Thursday, March 25, 2010

eddie and the cruisers

I don't think I ever watched the whole thing until today. It wasn't the worst movie I've seen but I would be lying if I said I didn't hit the fast forward button over many scenes of cars driving. And I actually jumped out of my chair when I saw Tom Berenger's character (a poet teacher) pull into the driveway of his single wide mobile home AND THE SHOT WAS FILMED FROM A CRANE. Who the fuck authorized that crane rental? For that shot? I thought to myself...this must be where the movie ends, with another crane shot because there is no way they dragged a crane over to this location for a single shot of a trailer...that really has nothing to do with anything. But I was wrong. The final shot is a montage of the Cruisers playing on televisions in a television store. Everyone is watching like a community event (so lame) and in the crowd is a leather jacked guy with a beard who looks.,..could it be...Eddie! Back from the dead and happy his music still lasted even though he was the asshole who drove off a bridge because the company thought his concept album (A Season in Hell, named after a Rimbaud poem) wasn't marketable.
"We paid for rock, and you gave us an opera."
There are many clunkers in this film like Berenger throwing his arm in the air, "Go Get 'em!" It makes me appreciate the method acting I found in Lee Marvin's The Killers. Marvin showed up drunk for his death scene (killing Ronald Reagan's last film role first). He stumbles out of the house and seriously falls off the stairs to the ground. Doesn't flinch. He's been shot...but he's really drunk...and he slams to the ground, no stunt double. He gets up, staggers to his car. The cops arrive and he pretends to have a gun in his hand and then falls dead as the money falls to the lawn.
TRACK CRANE BACK AND UP. SHOT OF LAWN. HOUSE. BODY. ROLL CREDITS
The crane was used in the final shot of Eddie and the Cruisers too, wasted on a night time wet street shot as Eddie walks away up the sidewalk. But it had to be moved from that mobile home. Such a waste of money for that film. Good soundtrack though even if it's all a rip off of Bruce Springsteen. At least they stole from the best.
Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.