I Shot Andy Warhol.

Review #2519: I Shot Andy Warhol.

Cast: 

Lili Taylor (Valerie Solanas), Jared Harris (Andy Warhol), Stephen Dorff (Candy Darling), Martha Plimpton (Stevie), Lothaire Bluteau (Maurice Girodias), Anna Levine (Iris), Peter Friedman (Alan Burke), Tahnee Welch (Viva), Jamie Harrold (Jackie Curtis), Donovan Leitch (Gerard Malanga), Jim Lyons (Billy Name), Michael Imperioli (Ondine), and Reg Rogers (Paul Morrissey) Directed by Mary Harron (#1984 - American Psycho)

Review: 

"I was amazed, because, apart from saying that she shot him and she was crazy, nobody had ever talked about Valerie Solanas. So I had this idea for an anti-documentary. It was never going to be conventional. My thinking was, what if you took the most obscure person in this glamorous circle, and that most obscure, most despised pariah turned out to be the most interesting person of them all? What if you did a kind of reverse hagiography, where you take this person in the shadows and put them in the center? Now, how I was going to do that, I didn’t know. I just had this burning desire to make a film about her."

I suppose this is the best way to dip the toes into the world of Andy Warhol. Once upon a time, Mary Harron was in the punk scene and into The Velvet Underground, the rock band with a distinct influence within the underground scene that mixed right in with Warhol being their manager from 1966 to 1967. In college, Harron had written a piece about Warhol and his work for a university magazine and even spent time looking upon his movies. When she became a music writer, she was fortunate enough to have a brief interview with Warhol around his studio of The Factory (he subsequently died in 1987). A couple of years later, when working in television, she did research for a Warhol documentary and happened to come across the SCUM Manifesto (self-published in 1967 before becoming commercially published in 1968 through Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press) in a store that interested her because for all the footage and interviews one knew of Warhol and the Factory, one name never really came up with Valerie Solanas. Her interest in doing a documentary happened to crisscross with Tom Kalin and Christine Vachon in doing something...as a film. Harron co-wrote the film with Daniel Minahan (with research by Diane Tucker along with having certain dialogue come from Jeremiah Newton's edited compilation The Letters and Diaries of Candy Darling) and the movie had funding from a variety of companies such as Killer Films and Goldwyn Films International. John Cale of the Underground wrote the music score for the film despite disagreements with Lou Reed. The movie made a bit of money and was enough of a hit with its screening at Sundance that the offer to do the script for American Psycho came right afterwards. The years that followed the release of the movie is fairly interesting. The movie was released by a company that soon went bankrupt and the rights were in murky limbo for a time to where it was barely available on DVD and it apparently was once only available online through a rip on YouTube. Solanas had crafted a play called Up Your Ass that she had given a copy to Warhol that was accidentally misplaced - in 1999, it was rediscovered and produced in 2000 in San Francisco by George Coates Performance Works*. Further information about Solanas came around with the 2014 biography Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol)*.

You might wonder what Solanas (a graduate of University of Maryland, College Park) has to offer in terms of a manifesto. Well, its opening declaration [with one word difference depending on the edition] states that women should "overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate [destroy] the men" (incidentally, there are a few moments in black-and-white that depict stuff from the manifesto being read). She sold copies in bookstores and on the streets of Greenwich Village for $1 (unless you were a guy, then it was $2) and even appeared in one Warhol film with I, a Man (1967). One person associated with Warhol once stated that life around the sphere of Warhol ended up making them "all captives of Andy's magnetism and his outlaw culture". Amidst all of that, Solanas might as well be an imp to these self-obsessed people that can't quite get the recognition they believe they deserve,and Taylor carries the film to fascinating levels of curiosity. It isn't a lament of a "tortured genius" or just a "craven nut" but instead something that teeters in the irony that comes in so many contradictions that can be tragic along with being fascinating. There is a burning, acerbic spirit to her that you can't exactly shoo away as an irrational being because damn it, there are plenty of irrational people to go around anyway, even if most don't go around shooting people and getting their own spin of a bio-drama.  Harris pulls in well with shades of vulnerability and elusiveness (without being a caricature to poke with) that you can't easily grab upon beyond the obvious that might as well reflect how one views Warhol and his art, for better or worse.  The real Solanas spent time in a prison ward and periods of evaluation over her mental state (mainly the paranoid schizophrenia) before she essentially faded into obscurity by the late 1970s and died in San Francisco in 1988 at just the age of 52. Regardless of how one might view Solanas and her view of men (as represented by, say, this exchange here or this one), there is something quite fascinating about what Herron has captured here about someone who lived by their contradictions. As such, this is a worthwhile debut in its capture of a misfit that doesn't judge or defend but instead lets the images and words speak for themselves in entertaining fashion that is a strange little gem.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day

*Apparently, Warhol was quoted in a book in the 1980s that he apparently glanced at the play and was more concerned with wondering if she was actually an undercover cop. By the way, that gunshot was brutal: he got shot in a way that had damage to his lungs, esophagus, liver, spleen, and stomach.

*For one thing, Solanas actually had children at a young age but had to give them away. 

*honestly, the fact that there was an anarchic group named "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker" in the 1960s shouldn't surprise me.

High Fidelity.

Review #2333: High Fidelity.

Cast

John Cusack (Rob Gordon), Iben Hjejle (Laura), Jack Black (Barry Judd), Todd Louiso (Dick), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Charlie Nicholson), Lisa Bonet (Marie DeSalle), Sara Gilbert (Anaugh Moss), Chris Bauer (Paul), Lili Taylor (Sarah Kendrew), Joan Cusack (Liz), Tim Robbins (Ian "Ray" Raymond), and Joelle Carter (Penny Hardwick) Directed by Stephen Frears.

Review: 

“I liked the idea of it being in America. It had a sort of, this sort of more optimistic way in which Americans live, seemed to me to add something to it, rather than taking it away. So it lost some of its stoicism and became slightly more romantic.”

Yes, movies from the new millennium are soon to turn 25 years old, so it seemed apt to cover a movie just as much a result of the writers as it is the director. In 1995, essayist Nick Hornby (probably best known already for his 1995 memoir Fever Pitch), had his first novel come out to the frenzied attention of British audiences who apparently found something in themselves with a setting at a London record shop and a distinct inner monologue. There were rumblings of doing a film as soon as the book came out, with plans ranging from having a draft script done by Scott Rosenberg set in Boston or having Mike Newell involved as a director. Eventually, it was sprung to have John Cusack take a crack at writing a film screenplay, one done in collaboration with D. V. DeVincentis and Steve Pink, who each had worked on Grosse Pointe Blank (as released by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution in 1997). It was through Hornby's permission that they could change the setting to Chicago. Basically, Cusack and Pink/DeVincentis would each go through the book and write what they structured from the book and eventually edit what they saw by basically approaching it as "a checklist of things we need to get done". Cusack suggested trying to approach Stephen Frears to direct. He had actually studied law at the University of Cambridge before electing to work as an assistant to Lindsay Anderson at the Royal Court Theatre (he also worked as an assistant to Karel Reisz as well) and he soon honed his skills for British television. He became a feature director with Gumshoe (1971), but he became a name with My Beautiful Launderette (1985). Hornby was apparently quite satisfied with the adaptation, mostly because a good deal of the dialogue addressing the audience is basically straight from the book. In 2020, a television adaptation of the book came out that lasted one season.

There is something strangely comforting about a comedy that doubles as a sort of male confessional. It is the kind of movie made for people who besides having a certain interest in music maybe, just maybe, need to grow up. The love affair one can have with music in all of its meaningful depths and reaches is palpable with the people we experience in the film that actually end up feeling like people we know in some way or form. Maybe we don't all make top five lists, but we sure do stew on something in the great book of lists and hang-ups. Strangely, it reminds me of Annie Hall (1977), which also handles the anatomy of a breakup through a lead that likes to address the audience (of course, one actually feels the pulse of a tolerable human being in terms the direction and in the acting with High Fidelity, so chew on that). From the jump, it is quite understandable to see Cusack at his most curious and possibly his most effective role. He corrals the movie with a certain kind of slacker (one can operate a store and still slack) charism that really does come through in a manner that we follow along with in ways that a lesser actor would've simply just made a muddled mess. I posit that while some people are self-absorbed, we call them friends anyway because there is a difference between terribly behaved people and people with terrible behavior (i.e. the type that needs to hear "shut up!" once in a while), and some movies win out with weirdos like this. We chuckle and recoil at what we see and hear of a person in all of his bewildering aspects because Cusack just happens to have the voice to carry that drumbeat of weirdness to finding something to do besides just looking back. Of course, it just so happens that there is a pretty capable cast right behind Cusack to make things work beyond just a grandstand for music. Black and Louiso are a dynamic pair of amusement because each just happen to have their own distinct type of humor that connects from the jump in terms of timing and general energy for the material that is palpable in more ways than one. Hjejle goes along with the proceedings that arise from being presented in the prism of one-sided weariness that works in parts. There are a few other little surprises to be found in small moments to see someone such as Robbins take one on the chin in one particular scene of imagined confrontation or one particular cameo to raise a chuckle. I like the overall mood of the film, one that doesn't just dally to conventional means to try and say something about weird hangups or the people you see along the way, and doesn't overstay its welcome at 113 minutes. In general, what we have is a film made by people who clearly had an interest in making a confessional for the hang-ups in all of us that has a distinct love for Chicago and enough charm to make one mix themselves into seeing it play out.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.