Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
There’s no one quite like Burt.
A former football player turned stuntman turned cowboy bit actor turned promising actor turned cowboy superstar turned, well, Burt Reynolds, Reynolds’ career has ridden a roller coaster of peaks and deep valleys. After coming to prominence with daring, murky work in the likes of Deliverance and The Longest Yard, Reynolds seemed content to coast on his laconic presence and mega-watt charisma in lovable programmers like Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper. After spending years as a punchline, at best, Reynolds’ turn in Boogie Nights was a revelation, but he reportedly despised the film after his first viewing so much that he fired the agent who convinced him to do the movie. After a brief flirtation with a return to richer, more complex movies and performances, he fell back into churning out crap, with glorified walk-on roles meant to get nostalgic hearts a-quivering.
But with Burt Reynolds, you just can’t ever count the guy out, with the recent news of his casting in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood suggesting that the 82-year old has at least one peak left in him.
Writer/director Adam Rifkin attempted to make some sense out of the contradictions that form Burt Reynolds when he wrote the character of ‘Vic Edwards’ specifically for Reynolds. In this week’s pick, The Last Movie Star, ‘Vic’ is an aged, lonely movie star introduced having to put down the dog that has been his only companion and source of joy for, seemingly, years. Vic stumbles out of complacency when he accepts what he believes is a prestigious award from a film festival in Nashville. It quickly turns out that the film festival isn’t quite so prestigious, and Vic is forced to spend time with a pair of enthusiastic fanboys (Clark Duke, Ellar Coltrane) and his apathetic ‘assistant’ (Ariel Winter) as he tries to reconcile with his past and make peace with his present.
Next Week’s Pick
Two weeks later, the passing of legendary comics creator Steve Ditko still stings. Ditko is most well known as the Marvel artist who worked with Stan Lee to create Spider-Man, one of the most popular and enduring fictional characters of the last century, not to mention a box office titan now in its third series since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man in 2002. Ditko has always been famously private, and virtually invisible compared to the boisterous public figure of Lee, but the influence of his work is immeasurable. In 2007, the BBC’s Jonathan Ross created and broadcasted a passion-piece documentary called In Search of Steve Ditko about the reclusive comics legend, and this is our next film club pick. The documentary is available on Youtube.
Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday!
Our Guest
Blaine McLaren:
Adam Rifkin is a director that I have had a strange and long interest in. From the old “Rif Coogan” days, all the way to this year’s fantastic Director’s Cut, I have admired how he could weave so effortlessly between different kinds of projects and genres. I love that the same guy who wrote Mousehunt had also directed the strange and wonderful horror-comedy Psycho Cop 2. Who else has been able to release films like The Dark Backwards and Detroit Rock City in the same year?
Just like back in 1998, we’ve been given the treat of seeing two Rifkin flicks in the same year and they are just as different from each other as the two that I just mentioned. Epic Pictures released the fantastic meta-horror film Director’s Cut, starring Pen Jillette and the movie that we are currently discussing…The Last Movie Star.
I will get the ugliness out of the way immediately and say that I hate this type of movie. An old guy realizes that he’s been an asshole his whole life and teams up with an unlikely young person, where the two can learn form each other…yuck! I really hoped that Rifkin would add his touch to make it something more than what you would expect, but the film was exactly what I feared the most. It was boring and forgettable, lacking the humor and clever moments that I have come to expect from this veteran filmmaker.
What I did enjoy was the brief moments where we see an old Burt Reynolds interacting with his younger self in his past films. These moments felt inspired within a film that was anything but that. Seeing Burt Reynolds as a lead again was also nice, but I would love to see him do more than drink and frown. As hard as I am being on the film I do think that some people may still enjoy it. If watching white people learning to love again is your jam, then watch it for free on Amazon Prime. (@Mondo_McLaren)
(Blaine co-hosts the awesome podcast Grindhouse Messiah with our pal and esteemed team member Justin Harlan. You can follow them on iTunes and Twitter!)
The Team
I love Clark Duke. I love Burt Reynolds. The film has an interesting premise. Adam Rifkin has written and/or directed some truly awesome flicks… and Going Overboard. In short, this film has a ton going for it.
I really dig this one and I’m happy to have had a good excuse to watch it. The great throwback Burt Reynolds bits are all golden and old man Vic is entertaining as Hell.
In short, I’m a fan. Is it the best film of the year? Not exactly, but I enjoyed The Last Movie Star a ton! (@thepaintedman)
I’m with Blaine. More than just the overtly familiar material (though Rifkin never met a cliche he didn’t want to incorporate, or an idiotic anti-millenial strawman complaint that he couldn’t parrot), The Last Movie Star is just a miserable sit. Reynolds is doing some of the best and most vulnerable work of his career, but at a certain point the movie starts to play like an emotional snuff film,or a video of a puppy getting the crap kicked out of it. It’s too much, and the fact that Rifkin lines the movie with shrill caricatures of dopey fanboys and social media-obsessed young people just makes everything feel that much meaner and that much less sincere. Reynolds is strong enough that the movie might be worth watching just for him, but my patience for the movie around him evaporated pretty quickly. (@theTrueBrendanF)
Did everyone else watch the same movie I did? Clearly, I’m a huge fan of Reynolds and perhaps our resident Burtvangelist (Exhibits A and B), but I found The Last Movie Star to be not only a fitting tribute to a Hollywood legend, but a very touching and heartfelt story on its own merit. Like me, Rifkin clearly adores Burt Reynolds, and the fictional story of “Vic Edwards” is infused with so much of truth from Burt’s life experience that it becomes a transcendent experience, and sometimes I found myself momentarily forgetting that this was a fictional construct and that I wasn’t just watching Burt bare his own wounds (which, in a way, he is). Specific segments show an elderly Reynolds integrated into his older films, wistfully talking to younger, cockier versions of himself from Deliverance and Smokey and the Bandit, adding another layer of both meta-commentary and fan service.
To add a bit of outside opinion, my wife, who is neither a cinephile nor particularly a fan of Burt outside of Smokey — also was deeply moved by the narrative as we both cried through Vic’s overdue journey from self-loathing to self-discovery, to finally looking beyond the self. The Last Movie Star is unlikely to ever become one of Reynolds’ most popular films, but it may very well be his most poignant triumph. (@VforVashaw)
Further reading:
Next week’s pick: