Only now does it occur to me... BEST OF THE BEST (1989)

Only now does it occur to me... that BEST OF THE BEST (not to be confused with the Milli Vanilli album) is practically a lost Cannon film––a South Korea vs. U.S.A. martial arts tournament movie packed with Golan-Globus alumni: Eric Roberts (RUNAWAY TRAIN), James Earl Jones (ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD), John P. Ryan (AVENGING FORCE, DEATH WISH 4, DELTA FORCE 2), Eddie Bunker (RUNAWAY TRAIN, SHY PEOPLE), Louise Fletcher (INVADERS FROM MARS), Tom Everett (DEATH WISH 4, MESSENGER OF DEATH), and Kane Hodder (AVENGING FORCE). Damn!

There are at least a dozen good reasons to see BEST OF THE BEST, so, without further ado:

#1. Eric Roberts. A.K.A. a Steel Town Boy on a Saturday Night.

It's sort of the FLASHDANCE of Taekwondo tournament movies, with Eric Roberts playing a widowed father who spends his days welding at a car factory. Though he lives with a shoulder injury, his one passion is martial arts. Eddie Bunker (ex-con, novelist, and bit player who might be best known to audiences as "Mr. Blue" from RESERVOIR DOGS) is his co-worker who just wants to hang out and grab some beers.
 
Roberts has got a statement mullet and wears statement sweaters with deep V's.


As the film's heart, Roberts bleeds with his usual acting intensity, often reserved for conversations with his mother, who is played by––

#2. Louise Fletcher.

"Nurse Ratched" is quite the score for a tournament fighter movie. It'd be like if they got Meryl Streep to play Johnny Cage's mom in MORTAL KOMBAT. Fletcher gets to flex her acting chops in about three scenes, which is pretty good for something like this, I guess.

#3. Philip Rhee as "Tommy Lee." (Not to be confused with the drummer from Mötley Crüe.)

Perhaps best known for BEST OF THE BEST, BEST OF THE BEST II, BEST OF THE BEST III: NO TURNING BACK, and BEST OF THE BEST IV: WITHOUT WARNING, Rhee is a talented performer tasked with the movie's soul and most exhaustive backstory. It's a representational relief that the lead character in an '80s movie about a Korean/American martial arts tournament is Korean-American. He may only have fourth billing, but this is truly Rhee's movie (he was also a producer and co-writer).

#4. Chris Penn as a Martial Artist. It feels right to come off of the entry about an actual martial artist to arrive right here. The movie doesn't comment on Penn (right, in the blue pants)

being unable to jump rope, or basically unable to lift his legs

or do a proper push up.

I also want to be clear that I am definitely in favor of this choice. He also gets to shout the line, "Grab him like a toilet seat!" in the climactic fight. He's kind of the "Vernon Wells in COMMANDO" of this movie, whereupon an out-of-shape guy was slapped in a chain-mail sweater and pitted against Arnold Schwarzenegger. Bless.

#5. The montages. The above images come from a training montage set to an "Eye of the Tiger" rip-off called, fittingly, "Best of the Best," by Stubblefield & Hall. No "Hall & Oates" are they, but they acquit themselves with "whooooahhh/be the best that you can be/the best of the best" lyrical élan.

This is all crosscut with their South Korean opponents doing exercises that are a lot more strenuous. Even though one of the Koreans killed Tommy Lee's brother in a match, they're not exactly set up as Ivan Drago-ish villains. (Every member of the South Korean team can do a push-up.)

#6. I haven't even mentioned the people who run the American team. The first would be the head coach, James Earl Jones.

He has pretty much one rule: "DON'T EVER BE LATE!" (That should be printed on an inspirational poster and attributed to Darth Vader.) He cares a lot about his team members showing up to practice, and a melodramatic plot development where Eric Roberts wants to miss a practice because his son was hit by a car (!) leads to the following exchange:

"MY KID MIGHT LOSE HIS LEG!"


"WE ALL HAVE OUR PRIORITIES!"

Damn, James Earl Jones, you're as cold as ice!

#7. John P. Ryan. He shows up briefly as the owner (?) of the American Taekwondo team. It's kind of unclear what the bureaucracy is, but he gets to act as if he is very excited about a martial arts tournament.


#8. Finally, Sally Kirkland (JFK, ANNA) rounds out the team management as a specialist on the mental aspects of martial arts. She takes everybody back to karate school or whatever

and I thought there was going to be a big plot-line about "we're not gonna let some woman tell us how to kick dudes in the face" but she's pretty much treated with respect from the outset, so... nice job, movie!

#9. Kane Hodder. You know him best for playing Jason Voorhees from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII through JASON X, but prepare to get to know him all over again as "Redneck in Barfight" shouting "I want him, I want his balls!"

To which Chris Penn retorts, "Yeah I thought you were missing a pair, ASSHOLE!"

#10. Ahmad Rashad as himself.

He commentates over the tournament finale, lending it a "documentary" sports feel.

#11. Simon Rhee (Philip Rhee's brother) playing the South Korean badass who accidentally killed Philip Rhee's (fictitious) brother.

The eyepatch lends him a kind of "South Korean Snake Plissken" vibe, and he has the acting and martial arts chops to pull it off.

#12. The sincerity.

Without giving too much away, by the time THE BEST OF THE BEST is over you will regard it as a shockingly sincere 80s sports movie, one which that recognizes opponents as "not bad guys at whom you should scream 'U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A!,'" but multi-dimensional human beings who are also in pursuit of excellence and worthy of respect. That's all.

Only now does it occur to me... HITMAN'S RUN (1999)

"Lesser Lester" Week Continues:

Only now does it occur to me... that Richard Donner's ASSASSINS (1995, starring Stallone, Banderas, and Julianne Moore) was apparently enough of a 'thing' to inspire some imitators––including Mark L. Lester's HITMAN'S RUN.

Banderas in ASSASSINS....


...and Eric Roberts in HITMAN'S RUN.


Mostly notable for an evocative scene where Eric Roberts kills a man in a phone booth by running him over with a wood-paneled station wagon,



HITMAN'S RUN follows the exploits a former mafia assassin (Roberts) in the witness protection program who comes out of hiding for one last adventure involving hackers, floppy disks, CD-ROMs, skateboarding kids, stylish haircuts, late 90s sweaters, and lite John Woo-style gunplay.

"Give a guy a gun, he thinks he's Superman. Give him two and he thinks he's God."

Other major highlights include the bizarre and possibly improvised interactions between Roberts and his new wife (who knows not of his hitman past).  I mean, just look at this beautiful exchange:





Yes, it certainly does seem so much longer.  But Roberts is doing a decent job, and I appreciate the extra effort his haircut is making.


Hey, look, it's C. Thomas Howell!

There's always a peculiar melancholy whenever I see C. Thomas outside of the 1980s... like I'm a distant relative who expected the worst, but when I see him, I squeeze his shoulder and say really sincerely, "Oh, I'm so glad to see you're doing okay."  I feel like I should be sending him $25.00 checks for his birthday, is what I'm saying.


I also learned that a recordable CD has 650 megabytes of memory.

Er-–wait a second––who is that sweater-vest-wearin', faintly 90s subculture HACKERS émigré?  I know him from somewhere...  It's almost like I can see him, about to be paddled by a douchey Ben Affleck...

Yup, it's Esteban Powell, best known as Mitch's pal "Carl" from DAZED AND CONFUSED!

Not a lot has changed.

His major character trait in HITMAN'S RUN is that he says things like "Whoa-kay!" instead of "Okay," and I suppose that's fine.

In the end this is the kind of generic mafia flick that's sort of worth your time. It's certainly a "lesser" Lester––on the second-rate action scale, I'd put it somewhere between a Glickenhaus and a Pyun.  Most of it will depend on your tolerance for the less-than-selective Eric Roberts (according to IMDb, he has THIRTY-SEVEN films coming out in 2016!), as apparently not everyone is on the Roberts bandwagon.  I, conversely, am driving that bandwagon.  I realize that some of the joy of Eric Roberts is how terrible many of his films are, but I still contend that the man himself is one of the finest actors of his generation (see RUNAWAY TRAIN and STAR 80 back-to-back if you don't believe me), and even amid the direct-to-video dreck, little shards of his talent keep piercing through.

Junta Juleil's Top 100: #100-#96

Alright, here we go, ladies and gentlemen:

#100. AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973, George Lucas)

Ah, how I love the late 50's, early 60's nostalgia pic, of which AMERICAN GRAFFITI is the beloved grandaddy. Though I and many of the genre's admirers cannot lay claim to having experienced the era firsthand, so many films which I deeply enjoy (THE WANDERERS, STAND BY ME, CHRISTINE, etc., etc.) use it as an effective template for imparting profound lessons about the nature of adulthood and what it means and feels like to be on the cusp of it, the cusp of that storied abyss. (They also use it as an effective template for cramming in as many great Oldies tunes as is humanly possible!) In retrospect, I can't help but feel that these films go even further, sort of imparting mythical lessons about what life was like Before Things Got Shitty, or the fairy-tale time When People Had Something To Look Forward To. Now perhaps I'm being somewhat facetious, but it certainly feels that way these days. Regardless, this is a humanist masterpiece with a vital young cast (Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Cindy Williams, Charles Martin Smith, Paul Le Mat, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, among others) and a bittersweet ending that speaks toward What Came Next. It's George Lucas (or was it really Marcia?) at his best.

#99. SOMEWHERE IN TIME (1980, Jeannot Szwarc)

I'm not exactly a fan of the 'Romance' genre by any means, but the genuine aura of tenderness and melancholy which flows forth from this movie can play my emotions like a piano. As he has proven again and again, Richard Matheson's mastery of time travel as a narrative device is rarely (if ever) matched; he tackles it not as science, but as a reverie, an abstraction, a wandering sense of nostalgia and regret. John Barry's score is a pleasure to the point of pain, and Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour's connectedness easily make us forget about pop culture personas like "Superman" and "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman." A beautiful film, and one which didn't blow 'em away at the box office, but which has inspired a rabid cult following, including an extremely dedicated fan club which predates the Internet.

#98. RUNAWAY TRAIN (1985, Andrei Konchalovsky)

A prison escape film, of sorts, which passed through the hands of Akira Kurosawa, Paul Zindel, Eddie Bunker, and Golan & Globus before it became white-knuckle reality. RUNAWAY TRAIN is scraping steel, snowy vistas, blood and oil and grease and steam. The sheer, absolutely brutish intensity of Jon Voight and John P. Ryan is mind-blowing- we see men become animals, we see animals become men. Eric Roberts gets in on the action, too– this thing is a goddamn master's course in acting. One of the most potent, well-constructed thrillers in recent memory.

#97. THE PENALTY (1920, Wallace Worsley)

Some of you know that I'm quite the Lon Chaney devotee; I've said in the past "from his achievements in self-mutilation to his mind-blowing makeup effects to his mastery of the crazy-eye to his portrayals of mad jealousy, mangling frustration, and unfettered pathos; he assembled a vast body of work that really can't be matched for variety, commitment, or poignancy- and half of his films are lost!" The man's masochistic streak and tortured countenance are well-demonstrated here in THE PENALTY as he plays a frightening gangster named "Blizzard" whose legs were mistakenly amputated as a boy. The apparatus he uses to sell the effect is astounding, as are the nuances in his facial expressions, particularly given the fact that he was in enormous pain and hence prone to losing consciousness for the duration of the shoot. This is silent melodrama at its finest: whether it's slugging you in the gut or tugging at your heart-strings, you feel as if you've utterly surrendered yourself to the experience– it grabs you by the lapels and takes you for a ride, and isn't that what cinema's all about?

#96. ACE IN THE HOLE (1951, Billy Wilder)

Ah, the "newspaper flick." They're full of gritty, fast-talking men who're part-time wordsmiths and full-time swindlers, the sort of men who'd rather die than see some rival publication get the scoop. Enter Kirk Douglas, a gal-slappin' sonofabitch named Chuck Tatum who turns manipulatin' the masses into a spectator sport. I applaud this film and its ridiculous cynicism; it knew that that the days of aw, shucks truth-bending ("when the legend becomes fact, print the legend," anyone?) would one day give way to poisonous, THEY LIVE-grade distortions on a global scale. The alternate title was THE BIG CARNIVAL, and how goddamned right they were, what a big fucken carnival, indeed. As this list progresses, I'll likely say that a number of films seem prophetic in today's world (including this one!), but then again I suppose the repressers of the truth have always been sonsabitches; just who knew to what scale they'd end up takin' it? ACE IN THE HOLE is a movie that takes you by the throat, leads you toward the glory of "The Information Age," and shows you a few of the uglier pit-stops along the way. I also highly recommend: SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS and NETWORK.

Coming up next...some Carpy, some Polanski, and possibly the biggest, baddest tear-jerker of all time!

Film Review: STAR 80 (1983, Bob Fosse)

Stars: 4 of 5.
Running Time: 103 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Eric Roberts, Mariel Hemingway, Cliff Robertson, David Clennon (Palmer in THE THING),- Keenan Ivory Wayans cameo as a stand-up comic.
Best one-liner: "You won't forget Paul Snider."

STAR 80 is another in a series of brilliant Fosse-directed biopics (LENNY, ALL THAT JAZZ). This time it's about slain Playboy playmate and burgeoning actress, Dorothy Stratten, and her jealous, unhinged husband, Paul Snider. His last film, and his follow-up to ALL THAT JAZZ, Fosse makes it almost another AUTO-biopic, accentuating similarities between Snider and himself (as portrayed by Roy Scheider in ATJ). This is the story of Paul Snider, but it's also an alternate history of Bob Fosse; the 'what might have been,' had he been just a little bit sleazier and a lot less talented.

As Snider, Eric Roberts is an absolute powerhouse. Over the top, but, by all accounts, true to life, Roberts transforms the self-obsessed Snider not quite into a character that we pity, but a character whose distressing machinations we can at least understand.

Mariel Hemingway is sweetly, depressingly naive as Dorothy (filmed in the very apartment where the real Stratten was murdered), who becomes almost a ghost in the film, frozen in time by Fosse's snapshots and white-outs.

Stylistic decisions such as these give the film an extra sense of urgency, combining documentary-style staged interviews, ample cross-cutting, and overlapping audio to again (as in ALL THAT JAZZ) present reality from a godly point-of-view, the wreckage of a life endlessly piled atop itself, all happening at once.

As a personal achievement, it would be impossible to eclipse ALL THAT JAZZ, but STAR 80 is a powerful companion piece, both as an artistic document of Stratten and Snider's tragic tale and as a rumination on the horrific life that could-have-been for Fosse. Four stars.

-Sean Gill

Film Review: RUNAWAY TRAIN (1985, Andrei Konchalovsky)

Stars: 4.7 of 5.
Running Time: 111 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Jon Voight, Eric Roberts, Danny Trejo, Eddie Bunker, John P. Ryan (IT'S ALIVE, DELTA FORCE 2, CLASS OF 1999), T.K. Carter (Nauls in THE THING), Rebecca de Mornay, Hank Worden (THE SEARCHERS, STAGECOACH, the odd, milk-delivering waiter from TWIN PEAKS Season 2), Tommy 'Tiny' Lister (EXTREME PREJUDICE). Music by Trevor Jones. Produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.
Best one-liner: [makes flatulent noise] "That's your mother's farthole, Rankin. The bitch is LOUD."

"Existential." "Poetic." "Award-winning." These are not words I would expect to use while describing a Golan-Globus film. To put it in perspective, they produced DEATH WISH 3, RAPPIN', INVASION U.S.A, and MISSING IN ACTION 2 the same year (1985).

Now, the forces which collaborated to make RUNAWAY TRAIN a reality are simply mind-blowing: it began its life as a shelved Akira Kurosawa script, picked up by Cannon and adapted by Paul Zindel (Pulitzer Prize winner for EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS), Djordje Milicevic (Serbian writer of John Huston's VICTORY), and Eddie Bunker (former inmate turned writer/actor). Bunker (who plays a memorable role here), is likely the most fascinating of the bunch- he stabbed a boy in the eye with a fork at 15, he was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, he shivved a prison guard and befriended Danny Trejo (who makes his debut here), became buddies with Michael Mann after his release, wrote STRAIGHT TIME and ANIMAL FACTORY, and appeared in RESERVOIR DOGS (as Mr. Blue) and THE RUNNING MAN, among others.

Annnyway, Golan and Globus handed the directorial reins to Russian art house director Andrei Konchalovsky, and cast it with Hollywood powerhouses and Cannon heavies alike. Holy shit, what a combination! Our plot is this:

Two inmates- Jon Voight (a charismatic, raging grizzly of a man- "I'm at war with the world and everybody in it!") and Eric Roberts (who possesses a sleazy, oddly snakelike naivete)- escape the clutches of their steely, gum-chewing, mustachioed warden John P. Ryan

(who prays "God, don't kill them- let me do it!"), only to find themselves on a...RUNAWAY TRAIN. It develops into a brutal meld of TAKING OF PELHAM 1,2,3 and BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI that feels like a shiv to the palm.

It all ends with a Shakespeare quote, and your gut reaction is not "Damn, that's pretentious," but rather to catch your breath, wipe your brow, and make sure your guts are still there. Now, THAT says a lot.

-Sean Gill