So coming up on Questionable Taste Theatre is a random spate of period dramas. I’m a costume whore, what can I say?

We begin Ye Olde Monthe with the 14th century mystery The Reckoning. (The link goes to the trailer, which is worth seeing.)

Nutshell: Disgraced priest Paul Bettany falls in with a group of traveling actors, led by the MOST SINEWY PERSON IN THE WORLD, Willem Dafoe. When they hit a town that’s less interested in morality plays than in convicting the local deaf woman for the murder of a young boy, the troupe ends up caught up in history’s first-ever episode of Law & Order: Swyved Victimmes Unit. Which I spoil, so, you know, spoilers.

“She couldn’t have done it! SHE COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT!”
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An unexpected casualty of Questionable Taste Theatre is going through YouTube for any relevant clips, and then getting lost in a maze of hilarious music videos. Or, worse, someone’s funky fetish video collection. (If your usename contains “padded cell” and you have a bunch of clips of women in straightjackets, please, never contact me, okay?)

SO. No video clips of today’s film, The Linguini Incident, and almost no pictures, because this movie is so rare that I am the only person who remembers it was ever made.

What this movie has: Roseanna Arquette as a failed escape artist, David Bowie as a bartender on the run from the law, Eszter Balint as a defensive-lingerie designer, and Marlee Matlin as a cashier with a pretzel hairdo and a silver lame uniform.

“The simple plan is, no one in this room is going to have sex with anyone else in this room. We’ll be platonic… like our parents.”

The Linguini Incident is technically the story of child-prodigy-turned-humungous flop Lucy “the Magnificent”, who used to be an amazing escape artist and now works as a waitress by day and nearly hangs herself regularly by night, and her quest for love, friendship, and a successful stunt. In reality it’s an awesome surrealist fable with bras.

Check out that blazer, guys. That’s enough blazer for, like, six people.

The restaurant is Dali’s, a sendup of every snotty restaurant ever, where the breadsticks are freeform and the employees are really, really badly dressed. Their newest hire is the British Monty, who’s so hot he makes the silver lame look good.

He’s also a charmer, and by “a charmer” I mean “desperate for a green card”; he proposes to Marlee Matlin (she wants $10k, HA!); he blackmails Lucy, and when Lucy dithers, he enlists the help of her friend Vivian.

Her friend Vivian? IS AWESOME. She’s a designer working on “defensive lingerie”; imagine bras with switchblades in them, for when men don’t know when to quit. Because she’s not blind, she also sets her eye on Monty, and when it becomes clear that Monty’s attentions are being lavished only on restaurant employees, Lucy sets a moratorium on the kissyface. Vivian utters the immortal line, “The simple plan is, no one in this room is going to have sex with anyone else in this room. We’ll be platonic… like our parents.”

That plan lasts about two seconds, until Lucy and Monty make out in the walk-in freezer, at which point he says breathlessly, “My God, you look beautiful. Almost…Ukrainian.”

The love triangle is pretty hilarious, since David Bowie seems totally happy to make out with anyone for the duration of the movie, and the girls like each other too much to actually get pissed about it, so there’s one or two moments of, “Well, I ALSO think he’s hot!” followed by, “Let’s go up on the roof and get wasted,” which is the best way to handle a love triangle, I’ve found.

Sex just wasn’t the same without Vivian to unlock them afterwards.

There’s a whole heist plot that involves Vivian, a hat with a veil, a huge restaurant coffer, a bra with swtichblades in it, and a DELIGHTED Marlee Matlin, who totally breaks character whenever Vivian shows up for a robbery, gleefully shoving money into the bag. The restaurant gets more and more famous, Monty gets more and more desperate for a green card, and at the end there’s a big caper, of course.

I seriously love this movie. I bought a VHS copy off eBay in, like, 1999, for something like 40 bucks. (For the young people, $40 in 1999 is like $2,000 today.) And every time it looks like it’s going to be serious/heartwarming, it goes INSANE instead. And yet, you still really hope that everything turns out okay for those crazy kids.

Some of the lines in this movie remain among my favorite movie lines of all time, either because of the context or because it’s just hilarious.

[Monty finds Lucy tied up in her apartment mid-botched-escape, being sniffed by her pet magician's rabbit.]
Monty: OH GOD!…I thought that rabbit was eating your head.

Dude, WHAT? AWESOME.

I would go on and on about Vivian (Balint really steals this movie), but we’ll just go with the last lines. Please note, the crazy kids get together, make a breakfast date for the next day, and then Lucy and Vivian ride their bikes home together. Only in a crazy film would a woman not abandon her friends the moment she had a boyfriend!

So, they’re biking away into the dawn.

Lucy: We should go to the park this weekend and watch all the children shooting squirrels with their BB guns.
Vivian: True. We don’t appreciate nature, enough.

How could you NOT LOVE THIS MOVIE? Well, maybe if you like actually-good movies you wouldn’t love this movie. But then you would be joyless and mean. How can you hate a movie that spends two hours being like, “We could just…here, you guys do something cute! Funny lines! Capers! Houdini’s wife! Bitchy restaurant owners! Iman! Kissing! Bras! WHEEE!”

N’awww, those crazy kids!

This week I celebrate my fat-kid-cakeness love of Thunderheart. It has Val Kilmer before he got crazy, Graham Greene before he couldn’t get work any more, and EIGHT POUNDS OF PWN.

Enjoy this beautifully-composed shot…right before this dude is killed-ass.

NOTE: All pictures are from this site; I saved them here to avoid hotlinking. SPOILERS if you go.

In fact, SPOILERS all around! Beware.

Nutshell: By-the-books FBI Agent Ray Levoi is 1/4 Sioux; that gets him sent to a Sioux reservation in South Dakota as a “liasion” for a murder investigation. Turns out the murdered man is a tribal activist. Ray runs into a lot of friction as people figure out he’s whiter than a Wonderbread sandwich, but despite himself he feels the investigation is fishy, the “government aides” are assholes, and the tribal residents are being fucked over. Will he find the balls to do anything about it? (Would I watch this movie if he didn’t?)

Thunderheart’s history is almost as interesting as the movie; it was filmed by Michael Apted in response to his documentary about the murder of two government officers on an Indian reservation, and what was really going on in this forgotten pocket of America. The story must have grabbed him, because he took a lot of particulars of the documentary, changed some names, stuck in some mysticism to keep things “fictional”, and made this movie, which I think is fucking awesome and no one else has ever seen. (Except .)

While there is an air of mysticism on the rez that can seem a little plot-devicey (prime suspect Jimmy is generally considered to have shape-shifting powers, which he uses to escape the police, like, 150 times), Apted’s strength lies in debunking the tropes while underscoring that cultural identity has a similar power.

Another of his strengths is that this movie is ragingly non-bullshitty.

Like – visit beautiful South Dakota!

…home of the impoverished Sioux reservation!

I wrote a whole lot of MFA thesis stuff here, but I’m going to just keep going, because I don’t think anybody here would be surprised that a movie showing government goons terrorizing the violently disenfranchised people on the rez didn’t get a whole lot of screen time.

Ray’s first contact on the rez is with Walter Crow Horse, played by my boyfriend, Graham Greene. He’s the rez sheriff, and he loves fucking with Ray. And I love him. It’s the circle of life!

Walter Crow Horse: License and registration?
Ray Levoi: Blow me.
Walter Crow Horse: Hey, this is *my* jurisdiction now. And you were going 59 in a 55 zone.
Ray Levoi: Let me see the radar.
Walter Crow Horse: I don’t need no radar, I can tell! I just listen to the wind; it said, “Fifty-nine, nail ‘im!”

Walter Crow Horse is the one who initially opens Ray’s eyes into the huge holes in the investigation, and some of the best scenes are when he says something like, “You gotta listen to the water,” Ray rails against superstitious BS, and Walter’s like, “Well, there was river water in his lungs, but he was found in the middle of the desert,” and Ray’s like, “…pwned.”

You know who else pwns Ray?

Maggie Eagle Bear. Educated, articulate, and a huge menace to the government goons, which is why half her conversations with Ray end with them diving to the ground to avoid getting shot by the FBI. (SPOILER: In the movie, Maggie Eagle Bear is murdered by the government. In the real-life incident that inspired the movie, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash fared even worse, accoridng to Wikipedia:

“The first autopsy (reports are now public information) states: “it appears she had been dead for about 10 days.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ medical practitioner, W. O. Brown, missing the bullet wound on her skull, stated that “she had died of exposure.” [4]

Subsequently, her hands were cut off and sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington, D.C. for fingerprinting. Although federal agents were present who knew Anna Mae, she was not identified, and her body was buried as a Jane Doe.”

Aren’t you shocked this movie isn’t more widely known? I certainly am!)

Jimmy Looks Twice. Tribal activist, prime suspect in the murders. The other guy’s an FBI agent who’s just pulled him out of a religious ceremony. (He’s a very thinly-veiled Leonard Peltier.)

On your right, GRANDPA SAM REACHES. Likes long walks on the rez, having visions, watching Mr. Magoo, and PWNing Ray.

(On the left, my boyfriend, who likes being totally handsome.)

Things this movie does right: Dude, almost everything. Ray, as an FBI agent, reaches his first stages of empathy not because of any “magical Native American”, but because things in the case don’t add up and, as an investigator, he starts to figure out that maybe the people menacing families with guns are not totally to be trusted. Later, as his empathy increases, his sense of belonging in the community also increases, but he has to work hard to deserve anyone’s respect; some people’s respect he never gets. I find this very cool. DESERVE that shit!

Things this movie does wrong: Towards the end, Ray does get a magical vision where it seems he’s the reincarnation of someone running at Wounded Knee. (However, case is given that it might be a dream, and Walter gets royally pissed that an “instant Indian with a fucking Rolex and a brand new pair of shoes” should have the audacity to have a vision, so, hee.) Also, the movie ends on a far more upbeat note than the actual event did, but otherwise it would have been unrelentingly bleak, and so I understand the reasons why. So maybe it’s not that the movie did it wrong, but instead that the world is a terrible place! Yay!

So, to sum up: I think this movie is awesomecakes. Thank you and goodnight!

PS. It’s beautifully shot. Look at this.

Never has Emma Thompson’s judgemental glare been so painful to me.

Yes, it’s Her Alibi. The movie with a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. FIFTEEN PERCENT.

Sure, the majority of it is a stinkfest, but there is not a day that goes by without at least one line from this movie being directly relevant to my own life.

(From a scene where a reluctant Phil goes to a book launch for his British writer-nemesis.)

Nemesis: so what are you working on these days? I love that character of yours, that Peter…Swine?
Phil: Swift.
Nemesis: Of course!…he’s so populist.

Plot: Mystery writer Phil Blackwood has writer’s block. His career is threatened until he runs across the beautiful Nina, who’s accused of murder. Because she’s hot he becomes her alibi, and as his career heats up with his fictionalized account of Nina’s mystery, his life is threatened. Repeatedly. Once he gets an arrow in the ass. This is not Oscar Wilde, what can I say.

Does it suck?: It was 1989. Of course it sucks. Like, “the house blows up and five minutes later not only is it fully rebuilt but the computer still has the novel draft on it” sucks.

AND YET: every time I watch it, I laugh. Not the arrow-in-the-ass part, or the “America is much nicer than Romania!” bullshit that pervades the movie for no good reason. The (only) funny parts of this movie are the mocking-writing bits, such as when his novel excerpts are VOed over the actual situation.

If these moments have never happened to you, then YOU SHOULD WORK HARDER.

Scene: At a lawn party, Phil’s nephew gets stuck on top of a barn. Nina nimbly climbs up a rope, swings onto the roof, walks the ridgepole to the kid, guides him to safety via some jungle-gyming, and swings back into the barn. Phil stands and watches, baffled.

From-memory (probalby not exact) excerpt of VO: “Bracing himself against the punishing Alpine winds, Swift edged along the roof towards the terrified child…the desperate screams of the assembled women rose like prayers from far below.”

Seriously, someone just loved mocking the crap out of writers. List of novel titles as seen in the opening credits:

Guns I’ve Loved (cover image: a tree on a hill)
Death of a Critic (cover image: a desk and typewriter)
Death Came Formal (cover image: woman in a red dress)
Looks Like Curtains (cover image: Sam Spade at the opera)
The Dying Position (cover image: cheerleader standing atop a football helmet)
Bullets Never Forget (cover image: zoo elephant)
Computer Virus (cover image: Atari with ASCII naked-woman)
The Dying Habit (cover image: stained-glass nun window)
One Down and Two Dying (cover image: crossword with a dagger in it)
Sayonara, Cyanide (cover image: geisha standing atop a skull)

It also contains the line, “Nah, the woods will be full of Romanian virgins swapping recipes.” Which, COME ON.

In fact, random Friday challenge: write the back-cover copy for any of those books! You know you want to.