This week on Cisco and Ebert, Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine find there's no honor among thieves in blood and wine.
Musician Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette take a wild ride down David Lynch's lost highway.
And Darth Vader plots revenge as the Empire strikes back.
Music
Julie, set 271.
What are you doing? You're not actually going into an asteroid field.
They'd be crazy to follow us, wouldn't they?
Once again, the Millennium Falcon is pursued by the evil Imperial fleet in the Empire Strikes Back,
the second installment of the restored Star Wars trilogy and one of five movies we'll be reviewing this week on Cisco and Ebert.
I'm Gene Sisco of the Chicago Tribune.
And I'm Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times.
Our first movie this week is The Empire Strikes Back, and this is the best of the three Star Wars films,
the most mysterious, the most somber, the one where the story takes a dip from cheerful space opera down into the depths of its buried mythology.
The look of the movie is richer than in the first film, maybe or probably obviously because this time they were making the sequel to the biggest box office hit of all time,
and so they didn't have to worry as much about the cost of the special effects.
Look at the famous presence of these elephant-like Imperial walkers, which are surely the most impractical weapons of war ever created.
Cable out. Let her go. Detach cable. Cable detached.
Come on.
And look here at the cloud city where Han Solo brings Princess Leia and the others for safety, he hopes.
The look of the city has been enlarged upon and enhanced for this reissue, and here Billy Dee Williams as Lando greets the rebel fighters.
How you doing, you old pirate? So good to see you.
Well, he seems very friendly.
Yes, very friendly.
Of course, that was Harrison Ford as Han Solo and Carrie Fisher as the princes.
The heart of this movie takes place on a forest planet where Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill, is taught in the ways of the Jedi by a little creature named Yoda.
You must unlearn what you have learned.
All right, I'll give it a try.
No, try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.
More so than in the first movie, Empire is dominated by the towering, chilling presence of Darth Vader.
You are beaten. It is useless to resist. Don't let yourself be destroyed as Obi-Wan did.
If Empire reveals a weakness this time around, it's in the character of Chewbacca, whose mournful howls get a little tiresome after a while.
The princess. You have to take care of her.
You hear me? Huh?
There's no doubt about it, The Empire Strikes Back is one of the great visual achievements in the history of special effects and of the cinema.
And not because of the skill of the special effects, because skill can be bought and paid for in Hollywood, but because of the imagination behind them.
You can blow things up all day long in today's Hollywood and never give it a moment's thought, but to create these worlds in this film with their amazing creatures and their awe-inspiring sights, that takes a certain genius.
And The Empire Strikes Back is rich and generous with its imagination.
Well, Roger, let's credit the director of this film, Irvin Kershner, who was an inspired choice. There was nothing, I don't think, in his career that would lead anyone to believe that he could have made an action picture.
He had made a film, I think, called Loving before that. So I don't know where Lucas came up with that.
And then, yes, it is the best of them, because it's a challenge to create the second part of the puzzle here and the guts to make it an ending that doesn't wrap up everything completely.
Wow, is that exciting. Could that be done today with the mentality out in Hollywood? I don't even know if Lucas could get it by.
The way this series is grossing at the box office, maybe somebody will be inspired to make more movies like this, and of course Lucas is going to make three more.
But you know, I spoke about Yoda. How did they do that with an artificial creature? It's not just that he moves and talks and has eyes that open and close.
It's that the face mirrors every emotion you could ask for from a human actor.
Well, I suppose it's the story situation that we understand it. It's been set up clearly enough.
And again, the eyes. Literally, the technological work done on the eyes makes Muppets and every other creature in the movies work.
Okay, next movie, and our next film is a most entertaining and revealing documentary called When We Were Kings about the famous Muhammad Ali George Foreman Championship fight in 1974 in Zaire, the so-called Rumble in the Jungle.
It's been a full generation since that fight, since Ali protested the Vietnam War, since he reached out to his people and became the most recognized face on earth.
Here is Ali at his most entertaining, selling the fight to the New York Press.
I'm experienced now, professional. Y'all's been broke, been knocked down a couple times. I'm bad. Been chopping trees. I done something new for this fight. I done roustled with an alligator.
That's right. I have roustled with an alligator. I done tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning, throw thunder in jail.
Even Ali's greatest booster, Howard Cosell, was scared for him.
Against George Foreman, who does away with his opponents one after another in less than three rounds, it's hard for me to conjure with that.
The documentary follows Ali to Africa, where he shares his excitement at seeing black men in control of themselves, as well as even an airplane.
Ain't there something flying in an airplane with all black pilots, all black crew?
This is strange to the American Negro. We never dreamed of this. And every time we watch television, they show us Tarzan and the natives and the jungles.
They never told us that the Africans were more intelligent than we are. They speak English, French and African.
Before the fight, a concert that includes James Brown. The rights to the music and other material held up this film's release for more than two decades.
Based on this film, I have to rank Muhammad Ali as one of the most influential men of this century, physically gifted with rapid fire punching, mentally gifted with a big, generous heart, full of love for his brothers and sisters.
When We Were Kings was directed by Leon Gast, and it will take some kind of picture to keep this great work from winning the best documentary feature Oscar next month.
It's like a time capsule. It's like this movie was waiting for 23 years to remind us of this epochal event in the history of boxing.
And what amuses me about boxing as a sport is the way intellectuals are drawn to it. Norman Mailer, George Clinton, they have to be there down in the jungle.
They're writing articles for Esquire. They're writing books about it because they want to somehow take something that is very elemental and simple and turn it into something that's very cerebral.
And that whole process here creates a lot of interest.
Well, I mean, but you're not even talking, you haven't mentioned the word Ali yet.
I thought you covered him pretty well. I think he's fabulous in this film. He's a really charismatic figure.
What's interesting is the suspense because frankly, nobody thought he had a chance against Foreman.
Yeah, again, to me, the fight wasn't a surprise. The timelessness, wrong word, the currency of what he said 23 years ago is still on the money today.
When we come back, Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine are desperate jewel thieves in blood and wine.
I thought it over. I can't move that. I'm on parole. I'm known. You're not. So you'll fly to New York, catch a cab, take a walk, find an address.
Part of the problem, as they say in Bordeaux.
All right, you've got my Discover card statement.
Well, I write, but a lot of people don't realize I make wonderful pictures, too.
And what I do is I paint on acetate with indie ink.
I went into Barnes & Noble one time and bought three books I myself had written.
And I presume I got a royalty as well as the bonus from Discover card.
How many credit cards make a statement like that? It pays to discuss it.
I think that's me. Use it where you see the Novus sign.
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The interesting thing about rich people is they're so cheap.
They'll spend $1.3 million on a necklace with diamonds the size of chocolates.
And they'll no lock it in a tin box from Sears.
Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine plan the theft of a million dollar necklace in that scene from Blood and Wine,
a gritty thriller about desperate men who fear they're losing their touch.
And this movie contains some of the best work Nicholson and certainly Caine have done in a while.
The set up comes when they case the joint of a rich family that's planning a vacation.
This will be an inside job. Nicholson is having an affair with a nanny played here by Jennifer Lopez.
She's not in on the plan. Neither is Nicholson's stepson played by Stephen Dorff.
Is Frank around? They have done at the boat, Mr. Gates.
Where do you want this? These are for the voyage. Would you show him down to the boat?
I'm going to put this in the wine cellar.
After Nicholson and Caine steal the necklace, they find themselves faced with the age-old problem of trust.
What did you just do?
I like to take a photo of the goods. Avoids any disagreement on the sale.
You got me in the picture.
Did I?
Give me the photograph.
We'll tear it up when we have the money.
There's no such thing as honor among thieves.
Nicholson's day job is as a wine merchant. He's married to Judy Davis, who is bitter because he's lost all of her money on his business and also because she suspects he's holding out on her.
I was looking for those.
Tom and Lucy Garcia?
They're agents. They're going to New York to see a wholesaler.
First class?
Yes. Sometimes you've got to keep up relationships.
Apparently not with me.
And watch Caine in this scene. The character is acutely aware of how far he's fallen in life and how little is ahead for him.
I do not intend to suffocate in a county hospital because you are sentimental.
Take it easy, Vic.
Blood and Wine was directed by Bob Rafelson, who made Nicholson's first great movie, Five Easy Pieces, and has worked with him several times since.
This time they find the old magic and it still works.
The movie is rich with characterizations and relationships and there's a romantic triangle, which I won't reveal, that leads up to a crucial scene we absolutely cannot predict.
Caine is wonderful in his role, sick and bitter and sarcastic, and as for Nicholson, it's movies like this people are thinking of when they smile when they hear his name.
I didn't like it as much as you, Roger. Caine, absolutely.
Yeah.
Michael Caine's performance here is superb and if he can outact Jack Nicholson on the big screen, which I think he does here, it just proves how great he is.
The Nicholson performance and a lot of this film to me seemed over the top in this way.
These are wonderful actors, but the things that they're required to do, I always felt that it was like in service of a story where every scene was being played to the full tilt.
There was nothing quiet about the film in every way and I think that there are so many convolutions also in this script that frankly I didn't care and I don't even know if the movie cares or if it makes any difference to anybody who sees the picture, how it eventually ends.
You're asking for quiet moments. This isn't a quiet picture. This is exactly what it pretends to be, a lurid crime melodrama with a convoluted plot involving a diamond necklace that goes around and around and gets everybody involved in it and on that basis it works.
It's not fair to say it doesn't work on some other basis. No, no, no, no, no. There's crime pictures about the working class criminals like the one we were... Straight time. Straight time and also... It's not that either. Wait a second. This is what it is.
And also the Friends of Eddie Coyle with Robert Mitchum. This isn't that either. This is way over the top except I think for Michael Caine's performance. Let it be over the top. That's what it wants to be.
Coming up next, a mysterious case of murder and sex and changing identities. David Lynch's Lost Highway.
The Star Wars trilogy is back on the big screen and each planet is celebrating in a different way.
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Patricia Arquette receives an envelope at her doorstep and thus begins the wild, confusing, moody, terribly violent and I found rather meaningless David Lynch film called Lost Highway. As a critic, I'm all for seeing something I haven't seen before.
Lost Highway has that quality, but it also is a film that makes very little sense to me at least. So its violence pops out and seems empty headed.
Patricia Arquette also plays a mobster's girlfriend in the film. Characters and actors shift identities throughout the story and here she makes serious eye contact with a young garage mechanic played by Balthazar Getty in front of her boyfriend played by Robert Loja.
This magic moment. So different, so new, was like any other. Until I met you.
The kid's boss at the garage is played by Richard Pryor. It's great to see him in a film, any film, even this one. Mr. Eddie called. Can I call him and tell him to come in? Yeah, call him, tell him I'm back and you know.
The other key characters in the story are a devilish mystery man played by Robert Blake and a jazz musician played by Bill Pullman. Where was it you think we met?
That's your house, don't you remember?
As a matter of fact, I'm there right now.
That's crazy man.
Call me.
I told you I was here.
The story I suppose is a metaphor for these times, times in which people don't know who they are and are affected mostly by violence. That's the only interpretation I can come up with. David Lynch is a most creative filmmaker as a fine visual sense, employs great musical scores, but I don't think Lost Highway adds up to much and therefore it's considerable violence really turned me off.
I feel just about the same way. You know every time I see a David Lynch picture, I think to myself this guy is so gifted that if he would only just break down and make a movie instead of being so clever all the time and trying to outsmart himself with basically what are South Moric little plot devices, you know, stuff that.
It would be very hard to make this convincing.
It doesn't pay off. It doesn't have a purpose. It seems contrived. It seems frustrating and not to an end.
No, it just lays there and and again, I don't know if anybody could make heads or tails of this material when we come back Margaret's Museum with Helena Bonham Carter learning about love and faith.
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Our next movie is one of a kind. A love story set in a mining town in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia late in the 1940s.
Helena Bonham Carter stars in a wonderful performance that's far from her past roles playing a young cleaning woman whose father and brother have died down in the coal mines.
One day a stranger walks into the local restaurant and wins her heart, although not quite immediately.
Your name's Margaret McNeil and you've never seen pipes.
Well maybe I haven't, but it sure as hell I haven't missed them. So get out of here.
I will not.
Neal is played there by Clive Russell. Margaret's mother is played by Kate Nelligan in a brilliant, bitter performance.
Having lost half her family down in the mines, she sees marriage and children as still more ways that life can break your heart.
You think I don't know why you go to those funerals?
You're like an old black buzzard, waiting for widows to die so you can get your money.
You're right. We feed off each other like buzzards.
Margaret doesn't want her husband going down in the mines and so he works at odd jobs at first rather than becoming a miner.
Even when they're in a rowboat at sea, Margaret consents when they're over one of the feared mine shafts.
Row Neal, row. If we stay any longer they'll pull me under and keep me there.
The movie is a love story with a tragedy buried inside, a combination of sunniness and sadness, very well acted and directed. It's a real discovery.
I enjoyed it too. You know, we have seen the story of miners and their plight and the abuse of them portrayed in countless films,
most of them documentaries or obvious political statements. This one I think is as powerful, but by almost leaving it aside
and having it always just be on the edges and influencing all the behavior while people are trying to get on with their lives
and the fatalism involved of the people that will go down is stunning because it isn't commented upon.
A guy is going down there to do his work and yes he knows he's probably going to die and he goes down there and he doesn't comment on it.
And that's shocking. The one guy who survives the mine explosion and he's in the hospital saying, you know, I miss it.
I can't wait to go back down again. It's a special film and look for it because it isn't going to be advertised a lot on television, for example.
Coming up next, our video pick of the week and in the revolutionary spirit of Muhammad Ali, I'm going to recommend a groundbreaking independent black power film from the early 70s.
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Siskel and Ebert's Video Pick of the Week is brought to you by Raisinettes. At the movies or anytime, Raisinettes.
In 1971, I went to the Oriental Theater in downtown Chicago and saw a movie that audibly stunned its mostly black audience.
It was Melvin Van Peebles Sweet Sweet Back's Badass Song.
The story of a man who gains revenge on the police, who abused him and lives to get away with it.
Reared by a prostitute, the adult Sweet Back snaps when he's forced to witness racist police brutality.
The adult Sweet Back is played by writer-director Melvin Van Peebles.
Amazingly, Sweet Back escapes to run free.
Sweet Sweet Back's Badass Song is being honored in a new Laserdisc version, released by the prestigious Criterion Collection.
Featuring a parallel narrative soundtrack with director and star Van Peebles talking about the creation of his movie.
I put in my permit, I got my permit on a Friday afternoon to do this.
And it hadn't gotten through yet.
But I had my permit. And so when the police cars and everything showed up, that was for free.
Sweet Sweet Back's Badass Song is also available on tape without that extra soundtrack.
It would usher in a wave of so-called laxploitation films. It was as much a political as an artistic act.
And it is a rare film that has genuine cultural importance.
I'm very glad I gave it a positive review at the time. It's my video pick of the week.
Now let's recap the movies we reviewed on this show.
Two thumbs up for The Empire Strikes Back, the stylish continuation of the Star Wars trilogy.
It is the best of the trio.
Two thumbs up for Leon Gass' When We Were Kings, a tribute to Muhammad Ali and the Rumble in the Jungle.
A split vote on Blood and Wine. Roger enjoyed a lot more of it than I did.
I only cared for Michael Caine's performance.
Two thumbs down for Lost Highway, David Lynch's strange to the point of annoying rumination on alienated life today.
At least, I think that's what it's about.
And two thumbs up for Margaret's Museum.
Next, we'll be back with reviews of more new movies, including Donnie Brasco starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp
and the story of an old mafioso and his young protege.
And also Smell a Sense of Snow starring Julia Orman and Gabriel Byrne
and the story of a mysterious death and a secret hidden in the ice of Greenland.
That's next week and until then, the balcony is closed.
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