Month: May 2022

When one of the customers at the dry cleaning business he works for leaves a bag of cocaine in a pocket, it drags Wood Harris into the Harlem drug world where he must keep a close eye on his enemies and friends. Based on the true story of a trio of 1980s Harlem drug dealers, the friendship between Harris, Mekhi Pfifer, and Cam’ron is central to the story and carried off well. While there are period details tossed about, the city is too clean and the style of the leads isn’t changed enough which unfortunately loses the sense of place for the tale.  

When widowed Jane Fonda discovers that her friend and co-worker Robert DeNiro is illiterate, she offers to help him with his disability. The two leads have just enough chemistry and talent that the central romance carries off decently. Unfortunately there is such simplicity in the story-telling to render it distracting. DeNiro is obviously functionally illiterate as he cares for his elderly father and somehow got his current job, but in the film, there is no indication that he has figured out how to get around basic reading-adjacent skills such as navigating a city or choosing from a set of pill bottles. Secondarily, when Fonda’s teenage daughter Martha Plimpton gets pregnant, there is no discussion about her options instead Fonda immediately berates her and jumps to the ‘I’m not going to take care of it’ trope.

The third Paul Fejos film featured on the DVD for Lonesome, this was the weakest of the group. A fairly cliched story for the time, a song and dance couple’s future act is threatened when the female partner gets mixed up with a bootlegger. The film is fairly noteworthy for Fejos’s design for a special camera crane allowing for better coverage and more fluidity in shots, which does at least compliment its sometimes grandiose sets.

In 1950s Los Angeles, Nick Nolte and his crew of ruthless LAPD detectives are called in to investigate the suspicious death of prostitute Jennifer Connolly. Adding complications to the investigation are the prostitute’s previous involvements with Nolte and officials working at the Nevada Test Site. A fairly decent modern noir, it has an absolutely stacked cast with the likes of John Malkovich, Louise Fletcher, and Bruce Dern. I watched this because its title always made me do a double take with its similarity to Mulholland Drive, but in the end, I enjoyed what was offered here and would have liked to see more cases involving the amoral detectives.