Born Losers

Movies to See Right Now

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Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in GREEN BOOK

Roma on Netflix and Green Book in theaters are still my top picks.   And here’s my remembrance of actress Verna Bloom, with a recommendation for her The Hired Hand.

OUT NOW

  • Roma is an exquisite portrait of two enduring women and the masterpiece of Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien). Will win multiple Oscars. It is streaming now Netflix.
  • Green Book: Tony Lip is a marvelous character, and Viggo Mortensen’s performance is one of the great pleasures of this year in the movies.
  • Shoplifters won the Palm d’Or at Cannes. This is a witty, and finally heartbreaking, look at a family that lives on the margins – and then is revealed to be not what it seems.
  • Stan & Ollie: Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy deliver remarkable portraits of a partnership facing the inevitability of showbiz decline.
  • Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind and its companion documentaries, all available to stream on Netflix.
  • The masterful documentary Monrovia, Indiana is a fascinating movie about a boring subject.
  • Pawel Pawlikowski’s sweeping romantic tragedy Cold War is not as compelling as his masterpiece Ida.
  • The Favourite: Great performances by three great actresses, sex and political intrigue are not enough; this critically praised film didn’t work for me.
  • Skip First Man – a boring movie about a fascinating subject.

ON VIDEO

Here’s a really fun movie. Land Ho! features a vibrant and irascible geezer who conscripts an old friend into a rowdy road trip to – of all random places – Iceland. Land Ho! is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, and Google Play.

ON TV

On January 19, Turner Classic Movies will show The Last Hurrah (1958): The master director John Ford is famous for westerns, but this portrait of an embattled incumbent is a classic of political cinema. Spencer Tracy plays the leader of an urban political machine. He’s got years of accomplishments and a machine in his favor, but his newspaper-owning antagonist is running an empty suit against him in a campaign that is increasingly fought on the newfangled medium of television. He’s been so successful for so long that his ward heelers have become complacent, and he’s smelling the campaign getting away from him…

And on January 23, TCM will air the 1967 biker exploitation movie Born Losers, in which Tom Laughlin originated the character of Billy Jack – all discussed in my post about TCM’s recent Billy Jack Extravaganza.

Also on January 23, TCM will cablecast a film from my Bad Movie Festival – Psych-Out, a hippie exploitation movie from 1968. Features Bruce Dern as a schizophrenic Jesus and Jack Nicholson with a ponytail glued onto his head. Hilarious.

Spencer Tracy (center) in THE LAST HURRAH

Happy 80th, Billy Jack

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Billy Jack (1971)

 

Tom Laughlin

Tom Laughlin, the groundbreaking independent film maker who created the 70s iconic character Billy Jack, turns 80 today. Laughlin originated the character in his biker exploitation movie Born Losers (1967), and then fully unleashed him in Billy Jack (1971), The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) and Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977).

Billy Jack is a Vietnam vet who embraces his own combo of New Age mysticism and Native American spiritualism and uses martial arts to kick the crap out of the bad guys who bully women,  Native Americans and teenagers.  Laughlin played a character along similar themes in his The Master Gunfighter (1975), only bearded and wielding a samurai sword.

The prickly Laughlin made and distributed his films independently, and Billy Jack and Trial were huge box office successes, among the most financially successful indies ever.  For The Trial of Billy Jack, Laughlin engineered the then-unheard-of simultaneous release on 1500 screens.  This excellent Bill Gibron article in Pop Matters describes this precursor of the Hollywood blockbuster strategy.  Billy Jack was also the first widely seen martial arts movie in America.

Despite his innovations in the movie business, Laughlin never succeeded in making a good movie.  Filled with clumsy acting and hackneyed dialogue, the films are still pompous,  self-important and humorless.

Laughlin’s signature as a screenwriter is heavy-handedness.  It’s never enough for the bad guys in the Billy Jack movies to be bad.  They also have to be racist AND mean to animals AND sexually perverted.  Billy Jack opens with the bad guys illegally raiding an Indian reservation to steal a herd of wild mustangs and herd them to a corral where they will be shot at pointblank range to bring in six cents per pound as dog food.  One of the Billy Jack villains seduces a 13-year-old, insists on forcing a willing floozie at knifepoint and, for good measure, stakes a saintly teacher to the ground for a ritual rape.  In The Trial of Billy Jack, a government henchman shoots a child – in the back – while he is cradling a bunny.

I have a Bad Movie Festival that features unintentionally bad movies that are fun to watch and mock.  The Billy Jack movies are too painful for this list.  While bad enough, they are gratingly platitudinous.

Laughlin has been married since 1954 to his Billy Jack co-writer and co-star Delores Taylor.