… and we’re back to Past Attractions, a guide to whatever was good for you.

To get the ball rolling after our vacation, we turn once more to superscrupulous journalist Nanni Cobretti, with his take on Walter Hill’s classic entry in the “macho dudes with guns” genre, Extreme Prejudice…

——-

Welcome to the School of Trailers, lesson 1: how to make a proper badass trailer.

It’s simple, really.
You take a bunch of badass actors.
You show them one at a time on black background, wearing badass, military clothes.
You put badass weapons in their hands, and make them strike a really badass pose.
And you get a badass voiceover introducing them with some badass facts about them.
If you don’t have time to hire an orchestra, or even a guy with a synth, you can steal the soundtrack right from Rambo: First Blood Part II. You can, I swear to Colonel Trautman.
Then you top everything with the main star.
If you can’t have Sly, Arnie or Chuck, you go with the next best thing: Nick Nolte.
I know the man also made some pathetic chick flicks with Barbra Streisand and Julia Roberts, but trust me: when he does his job, he’s up with the best of them.
Still not sure? Add mirror shades and moustaches, and les jeux sont faits.
Want more??? Fuck off, you cheeky greedy bastard…

In case you’re wondering: Past Attraction is on vacation.

Regular updates will start again next week.

E is for England.

I know, right? I know.

Laying down the template for many, many mad affairs to come, 1988’s Fresh Horses could very well be the first example of Tennessee Williams-lite drama that’s actually set in the North. From here onwards, any starlet wanting to be taken seriously would start to drop her g’s and act as a runaway from a broh-kan, you-can’t-fix-me nameless town. Or, for that matter, any pretty boy wanting to account for more than being a pretty boy would just try the junkie/bookie/victim/angel/lunatic angle.

So, let’s get to the plot, fast:

“A Cincinnati college student breaks off his engagement to his wealthy fiancée after he falls in love with a backwoods Kentucky girl he meets at a party. She says she’s 20, but he finds out she’s 16 and married to an abusive husband.”

Yeah. Everything you need to know, tidily compressed into a 1’ trailer. Except Ben Stiller. And the abuse-y bits. Neat.

Ringwald gives off a distinct  “Southern Gothic dame lost in a maze of negatives” vibe here, which should never, ever sound like a backhanded compliment, but it sort of does.

Well well well.

I can’t make up my mind: does the trailer for Terry Gilliam’s Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas laugh with you, luring you into a sense of “hey, you can totally read Hunter Thompson’s book as a buddy comedy about the Sixties”, or does it laugh at you, in a grand, evil plan to suck money out of unsuspecting moviegoers?

The trippy ambiance is laid out for anyone to see, except for the more explicitly disturbing bits (White Rabbit, anyone?), and there is a sense that larger things are at play here - see the gorgeous “bat county” sunglasses shot, or poor little Christina Ricci being (we assume) left alone to fend for herself. On the other hand, compared to what happens in the movie, the score is cut and used in a drastically different way: same tracks, opposite situations. Everything sounds so much raunchier, and so harmless here, it might even work as a recut trailer.

Three Dog Night pops up at 1’ 12”, and that’s probably the moment of truth.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “I love this movie. It appeals to all generations.”

Sorry for the lack of updates - we’ll be back tomorrow. Promise.

For more special guests, I asked the gang over at I 400 Calci - the very professional Wim Diesel stepped up first with his take on 1985’s Runaway Train…

——-

You shall trust blindly any film whose cast is made of such ugly mugs that Eric Roberts is placed in the kind-at-heart slot.

The priest who taught us Religion in high school spent four years screening us movies so that we’d start asking ourselves questions about religion at large - come our final year, he’d stroll in with a bunch of clear, manifesto-ey answers leading up to Jesus (who was not James Caviezel at the time). His plan was wrecked by the fact that in your final year you only think about finals and your own fucking business, but you can’t imagine how bad we had it in the meantime: The Program, No Way Out, Kramer Vs. Kramer, Alive (this one, maybe, to help us familiarize with the “communion = cannibalism” metaphor), Guess Whose Color Is The Man Who’s Coming To Dinner, yada yada yada. One day, I think it was our sophomore year, priest walks into class with a movie called “Thirty Seconds To The End” (one of those rare cases of non-faithful Italo adaptation working better than the original title, as I’d find out much later), whose plot bears a vague resemblance to Locked Up, but with no Sly in sight and certainly with no Tom Sizemore being a snitch. So: charismatic inmates, ‘staches aplenty, local dudes acting heroic, a monumentally evil warden (not quite reaching to Sutherlandian proportions, but he could hold his own), a million tons of snow, an unstoppable train speeding into the unknown, boxing matches, helicopters, and redemption (which I learned from watching a tough-as-nails prison flick - Scorsese’s got nothing on me). Trailer bares it all, if you can make it past the first minutes of raving quotes. Who’s going to get it in the end? Every synopsis online can tell you that (guess that after 20+ years no spoiler policy applies), but you better drag yourself to the video store, stock up on beer and nachos and get ready to cry like a little bitch. EDWARD BUNKER wrote this one. There you go.

We’re going a little off track with this one, but it’s worth it - so make room for today’s guest, Miss Catriona Potts, with a Very Special Past Attraction, And We Do Mean Past…

—————

I’m way too romantic for crying at movies (I’ve cried once, during the “Mau! Mau!” scene of The Deer Hunter, but that’s another story). But I’m a sucker for romantic comedies and, yes, they don’t  make them as they used to, so I’m always  in desperate search of a new/old one. And it’s getting hard, because I’ve seen most of them, even a flick called Expensive Husbands (don’t even bother: it’s a 1937 C-movie plagued by an awful script, a non-existent direction, bad acting and bad editing).

But I’m rambling.

A romantic comedy should deliver open, unabashed feelings, the strongest being the erotic attraction between two characters everybody thinks should stick together (but they don’t know it yet). And it must turn that attraction into an exciting game, making you laugh and cry (well, sort of) and play with the characters.

Here’s a challenge: name the last romantic comedy you saw and you could say those things about.

For me, it’s I Know Where I’m Going! (affectionately known as IKWIG), a 1945 movie by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Okay, I worship Powell & Pressburger and Martin Scorsese (who said “I reached the point of thinking there were no more masterpieces to discover, until I saw IKWIG”) but let’s forget that.

The thing is IKWIG has everything: a stubborn, materialist young woman and a romantic, Scottish young men; blinding mists and deafening gales; harsh reality and fascinating legends; a long-lost and unattainable love and a new and possibly ever-lasting love; a deadly whirlpool and a sparkling diamond ring; a tooting hat and a wedding gown; a tamed eagle and a skinned rabbit (off screen); a phone booth under a waterfall, men in kilts, cursed castles, tartan-covered hills…

You can’t get any better than that.

Actually, you can.

You can watch the whole movie on Youtube.

Oh, this one’s a keeper.

A quintessential rite of passage for any girl born between 1965 and 1980, depending on the mood, John Hughes’s Pretty In Pink becomes a) the reason why an awesome soundtrack was put together; b) a very Eighties take on the Cinderella paradygm; c) the lowest common denominator for anything connected to nostalgia; and d) all of the above.

It also makes for a classic trailer, in its own right. The opening credits montage of Molly Ringwald getting dressed and ready for school [i.e. is the chick flick equivalent of the other Eighties staple, the “hey, let’s go grab some guns” action montage] is spliced throughout the whole thing, acting as a visual refrain to the Psychedelic Furs’ lyrics for the title song. Every possible subplot is explored, as far as the teen characters are involved (guess that poor Harry Dean Stanton not letting go of his deadbeat wife didn’t resonate at the box office), while the main plot is, well, laid bare. At least the third act resolution is left as a guess.

Which makes me think of another trailer that made the rounds back then (video release, maybe? dunno), this one with an unusually Duckie-heavy slant. Did wacky borderline obsessive third wheel sell more than star-crossed class-transcending teenage love? Really? Oh, ok.

If you never saw it as a grownup, be sure to check out The Spader in all his own sniveling glory. He looks so much better with the benefit of some distance.

“And you… are the Devil’s spawn… evil from the moment of conception!”

Truth be told, I’ve been wanting to see Flowers In The Attic for a lo-o-o-o-ong time, i.e. since it came out in 1987. But my usually loose cinematic morals came to a a yet-to-be-explored grinding halt, and I couldn’t work out the courage to ask any unsuspecting babysitter and/or relative as a companion.

Back to the now - I honestly have no idea how V.C. Andrews’ neo-Gothic saga (that went on and on and on even beyond the grave) was ever deemed a “sure bet” at the box office, given that “incest”, “captivity” and “borderline non-con” were the novel’s biggest draws: much like Valley Of The Dolls, the trailer is built as a collection of money shots (Bible-thumping Grandma! Attack dogs! Blonde ingénue! Child abuse!), while the Ominous Voiceover informs us that, yes, way more oh noes lie ahead. But everything would be revealed as watered-down Andrews, much to the fans’ dismay.

On a lighter note, I suspect that Kristy Swanson’s ubiquitousness in the mid-Eighies could be connected to her passing resemblance to a cheap, discount-ready Barbie doll clone - they sure came in handy when it was time to fool around with experimental hair treatments.

Somebody must own the DVD somewhere. Make me a copy and win my trashy, no-good heart.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “When I first saw the house in the trailer it reminded me of the home described in FITA I’m like! OMGSH FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC BECAME A MOVIE!”