Today at the movies — bad parenting in a small town, good gangstering in a big city, a bleak lesbo horror, a baseball tragedy, a rock'n'roll fantasy, making art and finding a home in a world that despises you_,_ and something so awful I clicked it off before it got awful.

• Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

• King of New York (1990)

• Out of the Blue (1980)

• Paris is Burning (1990)

• Scott Pilgrim vs the World (2010)

• Symptoms (1974)

• The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

Best of show, absolutely, is Paris is Burning.

The big disappointment: Out of the Blue.

♦ ♦ ♦

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

All the boys at my school simply loved this movie, and I got sick of hearing how great it was, especially since there was no way to see it back then, unless it came on TV. Which it never did, so tonight is the first time I've seen it.

It's a baseball movie and a buddy movie and a tearjerker, because one of the baseball buddies has a fatal disease and isn't long for this team or any other.

The buddies are Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty), the team's star pitcher and a smart guy who once wrote a book, and Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro), Henry's favored catcher and best friend in the world, who's never read a book and probably lacks the needed brains. Their friendship feels authentic, and Vincent Gardenia is terrific as the team's manager.

This might be Moriarty's best performance, and it was De Niro's big break, and Danny Aiello's first movie. The kids at school were right that it's a great movie, but wrong when they said (many times) that it's a true story. It's based on a novel, which was actually the second novel in a four-book series.

I'm not sure there's ever been a ball club as filled with G-rated good guys as this movie's New York Mammoths, but that's a small complaint. Bang the Drum Slowly tells a small, personal story against the backdrop of old-time big league ball, and it does it very well.

Weirdly, but probably only for me, the movie's repeated musical motif is "The Streets of Laredo," which Google tells me is a well-known American country/western song. Not sure I'd heard it before, but it shares the same tune or it's mighty similar to a very familiar hymn from my childhood church, "We Gather Together to Ask the Lord's Blessing." More than a little bewildered was I, half expecting the movie to build toward an altar call. Thankfully, there's no come-to-Jesus moment here.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

King of New York (1990)

Abel Ferrara made the very good Ms 45 and the original Bad Lieutenant, and the disappointing Body Snatchers and New Rose Hotel. If you catch him on a good day he's brilliant, and it you catch him on the wrong day you're going to see a bad movie.

This was written by Nicholas St. John, who wrote most of Ferrera's movies during his good era. It stars Christopher Walken, and that's what nudged me into watching it.

It's a gangster movie, with Walken as mega-mobster Frank White, fresh from five years in prison, and in a hurry to take over as 'King of New York' — the city's top crime lord.

It's an ordinary genre story, but Walken is Walken, which means the words dance from his lips, and he's stylishly terrifying and dangerous.

A few scenes are classic, like when Walken crashes the poker game, or when he's menaced by hoodlums on the subway, tosses one of them a snap full of cash, and says, "Come by the Plaza Hotel, I've got work for you. Ask for Frank White."

The film has lots of gratuitous nudity, which I can tolerate, and also early rap music, which I don't tolerate so well.

David Caruso has a key supporting role as an oh-so-tough cop. Caruso has only played two characters in his acting career: oh-so-tough cop, and oh-so-tough bad guy, and he's oh-so-unbelievable at either, but the movie gets over the mistake of casting him. Wesley Snipes plays another cop, and seems like a cop. Imagine that. Lawrence Fishburne is an intentionally obnoxious baddie, and he's delightful.

"Nobody rides for free, motherfucker!"

There's a lot of bullet ballet here, something I've lost all interest in — busy gunfights with guns blasting in every direction, people's chests and heads exploding, movie-blood all over the walls, etc. Seeing all those lives, even fictional lives, ended only for the entertainment value of a streak of red sliding down a wall has no appeal for me, but your mileage may vary.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Out of the Blue (1980)

Dennis Hopper was a very good actor, and he directed Easy Rider (1969) and Colors (1988), so he was a very good moviemaker, too. After his death, Chloe Sevigny and Natasha Lyonne chipped in for the restoration of this film, also directed by Hopper. It's a great restoration — it looks and sounds like a brand new shitty movie.

Hopper plays Don, no last name, a truck driver who dotes on his daughter, Cebe. She's played by Linda Manz, the child actor who was unforgettable as a Depression-era waif in Days of Heaven.

In the opening scene, Don is driving Cebe to school in his big rig, and they're talking and laughing and Don's drinking whiskey, and he plows his truck into a school bus. The bus looks about half full of kids, but we're never told how many died. My low estimate is half a dozen, with the rest merely maimed for life.

Don is sentenced to only five years in prison, which seems more lenient than you'd expect for a drunk driving wreck with at least several child fatalities.

Cebe gets wild in his absence, what with her mom being a junkie and all, but things might get better when Dad's released from prison, right?

Nope. Don and his family haven't moved away — they still live in the same community where he killed those kids, but there's only one local man who's angry that Don is out of prison and back in town. Everyone else lets dead kids and bygones be bygones.

Don is not allowed to drive a truck again, but still drives his car with a beer in his hand, and now he works at the county dump, operating heavy machinery with a bottle of whiskey in his jacket.

Under pressure from that one and only guy in town who doesn't like him because Don killed his son, Don's boss at the county dump fires him. Don's response is to bulldoze the boss's office, accompanied by heroic music suggesting it's the triumph of the little guy. "Don't fuck with me, brother, don't fuck with me," says Don.

When he's inexplicably not arrested for this, Don grabs a lug wrench and brains the man who'd complained about his return to town. There are no consequences for this either; no investigation, no arrest. Maybe his victim is dead; he isn't seen or mentioned again in the movie.

Out of the Blue is also focused on Cebe, Don's daughter, and should've been much more focused on her. As in Days of Heaven, Linda Manz owns every scene she's in, and she's holding the movie's big plot twist, which director Hopper clumsily makes obvious even before ramming the school bus in the first scene.

Court-appointed psychologist Raymond Burr might be able to help Cebe, if only he could remember her name — he keeps calling her Cindy, but the movie doesn't notice.

The restoration's opening crawl tells us that Hopper had been hired only as an actor, but the producers didn't like the early footage, fired the writer/director, and Hopper volunteered to take over. He rewrote the script over a weekend, and there is a hint of something worthwhile in the story. It needed more than a weekend's rewrite, though, and everything's buried under Hopper's surprisingly bad writing, direction, and acting.

Verdict: BIG NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Paris is Burning (1990)

With few exceptions, most of the people in this marvelous drag documentary are black, male, and gay, and one of them explains:

"My dad used to say, You have three strikes against you in this world. Every black man has two — just that they're black and male, but you're black and male and gay. You're going to have a hard fucking time. And he said, If you're going to do this you're going to have to be stronger than you ever imagined."

This is the true story of some black gay men who are stronger than you can imagine_._ Filmed at New York's legendary "Paris is Burning" secret drag balls between 1985-87, it includes commentary from several participants at the secret balls.

These events were held secretly for two reasons — obviously, cops could raid the place and arrest everyone for crossdressing, but also, a lot of these ladies' accessories were stolen. If you're an effeminate-looking black man in that era, you're not likely to find a decent job in the straight white world. A few participants brag that for a particular purse or pair of shoes, "I even have the receipt."

In addition to the expected vogueing and floor show competitions between men wearing women's clothes, there's a different kind of drag you might be unaware of. The balls included competitive categories for men dressed in military uniforms, and men dressed as businessmen, because discrimination made those 'looks' impossible dreams as well, achieved only at the balls.

Most of these kids and young adults lived in shared houses, becoming family to each other. "A house is a gay street gang," one of the house mothers explains. "Now, where street gangs get their reward from street-fighting, a gay house street-fights at a ball, and you street-fight at a ball by walking in the categories."

This is what people adrift do in the big city: they find others who are adrift, and anchor each other. "This is a new meaning of 'family''," says someone in the film, and you don't have to be black, male, or gay to understand it.

The mainstream popularity of drag began shortly after these secret balls, in part because of the warm critical reception for this film. So here's a movie that changed the world, and amazingly, it was made by Jennie Livingston, a white woman who'd never made a movie before, and who's made very few after. She's said in interviews, she loved the balls, had a camera, so why not make a movie?

The first dozen times I saw Paris is Burning was at the old Strand Theater in San Francisco. They always booked old and weird movies in double- and triple-features, playing for one day only, but there were two movies the theater booked so frequently — several times monthly — I wondered if they actually owned the prints. One of them was Paris is Burning. They other was Ms 45, which is quite a different film.

No matter how often Paris is Burning played at the Strand, and no matter what the co-features were, it reliably drew crowds and invariably ended with applause in the theater. I saw it at the Strand co-featured with science fiction, with comedies, with two James Bond movies, and at least once with Ms 45.

Even when I'd already seen it several times, I never missed Paris is Burning. If there's a heart in your Grinchy soul, it's a movie you have to see. And by all means, bring the kids. It's not rated G, but there's never been a more family-friendly film.

Everyone on the screen has been adopted into a family, and most live with their self-chosen not-Brady Bunch, sharing a made-up surname — the Chanel family, the House of Ninja, the House of Xtravaganza. If you live in the House of Xtravaganza, that's your family, and that means everything, since most of these people had been kicked out of their biological families.

In the first few seconds of the film, before a word is spoken, a headline scrolls on an newspaper building's electronic readerboard: "White supremacist church begins national conference." Just an ordinary headline, but that's the oppressively white and straight world where these people try to exist, then and now. Gotta have the balls, and gotta have each other.

Oh, this is a joyous movie. I've seen it a dozen times, and still can't watch it without crying, but it's a happy cry.

Verdict: BIG YES.

As with most do-it-yourself movies, there's a long list of thank-yous in the closing credits. Somehow it's not surprising to see Werner Herzog's name.

♦ ♦ ♦

Scott Pilgrim vs the World (2010)

Edgar Wright seems incapable of making a bad movie: Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, The World's End, Baby Driver, The Sparks Brothers, and here's Scott Pilgrim.

It's shallow and loud, but also heartwarming and hilarious, and I will never again hear the pompous musical flourish for Universal Pictures without smiling.

Scott (Michael Cera) is a nervous young nerd in a band called Sex Bob-omb, with his friends Stephen Stills (but not that Stephen Stills) and Young Neil, along with their drummer Kim, who was long ago Scott's girlfriend. He's still depressed from being dumped by a different girlfriend, she who cannot be named, but now he's dating a high school girl, Knives, which is a scandal because he's 22.

Scott is more attracted to Ramona, though, so he really should break up with Knives, and while he's figuring out how to do that, Sex Bob-omb is in a battle of the bands. Oh, and Scott can't score Ramona until he's fought and defeated each of her seven evil exes.

From there it's a stylized stroll through early-adult angst and romance, with fantasy toppings and video game exclamation points. This is a rock'n'roll movie, with lots of loud music from two generations behind me, but I still liked most of it.

I have now seen Scott Pilgrim vs the World three times; when it first came out, again a few years later, and tonight with a Salisbury steak TV dinner. Enjoyed it each time, but it's complicated even while being thimble-deep, and it's exhausting, and moves faster than I can keep up, all with laughs.

Also, push-back welcome, but Scott Pilgrim is kind of an ass.

Hell of an all-star cast, most of whom weren't (or were barely) stars when the movie was made — Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson, Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, Brandon Routh, and Jason Schwartzman.

Beautiful comic-bookesque cinematography by Bill Pope. Written and directed by Wright, based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, which I've never read but ought to but, oh well.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Symptoms (1974)

Helen, recovering from a breakdown, lives in a garish rural mansion, and invites her girlfriend Annie to stay with her there. The groundskeeper is an odd fellow, but Helen and Anne are weird as well.

Symptoms is probably not for you if you need slam-bang action or quick-order frights. It's very atmospheric, generally gloomy instead of scary, and plays like a mystery instead of a horror, but it does have some jolts toward the end. Best savored when you're in the right mood for something a bit unusual.

It's from noted Spanish movie-maker José Ramón Larraz, the first of his that I've seen, but it's in English.

Stars Angela Pleasence, daughter of Donald, who's similar to her dad in screen presence and style.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

A clearly deranged woman thinks her child-molesting father was the greatest dad in the world. He was lost at sea, she says, but others say there's a darker version of events she's not willing to admit. She has some kind of strong sexual kink that's tending toward violence, and right now — twenty minutes into the film — she's using a razor blade to cut up the man she's tied to her bed.

I'm not sure what's going on here, but I've decided to let it go on without me.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Coming soon:
• 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
• Death to Smoochy (2002)
• Ernest Borgnine On the Bus (1997)
• Foxfur (2012)
• Personal Services (1986)
• Rancho Deluxe (1975)
• Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)
12/14/2022

There are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of making them — that if you only watch whatever's on Netflix or playing at the twentyplex, you're missing out.

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Top illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim. Real butter, not that fake crap, on the popcorn. I try to make these reviews spoiler-free, but sometimes screw up, sorry. Piracy is not a victimless crime. Click any image to enlarge. [Comments & conversations invited.](mailto:[email protected]?subject=Comments for Mostly Words)