this world. And rifling through a list of available movies to program on the Critic’s’ Picks night on Hollywood Suite led me to a kind of cool one. 

Perlman, McGill, El-Kadi and Rae Dawn Chong. Quest For Fire is available on Hollywood Suite this month

I sensed no overriding theme from the list, except for the fact that I first saw all but one of these films in theatres – a sad reflection on this moment in history.

But when I looked at Hollywood Suite 2000s, I realized that the three movies I’d picked were all Canadian. I hadn’t set out to bleed maple syrup. I simply saw three titles that jumped out at me. With its follow-ups Watermark and Anthropocene, Manufactured Landscapes was the first of the trilogy of artful and compelling documentaries about humans’ effect on the planet, by photo artist Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier – a trio I dubbed “The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” (Baichwal quoted the line when she accepted a Canadian Screen Award).

Fido  was an unusual vision for a zombie movie, a satire on the Cold War, set in the ‘50s, where the walking dead served as a metaphor for Commies at the gates (except inside the gates, zombies were kept as slaves via controlling technology). A human/zombie love story on the side, it contained, one of Billy Connolly’s most touching performances (and an almost wordless one).

And Goon? It’s simply the second-best hockey movie ever made (after Slap Shot), based on the true story of a New England bar bouncer who slapped on skates and became a team tough guy. Seann William Scott proved he could act. Canada’s best comedy director Michael Dowse proved Fubar wasn’t a fluke. And Alison Pill proved she makes everything better (has there ever been a more romantic sentiment than, “You make me want to stop sleeping with a bunch of guys.”)?

As a career reviewer, the ‘70s are important to me, because it was the time in my life when I paid to see movies, as opposed to being paid to see them. 

Liev Schreiber and Seann William Scott in Goon. Goon is available on Hollywood Suite this month.

I had like-minded friends, and what was there to do in Thunder Bay besides go to the movies? We’d been laughing our heads off at Monty Python’s Flying Circus on CBC (and nearly getting into accidents when sketches like “The Argument Clinic” would pop up on the car radio on the local CBC station). 

And Now For Something Completely Different was a must-see on its second theatrical release in 1974 (despite the fact that many of the sketches originated in the show). It shifted our appreciation for the Pythons to the big screen, and primed us for the blissful release of Monty Python and the Holy Grail  the next year.

Play Misty For Me is the only movie on this list I discovered on TV, as a late-night movie in the late ‘70s. I was intrigued by the idea of Clint Eastwood directing (it was his debut), and that he cast himself, not as a cowboy or a cop, but as a jazz deejay. Jessica Walter, who should have become a way bigger star, gave a Glenn Close-calibre portrayal of a psycho stalker/romantically-obsessive fan.

And in 1979, I was at the exact right age for a quirky, feel-good coming-of-age movie like Breaking Away, given that I was in the process of breaking away from my own home town. The promising Dennis Christopher who starred as the Italian-spouting cyclist Dave, is the hardest name to place today in a cast that included Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley and Paul Dooley (in his best role as Dave’s exasperated dad).

Haley, Quaid, Stern and Christopher. Breaking Away is available on Hollywood Suite this month.

But a career as a film critic beckoned. And in 1982, while working for the Ottawa Citizen, I covered my first Toronto International Film Festival (then modestly called The Festival of Festivals). 

There I believed I’d discovered a movie for the ages in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest For Fire, about three Cro-Magnon stooges (Everett McGill, Ron Perlman and Nameer El-Kadi) looking for a new flame after their communal fire goes out (they were not the most advanced primates in the movie). 

I believed I was looking at the next Oscar Best Picture. It did ultimately win for Best Makeup, but had no other nominations.

There was, to me, something almost hypnotic about how good John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London was, with its skillful injections of humour into the horror mix  (including Griffin Dunne as a sarcastic, decaying corpse) and Rick Baker’s then ground-breaking creature effects. 

It was released just before I bought my first VCR. And after seeing it in the theatre, I recorded it on that other new medium, Pay-TV, and played it for everyone I knew. Like Dennis Christopher, American Werewolf star David Naughton didn’t go on to have a leading man’s career. But he did get a short-lived sitcom called Makin’ It, and sang the theme song which hit #5 on the Billboard charts. 

Despite my longtime obsession with Julie Delpy, the less said about the sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris, the better.

The Right Stuff? That’s a no-brainer. I’d read most of Tom Wolfe’s books, and I consider his astro-chimp’s-eye-view chapter of this one to be one of the finest pieces of writing in his canon. Everything about that movie was spot-on, from the spam-in-a-can disgruntlement of the astronauts, to Ed Harris’s John Glenn to Dennis Quaid’s cocky Gordon Cooper to Sam Shepard’s strong, silent Chuck Yeager. A ridiculously good cast all around.

Call it a coincidence that there are two movies about psycho fans here. The Shining is a masterpiece, but Misery is arguably the truest-in-spirit adaptation of any Stephen King novel, a claustrophobic two-hander between the terrified, injured James Caan and his “caregiver,” Kathy Bates (who rightly won a Best Actress Oscar for the character of Annie Wilkes).

In retrospect, Annie, who tortured her favourite author to keep him from killing a beloved character, also anticipated the modern-day online phenomenon of fans demanding a proprietary say in other people’s creations – “How dare you kill that Avenger? How dare you cast a woman in a previously make role?”

If you have trouble processing what you’re seeing, it’s often the sign of a very good film. So, it was with David Fincher’s Fight Club, which initially baffled me, and provoked some fascinating interview conversations with stars Brad Pitt and Edward Norton (who considered it a passionate anti-Boomer manifesto, and was happy to break the first rule of Fight Club to say so at length). 

And I’m eager to revisit Election, Reese Witherspoon’s best early movie. Tracy Flick, her ambitious wannabe student body president, is remembered by many as a screen villain, at war with the disillusioned nice-guy teacher (Matthew Broderick) who sees through her.

This is a movie that is getting a re-think in many corners. Tracy’s crime, in retrospect, is that she is an ambitious young woman. Seen through 21st Century eyes, she might even be the hero of this story.

Jim Slotek’s Critics Picks on Hollywood Suite

‘70s – And Now For Something Completely Different (1971, Sony), Play Misty For Me (1971, Universal), Breaking Away (1979, 20th Century Fox)

‘80s – Quest For Fire (1981, 20th Century Fox), An American Werewolf in London (1981, Lionsgate), The Right Stuff (1983, Warner)

‘90s – Misery (1990, Warner), Fight Club (1999, 20th Century Fox), Election (1999, Paramount)

2000s – Manufactured Landscapes (2006, Mongrel), Fido (2006, TVA), Goon (2011, eOne)