Cynical Cinema

The cover of the DVD “Cougar Club” certainly seems to indicate toplessness. As does the banner splashed across the jacket, “topless menus!” And it delivers! There are indeed topless girls in the menus. Possibly cougars, but likely a little too young to truly be actual cougars. So…if you click around on the menus, you will see boobs. If you watch the film all the way to the end, you will see boobs there as well, in a monatage of boobs over the closing credits. In between, during the movie itself, there are not many boobs. But a few boobs. In short, the only thing this movie has going for it is boobs, but there are not enough boobs to make this boob of a movie any less of a boob. The dialogue in the film is just about as clever as my own in the first part of this paragraph. An altogether painful experience, Cougar Club.

I know what you are thinking. If you knew it was just going to be one of those stupid teenagers-have-sex-with-people movies, why did you rent it? Good question. The main reason was the cast. I saw the DVD case and moved on. But on a second pass, I saw the name Faye Dunaway! And I took a look at it. I then saw Carrie Fisher, Joe Mantegna, and Izabella Scorupco. I thought, there is no chance all these fairly significant actors (or, in the case of Dunaway, legendary actors) would all have made a terrible error at the same time, would they? But it appears that yes, they would. And there is a big problem with a movie that’s only premise is the promise of boobs. The problem is that people will rent the movie based on their desire to see the boobs of the actresses whose names appear on the cover of the film. When neither Fisher, nor Dunaway, nor Scorupco, and not even the wrestler Chyna (who gets big billing as well) doff their tops, even though they all have gratuitous sex scenes, it clearly undermines the rest of the boobs, which belong to nameless girls and are so gratuitous as to be comical.

The basic premise of Cougar Club is that two young guys go to work for a law firm, and discover that they can easily have sex with their bosses’ wives. So the wives recruit other cougars, the young guys recruit other young guys, membership fees are charged, and a brothel of inter-generation trysts is created. This all gets wrapped up nicely in one of the worst courtroom scenes in history, and definitely the most offensive back-of-a-courtroom scene of all time. I have spent a long time enjoying cougars myself, but…I have spent way too much time dissecting a movie that really shouldn’t ever even be discussed. This ends now.

There is a bit of controversy over the shutout of American Gangster at the Oscars. It was not nominated for best picture, and both Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington were shut out of the nominations for best actor. I understand the snub of Crowe. (Frankly, he deserves it more for 3:10 to Yuma than he does for this movie.) But the only reason I can think of for snubbing Washington is that he is too tailor-made for this part. You forget that he is an actor, because you’re watching Denzel Washington. As though it were a reality show about his life. If Denzel killed people and ran a drug empire and married Miss Puerto Rico, this would be exactly what his life would look like. The one role he has played to which I could compare this one was in Training Day, and he won the Oscar for that one. And here, he is better. That really is the strength of American Gangster, the performances.

Not just Washington, but Russell Crowe is reliably terrific as the cop tracking him down, and the supporting cast is remarkably good. The RZA, of the Wu-Tang clan, appears here, and as soon as I saw him I thought “oh, no! A rapper in a major role means this movie will start to hit Seagal territory in parts”. But the RZA is good. So is Armand Assante, who I love, and Josh Brolin as a crooked cop. Cuba Gooding Jr. is in the film also, and I absolutely hate Cuba Gooding Jr. However, he has maybe five lines, total, and wasn’t around long enough to irritate me. I also really like the inclusion of Clarence Williams III as Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. Johnson was a real-life legendary gangster figure in New York, and he was the subject of the under-rated 1997 movie “Hoodlum”, where he was played by Lawrence Fishburne in one of the best roles of his career.

In American Gangster, Bumpy dies near the beginning, and his right-hand-man, chauffeur and gopher, Frank Lucas, is left a little adrift. Frank is played by Denzel Washington, and he has few choices. Now that his mentor is gone, he can either leave town and go back to his family, or work for someone else, or take matters into his own hands. Of course, he chooses the third option and rises to power as the number one dealer, importer and gangster in New York. He manages to exist on the periphery, away from the other gangsters, the corrupt cops, and the good cops. One of those good cops is Russell Crowe, who has been blackballed by his police department for being a good cop. In a few scenes very reminiscent of Serpico, he is left hanging because the other cops in the department feel that if a cop won’t take money, then he of course would turn in cops who do. But of course, it isn’t black-and-white. Washington is not all bad, Crowe is not all good, which of course happens in any great movie. And a lot of bad ones.

What really sets American Gangster apart, aside from the fantastic actors doing fantastic acting, is the style. Ridley Scott has managed to make some of the most visually appealing movies in history. (Check out his early work, like The Duellists, or Alien). Sometimes that goes off the rails and the movie suffers for the stylish makeup - think Hannibal, or Black Hawk Down. But in American Gangster, Scott seems to treat the whole movie almost like a period piece. Of all his movies, this one feels the most like The Duellists, both in it’s theme and it’s style. It moves along at a crackling pace on the backs of Washington and Crowe, and although it runs more than two and a half hours, you never have a sense of the time passing. Tremendously engaging and fantastically done.