Films
Director
Homegrown (1998)
Five million dollars worth of California’s sweetest marijuana is up for grabs when a mysterious assailant kills the more or less rightful owner (John Lithgow), a rich guy with a mansion up in the lush hills north of San Francisco. Now, his three naïve hired hands (Oscar-winner, Billy Bob Thorton, Hank Azaria and Ryan Phillippe) who witnessed the murder are drawn into a dangerous world of double-dealing and death threats as they decide to try to harvest and sell the yield. Part “Treasure of Sierra Madre,” part Marx Brothers, this paranoid comedy finally becomes something about growing up.
Available at: iTunes | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Blockbuster | Netflix
Losing Isaiah (1995)
Jessica Lange and Halle Berry give performances of uncommon poignancy and depth in this film that’s “as powerful, provocative and moving a drama as you’re likely to see this year” (Paul Wunder, WBAI Radio). Lange, following up her Oscar-winning Blue Sky with another stunning characterization, plays an adoptive mother who gives an abandoned child a new chance at life. Berry, in a remarkable portrayal heralded as her dramatic breakthrough, is the birth mother who cleans up her life and sets out to reclaim the child. Oscar-nominee Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction) portrays her firebrand attorney, while Oscar-nomineee David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck) plays Lange’s compromised husband.
Available at: iTunes | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Blockbuster | Netflix
A Dangerous Woman (1993)
Three time Oscar-nominee, Debra Winger, plays Martha (nominated for a Golden Globe in this role) as a quiet, lonely woman who has adjusted to a life without a man as she toils away at her small job in a small town, living in the guest cottage of relative Frances (Barbara Hershey). Frances is a single woman who takes up with a variety of men as a cover for her loneliness and insecurity. When Anita (Laurie Metcalf) barrels her car into Frances’ porch (thinking, correctly, that her husband is inside), alcoholic handyman Mackey (Gabriel Byrne) appears on the scene to clean up the mess. Instead he becomes involved with both Frances and Martha. Into this witch’s brew comes Getso (Oscar-nominee, David Strathairn), a petty crook who works with Martha. The disturbing results include unwanted pregnancy, murder, and some unsparing violence.
Available at: Netflix
Waterland (1992)
Based on Graham Swift’s acclaimed classic novel, “Waterland,” the film follows Tom Crick (Oscar-winner, Jeremy Irons) a fading history teacher whose students don’t find his lessons on the French Revolution particularly worthwhile. But as Tom’s personal world implodes with a revolution of it’s own, he begins telling stories to his students (including a young – later Oscar nominated – Ethan Hawke) about the family skeletons he’s been trying, hopelessly, to forget. As Tom continues to talk, he goes further and further back in time, narrating a personal and social history that entangles his students, himself and his wife (played by his real-life wife, the acclaimed Irish actress, Sinead Cusack). The film never strays far from jealously, madness, incest and murder.
Available at: iTunes | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Blockbuster | Netflix
Paris Trout (1991)
Oscar-nominee, Dennis Hopper, is Paris Trout, an unrepentant racist in 1949 Georgia. This is a performance Dennis has described as one of the finest of his life playing a greedy and paranoid shopkeeper who murders the sister of a black man who refuses to repay Trout’s IOU. When Trout is arrested for the crime, he is stunned and enraged, a man of the old south. Lawyer Harry Seagraves (Ed Harris, 4 time Oscar nominee) arrives to calm the waters in court, but Seagraves is soon caught in crimes of his own, a dangerous and doomed affair with Trout’s wife, played by Barbara Hershey (Oscar nominee). All’s well that end’s well – but in this film it doesn’t.
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A Killing in a Small Town (1990)
This film, hauntingly shot be cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will be Blood, Good Night and Good Luck, also Waterland and Paris Trout), delves deep beneath the serene and well organized surface of Texas housewife and Sunday School teacher, Candy Morrison (Barbara Hershey, in a multi-award winning performance). Hoping to escape from the boredom of her small-town life, Candy engages in a careful affair with a fellow churchgoer, but when his wife Peggy learns of the relationship, she attacks Candy with an axe; after a struggle, it is Candy who kills Peggy, hitting her 41 times with the axe. This True Story has moments of intense brutality, but what is explored is far more than the sensationalist headlines that followed the real-life story, far more than your standard view of the pundits when this kind of violence flares in our good communities. It is a human story, entangled with many of the questions that need to be asked of us all, even as it is only one of us who succumbs to this kind of chaos.
Available at: Amazon | Blockbuster | Netflix
Certain Fury
Tatum O’Neil and Irene Cara (two Oscar winners) star in this “action-packed”, exploitation pic, that Quentin Tarantino, has noted as one of his inspirations for the Kill Bill series. Scarlet (Tatum), a small-time hood, and Tracy (Cara), a spoiled rich girl, must rely on each other when trigger-happy cops mistake them for cop-killing prostitutes. Soon they’re on the run (ala The Defiant Ones, starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis) but, frankly, this is no high-minded flick about black-white relations; it’s a sex, and violence romp with hip camera angles of the time and, while it was not originally intended to move into the world of camp, it might be hoped that by now it has reached something close to that status. (The film also features Oscar nominee, Peter Fonda)
Available at: Amazon
Actor
Crashing
Having found fame and fortune with his debut novel, Richard McMurray (Campbell Scott) is trapped in Malibu, stuck in a bad marriage and under contract to complete a novel he hates. When his wife locks him out, he’s suddenly free of both her and the book.
After speaking to a writing class taught by his ex-girlfriend Diane (Alex Kingston), Richard finds himself crashing on the couch of a couple of students, Jacqueline (Lizzy Caplan) and Kristin (Izabella Miko). Inspired by seeing these ambitious young women’s lives in such close quarters, he starts secretly writing about them. They, in turn, write their own short stories, which seem to be taunts directed at him. An elaborate game of cat and mouse ensues — who exactly is pursuing whom?
