New poem: WORKING ON WILD BILL

Wild Bill e un Western terminale--from WALTER HILL by Simone Emillani and Mauro Gervasini

it was a pleasure to do next to nothing

first, curling into a fetal position

and then lay on a bed with a blank stare

all of this meant to simulate opium addiction

while Jeff Bridges as Wild Bill Hickok

carrying the foreground part of the scene

as a pretend cowboy with real facial growth,

I had a couple of good days

at what used to be the

Samuel Goldwyn studio

where, at lunch,

I was less than a foot away

from part of the history of Hollywood:

producer Richard Zanuck

sat at the same lunch table

not too proud to eat with

mere 65-dollar-a-day extras

Tom Cruise becomes the Sylvester Stallone of his generation.

Exhibits A, B, C: OBLIVION, ALL YOU NEED IS KILL (re titled EDGE OF TOMORROW and LIVE DIE REPEAT on video), JACK REACHER etc. etc.

Tom Cruise is in his fifties now--but given Hollywood logic for veteran male stars, he gets ten years taken off his age (remembering how the 70-year-old Paul Newman was only 60 in NOBODY'S FOOL, but Newman, even in the 90s, was ageless).

Here's moviesquad commenting on the HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE site (highlighting by me):
I think Tom is in the midst of a mid-life crisis where he's trying to pump out as many of the sort of movies that prove he's still young as he can... and I'm glad for it.
He can do the more serious pics you want him to do when he is no longer believable in these sorts of roles. We need this Tom Cruise at this moment in time.

Meanwhile, Sylvester Stallone continues his post-EXPENDABLES career upturn in BULLET TO THE HEAD (directed by Walter Hill, who had a run of good actioners between 1978 and 1987), in which (from evidence in the trailer) he tries to erase two decades from his actual age.

Catching up with Walter Hill's JOHNNY HANDSOME on its 20th anniversary.

In the wake of Mickey Rourke's Academy Award-nominated comeback in THE WRESTLER, there's been a revival of interest in his work from roughly the early 80s to early 90s. In fact, the Best Buy I went to a few days ago in Canyon Country, CA had a special Mickey Rourke display.

Last Tuesday, I went to the closing-by-midsummer Virgin Megastore on Hollywood Boulevard and bought a standard DVD of JOHNNY HANDSOME--a mostly-forgotten Rourke-starrer from 1989--for $10.

The storyline--disfigured Louisiana criminal gets a second chance after experimental plastic surgery turns him physically "acceptable"--is serviceable enough.

While the film isn't top-tier Walter Hill (who directed) or Mickey Rourke, it has enough incidental pleasures to make it worth renting or buying at a low price. The performances of Lance Henriksen and Ellen Barkin (as a sort of bayou Boris-and-Natasha), a pre-wise-old-sage Morgan Freeman (when he was still allowed to be edgy) and Elizabeth McGovern (making something fairly substantive out of a standard good-woman role) will hold the viewer's interest. And the running time is a reasonably quick 93 minutes.

Given how low the quality bar is being set for 2009 mainstream theatrical film releases, subpar entries in the Walter Hill filmography (see also RED HEAT, ANOTHER 48 HOURS, LAST MAN STANDING) are beginning to improve with age.