Someone to Watch Over Me

Someone to Watch Over Me presents the none-too-novel situation of a cop being asked to guard a high-society woman who is a witness to a murder. Proximity being the matchmaker that it is, the cop and the society dame fall in love.

The world “witness” is the tip-off here; this movie is embarrassingly close to the cross-cultural romance of Witness, although there’s no little kid here and the Manhattan high life takes the place of Amishness. Someone taps into the same dynamic of two very different people feeling a very human pull when they’re thrown together.

And these two people are different, all right. The cop (Tom Berenger) is a plain-talking flatfoot who’s just made detective. He lives in Queens with his wife and son in a small house. Meat and potatoes. Salt of the earth.

Then he gets his first whiff of champagne. A wealthy, beautiful upper-crust lady (Mimi Rogers) witnesses a gangland murder in a dance club. She identifies the killer, but he’s the sort of bad dude who could have her rubbed out at any moment; so she gets a 24-hour guard put on her ritzy apartment. Our man Berenger draws night duty.

During the early stages of their mutual attraction, there are some tender moments. When she wants to go to a museum opening, she takes him along as escort. A delicate, mysterious bond is made between them when she insists on buying him a more expensive tie for the occasion.

Pretty soon Berenger is starting to slip words such as “aperitif” and “cocktail” into his vocabulary. In the film’s best scenes, there’s some nice feeling for the early stages of infatuation, and the romance of New York streets at night.

The movie becomes all too standard as it heads toward its predictably violent conclusion, in which a pat solution is simultaneously found for both the criminal and the romantic aspects of the plot.

With every movie he makes, the director, Ridley Scott, becomes less and less interesting. He has directed Alien, Blade Runner, and the giggly Legend. His visual busyness seemed appropriate for larger-than-life projects; here, all the flashing lights and smoky close-ups simply serve to show how little originality is present.

Scott has cast the film well, however. Berenger, the Ahab-like sergeant in Platoon, uses his low brow to connote the cop’s simplicity, though his New Yawk accent sometimes just sounds like an actor doing a New Yawk accent.

The real find is Mimi Rogers, for whom this is a breakthrough role of sorts. She’s done television and recently appeared in Street Smart, but nothing that suggested the depth of this characterization. She’s cool, careful, and lovely, and the best thing about Scott’s direction of her is that he puts her in a lot of luminous close-ups. This makes us understand Berenger’s attraction to her, in case we needed any help.

First published in The Herald, October 1987

I guess I was so impressed with Mimi Rogers that I forgot to mention Lorraine Bracco, who plays Berenger’s wife – her first really significant film role. The movie came out not long after Rogers married Tom Cruise, but I was too lofty to mention such a thing.

Blade Runner

I don’t think I’ll ever quite get over my sense of disappointment upon walking out of the first screening of Blade Runner at the Cinerama theater in 1982. Expectations were high, of course, so maybe disappointment was understandable.

But a second viewing confirmed my feeling, and even a decade’s worth of growing cult appreciation hasn’t changed my mind. Among other things, I thought the movie was a comedown from a rather brilliant science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

To be fair, the Blade Runner released in 1982 was a compromised film. Over the objections of director Ridley Scott and star Harrison Ford, voiceover narration was added to the movie, as well as an absurd happy ending. Those were two of the worst elements of the film. In fact, Ford spoke the narration so poorly that I always wondered whether he was deliberately tanking it.

Now the film has been recut by Scott, who has subsequently made Thelma & Louise and Black Rain and the upcoming 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Scott persuaded Warner Bros. to let him yank the narration and lop off the happy ending, as well as perform some minor tinkering. (I believe there’s a brief dream shot of a white unicorn that’s been reinstated.)

It’s a better movie. The cutting of the stupid narration makes the film seem denser and more disorienting, which was probably why the studio wanted it inserted. And the nicely ambiguous ending is a huge improvement over the tacked-on finish of the 1982 release.

Scott shows a certain grand disdain for ordinary storytelling in Blade Runner. In simplest terms, the movie is about a hired gun (Ford) who goes out to exterminate some replicants—that is, humanoid robots—who are running loose. The replicants are trying to get to the head (Joe Turkel) of the megacompany that built them, to discover how they can extend their intentionally short life spans.

The replicants are beautifully played by Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah, Joanna Cassidy, Brion James, and nonrenegade Sean Young. The movie teases around some basic ideas about what it is to be human, especially in Hauer’s climactic speech about the false “memories” he’s been programmed with, and how they are doomed to inevitably vanish—”like tears in the rain.”

Even in this fine new version, Blade Runner still doesn’t strike me as a masterpiece. There’s much to admire about the film’s eye-popping production design; its vision of Los Angeles circa 2019 has never been topped. And Scott’s druggy, slowed-down pacing is fascinating.

But the profound ideas that Scott is clearly searching for remain mostly untouched. Because the film aims high, it is glaringly obvious when it fails to reach. But what an intoxicating attempt.

First published in the Herald, September 18, 1992

I didn’t review Blade Runner the first time around, so it seems legit to reprint this ’92 reappraisal, even if this isn’t much as a piece of writing. See, I really don’t dislike the movie!

Legend

Unicorn, Cruise, Sara

Tom Cruise was the hottest thing in movies in the fall of ’83, on the heels of Risky Business and All the Right Moves. In that position, he could pick and choose the projects he wanted to pursue.

He chose to work with Ridley Scott, the director of such visually elaborate works as Alien, Blade Runner, and the Pepsi commercial with Don Johnson and Glenn Frey.

Well, by my watch it’s now April 1986, and Cruise’s follow-up film finally has arrived. Legend has been finished since at least summer of last year, when its release was originally set, but studio executives must have been perplexed about how to sell it.

You can hardly blame them—it’s not your average teen flick. A prologue coyly informs us that the film takes place when there was no such thing as time. It’s a magical world of fairies and sprites, of people living in the forest among the elves and the animals.

Cruise plays Jack, a hermit nature boy. He loves Lily (Mia Sara), an equally innocent country lass. The sun streams through the trees; all men are brothers; in short, your basic peace is reigning throughout the land.

Then Jack goofs by showing Lily the sacred unicorns who seem to be the source of all this goodness. This is forbidden by the laws of the elves. Worse, they’ve led the henchmen of darkness to the unicorns. These nasty goblins steal one of the unicorn’s horns, thereby plunging the landscape into a freezing world of eternal night.

It’s up to Jack and his elf friends to invade the underworld and rescue Lily, who has fallen into evil clutches, and retrieve the horn. This prompts a showdown with Darkness (Tim Curry), a huge, red, bullish character with big black horns and a nasty chuckle.

You can see that, whereas the art direction is busy and imaginative, the story is as uncluttered as can be. That’s intentional, I assume; Scott and screenwriter William Hjortsberg seem to want to tap into the traditional mythic elements, with the resourceful hero, the fair maiden, the unmitigated evil, and the talismanic unicorn horn.

They fulfill all those elements; but there’s some question, I think, as to whether that makes a good movie. At barely 90 minutes, there’s not much room for anything but story, and I missed knowing more about these characters and their connections with each other.

There’s also a lot of anachronistic dialogue—elves say, “Adios, amigo,” and a goblin tells Darkness, “Hey, can’t you take a little joke?” Technically, since the film claims to be timeless, I guess it’s okay, but it still smells like cheap laughs.

Cruise gropes for his character. Most of the other actors are dominated by Rob Bottin’s amazing makeup (a lot of viewers may watch the film and then wonder where Tim Curry was—that’s how overwhelming his costume is).

As a director, Ridley Scott remains a puzzle. He’s as good at conjuring vivid visual textures as anyone, but his storytelling ability, even with the basic legend of Legend, is variable. We may be better able to judge from his next film, which, if he hurries, could be out before the 1990s.

First published in the Herald, April 23, 1986

There’s another version, which proponents suggest is a better movie. Maybe that’s worth a look, although when push comes to shove, it’s still about unicorns. By the way, “talismanic unicorn horn” is my lost book-length poem from the Beat era, if I’m not mistaken.