The Planet of Junior Brown (1997)
Director: Clement Virgo
Based on the book: Junior’s Groove by Virginia Hamilton
Starring: Martin Villafana, Rainbow Sun Francks, Sarah Polley, Lynn Whitfield, Margot Kidder, Clark Johnson
Number 9 in Bridey’s Top Fifty

BUD: Hard to believe this is a Canadian movie.

BRIDEY: This is not a Canadian movie.
BUD: See?

BRIDEY: Who are those folks keeps pulling up and talking to them homeless kids?

BUD: Army recruiters. Look at them kids all holed up in that old church. I must say it looks cosy. Cosy, like having afternoon tea and listening to Chopin whilst the lobster fishermen is rioting outside your dooryard…

BRIDEY: If we kicked Bud Junior out do you spose he’d go down and live to the church?
BUD: Father O’Shamelessly wouldn’t know whether t’ kick his arse or welcome him back to the flock.

BRIDEY: First’d come the welcoming, then the arse-kicking.

BUD: I like this kid. His ma’s a little cracked though if you ask me.

BRIDEY: She’s doing the best she can. She’s not in the best situation.

BUD: This movie puts me in mind of”?nothing! I’ve never seen the likes of it.

BRIDEY: It’s all about somebody else coming along and pulling your brake cord, ain’t it? Junior Brown had his brake pulled for playing piano. He had his brake pulled for drawing pictures of bare nekkids. They pull his brakes for wanting to learn instead of having to go to school.

BUD: I was sick to the heart for having to go to school.

BRIDEY: I suppose having to keep going back with the other kids getting smaller than what you was every year…

BUD: That was the easy part.

BRIDEY: Look! Now he’s having his brake pulled for wanting to have a good meal onct in a while.

BUD: Now that I can see. Look at the boy”?he’s big as a planet! Let him live off the fat of the land!

BRIDEY: Maybe it’s his glands. Either way he don’t deserve to starve. And neither do I. Here, let me have some of them french fries.

BUD: What’s this in your top fifty?

BRIDEY: Number nine. Right in between Smoke Signals and Fiddler on the Roof.

BUD: Do I see a pattern here?

BRIDEY: The lost, the fatherless, the disenfranchised”?

BUD: Speakin’ of these ol’ french fries, how’s about handing ’em back?

Bud and Bridey only watch old movies. If you’re looking for reviews of more recent films, let the Voice editor know, or inquire about writing for The Voice.

By Wanda Waterman St. Louis, with Steven St. Louis.

Scarface (1983)
Director: Brian De Palma
Update of 1932 movie “Scarface, the Shame of the Nation”
Screenplay: by Oliver Stone
Actors: Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia, Miriam Colon, F. Murray Abraham, Paul Shenar, Harris Yulin

BUD: Those folks looks and dresses just like them down to the legion.

BRIDEY: For some of us the eighties never die.

BRIDEY: Why do you suppose Castro dumped all those jailbirds on the shores of the U.S.?

BUD: Out of the kindness of his heart. ‘Cause he loved them so.

BRIDEY: The crooks or the Yanks?

BUD: Both.

BRIDEY: T’isn’t the first time the dregs of a foreign land have been dumped on America’s green shores. England did it regular as death and taxes.

BUD: It’s what made America great.

BRIDEY: Tell that to Michael Moore.

BUD: We should have killed you people when we had the chance.

BRIDEY: Ah, hindsight. Well,you’re stuck with us now.

BUD: Tony Montana entered the room with a challenging air, like a farmer with pig manure on his boots and a sawed off shotgun in his pocket who silently dares the folks at the bank to tell him he smells…

BRIDEY: See the way he smiles at his sister? Something funny about that, ain’t there?
BUD: Remember that old priest? The one that used to say, “Oh how I love the smell of incest in church”?

BRIDEY: That’s not the woman for you, Tony! Ain’t a pick on her! You could slide her under a door! If she bends over she’ll snap like a twig!
BUD: Yeah. Now your sister”?there’s a woman!

BRIDEY: This puts me in mind of ‘Pulp Fiction'”?Pfeiffer’s hairstyle, her rich drug dealer husband, the crack she keeps on snuffing up her nose. I wonder how many times Tarantino saw this film?

BUD: Pacino does a pretty good Hispanic accent.

BRIDEY: You think so ’cause you never get to listen to any Hispanics.

BRIDEY: Not much.

BUD: French, Mi’kmaq, Germans, Arabs, Greeks, but relatively few Hispanics here in the province. Remember that Mexican exchange student in high school? It was like the Martians had landed.

BRIDEY: Is Tony Montana a bad guy? Or is he a good guy driven to desperation by poverty and the baubles held out by consumer America? Or is he filled with a sense of emptiness he desperately seeks to fill? As the utilitarian philosophers say, everyone seeks happiness as their highest goal, we just differ in what constitutes happiness and in where we seek it. Too many of us seek happiness in ways that destroy us. This is the essence of the human tragedy.

BUD: Did you read that on the back of the video box?

BRIDEY: No. Sometimes this late at night I start to make a little sense.

BUD: A little. What’s this on your list?

BRIDEY: It’s on standby. I’ll need to see it again.

Bud and Bridey only watch old movies. If you’re looking for reviews of more recent films, let the Voice editor know, or inquire about writing for The Voice.

By Wanda Waterman St. Louis, with Steven St. Louis.

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Director: James Foley
Adaptation: David Mamet
Original play: David Mamet
Actors: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, Johnathan Pryce, Bruce Altman, Jude Ciccolella.

BRIDEY: Always did love this picture. Love it the more each time I see it. Wow. That jazz is so jazzlike as to be absolutely jazzy.

BUD: I like the shadows. The reds, the blues… They’re deep-deep like when you’re in high school and you realise you’re smarter than the teacher and you tell him so and he laughs in your face and then flunks you.

AL PACINO: They say it was so hot downtown this afternoon that grown men on the street corner were going up to cops and begging them to shoot them.

BUD: Only time I’d ask a cop to shoot me is if your mother said she was moving in.

BRIDEY: Speak to me, Al!

BUD: He’s a shrimp!

BRIDEY: Ah, but a man like that makes a woman feel like a goddess!

BUD: Right. A goddess. Bigger than life, you’re meaning. You don’t need no help in that department.

ALEC BALDWIN: Decision! Have you made your decision for Christ?!

BRIDEY: I used that line once to clear the house when Bud Jr. was having a party.

BUD: Look at ’em sitting around on their fat lardy asses! That guy makes sense. They should be out selling real estate. They haven’t none of them made a sale in months!

BRIDEY: Only because management doesn’t give them good leads! It’s the same all over. Just like to the fish plant-the boss wants you to fly to the moon and gives you a rubber raft to get there in.

BUD: This looks a lot like Tin Men .

BRIDEY: Yeah. Like, they’re forced to be shysters just to survive.

AL PACINO: You think you’re queer? Let me tell you something-we’re all queer. You think you’re a thief? So what!…Does hell exist on earth? Yes! I won’t live in it. That’s me.

BRIDEY: See how he gets inside this guy’s mind? Gets all tender and sensitive? Wins his trust?

BUD: Sells him something he doesn’t want?

BRIDEY: Makes you want to stop and think next time someone engages you in a heartfelt and meaningful conversation.

BUD: Makes you want to keep your hand on your wallet.

BRIDEY: Mamet’s a genius. Remember American Buffalo?

BUD: Yeah. But this is more like Tin Men.

BRIDEY: Yeah. Because of the salesman thing. It also puts me in mind of Clerks, and Friday because most of the scenes are in the same place. And The Big Kahuna and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf because the tension keeps rising and has nowhere to go. Did you like it?

BUD: I’d have to see it again. Is it in your Top Fifty?

BRIDEY: It’s there with bells on. It’s currently number twenty, in between American Buffalo and A Clockwork Orange .

Bud and Bridey only watch old movies. If you’re looking for reviews of more recent films, check out Laura Seymour’s Flicks and Folios Film Review

By Wanda Waterman St. Louis, with Steven St. Louis.

The Name of the Rose (1986)
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Based on book by: Umberto Eco
Actors: Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham, Christian Slater, Elya Baskin, Feodor Chaliapin Jr.,William Hickey, Michael Lonsdale, Ron Perlman.
Narrator: Dwight Weist

BRIDEY: Don’t it transport you, Bud? The old monastery, the monks, the robes, the singing…

BUD: The steam coming out of their mouths… Why was everything so gloomy back then?

BRIDEY: It wasn’t really gloomy. Modern folks just think of it as gloomy. Like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A medieval pall. Like we’re supposed to believe that all year round the grass was all dried up and yellow, with a dusting of snow onto it, and the skies always grey and dreary, like the sun didn’t want to come out, not never. I love the clothes the monks wore. Simple and elegant. Warm, too, no doubt, in spite of the itch.

BUD: When we’re rich I’ll buy you a whole wardrobe full of outfits like that. You can wear them every day if you want. Just don’t be lovin’ me up.

BRIDEY: Oh, no! They’ve entered the verboten library–they’re dead!

BUD: That’s where the monks store their hooter mags. Look! What’d I tell you?

BRIDEY: That’s no skin mag; it’s a book on anatomy.

BUD: If the middle ages had porn movies, what would the music be like?

BRIDEY: Hey nonny nonny boom chakalaka…

BUD: That hunchback looks like Hellboy.

HUNCHBACK: Me no know NAWthing!

BRIDEY: Look at those pompous idiots in their silly hats. Condemning the Franciscans for wanting the church to abandon worldly wealth. Now there’s an idea whose time has come–maybe do what Jesus told youse.

BUD: Those guys are all dressed up like Q on Startrek.

MONK: …he is guilty of having confused the love of poverty with the blind destruction of wealth and property. He is innocent of the crimes that have bathed your abbey in blood.

BUD: Has Pope John really been alive since then?

BRIDEY: He looks it.

BUD: …Isn’t that always the way? As soon as you want to do evil, someone’s always watching.

BRIDEY: The first book of Aristotle’s Poetics–I think I have that.

BUD: What?! It must be worth a fortune!

BRIDEY: No, fool, not the one. A paperback I bought to Frenchy’s.

BUD: …So the monks had their own soldiers?

BRIDEY: Yup. They were very wealthy. Just like the aristocrats.

BUD: The aristocats were just cats who sang in a band.

BRIDEY: No, they were the kings and queens and prices and dukes and barons and counts…and their retainers. How can a big stone thing like that burn? What’s in it that’s flammable?

BUD: Books.

BRIDEY: Ah, yes. Look, there she is. Do you suppose he’ll leave his beloved master and go chasing after her skirt?
NARRATOR: For: I’d learned from my master much that was wise and good and true. When at last we parted company he presented me with his eyeglasses. “You are still young,” he said, “‘though someday they may serve you well.” And in fact I’m wearing them now on my nose as I write these lines.

BUD: Top fifty?

BRIDEY: No.

BUD: Come on.

BRIDEY: It’s a good movie. I enjoyed watching it. Very…evocative. And accurate, far as I know, about the middle ages. I was really impressed at first–thought it was going to enlighten me in some way. But in the end it didn’t speak to my soul. There was nothing in it that I could see myself in or that challenged my brain. What about you?

BUD: Oh, it was good. Did Enya write this music?

BRIDEY: Sounds like it. She must be pretty old herself, having written all the music for the middles ages and the Celtic hoards.

BUD: She’s a hotty.

BRIDEY: An ageless beauty queen. Like me, eh Bud?

BUD: Like you, Bridey.

Bud and Bridey only watch old movies. If you’re looking for reviews of more recent films, check out Laura Seymour’s Flicks and Folios Film Review

By Wanda Waterman St. Louis, with Steven St. Louis.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Director: Robert Wise
Script: Edmund H. North
Based on book by: Harry Bates
Actors: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, Billy Gray, Frances Bavier, Lock Martin

BUD: Nice music.

BRIDEY: Wonderful music.

BUD: Look at the size of that satellite dish.

BRIDEY: I saw one like that in Whale Cove. A guard came out of a little trailer and told me to get away from it. I asked him what it was for and he said the Americans were scanning for bogeys.

BUD: Maybe it’s the same one.

BRIDEY: Klaatu–wasn’t that the name of a seventies Canadian progressive rock band rumoured to actually be the Beatles?

BUD: Yeah, Check out the robot.

BRIDEY: I saw him and that flying saucer on the cover of a Ringo Starr album. …Ah, yes, once more we are privy to the high ideals of human philosophy contrasted with the lowdown arseholery of human deeds… Lincoln! A wise man! In a pig’s eye! Wasn’t it Lincoln who wanted to ship all the slaves back to Africa? … Klaatu keeps yammering about telling the whole human race, or at least the smartest ones. I guess that means academics. I don’t know if I’d trust the future of the earth to my existentialist philosophy professor from university. He moved into the Life Sciences building after his house caved in. We’d see him roaming the halls at night all boogley-eyed when we pulled all-nighters at the study carrels. We called him Mouldy. Hey! That’s Aunt Bea from Mayberry!

BUD: Yup. And guess who else is sitting at that table?

BRIDEY: I don’t recognise–

BUD: It’s Captain Janeway.

BRIDEY: Impossible. But that is her voice. That would put her in her sixties or seventies when she did Voyager.

BUD: They girdered up her face lifts with duct tape.

BRIDEY: I just love black and white films. Check out those gleaming whites, those deep, enigmatic blacks, the light sparkling in the falling rain —

TOM: I don’t care about the rest of the world. You’ll see; you’ll feel different when you see my picture in the paper. You’re gonna marry a big hero

BRIDEY: Ain’t that just like a man. As if there’s gonna be papers! Don’t marry him, Captain Janeway–he’s foolish!

BUD: Well, there, they’re aiming to shoot the messenger. Earth is done for now.

BRIDEY: Bud, I want you to go to George Bush and say these words: “Klaatu barada nikto!” You must say these words to George so that he does not destroy the world.

BUD: I think “Klaatu barada nikto” means “Me so horny.”

BRIDEY: The robot must think so — look, he’s hauling her away in his arms.

HELEN: He has the power of life and death?

KLAATU: No. That power is reserved by the Almighty Spirit. This technique, in some cases, can restore life for a limited period.

BRIDEY: I’m sensing a messianic undertone.

KLAATU: …and the threat of aggression by any group can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all or no one is secure. Now this does not mean giving up any freedom except the freedom to act irresponsibly.

BRIDEY: I take it back. This speech is starting to sound like an infomercial for global totalitarianism. Our ancestors, my big cushy arse. Bud, you ain’t said much.

BUD: Pretty typical sci-fi message: buddy warns us, we don’t listen.

BRIDEY: What does Maltin say?

BUD: Four stars. Great acting. “Timely message.”

BRIDEY: He’s right for once.

BUD: So what’s this in your top fifty?

BRIDEY: It’s beautiful, it’s delightful, it’s well-crafted, and it’s instructive. But it don’t speak to my soul, so it don’t make the top fifty. I think I’ll make it number four on my sci-fi list.

Bud and Bridey only watch old movies. If you’re looking for reviews of more recent films, check out Laura Seymour’s Flicks and Folios Film Review

By Wanda Waterman St. Louis, with Steven St. Louis.